luckyluke193

God Particle

This is the one word (well, two words) that makes all physicists vomit. You can call it whatever you like, Higgs boson, Anderson-Higgs boson if you like to annoy particle physicists (they dislike Anderson even more than other physicists), symmetry breaking field, but stop calling it the god particle. It was supposed to be called the goddamn particle, but someone censored the "damn". It has nothing to do with any god.

The theory has to provide a path to get to that evidence, either directly or indirectly.

Let's look back to 90 years ago. Paul Dirac developed a theory of the electron, but found that it predicted the existence of a second particle with the exact same mass and opposite charge as the electron, nowadays known as the position or anti-electron. When he wrote down the theory, there was no evidence that such a particle exists, but it's properties were clear in the theory. Only a year later, such a particle was found in a study of cosmic radiation.

If we go back another decade, Einstein published his general theory of relativity. It replaced Newton's theory of classical gravitational forces with the, at its time, truly alien notion that spacetime is a manifold whose curvature gives rise to gravitation.

Now, how on earth do we go about testing that? On of the earliest tests was a computation of the orbit of Mercury, which slightly deviated from the result of Newtonian gravity. Astronomical observations showed that Einstein's calculated path was indeed correct - this is what made Einstein famous to the general public. Black holes are also a crazy notion that came from Einstein's theory, yet we can see stars orbiting invisible objects that have a huge gravitational pull.

There are two types of scientists in such a field, either they're good at what they're doing, or they're dead.

Dark Matter and Energy aren't necessarily "dark", we just cant see it with EM and don't have another name for it.

The reason we call it "dark" is because it seems to emit no light, i.e. it doesn't interact via EM. Calling something dark because it doesn't emit (much) light is very natural, that's how the word "dark" is defined in every day use as well.

Of course discussing names is pointless to any physical problem, but the "God particle" is just such an annoying name, it makes people think elementary particle physics is somehow connected to their religion. For example, an Indian colleague at CERN has been asked by his family, which of their Hindu gods is the one controlling these particles.

I think nowadays, a lab safety safety person would prohibit you from showing this to a lab safety person since they would probably die of heart attack when seeing how they worked.