What is Leon Lederman's theory of the Higgs boson?
The Higgs boson isn't my theory—it's Peter Higgs's and others'—but I gave it a memorable name. In my book, I called it the 'God particle' because it's so central to how particles get mass, yet so elusive. The idea is that a field, the Higgs field, permeates all space. Particles interact with it like a crowd of fans slowing down a celebrity—the more they interact, the more mass they have. Without it, the universe would be a soup of massless particles zipping at light speed. I argued that finding it was essential to completing the Standard Model, and when CERN confirmed it in 2012, it was a triumph of experimental physics. But don't call it divine—it's just nature's clever trick.
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