The Higgs boson is sometimes referred to as "the God particle" after the title of Leon Lederman's book, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory concerning the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions, which mediate the dynamics of the known subatomic particles. The Standard Model gives us a framework for our understanding of the fundamental particles and forces of nature.
A theory to answer why particles have the masses they do or why they have any mass at all, however, isn’t so straightforward. Back in the early 60’s Peter Higgs proposed, the idea that space is permeated by a field, similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what appears to be mass. The Higgs boson is thought to give all matter mass.
This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by particles moving through any thick liquid. The larger the interaction of the particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. Thus the existence of this field is essential in Higg's hypothesis for the production of the mass of particles. As well as possibly explaining how particles receive their mass, some think it could also explain how the universe got its shape.
A theory put forward by researchers at Switzerland's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne argue that the Higgs boson might allow us to account for inflation, the otherwise unexplained process in which the early universe grew by a factor of at least 10^26 in an instant.
The Higgs boson is, however, the only elementary particle in the Standard Model that has not yet been observed in particle physics experiments.
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