To be honest, physicists don’t react with unalloyed approval when I tell them about The Particle at the End of the Universe. As far as we know there isn’t any “end” to the universe, either at some location in space or at some future moment in time. And if there were a location where the universe could be said to end, there’s no reason to think you would find a particle there. And if you did, there’s no reason to think it would be the Higgs boson.

The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it’s up to us to make sense of it and give it value.

Gone are the days—as recent as the first half of the twentieth century—when a genius like Italian physicist Enrico Fermi could propose a new theory of the weak interactions, then turn around and guide the construction of the first self-sustained artificial nuclear chain reaction

There are the force particles that carry gravity and electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, which hold the matter particles together. And then there is the Higgs, in its own unique category.

At one point Pope Pius XII tried to suggest that the Primeval Atom could be identified with “Let there be light” from Genesis, but Lemaître himself persuaded him to drop that line of reasoning.