“THE goddam particle.” That’s what Nobel prizewinner Leon Lederman wanted to call the Higgs boson. In the end, his publisher’s commercial instincts won out, and his book on the particle thought to endow the universe with its mass ended up with a rather more grandiose title: The God Particle.
It’s a name that has caused considerable embarrassment to Peter Higgs, the physicist (and atheist) who postulated its existence – and by any reckoning the derogatory label might have been more appropriate, given the billions of dollars that have been spent chasing the elusive Higgs particle. Neverthless the name, combined with the breathless hunt, has helped…
