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Etymology of the “God Particle”
How a backfired joke gave the Higgs boson its popular nickname
“I was really rather annoyed about that book…I mean it was one of [Leon] Lederman’s little jokes, and I think it’s rather backfired.” — Peter Higgs
Six years after the announcement of its discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Higgs boson is once again in the news. As Jason Daley notes at Smithsonian.com, “after sifting through years of data, researchers working on the LHC’s ATLAS experiment announced that they can confirm something new: the decay of the Higgs boson produces bottom quarks, lending support to a theoretical framework of physics known as the Standard Model of particle physics.”
While this news is likely to add to a “growing sense of disappointment” about the “null results of searches for physics beyond the Standard Model” (Gershon, 2018), it will hopefully put an end to silly media narratives about how this famous particle got its popular nickname — the “God Particle.” For example, a 2013 piece by Shoshana Davis claimed it was named thusly “because it’s said to be what caused the ‘Big Bang’ that created our universe many years ago” (CBS, 2013). But as Forbes and Business Insider have explained, it was all just a…
