It’s time for everyone to stop calling the Higgs boson the “God Particle”. For one thing, it seems to have been publisher’s trick to boost sales of a physics book by Leon Lederman (here at UC) and Dick Teresi. As the Telegraph reports,
Lederman wrote in the book “God particle”: “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, that I have given it a nickname: the God particle.
“Why God particle? The publisher 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.”
But Higgs himself doesn’t like this:
The 83-year-old scientist, who lives in Edinburgh, insisted the reference was not funny and was actually misleading.
He came up with the theory of a subatomic particle, since dubbed the Higgs boson, which would explain the mystery of how things have mass.
But the professor wants people to stop referring to it as the “God particle” because he does not believe the particle holding the physical fabric of the universe together is the work of one almighty creator.
According to Prof Higgs, the nickname actually started as a joke, adding that it was “not a very good one”.
It’s not surprising that a godless person (and future Nobel Laureate, I suspect) would be ticked off that the particle he predicted should get a name that smacks of divinity:
Prof Higgs, explained his distaste for the term in a BBC Scotland interview. He said: “First of all, I’m an atheist.
“The second thing is I know that name was a kind of joke and not a very good one. I think he shouldn’t have done that as it’s so misleading.”
I’ve been reading a lot about the Higgs boson, trying desperately to understand how a field can also be a particle, and how that field can give mass to other particles in the Standard Model of physics. But I suspect that this is one of those nonintuitive oddities of modern physics that will forever defy my understanding.
There’s a typo in the title -> Athiest
Yep–fixed, thanks.
Good. Straightforward. No messing around with God-language, as many atheist scientists (esp. physicists) seem want to do. Removes some of the ammunition from apologists who utilize context-free quote-mining and ambiguities of meaning.
Can we call it the Santa Christ particle instead? It brings the gift of mass, after all….
b&
Veryu good!
Hilarious – thanks!
It is the same as with Einstein’s proclamation about that god doesn’t through dices. Theist apolegists like to misuse people’s statements for their own pervers puroposes.
I was once home sick from work & reading about the Higgs Boson when Jehovah Witnesses came to my door. I thought of the God Particle that time. 🙂
That picture’s adorable!
Just read the series of Mano Singham on Ftb on the higgs-boson. The particle is part of the field.
+1 I’m finding that a very good series.
“…and future Nobel Laureate, I suspect…”
They’d better hurry up if he’s 83 he might be as unlucky as Rosalind Franklin.
How about the “ceiling cat particle”?
YES!
or the shorthand form, the pawticle…
i do like that!
Years ago I heard a lecture by Leon Lederman. He touched briefly on the term “God particle” and didn’t seem very happy about it. As I recall he tried to pass the blame off onto his publisher. Wasn’t his idea for the title.
He also told a joke near the beginning of the talk (it was at a religious college) to warn the audience about how physicists viewed religion. It was the one where 3 physicists are arguing with Einstein on some esoteric scientific issue and suddenly a large voice of divine authority booms from the sky: “HE’S RIIIIIGHT!” There is a brief pause while everyone recollects themselves … and then one of the physicists says “Okay, but it’s still 3 against 2.”
The meaning of the ‘joke’ is and was ambiguous, I think. The audience clearly got the message that “physicists are arrogant” and this may have been what Lederer wanted to get across. But of course the implication that physicists are TOO arrogant is countered by the message that no, this is how science works. This is what it is, and should be. Even God would and SHOULD have to show His work and argue for His case using convincing evidence. The purpose of the process is to avoid accepting authority and this refusal is based on moral and ethical reasons, not “rebellion.” What God or religion or the religious say doesn’t mean anything on its own.
Lederer is probably suffering for his sins. I suspect that he’s used to ‘fans’ eagerly coming to hear him talk about how Science has finally found God and he’s sick to death of it. He has to smile and remain tactful.
See? See what happens when you mention the word “God” when you’re trying to get your grand new ideas out to a blase public? Be careful what you wish for, Leon.
Someone on another recent post told this joke about rabbis.
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It’s actually from the Talmud: Baba Metzia 59b. After God speaks from Heaven, siding with Rabbi Eliezer (a cat lover), “R. Joshua arose and exclaimed: ‘It is not in heaven.’ What did he mean by this? — Said R. Jeremiah: That the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai, After the majority must one incline.”
