The God Particle” is a sexy name, but many physicists absolutely hate it. It’s also led people to think that maybe the discovery of the Higgs boson has something to do with the search for God, but it doesn’t. Its discovery isn’t evidence of any sort of higher being and that’s not why scientists were searching for it. In Part 1 of this series about the Higgs boson, Julian takes an in-depth look at this discovery.
The particle’s discovery may not resolve the debate about God, but it was nonetheless a huge advancement of our understanding of the universe. The Higgs Boson made the behavior of other particles we’ve discovered make sense, it explained how atoms could exist and stars could shine. It was the last big piece of a fantastically complex jigsaw puzzle, and it’s not like scientists had a picture on a box to guide them.
The Higgs Boson was the last piece of a puzzle, and in a literal sense that’s true. It was the last particle predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which is our framework for organizing and describing elementary particles.
The Standard Model is split into two main groups. One group is the fermions, which are particles like electrons and quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons. The other group is the bosons, which particles use to exchange energy.
Photons, Gluons, and the W and Z bosons are called gauge bosons. Then there’s the Higgs boson, which is special. It’s not the boson itself that’s so important, but its existence points to something larger that solves a big problem with the standard model.