Posted by:
Amyjo
(
)
Date: April 28, 2019 03:29AM
Lederman was quipping about both uses, not just the term, God Particle. But the one he intended, and the one he went with from the start was the God Particle. He said so himself, and explained his reasoning for it.
"Higgs, Englert, and their colleagues theorized in 1964 that there must be something that explains why other particles have mass, why things hold together, why you and I are able to exist. That something is the Higgs boson.
But “God particle”? The name was the invention of Leon Lederman, himself a great physicist, who used it as the title of a popular book in 1993.
Scientists and clerics almost uniformly say they dislike it. Even Peter Higgs said he wished Lederman hadn’t done it. “I have to explain to people it was a joke,” Higgs said in a rare interview with The Guardian in 2007. “I'm an atheist, but I have an uneasy feeling that playing around with names like that could be unnecessarily offensive to people who are religious." [He was attuned to being respectful of others beliefs. Good for him. That makes him more than a great scientist. It means he was a mensch.]
The nickname, though, is a deft little contribution to the communication of science. Because of it, countless more people have heard of the Higgs particle, why it matters, and how much effort went into finding it. The name is catchy enough that, as physicists closed in on proof of its existence, people searched online for “God particle” more often than they did for “Higgs.”
Lederman was at once playful and ponderous about his nickname for the Higgs: “This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive . . .” he wrote in his book, continuing: "Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn Particle, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. [more joking here] And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one. . . .” The Higgs was a concept of almost Biblical proportions. [serious, thoughtful contemplative moment.]
Higgs bosons could be described as making up an invisible field of energy through which other particles fly, slowed by it as it imbues them with mass. Some writers have likened a field of Higgs particles to molasses—except that molasses can be seen with the naked eye and doesn’t decay in a tiny fraction of a second.
To detect the Higgs, the United States began to build a giant atom smasher beneath the Texas prairie in the 1980s, but the project became a logistical nightmare, and a $2 billion black hole, before Congress scrapped it in 1993. Physicists moved on to CERN, the vast European laboratory in the Alps, to continue the search. They weren’t successful until 2012.
Much of it was messy, expensive business. Lederman’s nickname, in contrast, was lyrical. It gave an arcane piece of physics a sense of wonder, something that happens when science elegantly solves a problem." In other words, a fitting tribute. No other name would have done it justice in the same amount of lettering.
Lederman knew exactly what he meant when he named it. It was not taken out of context, it was as he intended it from the start. And he expressed it as much.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2013/10/09/the-higgs-boson-wins-the-nobel-why-we-call-it-the-god-particle/#5ec48edc3cbf