Dennis Overbye does us all a huge favor by coming clean about “the God Particle.” The phrase refers to the hypothetical Higgs boson, long-time target of particle physics experiments. It was coined by Leon Lederman as a shameless ploy to sell books, and ever since has managed to appear in every single mention of the Higgs in the popular media — for example, in the headline of Dennis’s article from a couple of weeks ago.
Physicists, regardless of their stance toward timeless theological questions, hate this phrase. For one thing, it puts this particular boson on a much higher pedestal than it deserves, without conveying anything helpful about what makes it important. But more importantly, it loads an interesting but thoroughly materialist idea with absolutely useless religious overtones. Even harmful overtones — as Lederman himself notes, his coinage came about just around the time when creationism began to (once again) become a big problem, and this confusion was the last thing that anyone needed.
Furthermore, everyone knows that “the God particle” is misleading — even all of the journalists and headline writers who keep trotting it out. It’s just too damn irresistible. Particle physics is fascinating, but it takes some effort to convey the real excitement felt by experts to people who are watching from the sidelines, and a hook is a hook, shameless or not. If my job were writing about particle physics for a general audience, I doubt I’d be able to resist the temptation.
But, as Dennis notes, this God-talk is part of a venerable tradition on the part of physicists. We use “God” all the time to refer the workings of Nature, without meaning anything religious by it. Or at least, we used to; the nefarious encroachment of Intelligent Design and the religious right on our national discourse has given some of us pause. In the past I could have given a talk and said “Either you need a dynamical origin for the primordial cosmological perturbations, or you just have to accept that this is how God made the universe,” without any worry whatsoever that the physicists in the audience would have been confused. They would have known perfectly well that I was just using a colorful metaphor for “that’s just how the universe is,” in a purely cold-hearted and materialistic fashion. Nowadays I find myself avoiding such language, or substituting “Stephen Hawking” for “God” in a desperate attempt to preserve some of the humor.
All of which is to say: religion is impoverishing our language. I want God back, dammit.
My issue with the term, beyond the religious overtones, is that it somehow gives the impression that the Higgs particle is in privileged position in the standard model, the origin of mass etc. etc., whereas the truth is that the VEV of the Higgs field does all those miracles. Those are simply two different (albeit related) objects with similar names.
How is the Higgs a “thoroughly materialist idea”?
You may have a materialistic way of thinking about the Higgs, but that has something to do with you, not with the Higgs.
The Higgs fits into any world view that can accommodate the Standard Model, including but not only materialism.
And as we also know, even the only-very-slightly-more-responsible statement that the “Higgs explains particle mass” is also utterly misleading. 1) The Higgs does not explain the values of rest masses of individual fundamental particles. 2) The Higgs also does not explain the old problem of why inertial mass is the same as gravitational mass. The Higgs just couples proportionally to mass and is needed to make the standard model make any sense at all (and not give infinite predictions just above the TeV scale).
Maybe (just maybe…) the real Higgs might turn out to help us answer those two questions. But the predicted standard model one, as we know, does not.
OK, then, what *should* we journalists say about the Higgs? Can we at least say it’s why all particles don’t have the same (zero) mass?
George
George,
The Higgs mechanism does generate field-theoretic masses for the elementary particles. The actual values depend on the Yukawa couplings, and these are free parameters in the Standard Model. Thus, the Standard Model offers no explanation of the mass hierarchies and mixings between the different generations. However, the Yukawa couplings can be explained naturally within string theory.
Hi George — you definitely shouldn’t say that, as for example the proton would have mass even if the component valence and sea quarks were (somehow) massless — most of the proton’s (and neutron’s, and all light mesons’ and light quark baryons) rest mass is from the internal momenta of the quarks and gluons, not their rest masses.
If you were to add a “fundamental” in front of “particles” it would be closer.
But still not to my overly-critical liking, as it really doesn’t _explain_ “why” — the Higgs field just _relates to_ masses, it doesn’t really _explain_ them.
Hmm, what’s a truly accurate and precise one-liner about the Higgs…?
Good question.
Oh, so this particle is not what we are supposed to be worshiping? That New York Times always gets me.
Moshe’s issue, although a real one, is sufficiently higher-order that I wouldn’t be upset to see it glossed over in popular presentations. It would be nice to appreciate the distinction between a field’s expectation value and its associated particle, but on most days I’m not that ambitious.
The “explaining mass” issue is trickier. Within the standard model, if the Higgs didn’t exist, elementary particles would all have zero mass. That’s the sense in which the Higgs “explains mass” — the masses for particles in the Standard Model are all proportional to the Higgs expectation value. It doesn’t explain what the constants of proportionality are, true enough, but that’s another higher-level issue (in my personal hierarchy).
The thing that bugs me about the “explains mass” business is that the particles responsible for most of the mass in you and me — protons and neutrons — are not elementary, and don’t get their mass from the Higgs at all. They get mass from the strong-interaction binding energies (QCD) holding the quarks and gluons together.
A safe statement is “the Higgs is responsible for giving masses to the elementary particles of the Standard Model.” But that will never win any focus-group tests when placed against “the Higgs explains the origin of mass.”
I don’t see it as higher order effect, but it is a matter of taste. The point is that explaining the masses of elementary particles in terms of properties of the medium the propagate in, meaning in this case the Higgs VEV, is much less mysterious than relating them to some godly particle. It is intuitive and almost precisely correct to imagine the particles becoming massive because it is “more difficult” to move in the medium for which the Higgs field has acquired a VEV.
