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Oliver Buchmueller, from the rival research team CMS, was a little less trenchant.

“Calling it the ’God particle’ is completely inappropriate,” said the German physicist, who divides his time between CERN and teaching at London’s Imperial College.

“It’s not doing justice to the Higgs and what we think its role in the universe is. It has nothing to do with God.”

The Higgs boson is being hunted so determinedly because it would be the manifestation of an invisible field – the Higgs field – thought to permeate the entire universe.

The field was posited in the 1960s by British scientist Peter Higgs as the way that matter obtained mass after the universe was created in the Big Bang.

As such, according to the theory, it was the agent that made the stars, planets – and life – possible by giving mass to most elementary particles, the building blocks of the universe; hence the nickname “God particle”.

“Without it, or something like it, particles would just have remained whizzing around the universe at the speed of light,” said Pippa Wells, another Atlas researcher.

But Wells also has no time for theological terminology in describing it.

“Hearing it called the ’God particle’ makes me angry. It confuses people about what we are trying to do here at CERN.”

According to people who have investigated the subject, the term originated with a 1993 history of particle physics by U.S. Nobel prize winner Leon M Lederman.

The book was titled: The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?