Where did everything come from? This is perhaps the biggest mystery that science has been striving to answer for decades, if not centuries – how the universe came to be. Mankind’s most curious minds have been yearning to figure out what it is exactly that keeps the universe going as it does now and what is behind the creation of potentially millions of planets and clusters of stars residing within many galaxies. Over the years, various theories have been presented by men and women of science that seek to explain what it is that governs all forms of matter and energy and why these things behave the way they do. With so many of these postulations, it has become a major objective of the scientific field of physics to perhaps combine all existing theories and laws about the universe and unify them into a single and cohesive theory of everything. A One of the essential requirements involved in accomplishing this difficult objective is the discovery of the so-called god particle, which is what I will be talking about in this article .For around the latter half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the new millennium, particle physics is largely governed by what is referred to as the Standard Model of Physics. The Standard Model in particle physics is, for the moment, the most widely-accepted theory that provides a decent explanation concerning the behavior of all forms of matter and energy in the universe – particularly, the interaction of fundamental particles with elementary forces that exist in nature. According to the Standard Model, there are two types of fundamental particles: fermions, which are what matter is composed of; and bosons, which carry forces. These particles are identified and ordered in terms of several properties, specifically mass. The mystery surrounding these particles is that while their mass can be measured, scientists could not say for certain where exactly their mass originated from and why they have such masses in the first place. So, what explains the fact these elementary particles have mass? Well, that’s where the Higgs Field comes in. In terms of the Standard Model, the Higgs Field is known as a hypothetical force field which cannot be seen but is said to exist in every area of the entire universe.
It is also this field that gives mass to various elementary particles like quarks and electrons. A particles interaction with the Higgs Field when passing through it is theorized to be the one that gives the particle its mass. And the more that particle interacts with the invisible field, the more mass it contains. And so, according to this theory, without the Higgs Field, nothing would exist in the way that they do now – not humans, not Earth, not the stars, and not the many galaxies in the universe. But how do we know the Higgs Field actually exists? Many particle physicists believe that among the final missing pieces that could complete the puzzle, the god particle – one of the universes force particles- will be the one to prove the field’s existence and consequently provide a better understanding of the current Standard Model. The term god particle was coined around the 1990s by Leon Lederman, a physicist and Nobel laureate who published a book about particle physics and discussed sciences pursuit to discover a specific elementary particle referred to as the Higgs boson. Many scientists dislike the moniker god particle and would prefer to use the official term Higgs boson, but what is it exactly? And why is it so important in proving the existence of Higgs Field and evaluating the Standard Model? The god particle or the Higgs boson was proposed by Peter Higgs around the 1960s as a necessary element to support the possibility of an invisible field permeating the universe.
