by BOB MCDONALD
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider cringe when journalists use the term “god particle” to describe the Higgs Boson, because it has nothing to do with religion – even though it may have been essential to the very creation of the universe as we know it.
The announcement this week – that the elusive theoretical particle may have been glimpsed – comes after a long scientific journey, spanning half a century, that has attempted to solve one of the greatest mysteries in science: Why is the universe lumpy?
According to the Big Bang theory, the universe was born out of an unimaginably hot soup of energy with pressures so high that nothing with mass could exist. Even quarks, the smallest particles known, would have been squished into pure energy.
It makes sense then, that if something is that intense, it would be the same everywhere, like clear soup broth. If that broth expands outwards in all directions, you would think that it would remain uniform -so that the universe would still be nothing but pure energy today, just more spread out, diffuse and frankly, quite boring.
But that’s not what happened.
Somewhere along the line, energy turned into matter. That is, into quarks, protons, electrons, atoms, molecules, particles, planets and, eventually, human beings trying to figure the whole thing out.
If the universe hadn’t developed these interesting little lumps, we wouldn’t be here.
That’s where the Higgs Boson comes in. It helps solve the mystery of how a universe can make the transition from boring energy to interesting matter, by giving mass to elementary particles.
One version of how the term “god particle” originated is that when Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman published a book about the search for the Higgs, he wanted to call it the “god dammed particle” because of the frustration in not actually finding it in giant particle accelerators. Apparently, the publisher thought that title was inappropriate for a book cover and shortened it to The God Particle.
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One version of how the term “god particle” originated is that when Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman published a book about the search for the Higgs, he wanted to call it the “god dammed particle” because of the frustration in not actually finding it in giant particle accelerators. Apparently, the publisher thought that title was inappropriate for a book cover and shortened it to The God Particle.
CBC News for more
(Thanks to Mansoor Sharif and reader)