Why is it called the God Particle?

Most fundamental elementary particles have a familiar property we call mass. It doesn't sound too complicated. The properties of mass, like gravity, weight and momentum, are by far the most intuitive concepts in physics: ask any five-year-old if they can push a truck up a hill and they'll probably know the answer is no. But understanding precisely why some particles have mass has been anything but intuitive! Mass and its effects are a bit of a mystery, and not just for particle physicists. It's an active area of research for cosmologists studying the literal beginning of space and time.

If you want to understand how really small things with little or no mass interact, such as electrons flowing through the molecules of a conductor, or photons of light hitting atoms, quantum mechanics is your friend. If the idea is to model the behavior of big things with lots of mass interacting, like planets orbiting a star or galaxies full of dark matter colliding, you'll need to master the mathematics of gravity. That means undertanding Newton's work for an accurate approximation or Einstein's General Relativity to get it to as many decimal points as needed. But if you want to understand really, really tiny things with lots and lots of mass interacting with one another, you're shit out of luck. These two incredibly useful theories, that predict behavior so well in their respective domains of the large and the small, fail almost completely.

Fortunately, in everyday life, there aren't a lot of really tiny things with huge mass. So the status quo binary theory approach works great. But one place where it does matter, no pun intended, is in the first few moments of the Big Bang. The early universe was really small, as small as it gets, yet nothing could be more massive. The entire mass of everything that was and ever would be was squeezed into a space as small as you want to imagine, and then smaller still.

Most physicists and cosmologists agree, to even begin to address the most fundamental questions, how the fuse on the Big Bang was lit, why it evolved the way it did, if there could be other universes or have been other universes, or how new universes might arise, whatever that means, we need a marriage between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. See, it's not that physicists want to marry two theories that don't get along, it's that the nature of reality forces them to try to arrange it!

The Higgs Boson is not the sole answer to these questions (It is certainly not evidence for or against a cosmic creator anymore than any other particle). But it is so central to physics large and small, and proved to be so elusive, that the term "God particle" was chosen for the title of a popular book about it. The media loved that brilliant soundbite and ran with it, and that's how rhe Higgs Boson got its more grandiose nickname. Although some physicists came to call it the goddamn-where-is-it particle ' at least up until July 4th.