The first subatomic particle to be discovered was the electron. The charge-to-mass ratio was found to be relatively large, and independent of the gas used in his experiments, which indicated to him that he had found a true particle. Thomson gave it the name “corpuscle,” which was later changed to “electron.”

The first subatomic particle to be discovered was the electron, identified in 1897 by J. J. Thomson. After the nucleus of the atom was discovered in 1911 by Ernest Rutherford, the nucleus of ordinary hydrogen was recognized to be a single proton. In 1932 the neutron was discovered.

2 Answers. Electrons came first. In the early universe, during the so-called electroweak epoch, the temperature was so high that large numbers of heavy particles (W, Z, and Higgs bosons, for instance) were created.

Protons were discovered by Ernest Rutherford in the year 1919, when he performed his gold foil experiment. He projected alpha particles (helium nuclei) at gold foil, and the positive alpha particles were deflected. He concluded that protons exist in a nucleus and have a positive nuclear charge.

The Higgs Boson is a subatomic particle that is crucial for a stable universe. If the Higgs Boson lost stability, it would severely disrupt physics, chemistry, and life. However, the universe is big enough that the disruption might not destroy Earth for a long time.

Why is the Higgs boson so light? This is because the theory of how the particle interacts with the most massive of all observed elementary particles, the top quark, involves corrections at a fundamental (quantum) level that could result in a Higgs mass much larger than the measured value of 125 GeV.

Peter Higgs

An elusive particle A problem for many years has been that no experiment has observed the Higgs boson to confirm the theory. On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 125 GeV.

String theory (or, more technically, M-theory) is often described as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. But there’s no empirical evidence for it, or for any alternative ideas about how gravity might unify with the rest of the fundamental forces.