Anyone who has been following the goings onrnat 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".)rnAfter reading Frank Wilczek's The Lightness of Being, however, it is clear that the Higgs god is a laissez-faire deity at best, accountable for only some of the mass we observe - that of elementary particles such as quarks - but leaving the rest to other mysterious forces. The masses of protons and neutrons, for example, are far heavier than the sum of their elementary parts.rnSo if the Higgs boson is not responsible for most of the mass around us, what is? The answer, Wilczek tells us, is empty space.
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