Higgs Boson, or What’s the Meta in Metaphor for?

. Let’s get God out of the way to start. The Higgs Boson particle/field is not the God particle. (I keep telling everyone – the neutral B-meson is the God particle.) In part because of that name, and, certainly, the momentous confirmation at the largest site of physics experimentation in the world of a near […]

The Real “God” Particle

I hate trooping off in a gang. Scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN believe they have confirmed the existence of what others have called the “God particle.” Everyone exclaims “Higgs boson!” But I cry out “neutral B-meson” to that. I understand that for physicists, this discovery completes and substantiates the “Standard Model,” by which they currently […]

The Higgs-Boson Particle: That Which We Call a Rose

. So physicists it seems, both at Tevatron and CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider, may be closing in on the Higgs-Boson, or “God,” particle. Except, it seems, that many scientists are unhappy about that nickname. “I hate that “God particle’ term,” one member of the CERN team in Europe said last December. “The Higgs is not […]

The God Particle

Once upon a time in an intellectual land far, far away, philosophy concerned itself, among other matters, with questions such as the nature of meaning in life, how to live in the absence or presence of God, and why there is something rather than nothing. A great existential cartoon, which still hung on a bulletin […]