The God Particle / Lord God Bird (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

Apparently there is a growing backlash amongst physicists against
referring to the Higgs Boson as "the God particle".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/may/29/why-call-it-the-god-p
article-higgs-boson-cern-lhc

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/14/the-higgs-boson-why-scientists-h
ate-that-you-call-it-the-god-particle/

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/03/higgs-boson-may-be-rea
l-just-dont-call-it-god-particle/49599/

The third of the three links above says:

"It's the last undiscovered particle in the Standard Model, the theory
reputed to explain the behavior of particles, which has led to the media
to dubbing it the "God particle," even though scientists resent the
name."

The media did certainly latch on to this nickname, but did not "dub" the
particle with it.  It comes from Leon Lederman's 1993 book _The God
Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?_.

Here is an earlier cite from the media, but credit still obviously goes
to Lederman.

_Dallas Morning News_ 26 Oct 1992 p 1C [Newsbank]
" One is The God Particle by Leon Lederman, an American scientist who
won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1988. Houghton Mifflin of the United
States and Bantam Press of England are banking on this book about the
atom becoming another Brief History of Time. It will be published in the
United States next spring. "

See also the "Lord God Bird", a term used to refer to the Ivory Billed
Woodpecker and the Pileated Woodpecker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_God_Bird
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory-billed_Woodpecker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pileated_Woodpecker


_Miami Herald_ 30 Mar 1986 p 22 [Newsbank]
" Also easy to remember are the anxious, stuttering cry of the pileated
woodpecker (the big one that the Crackers called the Lord God bird ) and
the lonely whistling of the chuck-will's-widow. "

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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