While looking for something else I’ll blog about in a short while, I stumbled upon one of the most annoying of the articles on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (or any other particle physics experiment) that I’ve read in a long time. This is because of this utterly ridiculous business of calling the Higgs particle the “God particle”. Who started this? It really is so misleading and annoying. The title of the Guardian article is “In the beginning: scientists get ready to hunt for God particle”, and it is by Ian Sample. Some random bits:
It should certainly discover what some call the “God particle”, finally answering the embarrassingly simple but elusive question of why things have mass.
and…
Finding the Higgs boson will confirm scientists’ most complete theory of the universe and the matter from which it is created. “It’s probably the closest to God that we’ll get,” said Jos Engelen, Cern’s chief scientist.
Aaaaargh!!!
Some?! Who are these people who call it the “God particle”?! If you know anybody in the field who calls it the “God particle” (or even out of the field, for that matter) please write in and say. It could simply be that I don’t know these people since I am an irrelevant theorist.
And if that wasn’t enough, before I finished reading, I got to savour paragraphs like the one below, where I can’t even begin to imagine how the reporter could have got things so garbled. Note that typically no actual scientist involved in the piece is allowed to check stuff like this because of the internal editorial policies of these sorts of publications – and of course the general “who cares anyway?” attitude to science coverage:
Other experiments will veer sharply into what has previously been the realm of science fiction. Some scientists believe the universe has more dimensions than the ones we know about. In one extra dimension gravity is believed to be exceptionally strong. If the collider momentarily wedges extra dimensions open, it could release a powerful tug of gravity that compresses matter so much it creates a miniature black hole.
Aaaargh!!!*
-cvj
(*Imagine me running around in tight circles with my hands on the side of my head… screaming. For a full minute.)
I had always wondered about the H in Jesus H Christ.
Have any of you actually read “The God Particle” by Leon Lederman? I’m reading it for school right now. In it he says “One, the publishers wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection of sorts, to another book, a much older one …” (Lederman 22), after which point he connects it to the story of the tower of Babel in order to show how its discovery would make the universe more simple, in essence undoing the tower of Babel. He was not saying that it was the God of all particles or that it was related to god in any way, it was a metaphor and a joke. He just thought it was funny. Calling the Higgs Boson the “God Particle” is stupid because he was just joking when he named it that and he only repeated it over and over again to be funny.
some people compare ‘atom-smashing’ to taking something like a Vacheron watch and hurling it into a brick wall with all your TEVs and then saying, “Well that’s how it works!”
Nature, it seems, is the popular name
for milliards and milliards and milliards
of particles playing their infinite game
of billiards and billiards and billiards.
“ATOMYRIADES” by Piet Hein (Danish mathematician and poet)
Aw, c’mon, people. There’s something that enables everything, we know it’s there, but we can’t id it. I must know something that you don’t know…
maybe THATS why we cant stop saying “GOD PARTICLE!”. GOD IS A HIGGS BOSON! (Eh? It’s clear as mud.) (SJ Lewis or CS?)
“I’d like to know
What this whole show
Is all about
Before it’s out.”
thats more Piet Hein (i call him ‘Poet’)
Piet Hein wrote over 7,000 poems like that one. He called them ‘grooks’. Grok it?
…if we cant find the Higgs Boson then lets find a hoggs bison(ha!)
the only time i heard of the god particle instead of the higgs boson is in Angels and Demons!!!!!!!!!!!
According to the Amazon page, Lederman hoped the book would garner support for the Superconducting Super Collider at the University of Texas. Possibly the term was meant to appeal to pious politicians. It would be a non-coincidental compromise which happened to be futile.
Peter Higgs proposed the existence of something that gives “stuff” its mass. That something is called the ‘Higgs boson’. It seems to satisfy some way of thinking about the way nature ‘is’. Now, if this ‘boson’ doesn’t really exist, then we can say, “Heter Piggs discovered the Hoggs Bison(!)”
-cvj