I’ve heard it used to show that morality, etc. are up to humans now.
The response might be What does he know? Does he have any peer-reviewed publications on this topic? Anything on ArXiv, even?
But it should be Prove it, then!
But if he’s an atheist why does he look so jolly in that photo? He looks positively cheeky. Doesn’t he realise that without god everything is meaningless? Why isn’t he glum, moody and depressed??
Photoshopped!!!
Of course!! Those dastardly “non-believers” are trying to pretend that you can still be happy without believing that an all-loving, magical super-being will administer eternal suffering to anyone who acknowledges the lack of evidence he’s provided for his own existence. Fools!! They’re all fools!
A story relayed to me by one of my college physics profs:
Sydney Coleman had submitted a paper which included a particle interaction Feynman diagram; this specific example he labeled a tadpole diagram. The journal editors objected, on the grounds of excessive cuteness. They wrote to Coleman, informing him that a change would be necessary before publication. Coleman wrote back, saying “You are absolutely right to object, it doesn’t even look that much like a tadpole. I’ve decided to call it a sperm diagram. And that’s why, to this day, it is known as a tadpole diagram.
Hilarious!
I vote for Santa Claus particle owing to all of the gifts that Higgs B research brought for high energy physics. Dark matter should be renamed God matter, then funding could shift from Higgs to dark matter physics. We could rename ecology “God’s Works.” Maybe Templeton would fund my stuff on nematodes in soil food webs.
If Higg’s boatswain is God, it is yet further proof how teensy God is, since “mass” constitutes such a tiny part of the univere – ah but size does not matter?
How about ‘Who Needs God When You’ve Got This Particle’ particle or the WNGWYGTP particle for short.
Warning – this article and comments so far have implied, probably based on inaccurate science reporting elsewhere, that the Higgs field/bosun is responsible for all mass. As I understand it, it is responsible for the mass of leptons (e.g., electrons) only, which comprise a small fraction of the total mass of the universe.
I could be wrong also, but don’t assume without verification that what you read on the Internet is true, even here.
You are right … in the sense that the so-called black matter also exerts gravitational force. Leopards if electrons are by definition massless. Nor do the burn like tigers!
Re massless:
It is energy that goes into the gravitational interaction, hence photons et cetera masless particles feel and exert gravitational interaction.
“The point is that for gravity there are no exceptions — gravity always pulls on particles proportional to their masses. (Actually that’s itself a misconception; gravity pulls on things proportional to their energies. In daily life, any object’s energy is dominated by its mass-energy, E = m c-squared, so for rocks, people and stars, energy and mass are in almost exact proportion to one another. But gravity also bends starlight! If gravity only pulled on mass, then it wouldn’t pull on light, which consists of massless photons.)”
[ http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-known-apparently-elementary-particles/the-known-particles-if-the-higgs-field-were-zero/ ]
It is the (matter)energy that goes into general relativity description of how it curves spacetime, and in turn how spacetime affects (matter)energy.
So despite our common sense ideas from daily experience, massless particles do mess with gravity to some extent.
It is worse, the Higgs field is responsible for some of the Standard Model particle’s mass. Obviously not the massless particles, but also not the neutrino masses and not its own mass.
Dark matter masses may have an analogous scalar field, I dunno. Most of our mass, 99 % in fact, comes from the quark-gluon interactions in the nucleons, which in turn is mostly relativistic (!) mass – quarks travel near the universal speed limit within those confines.
What the Higgs field does is to make sure the charged proton is lower mass than the neutral neutron, so the latter is the unstable one but hydrogen (and some other nuclei) are stable.
Quark indeed! Someone read Finnegans Wake and lucked out! Joyce,too, had fallen in love with the word, German for requeson, cottage cheese, the word Germans used to use for utter non-sense! Glue some non-sense together and what do you get?
It is a pity Higgs has been such a recluse, otherwise his wishes could have been more influential early on.
Of course, since the Higgs field only gives _some_ particles mass, and that mass is some 1 % of the baryon mass so ~ 0.2 % of the total mass of the universe, it is totally appropriate that its boson(s) is called “god particle”. These concepts have the universal insignificance in common.
Conceptually there is something very wrong with the notion of a “massless” particle, no?Photons allegedly. Yet have energy???
