By Bob McDonald, Quirks & Quarks

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider cringe when journalists use the term "god particle" to describe the Higgs Boson, because it has nothing to do with religion - even though it may have been essential to the very creation of the universe as we know it.

The announcement this week - that the elusive theoretical particle may have been glimpsed - comes after a long scientific journey, spanning half a century, that has attempted to solve one of the greatest mysteries in science: Why is the universe lumpy?

According to the Big Bang theory, the universe was born out of an unimaginably hot soup of energy with pressures so high that nothing with mass could exist. Even quarks, the smallest particles known, would have been squished into pure energy.

It makes sense then, that if something is that intense, it would be the same everywhere, like clear soup broth. If that broth expands outwards in all directions, you would think that it would remain uniform -so that the universe would still be nothing but pure energy today, just more spread out, diffuse and frankly, quite boring.

But that's not what happened.

Somewhere along the line, energy turned into matter. That is, into quarks, protons, electrons, atoms, molecules, particles, planets and, eventually, human beings trying to figure the whole thing out.

If the universe hadn't developed these interesting little lumps, we wouldn't be here. 

That's where the Higgs Boson comes in. It helps solve the mystery of how a universe can make the transition from boring energy to interesting matter, by giving mass to elementary particles.

But the road to the Higgs Boson was a somewhat difficult one because, for 50 years, no one knew if it actually existed.

Anyone trying to figure out what happened during the first moments of the universe is faced with a huge problem: conditions were so different back then that the laws of physics we know today didn't always apply. And since we can't go back to the beginning of time to measure those conditions, theoreticians have to model them with mathematical formulae, the so-called Standard Model.

The model worked pretty well, but there are missing pieces. So in the 1960s, physicist Peter Higgs and several colleagues made up a hypothetical particle and used it to fill in a gap in the model, which not everyone was comfortable with.

Higgs and others suggested the Boson and its associated field, which now bears his name, must have existed back at the beginning of time and enabled much of the universe to transform from energy into mass. This gave the Higgs Boson enormous power in creating everything we know today - but he was not suggesting it was the "hand of god." Nor did he ever use that term.

One version of how the tern "god particle" originated is that when Nobel Laureate Leon  Lederman published a book about the search for the Higgs, he wanted to call it the "god dammed particle" because of the frustration in not actually finding it in giant particle accelerators. Apparently, the publisher thought that title was inappropriate for a book cover and shortened it to The God Particle.

If the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider prove that the Higgs Boson is real, the physicists will be delighted to know that they are on the right track to solving the mysteries that lay hidden at the beginning of time. 

Of course, the list of mysteries is still long. Are there other types of Bosons? What is dark matter made of? Where did all the antimatter go?

Scientists admit they don't have the answers to these and many other questions, which is exciting, because you never know what they will discover along the way to solving them.  Throughout history, all of the great leaps in thought and most great inventions have come from asking fundamental questions.  

But at no point do the scientists include divine intervention to answer these questions. Gods are not part of the formula. As one observer put it, when scientists don't have an answer, the investigation begins; but when God is the answer, the investigation ends.

Science is only interested in how we got here.  When the question becomes, "Why are we here?" - then that's a question for theology.

(If you want to learn more about the hunt for the Higgs and the physics behind it, tune into Quirks & Quarks this week for our interview with Oxford physicist Frank Close.)