What the heck is a God particle?
You've probably heard of this in the news recently. It has to do with the Big Bang, which has been proposed to be the very beginning of everything we see in the universe, including us.
What happened at the Big Bang? According to current scientific thought, the Big Bang occurred roughly 13.7 billion years ago when a tiny-and I mean very tiny--singularity--something that had infinite density and infinite temperature--popped into existence and expanded at faster than light speed into what we see today. Only after an infinitesimal fraction of a second after it appeared, a ball of energy no larger than a baseball contained an unbelievable amount of radiation, something so hot--on the order of trillions of trillions of degrees--that no matter existed. This ball of energy must have created a spectacular explosion when it happened, but no one was around to hear or see it. I guess that's why they refer to it as the Big Bang. This ball of energy underwent a phase transition and inflated exponentially, and when it stopped, it cooled enough to cause the condensation of energy into particles.
According to Einstein's famous equation E equals M times C squared, energy and matter are interchangeable. Matter can be thought of as condensed energy. Well, when the temperature of the early universe cooled sufficiently, matter condensed in the form of quantum particles, namely quarks and leptons. These things are so small they're ridiculous. Think of it this way: quarks make up the particles that make up the stuff of atoms, namely protons and neutrons, which constitute the nucleus of elemental atoms. Electrons, which are also extremely tiny, fly around the nucleus. If one held a marble to represent the nucleus of an atom in the center of a football stadium, the electrons for this atom would be flying around at the edges of the stadium. If protons and neutrons are that small then quarks that make up those particles are even smaller, much smaller.
Now we get to the crazy part. Apparently, quarks and leptons were created without mass, at least theoretically, which causes a dilemma in physics. We know that matter has mass, so how did it get this mass. The answer is; it needs the God particle to have been condensed out of the energy soup of the Big Bang along with quarks and leptons. It's this particle and its associated energy field that gave atoms mass.
Why do they call it the God particle? That comes from the idea that the Big Bang theory proves the existence of God and therefore this mass particle had to be a gift from God that made it possible for us to exist. Without mass there's no gravity and we wouldn't be here. However, the idea that God caused the Big Bang is a highly debatable idea. It could be that whatever was responsible for the Big Bang had always existed in the form of chaotic energy and God organized this chaos into something that would evolve into what we see today. That would make God more like a mechanic, not someone who makes things from nothing. If you read the book of Genesis carefully, this is the theme it conveys.
We can attribute the God particle to Peter Higgs, a physicist who first proposed that a particle that causes mass exists. This particle is also called, appropriately, the Higgs boson. However, a theory needs proof, and this proof came from experiments with CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, truly one of the greatest--and largest--scientific instruments ever made. What this thing does is smash protons together at nearly light speed and then detect all of the debris--particles--that fly out of the collision. It's like what a kid does when he smashes a watch against a wall and looks at the pieces that result to see what made the watch tick.
The Higgs boson was discovered on July 4, 2013. This God particle is associated with the Higgs energy field that all particles interact with to get mass. The more they interact, the higher the mass. Now we can all sleep peacefully. Everything is well with the universe. Yea!
Thanks for reading.