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firsthand. Every few years we host an “Open House” at Fermilab, where people from the community can come to see the accelerators and detectors and talk to scientists about what we do. People drive in from many distant Midwestern states for this event. Shortly after the appearance of the “God Particle,” we had such an Open House and the turnout of fundamentally religious people had significantly increased—a wonderful thing, as our tent is big enough for all who wish to come—but we suspect many came who sought “God Particles” and were somewhat disappointed by what they learned about our true scientific view of nature and, especially, its view on the creation of the universe. Here's one account of an incident:
I was serving as a guide at the Open House at this time, and one woman I met asked me rather suspiciously if there was also a “Satan particle?” “No,” I said. She continued, “So, exactly how did the God Particle create the world? I don't see it anywhere in Genesis or anywhere in the Bible.”
     I explained to her about mass , an essential property of matter, and how we see it in the “Standard Model” of particles, and how it has to do with something called the Higgs boson, and how the “God Particle” is just a whimsical literary name for that. “Mass?” she said, “…as in the Catholic Mass?” “No, I replied, “mass is a measure of how much matter there is in something.” She glazed over, and I again told her this was only poetically dubbed “the God Particle” by our venerable colleague, Leon Lederman, in his book, a copy of which she was actually holding.
     She seemed reengaged, and asked, “Well, where did all of this come from?” So I went on to explain a little about “creation,” as scientists see it, the “big bang,” “matter-antimatter asymmetry,” the “nucleosynthesis” part of it by which ordinary matter is created in the big bang, etc., and that most of the primordial matter is hydrogen and helium, and it all was here within three minutes—that's before a considerable amount of processing that subsequently happened in stars to make the heavier elements, the stuff we're made of. But, I explained, the raw materials were established in the big bang, and many mysteries abound, like “where did the antimatter go?”
     She seemed engaged in this and she asked a number of intelligent questions, finally getting to: “But what about life on Earth?” I explained that people weren't around at all for about thirteen and half billion years, and that we ultimately descended from microbial life-forms that arose, well, from large molecules, and eventually evolving into worms, vertebrates, primates, and then, “us.”
     At this point the woman looked utterly horrified, turned, and hastily beat an exit from the building, returning to a large bus parked outside with the name of a church in Missouri on its side panel. I am sure she felt that while, perhaps, he has no particle of his own, she had surely just met Satan, or one of his many cacodemons, incarnate.
    Leon Lederman, unflapped by all of the controversy, sits charmingly and serene as ever in his oversized leather desk chair with a smile on his face and a glowing sense of humor about all of it, the Einstein bobble-head doll on his desk bobbling in approval. The “God Particle” moniker has become a standard by-line in the latest newsworthy updates on the Higgs boson around the world, from Tibet to Timbuktu. “Timbuktu?” says Leon with a twinkle in his eye, “I have an uncle who sells bagels in Timbuktu…”
    In any case, for the purposes of this book we'll assume that Leon had the iconic Norse god Wotan (Odin) in mind when he named the “GodParticle.” And, in fact, the Higgs boson is not the end, or the “ultimate,” or even the “Götterdämmerung” of nature and science, but rather it all goes way beyond the Higgs boson. A Higgs boson represents the entry into a new