The day the physicist Peter Higgs passed away, April 8, Google search results were rife with headlines that the man who proposed the “God particle” was no more. Dr Higgs was famously private, having stayed away from the press for most of his career, yet while his opinions on many matters were out of view, it wasn’t a secret he didn’t want the particle named for him to be named for him alone — much less the “God particle”.
In 1964, three groups of physicists working independently all proposed the existence of an elementary particle that gave some other particles some energy, often understood as mass. (According to Albert Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence, mass is energy at rest.) This energy was required to explain some observations in experiments that didn’t fit the theories of elementary particles at the time. It was considered a very difficult problem because the solution also had to follow some rules of the theory that people had worked out by then.
The particle the groups proposed was the smallest packet of energy in an energy field pervading the whole universe. When a different elementary particle enters this field, the physicists proposed a mechanism by which their particle would interact with the newcomer and give it mass. Today, the field is called the Higgs field, the particle the Higgs boson, and the mechanism the Higgs mechanism.
