You all remember Peter Higgs, right? The guy who predicted the Boson (and later went after Richard Dawkins for no reason).
Well, he’s an Atheist and he despises the Higgs Boson being called the god particle:
Tomorrow, the BBC is airing a special on Peter Higgs, the British particle physicist. Higgs is the namesake of the Higgs boson, the particle discovered at CERN last summer that is sometimes called “the God particle.”
Higgs will use his BBC soapbox to ask us all to please stop it with the whole God thing.
“First of all, I’m an atheist,” The Telegraph quotes him as telling the BBC.
“The second thing is I know that name was a kind of joke and not a very good one.”
This is by no means the first time Higgs has mentioned his dislike for the term “God particle,” and he is by no means the only person to harbour such feelings.
I, for one, am with him and I “harbour such feelings” too! We don’t go around naming actual things after implausible fiction characters. There’s no Voldemort gene or Zeus trait, so why should there be a god particle?
