The book provides a brief history of particle physics, starting with the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Democritus, and continuing through Isaac Newton, Roger J. Boscovich, Michael Faraday, and Ernest Rutherford. This leads in to a discussion of the development of quantum physics in the 20th century. In a nod to the philosophy of atomism, Lederman follows the convention of using the word "atom" to refer to atoms in their modern sense as the smallest unit of any chemical element, and "a-tom" to refer to the actual basic indivisible particles of matter, the quarks and leptons.
The book is written in a lighthearted tone, with numerous jokes and humorous anecdotes. The particle identified in the title is the Higgs boson proposed by the physicist Peter Higgs [1], and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble [2], and François Englert and Robert Brout [3]. Higgs actually joked that Lederman originally wished to label this particle as "the goddamn particle".[4]