It started as a bit of Friday fun and ended a week later with 15 pages of entries and a dash to a nearby university to drop off a crate of ale. Judging can be thirsty work.
The week before last, Peter Higgs celebrated his 80th birthday and to mark the event, we thought we'd try to oust the media's nickname for his most famous contribution to physics. Officially, it is known as the Higgs boson, but to journalists and headline writers it is the God particle.
But back to that name. Physicists hate it when people call the Higgs boson the God particle. Even though the nickname was dreamed up by a Nobel prizewinning physicist with a tremendous track record in the field, Leon Lederman, I can't think of anything that galvanises physicists so completely.
We had stacks of entries. I like to think that's because we tapped into the pent-up fury of legions who were equally despairing of the nickname. People who wanted to see such nonsense banished from the journalists' lexicon but just hadn't been given the proper outlet. People who would fight to replace it with a name that is worthy and just. I'm sure that's what happened. What else could it be?
After the entries had been dispatched for judging, I leafed through the list to pick out my own favourites. It dawned on me that the judging job was worth far more than one crate of beer.
Lots of you followed a long tradition in physics and made sure the particle's new nickname ended with "on". It would be in good company, with the electron, proton, neutron, photon and gluon.
Nattydread69 suggested the "Non-Existon", which might turn out to be prescient. Emptyjames wanted to call it "The Mysteron", and I can see why: even if the Higgs is found, physicists still need to work out why it couples more strongly to some particles than others. Tbombadil liked "Mastodon". Doogsby rustled up the "The Lardon". Any one of these would have made undergraduate physics lectures easier to show up at.
Lalulilo said the new name should have an international flavour, and suggested "Esperon", meaning "hope" in Esperanto. Platonik gets a spot in my personal top five with "Rockon". It's a shame that Rockon raises a few unpleasant childhood memories, though.
Arimbaud nodded to Chris Morris's Brasseye with "Shatner's Bosoon", while Endnote didn't worry about wordplay and stuck with the original "Shatner's Bassoon".
Some of you clearly wanted a more approachable name and offered up Steven, Colin, Dave, Pete, Nigel, Boz and Bosie. One poster suggested "Mr Bum Bum" as a suitable name for our theoretical subatomic particle. You know who you are.
Slobloch liked "Lardycake". MERidley, "The God Killer". ArmitageS opted for "The Pavarotti Particle" and Jennyanydots went all Prince on us with "The particle formerly known as the God particle".
I liked Yrddraiggoch's (The Welsh Dragon's) "The Bajingo", but only because the entry was justified on the grounds of being "a very awesomely silly word." Ditto Trhenc's "H3-Bengka Boson" was sold as being "techno-fabulous with a hint of the exotic".
DNAtheist got another place in my personal top five with the "Disconcertingly Unfalsifiable Hyperbeing Particle", or "Duh Particle". It's close to genius in my view.
Pastalin hit on something by suggesting "Your Mother". TigerRepellingRock demonstrated how it might work in casual conversation: "Your Mother is so fat, she has a mass greater than 114.4GeV at 95% confidence level." If you want to know what that was all about, John Conway explains it well on the Cosmic Variance blog.
Incidentally, if you're a fan of The Simpson's, you'll be aware of the tiger repelling rock.
But in the end there could only be one winner. Having sifted through the whole lot, the one that stood out for our physicist judges came from the very same TigerRepellingRock, who suggested "The Champagne bottle boson".
So why did it win?
"The bottom of a champagne bottle is in the shape of the Higgs potential, and is often used as an illustration in physics lectures. So it's not an embarrassingly grandiose name, it is memorable, and has some physics connection too," the judges' spokesman said.
The so-called "wine bottle potential" is also called the "Mexican hat potential" and is a critical aspect of the Higgs mechanism.
So congratulations to TigerRepellingRock and thanks to all of you who took the time to enter. The revolution is afoot.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4