(more generally, the elementary objects in our description of almost everything are quantum fields, not particles. Many times they don’t even have “associated particles”, would be nice if this was better appreciated, but that’s a different story…)
The problem with the phrase “the god particle” is that it reeks of condescension and disrespect. It pretty much epitomizes everything horrible one can perpetrate in “outreach”.
I agree w/Sean re: Lederman’s shameless hype to sell his (I think) rather lowbrow rundown of particle physix and Higgsy…Or George Smoot’s post-COBE press conf., gushing, “Its like seeing god…”.
Arthur C. Clarke(Isacc Asimov?) once quipped that any sufficiently advanced technology or species would appear `god-like’ to lower denizens of the galactic populace.
If Holger Nielsen’s recent speculation that advanced effects from the future might manipulate discoveries at the LHC, then perhaps `WE’ in the future are playing god, with ourselves in the present, not unlike the `gods’ of Olympus, merrily throwing hints of Higgsy, sparticles,and black holes our way to confuse us, all to their perverse delight.
Only a god could ignore causality in the interest of illusion and games….
My major issue is that calling the Higgs the “God Particle” is like calling New York “America.” I made them all.
“Materialist” is a term coined by supernaturalists. IIRC.. I’m sure your googlefu is as good as my own.
There’s native framing to science. An example I’ve seen is “atheistic science”.
I guess the COD or COLD particle hasn’t quite got the same ring
How about the HID or Hidden particle
but then it may as well be called the Higgs.
Of course the gold particle to convey the excitement of a gold rush might have worked, or how about the bold particle – daring to go where particle (physicists) has never gone before
Translate particle for field as and when required.
Best way I can think of how to properly explain the Higgs to a public audience? Read the stanzas III, VIII, and XII of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”.
Just as C.E. will slowly replace A.D., the scientists should first recoin a secular punch word until the rest of the world eventually catches on and drop g.p. as passe. Something as pithy as ‘black hole’.
Besides what happens if LHC detects more exotic and heavier particles? If the god particle turns out to be not the ultimate IT, those lay people who bought the coinage for wrong reasons may turn against science irreparably.
Sooner the better to reinvent a word, preferably before Higgs is found, if it ever will be found, and all the epoch making news can refer to the new name without a single mention of g.p. Hopefully that should rectify a misnomer. Good luck, scientists!
My personal take: If it helps sway some confused politician to continue funding particle accelerators so that I can keep my job, im all for it.
Theres plenty of famous religious phrases in Physics (many coined by Einstein), and honestly as atheist as we all are, who cares. I like to think of them as metaphorical.
The public will continue to be just as confused about the actual science of it all, regardless if we call it the ‘God Particle’ or the ‘Anderson-Higgs particle’ or the ‘Globulator field’
Einstein is also quoted as saying. “religion without science is dead, science without religion is blind.”
While I’m under no illusion that Einstein was a “Christian” any more than Benjamin Franklin, there was no doubt that he (and Franklin) believed there was a supernatural,divine, intelligent being who created the universe “ex nihlo” from nothing. His belief in this “mystical/mythical” (today’s “scientific” viewpoint) did not impede his contributions to science any more than it did Issac newton, or Kepler who also openly enbraced a Creator-God.
I propose that we start referring to supersymmetry as the God symmetry.
> I propose that we start referring to supersymmetry as the God symmetry.
Why? Because it does not exist ?
😎
Sean says,
We never had ‘im in the first place. Think about it: if the Spinozan use of the word were the original meaning, would anybody remember Spinoza today? The definition of God as a synonym for “cosmos” which rhymes with rod and sod is a modern invention, a brainchild of the physicists, and people won’t understand it until they’re all educated in physics.
We do ourselves a great disservice by labeling the mysterious order of quarks and quasars with the name of a storm-bringer once worshiped on a patch of land beside the Mediterranean Sea. I suggest introducing more divine names into the physics meme-pool; we have, after all, thousands to choose from, of which a couple dozen have wide currency. Thus: “The good lady Isis is subtle but not malicious.” Or, “I cannot believe that Loki plays dice with the Universe.”
From what I’ve read about string gas cosmology, in that model the reason the Universe has three spatial dimensions is essentially the same reason why knots can exist in 3D but not 2D or 4D.
In neo-Einsteinian terms, perhaps the reason why we live in 3D space is because Aphrodite likes to get tied up in knots.
Oops, yes, I meant to say elementary particle.
Sean, although the vast bulk of hadron mass is binding energy, isn’t it also the case that if quarks had zero mass, protons would outweigh neutrons and we wouldn’t be here to discuss all this?
Why does attention typically focus on the question of fermion mass to the neglect of EW symmetry-breaking? Can I, in my journalistic capacity, describe the Higgs in terms of making photons and E&M what they are, flavor physics, etc.?
George
Come to think of it, if you want to talk about symmetry breaking, “Babel particle” isn’t a bad turn of phrase. And as a book title, The Babel Particle sounds like a neat science-fiction novel, instead of yet another attempt to use modern science to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for ancient mythology.
See, you put the Babel particle in your ear, and it instantly translates for you what the quarks and leptons are saying. . . .
I like babel particle a lot.