On april 21st physicists held their breath. An anonymous commentator posted a note on a blog, picked up by Fox News, suggesting that researchers at cern, Europe's main particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, had netted their biggest fish: the "God particle". The Higgs boson, to give the less exalted moniker preferred by scientists, is the hypothetical manifestation of the Higgs field, which is thought to pervade all space and whose interactions with other elementary particles give them mass. It is the missing piece of the Standard Model, a theory which links all the particles and forces of nature bar gravity into a single mathematical framework.
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