The boson we don't like to call the 'God particle' is named after physicist Peter Higgs. But what about all the other people who worked on the discovery?
On 4 July 2012, the discovery of a new particle was announced at Cern. It looked like the long-sought-after "Higgs boson", which gives mass to fundamental particles and generally makes our understanding of particle physics hang together. It is named after Peter Higgs, the Geordie physicist based in Edinburgh who wrote the first paper explicitly predicting the boson in 1964.
A few physicists are agitating to change that name. Many people contributed to the theory, and some of them seem a little peeved at the rock-star status being accorded the quiet man from Edinburgh. They have a case for a share of credit, and possibly of a Nobel prize, but not for changing the name. Anyway, they are far too late. Every physicist, including people such as myself, who were on the teams that discovered it, knows it as a Higgs. And as for the wider public and media, well, it's hard enough stopping you lot calling it the "God particle". Higgs boson is just fine.
The main motivator in science is to find out new things about how stuff works. But scientists are human, and disputes about priority and naming rights are not uncommon. The name of the J/ψ particle was the subject of a serious naming dispute. Burton Richter and Sam Ting were awarded a Nobel prize for its discovery in 1976. The J was Ting's preferred name, the ψ Richter's, but no agreement could be reached so the poor particle is the only one with a double name. Strange to say, this particle was the killer evidence in the discovery of the charm quark.
Even the law that describes the expanding universe, known as Hubble's law (for Edwin Hubble), was first written down (in French) by Georges Lemaître. However, far from disputing priority, Lemaître seems to have left it out of a translation of his own work, as "not interesting". If someone has said something once (in English), why say it again?
To be a famous scientist, you have to not only be brilliant, but in the right place at the right time, standing on the shoulders of the right giants. And then you have to get into print, and get taken seriously. And even then you might just miss out on naming rights. Stigler's law of Eponymy states that "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer" (the law was discovered by Robert K Merton).
But whatever the prizes, the new knowledge is what counts.
via Science: Physics | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/shortcuts/2013/apr/23/should-change-name-higgs-boson
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment