TB: The god particle was a phrase coined by the media, rather than the scientists themselves. It's common name is the Higgs Boson. We also shouldn't confuse religious faith with scientific faith as a scientist will admit their faith was misplaced if their experiments fail and they don't find any evidence for what they are looking for.
Thanks Sifer,
Here is some information on how the Higgs Boson got the God Particle name.
The name was created by Leon Lederman, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, for the title of a book ("The God Particle: If The Universe Is The Answer, What Is The Question?"). But it wasn't what he wanted to call it. Originally he wanted to call it the "Goddamn Particle", because "nobody could find the thing" (according to Lederman's one-time postdoc researcher Marcelo Gleiser). But his editor convinced him "The God Particle" would sell more copies. We don't know whether that's true, but what certainly is true is the name stuck.
Physicists, in general, wish it hadn't. Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh physicist who first proposed the boson's existence, dislikes the name: "I find it embarrassing because, though I'm not a believer myself, I think it is the kind of misuse of terminology which I think might offend some people," he told The Guardian three years ago.
