The Higgs Boson, commonly called “the God particle” is part of the standard model of particle physics. "The God particle" comes from the title of Leon Lederman's book on the topic and stuck although it has nothing to do with God. The Standard Model was put together in its final form in the 1970’s with the confirmation of the existence of quarks and consists of the simplest explanations for the behavior of particle physics. In the early 1960 the first high energy particle collisions were experimentally observed. The data based on the behavior of the resulting subatomic particles showed certain symmetries that allowed physicists to understand them as smaller parts of a whole (i.e. a proton). These symmetries also created very simple easy to handle equations. There was one issue though. As soon as any particle was assigned a mass the equations were thrown completely off. In 1964 Peter Higgs proposed the Higgs Field. The universally permeating field that resists the movement of particles within it, essentially giving them mass. (Imagine pushing an object through a pool of molasses). Since the particles don’t intrinsically have a mass then the current simple equations could remain intact if the Higgs Field was used as explanation for mass. Because the Higgs field was accepted into the Standard Model without any observable evidence, the search for its existence has been a major goal among the scientific community for decades.
Since its proposal, 60 of the 61 elementary particles of the standard model have found to have experimental evidence. The Higgs Boson, a particle resulting from the disruption of the Higgs Field has since become the last piece of the puzzle. This particle would differ from all the others because it contains a zero spin. Discovery of this particle was one of the primary goals of CERN’s Large Hadron collider in Switzerland. Because the Higgs Field interacts with particles to give them mass and its Boson is considered to have a relatively large mass then it must interact with itself. Even with the high energy collision in the LHC the Higgs Boson would only exist for an infinitesimally small amount of time before breaking down into other particles. In order to find evidence researchers would need to back track the resulting particles of the break down back to their creation and prove they came from a Higgs. Because the CERN LHC can