To be fair, that one came from an editor not a physicist; the physicist wanted to call their book «the goddamn particle», and it got censored/editorialized to «the god particle».

I've heard that story and it doesn't ring true to me. It's not that aggravating to find. Try measuring a neutrino mass, which is still an open problem and looks as if it will remain so for a very long time.

Is that really where the name came from? I remember being struck by how dumb that was and thought “a journalist must have come up with that”.