Higgs boson

The Higgs boson is a tiny particle that acts like a ripple in an invisible field filling all of space — the Higgs field. That field is what lets many of nature's basic building blocks have mass, instead of all zipping around weightlessly at the speed of light.

Think of the Higgs field as a kind of cosmic molasses. Some particles wade through it and feel a lot of drag (they end up heavy); others slip through easily (they stay light). The boson is the proof the field is really there: give the field a hard enough poke, and a single particle pops out for a fleeting moment.

Physicists spotted it in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, weighing about 125 GeV — roughly 130 times the mass of a hydrogen atom. You may have heard it called 'the God particle,' but that nickname is just catchy marketing from a book title; physicists don't use it, and it has nothing to do with religion.