• Question: How did the Higgs Boson get it's name, my best guess is that it was discovered by someone who had Higgs in their name.

    Asked by thejazzfalcon to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Good guess, but not quite the correct answer! The particle is named after Professor Peter Higgs from Edinburgh University, who was one of the people who *predicted* that such a particle should exist. *Predict*, not *discoverMATOMO_URL
      It’s a very fine example of the power of the scientific method. Based on what was known about particle physics 50 years ago, Higgs and his fellow theorists realized that our description of the universe would work a lot better if there were an extra particle with very special properties. So off we went and looked for it. And looked. And looked. And … (fast forward 50 years) … found it!!! You know that a theory is excellent if it can make awkward predictions, and then those predictions are found to be true. 🙂
      So in that sense the Higgs boson was not an unexpected discovery. It was pretty much just something we were hoping to find anyway. Unexpected discoveries are *next* on the agenda for the LHC. 🙂

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize for Physics a few weeks ago for being one of the people who predicted the Higgs boson’s existence in the 1960s. The 6000 scientists working together at CERN who discovered it in 2012 will never win the Nobel Prize, as it can only be given to three people at a time.

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      yes the particle is named after Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University as Kristian says. But what about “boson” (pronounced bozon). Well it’s called that because the particle has a spin equal to 0 and any particle with spin 0,1,2,… is a boson while any particle with spin 1/2,3/2,…. is a fermion. Bosons behave in a very different way from ferimions…they like to stick together whereas ferimions don’t.

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      I believe there were 5 individuals who could be credited with coming up with the idea of the Higgs Boson, and a Professor Higgs was among them. He recently won the Nobel Prize for it, along with the two surviving colleagues of his that co-theorised it.

      As others have said, he didn’t actually *discover* it: that took the effort of many thousands of scientists working at CERN, with the help of a multi-billion dollar atom smasher.

Comments