I work on the ATLAS project at the LHC and probably the most famous objective for the project is to find evidence for the existence of the "Higgs Boson". It also gets called the "God Particle" a lot and I really wish people would stop. I had an experience a couple of days ago which reminded me of just how much I hate this nickname and why, so I thought I'd share.
I'm not going to go into a detailed explanation of what the Higgs Boson actually is, but suffice to say that it would prove the leading theory regarding why things have mass, which would more or less validate our current understanding of the universe up to a certain point. If we don't find it, then it's back to the drawing board for a whole heap of theories.
So anyway, the experience.
I was waiting for a bus to CERN from the airport and someone (clearly not Swiss or French) asked me how to get to an area which has one of the CERN sites. I showed him and asked whether he was heading to CERN as usually foreigners heading to these areas are CERN scientists. He wasn't, but expressed an interest in what exactly we were doing and asked me to explain what the "God Particle" was.
I'd been travelling for the best part of 16 hours and reading a book by Feynmann, so rather than just giving a version of this post's second paragraph, I rambled on for a bit about how photons mediate the Electromagnetic force and how other forces are carried out through particles called Bosons.
I explained that although ideas like inertia are very intuitive, explaining them on a fundamental level is actually very difficult and finding the Higgs would help explain how it happens.
He seemed confused and asked whether we were investigating space with this research or how people function. I took a step back and tried to explain that nearly all of biology and chemistry is essentially Electromagnetic in nature, with some changes due to things having mass and being affected by Gravity. EM is very well understood, Inertia is what we're trying to explain now and Gravity is still very much a work in progress.
I also said that the Higgs would only have existed naturally in a very short window after the big bang and would help explain how matter developed during that window. Which is one of the reasons why you hear about space a lot in discussions about the Higgs.
This is only a summary of the conversation, he asked me at some point whether spending money one this sort of research is justified and to explain how EM can account for everything including (and I swear this was the example he gave) what happens when someone gets shot. Generally he seemed pretty interested in hearing me out although I doubt I could have explained all of the finer points satisfactorily.
Finally, I was asked whether we were doing this to try and explain how the Big Bang happened and how time started, so to speak. I replied that we're just trying to understand the Big Bang as early as possible, but going past the initial point is impossible, at least for now.
He said "So, the idea isn't to disprove the idea of God or anything like that then?"
Me: "No, nothing like that at all"
Him:"So then why is it called the God Particle"
Me: "Because some journalist though it was a cool name"
Him:"Ah, right, I see....... So, I guess not many people working at CERN believe in Creation"
Me: "err ......No, I guess not"
Him:"hmmn, I do, Genesis 1-1, you should really read it some time"
Me: "maybe I will"
(I do actually intend to read the bible at some point, just because I don't think hardly any of it's true doesn't mean I don't think it's important)
At which point my tram arrived (he'd clearly had one eye on the announcement board), we shook hands and I headed off.
After thinking about it for a minute on the tram I realised that the entire conversation had been sabotaged from the beginning by the idea that the Higgs Boson would somehow disprove the notion of God or had anything to do with religion. For anyone who doesn't know anything about particle physics "God Particle" is much easier to draw an image of than "Higgs Boson" (which is why I suppose the name stuck...), the problem is that this image is completely wrong. And whilst my neighbor at the bus station had been more inquisitive than confrontational (one odd example aside), others may have a different approach to trying to get scientists to "explain themselves".
So please, can we stop calling it the "God Particle", it gives a great number of people completely the wrong idea. Please?
