GENERAL INFORMATION
The "God particle" is the nickname of a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. In layman’s terms, different
subatomic particles are responsible for giving matter different properties. One of the most mysterious and
Important properties is mass. Some particles, like protons and neutrons, have mass. Others, like photons, do not.
The Higgs boson, or “God particle,” is believed to be the particle which gives mass to matter. The “God particle”
nickname grew out of the long, drawn-out struggles of physicists to find this elusive piece of the cosmic puzzle.
What follows is a very brief, very simplified explanation of how the Higgs boson fits into modern physics, and how science is attempting to study it.
The “standard model” of particle physics is a system that attempts to describe the forces, components, and
reactions of the basic particles that make up matter. It not only deals with atoms and their components, but the pieces that compose some subatomic particles. This model does have some major gaps, including gravity, and some experimental contradictions. The standard model is still a very good method of understanding particle physics, and it continues to improve. The model predicts that there are certain elementary particles even smaller than protons and neutrons. As of the date of this writing, the only particle predicted by the model which has not been experimentally verified is the “Higgs boson,” jokingly referred to as the “God particle.”
Each of the subatomic particles contributes to the forces that cause all matter interactions. One of the most
important, but least understood, aspects of matter is mass. Science is not entirely sure why some particles seem mass-less, like photons, and others are “massive.” The standard model predicts that there is an elementary particle, the Higgs boson, which would produce the effect of mass. Confirmation of the Higgs boson would be a major milestone in our understanding of physics.
The “God particle” nickname actually arose when the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon Lederman was published. Since then, it’s taken on a life of its own, in part because of the monumental questions about matter that the God particle might be able to answer. The man who first proposed the Higgs boson’s existence, Peter Higgs, isn’t all that amused by the nickname “God particle,” as he’s an avowed atheist. All the same, there isn’t really any religious intention behind the nickname.Currently, efforts are under way to confirm the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator in Switzerland, which should be able to confirm or refute the existence of the God particle.
As with any scientific discovery, God’s amazing creation becomes more and more impressive as we learn more about it. Either result—that the Higgs boson exists, or does not exist—represents a step forward in human knowledge and another step forward in our appreciation of God’s awe-inspiring universe. Whether or not there is a “God particle,” we know this about Christ: “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . . . all things were created by him and for him”
HISTORY
Particle physicists study matter made from fundamental particles whose interactions are mediated by exchange particles known as force carriers. At the beginning of the 1960s a number of these particles had been discovered or proposed, along with theories suggesting how they relate to each other; however, even accepted versions such as the Unified field theory were known to be incomplete. One omission was
that they could not explain the origins of mass as a property of matter. Goldstone's theorem, relating to continuous symmetries within some theories, also appeared to rule out many obvious solutions.
The Higgs mechanism is a process by which vector bosons can get rest mass without explicitly breaking gauge invariance. The proposal for such a spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism originally was suggested in 1962 by Philip Warren Anderson and developed into a full relativistic model, independently and almost simultaneously, by three groups of physicists: by François Englert and Robert Brout in August 1964; by Peter Higgs in October 1964; and by Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble (GHK) in November 1964. Properties of the model were further considered by Guralnik in 1965 and by Higgs in 1966. The papers showed that when a gauge theory is combined with an additional field that spontaneously breaks the symmetry group, the gauge bosons can consistently acquire a finite mass. In 1967, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam were the first to apply the Higgs mechanism to the breaking of the electroweak symmetry, and showed how a Higgs mechanism could be incorporated into Sheldon Glashow's electroweak theory, in what became the Standard Model of particle physics.
The three papers written in 1964 were each recognised as milestone papers during Physical Review Letters's 50th anniversary celebration. Their six authors were also awarded the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for this work. (A dispute also arose the same year; in the event of a Nobel Prize up to three scientists would be eligible, with six authors credited for the papers. ) Two of the three PRL papers (by Higgs and by GHK) contained equations for the hypothetical field that eventually would become known as the Higgs field and its hypothetical quantum, the Higgs boson. Higgs's subsequent 1966 paper showed the decay mechanism of the boson; only a massive boson can decay and the decays can prove the mechanism.
In the paper by Higgs the boson is massive, and in a closing sentence Higgs writes that "an essential feature" of the theory "is the prediction of incomplete multiplets of scalar and vector bosons". In the paper by
GHK the boson is massless and decoupled from the massive states. In reviews dated 2009 and 2011, Guralnik states that in the GHK model the boson is massless only in a lowest-order approximation, but it
is not subject to any constraint and acquires mass at higher orders, and adds that the GHK paper was the only one to show that there are no massless Goldstone bosons in the model and to give a complete
analysis of the general Higgs mechanism.
In addition to explaining how mass is acquired by vector bosons, the Higgs mechanism also predicts the ratio between the W boson and Z boson masses as well as their couplings with each other and with the
Standard Model quarks and leptons. Subsequently, many of these predictions have been verified by precise measurements performed at the LEP and the SLC colliders, thus overwhelmingly confirming that
some kind of Higgs mechanism does take place in nature, but the exact manner by which it happens has not yet been discovered. The results of searching for the Higgs boson are expected to provide
evidence about how this is realized in nature.
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