12/20/2011

Physicists dislike the name 'God Particle'


Physicists hate the nickname 'God Particle' given to Higgs boson.
"I detest the name 'God particle,'" Vivek Sharma, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and the leader of the Higgs search at LHC's CMS experiment, wrote in an email. "I am not particularly religious, but I find the term an 'in your face' affront to those who [are]. I do experimental physics not GOD."
"It's an awful name," Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York, told LiveScience. "It does not convey the particle's true role, that it is the last missing piece of the Standard Model, and that it gives mass to the other particles."
Particle tracks from a event at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
Events (a proton-proton collision) like in the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are a possible sign of the Higgs particle.
Many of the strongest objections to the name come because of its religious bent.
The name "carries almost no information about why the Higgs particle is important, it makes physicists sound pompous and arrogant, and it reinforces a very harmful presumption that physicists are trying to replace or compete with 'God,'" New York University physicist Kyle Cranmer wrote in an email to LiveScience. "In reality, physicists cover the full range from devotee to atheist. Physicists are generally driven to understand how nature works — as 'natural philosophers' we appreciate the beauty of its order and its chaos, perhaps more than most."
"'God particle' is a bad name, in every way," wrote University of Michigan physicist Gordon Kane. "It has nothing to do with the physics. Most (all?) physicists dislike it."
However some of the physicists like it.
"It's a catchy name, so why not? :)" wrote Brown University physicist Greg Landsberg.
Some physicists along with LiveScience's Facebook fans have offered up ideas for a nickname which range from "masson" and "OOM" like the Buddhist chant, to "Super Cool Non-Denominational Particle." Of course, others think "Higgs boson" works just fine.
"Maybe we should call it the "Billion" to remind us how much it cost to find the damn thing :-)" Cranmer wrote.

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