Hooray, Higgs Boson! But can we stop calling it "The God Particle?"
Originally published at An Experimental Life. You can comment here or there.
But can we stop calling it "The God Particle?" Even Higgs objects to the term.
I'm just as excited as the next guy about the recent confirmation of the Higgs Boson, and perhaps more than most. I even made a stupid little meme thingy to celebrate, complete with a bad pun. Because yeah, sorry, He-Man, but the Higgs Boson really is the original Mass-ter of the Universe. (See what I did there? And yes, the incorporation of the image is covered under fair use.)
But can we stop calling it "The God Particle?" Particle physicists in general don't refer to it that way, and Higgs certainly never called it that. In fact, in an interview in The Guardian, he says:
"I find it embarrassing because, though I'm not a believer myself, I think it is the kind of misuse of terminology which I think might offend some people." Of Nobel-prize winning-physicist Leon Lederman, who coined the term, Higgs says, "He wanted to refer to it as that 'goddamn particle' and his editor wouldn't let him."
Higgs himself just calls the Higgs Boson, "the Boson that's named after me," and likes to remind people that physicists Robert Brout and Franois Englert, at the Free University in Brussels, hit on the same idea at about the same time--Higgs just got more of the initial attention--and opines that they, also, deserve to have their names attached to the particle.
Read the interview here.