Though Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who died on 8 April, will be saddled with the term for all eternity, he himself hated the use of the term “God particle” to describe the boson that imparts mass to the universe. As modest as the man himself, the Higgs boson discovered experimentally nearly 50 years after he had predicted it in 1963 has remarkably few overt characteristics and quickly disappears into the background, and yet without it what we are pleased to call reality is scarcely conceivable at all.