Jerry, you are “trying desperately to understand how a field can also be a particle…”
Join the club. Sean Carroll says at http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/04/12/frogs-see-photons/ that
“…David Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality [is] an attempt to connect our underlying fundamental description of the world, which is in terms of fields, to what we see when we make a quantum observation, which is in terms of particles — at least if we look closely enough.”
and:
“…light is really a vibration in the electromagnetic field, but careful observations (be they by frogs or artificial photodetectors) reveal individual energy packets call photons. It’s not that the field is “made of” photons, it’s that what we see when we perform measurements in a world governed by quantum mechanics is different from what the world is “actually made of,” to the extent that it’s okay to think about such a concept.”
I’m sure this clears everything up for you!
Lederman himself says he “mentioned the phrase as a joke once in a speech” and it became “the working title of the book” not expecting the publisher to use it. (Preface, The God Particle; Mariner / Houghton Mifflin Co, 2006). Lederman also writes that the Higgs boson “is so central to the state of physics … yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle.” (p.22, The God Particle, 2006, 1993).
Quantum fields are associated with particles, generally – if not universally – which is why physicists are searching for a ‘graviton’ to help explain attraction at a distance. The Higgs boson is specifically associated with transferring an attribute, mass, to electrons, but it may turn out ‘mass’ may be just another attribute of an energy-state, like ‘spin’ or ‘top’ or ‘color’ – just words signifying what energy ‘does’. Without getting too carried away here, what a human is, what a cat is, and what a table is, is a mess of different energy-states organized and interacting in a relatively specific way. ‘God or no god’ is still an unanswered question, and probably always will be. Even Dawkins has said that, as has J.C. here on his blog (or words of similar effect). Low probability may apply, of course, but I have no idea how anyone could apply actual probabilities to that equation. The Higgs boson won’t solve it either, which is maybe why Higgs is smiling?
Given the enormity of the claim and its direct connection to discarded ideas like vitalism and mind/body substance dualism, I think the probabilities of ‘God’ existing are sufficiently low that we don’t actually have to be able to assign it a number. It’s not as if the hypothesis is a live option.
If you want to assign a non-zero possibility that god exists you need to define the concept first. I have never seen a definition that was not incoherent and internally contradictory, so until that changes I am happy to accept a zero probability of gods’ existence.
The definition of God as “beyond comprehension” looks pretty good, except that of course it evades the question. Look, God is a projection of good old Daddyo who pretnds to the infant, or the infant thinks he is THE creator. Ctd. belief in God above and beyond the recognition of the part played in it by Daddyo’s sperm testifies to the eternal infantilism of most of humanity.
Not beyond comprehension, god is beneath comprehension.
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.
It’s not thrown around so much any more, but that “mitochondrial Eve” thing was similarly irritating.
I never found it so; it’s actually a remarkable fact that we can collect a lot of evidence about a particular real individual who was the direct maternal ancestor of every human living, and there is no better or more technically accurate name for her other than a sentence-length definition. As for ‘not thrown around so much any more’… usage has been pretty steady in recent years (apart from the huge peak in ’09 that seems to be mainly related to Battlestar Galactica). You could write everything understood about the Higgs particle in a physics textbook without mentioning Gawd, but Eve is here to stay in biology.
“….trying desperately to understand how a field can also be a particle, and how that field can give mass to other particles in the Standard Model of physics.”
Yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I would like to reincarnate with a better brain. But alas…
Calling it the God particle is an easy label applied irrespective of any relevance.
Dr. Higgs reminds me of Ed Wynn (here).
My brother is a theoretical physicist. After many attempts to have him explain particle/field duality, quantum theory, etc. in terms I can understand, I have come to the conclusion that theoretical physics is the discipline which gives all other scientific disciplines credibility.
(Alternatively, that you will never really understand it until you understand the maths.)
I was re-introduced to phyics in the mid eighties by translating Gerhard Fritsch’s book on QUARKS, which then required a lot of back ground reading, but not bringin my math back up to snuff. All those wonderfully naned little beasties entered my dreams – I fell ou of love with a wife, but in love with me dogs: the “charm”, now intensified by my aquaintance with quark qualities, fell off as an heart-ahsped amulet i had once had! Hoowever I ended up feeling that the understanding really was in the math of all this.
