A prediction
In the early 1960s physicists couldn't explain why the particles carrying the weak nuclear force were so heavy. In 1964 Peter Higgs in Britain, François Englert and Robert Brout in Belgium, and Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble published, nearly simultaneously, the idea that a field with spontaneously broken symmetry could give particles mass. Higgs explicitly noted that a new particle should accompany the field, and it came to bear his name. The mechanism became the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particles and forces.
The 2012 discovery
The Higgs is heavy and decays almost instantly, so finding it was hard. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman nicknamed it "the God Particle" in his 1993 book; he reportedly joked he'd wanted to call it "the goddamn particle." After CERN's 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider started up beneath the French-Swiss border, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced on July 4, 2012 a new particle at about 125 GeV. Higgs and Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics; Brout had died in 2011.
Mass and open questions
The Higgs field is often likened to a syrup filling space: particles that don't interact with it, like photons, are massless, and the more strongly a particle interacts, the heavier it is. Still, most of the mass in your body comes not from the Higgs but from the strong-force energy binding quarks inside protons. The discovery left questions open, including the nature of dark matter, how to reconcile gravity and relativity with quantum theory, and why the Higgs mass is what it is, so physicists are debating bigger next-generation colliders. Cosmologists think the field "switched on" as the universe cooled after the Big Bang.
FAQ
- Why is it called the God particle?
- The nickname comes from the title of Leon Lederman's 1993 popular book; it has no religious meaning, and many physicists dislike it.
- Does the Higgs create all mass?
- It explains the mass of elementary particles, but most of an atom's mass comes from strong-force binding energy.
Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26
References
- Higgs, P. W. (1964). Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons. Physical Review Letters, 13(16), 508–509.
- ATLAS Collaboration. (2012). Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Physics Letters B, 716(1), 1–29.
- CMS Collaboration. (2012). Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC. Physics Letters B, 716(1), 30–61.