Litnet

 

Ek sien die humor en plaas tog die volgende in alle erns net vir die agtergrond tot hierdie en is 'n opstel uit die New York Times wat soos alles wat 'n mens by bly uitstaan: 

 

Essay: What’s in a name?

By Dennis Overbye   

 

Parsing the "God particle," the ultimate metaphor We need to talk about the “God particle.”Recently in The New York Times, I reported on the attempts by various small armies of physicists to discover an elementary particle central to the modern conception of nature. Technically it’s called the Higgs boson, after Peter Higgs, an English physicist who conceived of it in 1964. It is said to be responsible for endowing the other elementary particles in the universe with mass. 

 

In a stroke of either public relations genius or disaster, Leon M. Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, referred to the Higgs as “the God particle” in the book of the same name he published with the science writer Dick Teresi in 1993. 

 

To Dr. Lederman, it made metaphorical sense, he explained in the book, because the Higgs mechanism made it possible to simplify the universe, resolving many different seeming forces into one, like tearing down the Tower of Babel. 

 

Besides, his publisher complained, nobody had ever heard of the Higgs particle.

 

In some superficial ways, the Higgs has lived up to its name. Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work on the so-called Standard Model, of which the Higgs is the central cog. Billions of dollars are being spent on particle accelerators and experiments to find it, inspect it, and figure out how it really works.

 

But physicists groan when they hear it referred to as the “God particle” in newspapers and elsewhere (and the temptation to repeat it, given science reporters’ desperate need for colorful phrases in an abstract and daunting field, is irresistible). 

 

Even when these physicists approve of what you have written about their craft, they grumble that the media are engaging in sensationalism, or worse.