Confirmation of the Higgs boson or something very much like it would constitute a rendezvous with destiny for a generation of physicists who have believed the boson existed for half a century without ever seeing it. Further, it affirms a grand view of a universe ruled by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws, but in which everything interesting in it being a result of flaws or breaks in that symmetry. According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only visible and particular manifestation of an invisible force field that permeates space and imbues elementary particles that would otherwise be massless with mass. Without this Higgs field, or something like it, physicists say all the elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light; there would be neither atoms nor life. The Higgs boson achieved a notoriety rare for abstract physics. To the eternal dismay of his colleagues, Leon Lederman, the former director of Fermilab, called it the "God particle" in his book of the same name, later quipping that he had wanted to call it "the goddamn particle". Professor Incandela also stated,