Prof Peter Higgs didn't actually provide the "god particle" nickname for the boson that he theorized back in the 1960s. 

Here's an interesting interview with University of Edinburgh physics lecturer Victoria Martin (she studied under Higgs as a student) where she explains that the name is actually a bastardization (my word, not hers) of what Nobel physics laureate Leon Lederman wanted to call it. Because of the difficulty in proving the existence of the Higgs boson, Lederman, author of The God Particle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Particle:_If_the_Universe_Is_the_Answer,_What_Is_the_Question%3F)  wanted to call it "that god-damned particle" a phrase which his publishers objected to. 

So there it is.
#higgsboson  

Embedded Link

'God Particle' Scientist Vindicated 50 Years Later : NPR
Peter Higgs is the name — and man — behind the Higgs boson. He and his team proposed the particle's existence back in the 1960s. Robert Siegel talks to Victoria Martin, a lecturer in physics and astro…

Google+: Reshared 2 times
Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

When I was a youngster, we were taught that all matter in the universe was made up of various combinations of electrons, neutrons and protons and you couldn't get any smaller. 

Well apparently the more that particle physicists looked at more the more they came to the realization that matter is in fact far more complex with quarks and neutrinos and bosons. 

For those of us that aren't particle physicists all of this stuff can be extremely daunting to wrap your head around. When I took physics III as an elective while studying mechanical engineering we just scratched the surface of relativity and didn't even begin to approach this stuff and it was already making my brain hurt.

It seems that most of what we think of mass in an atom may come from one of these sub-atomic particles known as the Higgs boson. Some of the smartest scientists in the world (certainly way smarter than myself when it comes to most of this stuff) have been running experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland for the past several years to compile physical evidence that the Higgs boson exists and does what many think it does. They've now compiled enough data to support the existence (you can never conclusively prove anything in science, only fail to disprove it) of the existence of the Higgs Boson. 

Take a few minutes and watch this video to start getting an idea of what this all means. 
#higgsboson  

Reshared post from +C.C. Chapman

This helped explain the whole Higgs Boson discovery a bit to me. Not an area I follow, but fascinating just the same.

Google+: Reshared 1 times
Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.