“…a field can also be a particle…”
I am certainly no expert, and I don’t think the above is necessarily indicative of the following confusion, but the latter certainly does occur:
There is a “Higgs field”, and there is a “Higgs particle”. Both of these are singular noun phrases. But “Higgs field” is singular in the commonest sense, like “Roy Rogers’ horse (called Trigger)”. There is only one (or was). On the other hand, “Higgs particle” is singular rather like “the horse”, as said by a biology teacher, is singular. It refers to an entire set (singular) of similar particles or horses(plural).
Please correct me if I’m wrong, Torbjorn or somebody else who really knows physics (I don’t claim much knowledge there).
I like this Mano guy’s writing on the Higgs, but I do think he should make this distinction clear. Just about every popularization seems confused on this, just like those same science reporters have been confused to think that popular ‘oval picture’ recently of the Planck satellite’s view of the early universe (microwave background) is a picture of the entire universe at that time (not even close!)
The confusion, if I’m correct, may come from mixing up ‘wave’ and ‘field’ in quantum theory. One has this (old-fashioned in a way) very-difficult-to-understand wave-particle duality from good old quantum mechanics of 1925 or earlier, non-relativistic. But quantum field theory is relativistic, that’s the whole point of doing it, starting with Dirac before 1930, and then gradually more successful after WWII, despite seeming to be mathematically inconsistent in some sense that I am trying to understand, but probably won’t live the many years needed for me to have a chance!
I suggest checking out Sean Carroll’s talk (there’s a video somewhere) “Higgs Boson and tthe Fundamental Nature of Reality”. Then try to wrap your head around the idea that everything is actually waves in fields, particles are not the ultimate reality.
Particles are only an aproximative description of the excitations modes of a quantum field for length scales greater than the Compton wavelenght of the particle/field.
Or, you can use Bunge’s terminology and talk about quantons (which are neither particles nor waves, just happen to have properties which are vaguely like them sometimes) and classons, which are more familiar.
The interesting question is how classons emerge from quantons – which as far as I know is an open question, though that’s what the decoherence program etc. is trying to do.
I’ll try my hand at this “particle – field” business with the caution that I’m not an expert, just a layman. I read somewhere (perhaps in The Hidden Reality) Brian Greene talking about the Higgs as a “field” but that every field implies the existence of a corresponding particle. The Higgs boson (particle) is just a piece of the Higgs field. That’s his way of trying to enlighten a non-expert like me. Is this any help?
Field theories (both classical and quantum) hold that fields are fundamental, not particles (which are just excitations of corresponding fields). But then again, they would…
I’d agree, except for the “classical”. I don’t think classical particles are at all regarded as excitations of classical fields, basically Maxwell’s E-M and Einstein’s GR.
For those of you who haven’t seen this yet…
http://lolyard.com/3897/god-particle
Here is how a field can be a particle:
Imagine that you are a particle. I am a particle! If we remove time, any person ends up looking a lot more like a noodle than a blob. It traces our path, everywhere we’ve ever been and ever will go – at once. Each of us is a single strand of human spaghetti.
What is the shape of your particle?
It is a field.
A field is never a particle, so there is no need to know how it could be. The spaghetti may be safely eaten with no loss of human knowledge, only a gain.
Jerry, you might try http://profmattstrassler.com/
a site that is eminently understandable and he even uses math in some of his explanations. This is my favorite physics blog/educational site.
“I’ve been reading a lot about the Higgs boson, trying desperately to understand how a field can also be a particle, and how that field can give mass to other particles in the Standard Model of physics. But I suspect that this is one of those nonintuitive oddities of modern physics that will forever defy my understanding.”
I recently came to the conclusion (while listening to a wonderful talk by Sean Carroll on the Higgs) that the only way I’m ever going to make sense of physics is to get my head around the requisite maths – a feat I’m pretty sure I’m not capable of.
kelskye, see my post directly above this one. Strassler’s blog does a bang up job of describing particle physics, why the Higgs field is important and, using no more than differential calculus, how it works. I’m sure the *real* math is a bit more complicated and particles are eigenstates of relativistic, complex valued tensor fields…. But I certainly understood the Higgs field better after reading h is articles.
On the oter hand, “villainous nature” and “elusive”—if the shoe fits…