Nobel laureate and British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs passed away on April 8, 2024, at the age of 94. His most famous achievement in his life was the prediction of a crucial particle and its mechanism of action in the Standard Model of theoretical physics.
Source: University of Edinburgh official website
It was for this contribution that he was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. This particle is called the Higgs boson in physics, but it has a much louder nickname in the mass media - the "God particle".
How is this particle "God"? Is it "created by God", or is it equivalent to "God" in physics?
Neither. In fact, it has nothing to do with God's literal or figurative meaning. There are a lot of bad names in the scientific community, but if scientists were asked to vote for the worst names, the name God Particle would have a good chance of winning first place.
Why the scientific community doesn't like it
The name "God particle"?
The name God Particle first appeared in the popular science book "God Particle" by physicist Leon Lederman.
In the book, however, he says that the name was not his original intention, and that he wanted to call it the "goddamn" particle because it caused big problems for physicists. But because of the publisher's strong opposition, he asked for a truncation to "god" particles, and he had no choice but to agree.
He also forcibly provided an explanation for the new name: in the eleventh chapter of the Old Testament Genesis, there is a myth that all human languages were originally common, but later because humans wanted to build a tower of Babel, which angered God, God confused their language and made it impossible for humans to communicate with each other, which is the myth of the Tower of Babel (Babel means "confusion" or "confusion").
Ledeman says that the Higgs particle may be a confusing thing that God and his old man have made. He even put this myth on Higgs in his book and parodied it, comparing the collider to the modern-day Tower of Babel that leads to the mysteries of the universe.
This explanation is clearly an after-the-fact remedy. In religious mythology, God has done a lot of things. Furthermore, if you have to use this allusion, it is more appropriate to call it "Babel particles". But all in all, that's what he called. And so the name spread.
Within the scientific community, few people like the name God particle. Although it is not uncommon in science to exaggerate names, this name is not only exaggerated, but also "exaggerated" in the wrong direction. The Higgs boson, of course, has nothing to do with the gods of any religion, but it does not solve all the problems of theoretical physics, and even has little to do with the fundamental origin of the universe, in short, it has nothing to do with God in every sense.
Higgs himself was an atheist and disliked the name, believing that it might offend others. Physicists who study the Higgs boson are also largely unanimous in their opposition to the name. Physicists have repeatedly proposed a new name, but the name was originally used by the mass media and not within the physics community, and these suggestions can only be mud cows.
So whose pot is this? Some argue that the blame is placed entirely on the publishers, arguing that this terrible name has nothing to do with physicists. But in fact, given the historical context at the time, Lederman almost certainly had a motive when he agreed to take the name.
The book "God Particles".
The background of the birth
The book "God Particles" not only popularized the Higgs boson, which had not yet been discovered at that time, but also vigorously touted the role of particle accelerators in fundamental physics, and the accelerator promoted by Lederman himself, the superconducting super collider, was facing a "life-and-death crisis" that year.
莱德曼摄于费米实验室。 图片来源：public domain
At the time, Lederman was the second director of Fermilab. His predecessor was physicist Robert Wilson. When Wilson was seeking funding for the construction of a particle accelerator for his laboratory, he was questioned by the Atomic Commission.
When a congressman asked him "what is the connection between this accelerator and national security," Wilson famously replied: "It has nothing to do with defending the country, except to make it more worth defending." This sentence greatly boosted the morale of the physics community at that time, and the inquiry meeting was successfully passed. Construction of the accelerator began on October 3, 1969, and Wilson personally shoveled the first shovel of soil.
That's in the past, though. Wilson himself had already resigned in 1978 protesting funding cuts. Lederman then took over the lab. He tried his best to upgrade the original accelerator to 1 megaelectron volt (hence the name megaelectron volt accelerator), but to make a breakthrough, he would need to build a new accelerator from scratch.
In 1984, the ambitious superconducting supercollider was launched under the auspices of Lederman, estimated to be 87 kilometers long and reach an ultra-high energy of 40 megaelectron volts. If the Higgs sub exists, the collider will almost certainly find it.
Fast forward to 1993. The Superconducting Super Collider is still just a 22-kilometer tunnel in the Texas wilderness, but $2 billion has already been spent. At that time, the Soviet Union had collapsed, Congress had lost the spur of the Cold War, government debt had exceeded $200 billion, and the new president, Clinton, was not too enthusiastic about the projects of his predecessor.
Scientists in other fields have also raised doubts, and another important project, the International Space Station, has also been seriously overrun, and it seems that there is only one choice but to choose. The Europeans left their money for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition, at the US-Japan trade summit, which was originally scheduled to discuss financial cooperation for the superconducting supercollider, the elder Bush suddenly had gastroenteritis, vomited on the clothes of Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, and fainted on the spot, and the follow-up discussion was forced to be canceled.
Lederman's book "God Particles" was born in this context. He hopes to use the book to draw public attention to the field of high-energy physics—perhaps to influence congressional policy and save his heart. The original name "Particles of God's Damnation" was originally the name of an extremely "title party", and although it is a great exaggeration to replace it with God particles, it probably does not violate Lederman's original intention.
However, he failed.
In March of the same year the book was published, the New York Times reported that the projected spending on the accelerator had grown to $8 billion. In June, the nonprofit released a report that found serious mismanagement of collider funding. On October 19, the House of Representatives rejected follow-up funding. On the 30th, the president signed the bill for the cancellation of the project.
In Europe, the Large Hadron Collider began construction in 1998 and was built in 2008, with one-sixth the energy of the superconducting supercollider, the Higgs boson deity was discovered in 2012. The Fermilab accelerator built by Wilson ceased operation in 2011 for various reasons. Today, the only particle accelerator still in operation in the United States is the relativistic heavy ion accelerator in Brookhaven, New York. At present, no collider in the world has reached the energy level intended for the superconducting supercollider.
In this sense, it can also be said that the naming of the God particle is not accidental. The name is destined to be terrible, as it carries the resentment of many American particle physicists. Lederman's dream of the Tower of Babel collapsed, and the United States finally chose to abandon the Super Collider, but does this mean that the limited funds are invested in more productive areas, or does it mean that the discovery that could have changed the world has been aborted?
Planning and production
Author|Fan Gang, popular science author