According to Wikipedia article – “The Higgs boson or BEH Mechanism, popularized as the "God Particle", is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics; it is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. Experimental observation would elucidate how otherwise massless elementary particles nevertheless manage to construct mass in matter. More specifically, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the massless photon and the relatively massive W and Z bosons. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (caused by the photon) and the weak force (caused by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter; thus, if it exists, the Higgs boson is an integral and pervasive component of the material world. “
As of yet, no experiment has directly detected the existence of the Higgs boson, but this may change as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN produces results.
Did all the information given above make any sense to you? Okay, you are not alone in having a significant challenge in understanding what elementary particle physics to scientists is literally these days J. Alright, let’s go back to the basics here.
Get physicists and cosmologists talking about their work and they will tell you that there are elegant theories and messy ones. Almost all of them believe the universe conforms to an elegant one. A central goal of today's physics, in fact, is to show that at its very beginning, the universe was ordered and unified. But this unity didn't last for long. Just instants after the Big Bang, as the explosion cooled and its contents scattered, the cosmos' forces and matter differentiated. The universe fell from a state of perfect grace into its current complexity, in a cosmic parallel to Adam and Eve.
Many great minds — Democritus, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein — took giant steps toward bringing the universe's lost unity out of hiding. In 1964, Peter Higgs, a shy scientist in Edinburgh, added his name to that list by coming up with an ingenious theory that gave scientists the tools to explain how two classes of particles, which now appear to be different, were once one and the same. His theory proposes the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to all things — a speck so precious it has comes to be known as the "God particle." The scientific term for it is the Higgs boson, and to find it physicists are counting on the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, a 17-mile underground circuit that took 25 years to plan and $6 billion to build
Basically, all the known forces in the universe are manifestations of four fundamental forces, the strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational forces. But why four? Why not just one master force? Those who joined the quest for a single unified master force declared that the first step toward unification had been achieved with the discovery of the discovery of the W and Z particles, the intermediate vector bosons, in 1983. This brought experimental verification of particles whose prediction had already contributed to the Nobel Prize awarded to Weinberg, Salam, and Glashow in 1979. Combining the weak and electromagnetic forces into a unified "electroweak" force, these great advances in both theory and experiment provide encouragement for moving on to the next step, the "grand unification" necessary to include the strong interaction.
One rather comic and more understandable (at least to the masses) explanation of what Higgs Boson is all about are given here. In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question 'What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?' The winning entries can be found here.
As usual in all things related to human discoveries, there is a rumor flying around that the so called God Particle may have already been found at the Tevatron, an accelerator located outside of Chicago. This isn't the first time a story like this has circulated. Until the LHC opens, the Tevatron remains the largest accelerator in the world. Among its most significant past discoveries is another standard-model particle, the top quark. And in 2009, it will shut its doors forever. Like the LHC, the Tevatron was built with the Higgs in mind, and as time runs out for America's biggest atom smasher, some nervy experimentalists have jumped the gun. The full text of this article can be found here.
For those who like to have a little more technical details on the whole matter (pun intendedJ) can access the articles at Hyperphysics. And like everything else, human capacity for trivializing the profound and thus making it less frightening to masses has been equally at work for Higgs Boson as well. You can find “music” inspired by the god particle at the so called edge of science at the official site of Higgs Boson!
The Higgs boson has appeared in several works of fiction in popular culture. These references rarely reflect the expected properties of the hypothetical elementary particle, or do so only vaguely and often imbue it with fantastic properties. The curious and long list of such fiction works can be accessed via this article!
There is more serious stuff at the scientific American on the questions related to Higgs Boson.
All the theories apart, to me the search for this ultimate particle is part of the overall quest of humankind to understand itself and its origins. We are, after all, made of star stuff. All that constitutes us was once manufactured in the nuclear furnaces of old and giant stars scattered throughout the cosmos. I find this quest irresistible.
Next, I’ll be talking about the wave-particle duality… watch out for this space :-)
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