![]() ![]() Although disappointed at the decision to cancel that project, I have still eagerly followed the news as the European Center for Nuclear Physics (CERN) has finally closed in on its discovery. In fact, I was looking forward to a career at the Superconducting Super Collider being built near Waxahachie, Texas in the early 1990's. In fact, I have been looking forward to this discovery for some time, having worked as an experimental particle physicist for around 9 years. The winner will be notified via the email address registered to their username.No, as a Christian particle physicist, the discovery of the Higgs boson particle does not make God less necessary to me. * The winner will be chosen by a team of independent physicists. Sign up to our twitter feed for all our breaking science news. The closing date is midnight Monday 1st June 2009 ![]() Where's Bill Watterson when you need him? Equally, God particle fails spectacularly on 1 and 2, but does rather better on 3. The Higgs boson scores well on 1 and 2, but in my view fails miserably on 3. The best rules for naming new phenomena in physics I can find come courtesy of yet another very smart Fermilab physicist, Joe Lykken.Ģ) It is good to name things after people, but only if you can resist the pressure to hyphenate with two or three extra namesģ) Names should be evocative and inspiring. So, it's time for another name, and Higgs' birthday seems as good a day as any to start searching for one. And we in the media just can't stop ourselves calling it the God particle. Physicists call it the Higgs boson, but it could easily be the B-E-H-G-H-K boson (make an acronym out of that if you can). So that's how we got to where we are today. In the book, he justifies the name by saying the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname. In the early 1990s, the former director of the lab, Leon Lederman, wrote a great book on particle physics that he called "The God particle", which was to be the main target for an enormous but ultimately ill-fated machine called the Superconducting Supercollider. Even Higgs often distances himself from the name, referring to it as the "so-called Higgs boson".įor physicists, the name seems to have stuck, but not for the media.įor the origins of the name so loved by journalists, we have to go back to Fermilab. ![]() The particle became known as the Higgs boson in 1972 after Ben Lee, a former head of theoretical physics at Fermilab, used the name to describe the idea. And a third group, including Gerald Guralnik, Richard Hagen and Tom Kibble at Imperial College in London followed soon after. Two Belgian physicists, Francois Englert and Robert Brout, published very similar work a week or two earlier than Higgs. Peter Higgs wasn't the only one to come up with the idea either. His work was influenced by several scientists, including the Nobel laureates Werner Heisenberg, Phil Anderson and Yoichiro Nambu. Peter Higgs did not pluck the idea for what is officially called the Higgs boson out of thin air. The line of progress is rarely straight and clear in physics, as Sheldon Glashow said in his Nobel lecture in 1979. The winner will receive a copy of Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara, and a surprise Higgs boson-themed gift.īut first, some history. Depending on the number of entries, we'll select the winner by: consulting physicists testing the entries on the humanities graduates who run the Guardian's newsdesk, aka "The Gate Keepers" or by printing them out on a sheet of paper and asking the chef to throw a dart at it*. Who said Friday can't be fun?īelow I've set out the best criteria I can find for how to come up with a good name for a new particle. So today, in honour of Peter Higgs entering the realm of the octogenarians, we're launching a competition to rename the God particle. When I've written about the God particle here before, I've suggested we might do well – or more accurately that physicists might do well – to think up another name for it. He worries it might offend people who are religious, but I think he hates it for other reasons too. In previous interviews, I've asked him what he makes of the name, God particle. Today it's the 80th birthday of Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh-based physicist whose work pointed to the existence of the particle in the early 1960s. It's rubbish." He then added: "If you walked down the corridor here, poked your head into people's offices and asked that question, you would likely be struck by flying books." And then he said: "I really, really don't like it. That machine is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world (that works).īut back to the physicist in Manchester. The other is the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. Cern is just one lab that is in the business of hunting for the particle. ![]()
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