It’s very exciting that recent experiments at CERN have revealed the existence of a particle roughly consistent with the properties of the long-sought Higgs Boson.<\/p>\n
But I am confused by this weird tendency for some non-physicists to call it the “God particle”. I know the term dates to Leon Lederman’s popular physics book with that phrase in the title, yet Lederman himself has said that he really wanted to call it the “Goddamn particle” because of all the trouble the elusive particle has caused, but the publisher objected.<\/p>\n
Peter Higgs, who by the way does not believe in the existence any gods, says he doesn’t like the term because it “might offend people who are religious”. But isn’t he worrying about offending the wrong people? Aren’t non-religious people the ones who are being offended here?<\/p>\n
There is a word in English — “blasphemy” — to describe the act of offending the sensibilities of religious people.<\/p>\n
Perhaps there should be a word to describe the act of offending the sensibilities of non-religious people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s very exciting that recent experiments at CERN have revealed the existence of a particle roughly consistent with the properties of the long-sought Higgs Boson. But I am confused by this weird tendency for some non-physicists to call it the “God particle”. I know the term dates to Leon Lederman’s popular physics book with that … Continue reading “Goddamn particle”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8595"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8595"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8597,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8595\/revisions\/8597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}