World News Korner

Scientists who discovered the "God particle" receive Nobel prize.

Courtesy of USA Today:

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to Britain's Peter W. Higgs and Belgium's Francois Englert, the Nobel Committee announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

They were jointly awarded the prize for their work on a theory that offers an explanation for how the fundamental particles of the Universe acquire mass.

Last year, the pair's work was confirmed after the discovery of the so-called Higgs particle — known also as the Higgs boson and the God particle — at a laboratory in Geneva.

I almost feel bad for referring to the Higgs boson as the "God particle' but since that is the way that it is universally known I thought it would make more sense to my visitors.

The person who gave it that misnomer has explained why:

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? Two reasons. One, 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. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one…

So now that we have discovered it, despite some early exclamations from the scientifically ignorant religious nuts, we have moved further away from a divine explanation for the universe rather than closer to one.

Perhaps, using religious logic (Does that even exist?), it would have been more appropriate to call it "Satan's Particle."

Personally I am just happy to be writing about something other than the government shutdown.

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