ANYONE who has been following the goings on at CERN over the past couple of weeks will have heard that mass, the defining feature of “things” in the world, owes its existence to a particle called the Higgs boson, which has come to be known as the God particle. (Leon Lederman, who is credited with coining the term, apparently called it “that goddamned particle”, but with a mix of embarrassment and advertising nous, his publishers shortened it to “God particle”.)
After reading Frank Wilczek’s The Lightness of Being, however, it is clear that the Higgs god is a laissez-faire…
