god particle |
A proton-proton collision at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN laboratory in Geneva that produced more than 100 charged particles.
The world of physics is abuzz with speculation over an announcement expected Tuesday, Dec. 13, from the CERN laboratory in Geneva -- home of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)We're expecting interesting news in the world involving physics in the next short while. Researchers at the Big Hadron Collider are to make an announcement at 1pm GMT. We all know it's not a "discovery" with the Higgs boson, per se - the standard threshold for discovery is five normal deviations, a so-called "five-sigma result". This means that there is only about single in a million possibility that your findings include the result of a record fluke. But rumours happen to be flying on the blogs around of a three-sigma consequence, or a one-in-a-thousand chance of problem, that a Higgs result approximately the 125GeV mark has been spotted. (For a little more info on what a 125GeV Higgs means, check out my submit from a few weeks back.)We know it's probably going to be something fairly advantageous, because, as The Guardian's Ian Test wrote last week, the heads of the two study groups will be creating the announcement, not really some junior Expert degree student or postdoc.
Nevertheless the real question is: why is it known as the God particle? It's not a God compound. It's nothing to perform with God, along with religion, with everything to do with development. Or at least any more as compared to any other particle can be.
The name was created by Leon Lederman, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, to the title of a e-book ("The God Particle: When the Universe Is The Response, What Is The Question?Inches). But it wasn't exactly what he wanted to refer to it. Originally he wanted to call it the "Goddamn Particle", because "nobody could find the thing" (according to Lederman's one-time postdoc researcher Marcelo Gleiser). But his editor convinced your pet "The God Particle" would promote more copies. And we don't know whether that is certainly true, but precisely what certainly is true will be the name stuck.
Physicists, generally, wish it we had not. Peter Higgs, the School of Edinburgh physicist that first proposed the boson's existence, dislikes your name: "I find it upsetting because, though I'm not really a believer myself, I think it is the kind of wrong use of terminology i think might upset some people," this individual told The Parent three years ago.
More importantly, it's misleading. If the LHC was preparing to fire up two years ago, plenty of paranoid people did start to create terrifying end of the world theories about how it would create a black gap and destroy the planet earth. A large part of the fear seemed to come from the organization with God, and for that reason Armageddon.
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