So this Wednesday, CERN is holding a big to-do where it is expected they will announce that the long sought Higgs boson (unfortunately named the 'God' particle in the popular press) has been found because of work done by the team at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider).
If it's true (and all the signs point toward that being the case) this would be the biggest piece of physics news in the best part of 100 years.
The Standard Model, which is the prevailing working explanation for why the particles exist and have the masses (energies) they do has had one piece of information missing: why do particles have mass
at all? The Higgs boson (named after Peter Higgs who first proposed the existence of the particle four decades ago) is purported to be the particle that gives other particles their mass.
This is why it is called the 'God particle'. It has absolutely nothing to do with theism, it doesn't prove or disprove God, all it does is explain why particles have mass but that 'all' is a BIG deal because without that mass particles would never bind together to form atoms. No atoms, no anything else.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...Wednesday.html
Cheers
Aj