Kontraband Know It All

What is the Higgs boson I have been hearing so much about lately? What is the LHC?
The Higgs boson is to scientists as the G spot is to the average man: they have heard of it and they want to find it, but it is almost impossible to find and not everyone believes it even exists. A boson is a particular type of particle which can occupy the same place in space as another equal particle. The Higgs boson is a specific boson which may or may not answer many questions regarding the Big Bang and the creation of the universe. The basic theory is that the Higgs boson can create a kind of cosmic glue that binds everything together and gives things mass; it stops our atoms from scattering all over the place like an explosion in a Smarties factory.
The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is a rather fancy piece of kit constructed out of a budget of around £6 billion that was used to try and demonstrate whether these sneaky hard to find bosons actually existed. To do this, boffins are firing off particle beams calculated to collide with each other at a speed that is just under the speed of light (a paltry 186,000 miles per second). In other words, they are trying to rip the universe a new one.

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Why is the Higgs boson sometimes called the God particle?
Scientists are not too keen on the term "God particle" but the media have latched upon it as it sounds much more interesting than "Higgs boson". The term gives something that could be incredibly esoteric and mind boggling a mystic connotation which doesn't mingle too well with the facts based science community. You won't generally hear Professor Brian Cox explaining the laws of the universe by saying "it's all done by magic".
The term God particle was coined by Leon Lederman from his book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? He originally wanted to nickname the Higgs boson the Goddamn particle because it is so hard to prove its existence, but his publishers weren't keen on the name, so it became the God particle. This fits well with the notion that the Higgs boson was an integral part of the creation of the universe and that that answer may not be 42 after all (sorry Douglas Adams).

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Who was the Higgs boson named after? What did he do?
This particularly shy boson was named after Professor Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist who hails from Newcastle upon Tyne. This extremely intelligent man, who according to world famous brainiac Stephen Hawking should win a Nobel Prize for Physics, hypothesised in a paper in 1964 that there was a particle with a special field that could "stick" other particles together to create mass. He was not the only scientist of the time who was working on these theories, but fortunately for him it was his surname that became associated with the now famous boson.
In his working career Higgs has worked as a researcher, lecturer and physicist. Because of his unique upbringing he found himself home-schooled and still managed to become a world-renowned scientist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Higgs is an atheist and is also not a fan of the term "God particle", as he feels it might be disrespectful to believers. At least he was a bit more tactful than Stephen Hawking, who basically said that Heaven was a fairy story for people frightened of death. He may as well have added that the tooth fairy doesn't exist, England will never win the World Cup again and Olivia Munn is going to become a nun, spoilsport.

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Will the Higgs boson destroy the world, possibly on 21 December 2012?
CERN scientists are deliberately smashing particles into each other at millions of miles per hour in the hope that the ensuing release of energy will create a new particle, hopefully the sneaky Higgs boson which is in there holding everything together. These collisions create a huge amount of energy and some doomsday types have stated that this energy could form a variety of entities that could destroy the world. This includes cosmic rays, microscopic black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles; any one of these turning the Earth inside out before swallowing itself up like some bizarre Star Trek special effect from the 1960s.
Full operation of the LHC began in 2009 after some initial teething problems and the official inauguration in 2008. As recently as 4 July 2012 scientists reported that a new boson had been observed which was displaying the behaviour of the theorised Higgs boson, so it is possible the Goddamn particle has been discovered and proved. The world will not be destroyed and 21 December 2012 will be a regular day, regardless of what some conspiracy theorist said about the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. Everyone knows the world will end when the Thetans invade, prove Scientologists right and make Tom Cruise the godlike Overlord of the World in 2020.

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