Why Were So Many "Crazy" Higgs Boson Stories Published? 291
The presumed discovery of the Higgs boson may be one of the most important scientific discoveries ever, but it did bring out quite a bit of "strange" science reporting. In addition to blogs, many mainstream news sites jumped on the crazy headline bandwagon. The ability to soon travel at the speed of light, the building of a Star Trek style transporter, and many stories of the particle proving God doesn't exist have made the rounds in the past week. Is the particle's discovery just on the fringe of common scientific knowledge and therefore prone to wild speculation, or does this all come down to having the most sensational headline?
Invitation to San Francisco Higgs Boson Party (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Invitation to San Francisco Higgs Boson Party (Score:5, Funny)
...and huge orgy. Everyone is welcome to come! WOOOHOOO
I'd love to be a fly on the wall when the neckbeards who rated this entry as informative show up for the "orgy".
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We have friendly people, interesting discussions and huge orgy
Minor correction, "you *had* friendly people, interesting discussions, and huge orgy."
Now that you've invited Slashdot, you'll have grumpy people, awkward silence, and a whole bunch of sweaty fat men staring at pictures of Natalie Portman and hot grits.
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
The exact same reasons we read headlines about creating universe eating black holes when the thing started up.. about global pandemics that are going to wipe us all out.. about “Africanized” bees. It gets eyeball time, which is what it’s all about.
“A long held theory has been possibly confirmed”
Vs.
“THE FUTURE IS HERE, LIVE LIKE THE JETSONS IN 5 YEARS!”
One of those is going to sell a _lot_ more toothpaste.
I'm postponing buying toothpaste (Score:2)
I'm waiting for the one-time-application tooth-enamel-protector we will surely have in 5 years thanks to the discovery of the Higgs!
Sorry advertisers, your current pre-Higgs-announcement product lines are already obsolete so I won't be buying any of them.
Re:I'm postponing buying toothpaste (Score:5, Funny)
I'm waiting for the one-time-application tooth-enamel-protector we will surely have in 5 years thanks to the discovery of the Higgs!
You know, I'd be happy with just a new way of getting a cleaning.
We put men on the moon. We can remove an internal organ through an incision smaller than a Kennedy half-dollar. We've discovered the Higgs Bosun. So why the FUCK are dental hygienists still using techniques clearly dreamed up and perfected by friggin' Torquemada?!
Re:I'm postponing buying toothpaste (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone with a lot of dental problems.. so much this.
I mean there is a lot of advancements in the dental industry.. composite fillings, implants, etc.. but some stuff is just conspicuously primitive. Maybe there really is no better way than physically scraping the junk off with metal picks.. or maybe it's impractical for whatever reason.
Personally I'd like to see one of these nifty painless numbing methods I've been hearing about as "just around the corner" since I was in high school to actually show up at my dentists office. Metal picks I don't mind.. my dentist trying to directly freeze my brain stem or something with a needle the size of a drinking straw and then STILL feeling it kinda gets on the nerves..
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There's a guy in town that uses a laser to get the plaque off
My dad did laser dentistry back in the early 90s to zap cavities. It was really cool because the laser would intensify when you ran over dark spots(he used a black business card to demonstrate it). Overall, it was a 50k machine that was apparently way ahead of its time since we don't really see laser dentistry everywhere(or the insurance problem that you stated).
Re:I'm postponing buying toothpaste (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'm postponing buying toothpaste (Score:4, Insightful)
All of them..
Consistently..
Seriously what the hell is with that. Not that I'm complaining, but that can't just be a coincidence.
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Maybe hot women start torchering people in high school and start to enjoy so much that they gravitate towards professions were they get to continue that... ;^)
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Re:I'm postponing buying toothpaste (Score:5, Funny)
More Novacaine!
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You need a different dentist^Horal hygenist.
How the hell do you think they get guys to come back an pay money to get poked at with sharp pointy instruments? We're not all into BDSM.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Where were they? (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't see any articles like that, are you confusing random small blogs for mainstream news sites? Or was this an American news thing?
Re:Where were they? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-radio-and-tv-18712238 [bbc.co.uk]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7955846.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00tt7kb/World_Have_Your_Say_WHYS_60_Is_there_room_for_Higgs_Boson_and_Religion/ [bbc.co.uk]
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While these sort of articles were the exception, not the rule, probably 80-90% of mainstream reporting on the topic seemed to mix up the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. Sad.
Re:Where were they? (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair to our beloved Beeb, none of those links point to "hard news" pages. They're either from the magazine section (a bit like the op-ed section of a paper) or a "balanced" current affairs program where one uninformed talking head berates another one for 30 minutes and noone emerges from the program any the wiser.
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Sadly you're absolutely right on that point. From my point of view, I pre-filter the stuff on the BBC news site that isn't on the main news page since most of it (the non-hard news) is no better than the Idle section of Slashdot.
In the absence of Ben Goldacre from his Guardian column (come back Ben), there's very little consistently good science reporting in mainstream UK media.
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Try the BBC: "The Higgs boson is another nail in the coffin of religion",
"What do you get if you divide science by God?", "Is there room for Higgs Boson & Religion?"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-radio-and-tv-18712238 [bbc.co.uk]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7955846.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00tt7kb/World_Have_Your_Say_WHYS_60_Is_there_room_for_Higgs_Boson_and_Religion/ [bbc.co.uk]
Apparently the BBC was taken over by the people that run the Daily Mail.
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I'm going to go with the latter. I saw very little sensationalist nonsense from the UK media on the whole, nor did I see a lot on any of the sci/tech blogs and sites that I read. The only place I saw anything even vaguely stupid (that wasn't intended as such) related to the Higgs discovery was on Twitter, where you can find stupid related to *anything* at any time.
Re:Where were they? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'll happily be the atheist who agrees with you. Religion isn't science. Science isn't religion. They don't overlap and claiming either can prove the other wrong is absurd.
most organized religions are about promoting how it(the religion in question) can prove itself as universal truth - you see, when religion is very tangibly used as explanation for how things work and came to be - and how they will be - then in a system like that there is no separation of "science" and "religion" and there really can't be. of course that sounds absurd if you're atheist though, since it creates humongous logical holes if you try to observe things yourself. religious authority says that world
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"Or was this an American news thing?"
If you RTFA, you'll see that the first two examples cited were from Canada's National Post and the BBC.
Re:Where were they? (Score:4, Informative)
"Or was this an American news thing?"
If you RTFA, you'll see that the first two examples cited were from Canada's National Post and the BBC.
Well sure, but had he RTFA'd, he wouldn't have gotten to do any American-bashing, now would he?
Not sure which is worse: AC's who only post anti-American nonsense, or the idiots who mod such posts Insightful... Hating on Americans must be trending.
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And if it did, it's because the Higgs Field, and why it's important, is somewhere just beyond the comprehension of your average person.
Even diffraction of fullerene is somewhere just beyond my comprehension, and I'm not your ordinary average person. I guess the deeper you go in the universe, the crazier everything becomes.
Not mutually exclusive. (Score:2)
Re:Not mutually exclusive. (Score:4, Informative)
I like to try to stay reasonably well-informed relative to the general population, but I still needed about 2 hours of looking up summary articles and digging through wikipedia entries to make any goddamn sense of what was actually discovered, and what importance it has to progress in physics research. My highschool science classes never discussed anything below the atomic level. I had absolutely no awareness of where the Higgs Boson was theoretically supposed to fit into the "Standard Model" since I'd never even heard of the Standard Model either.
Pretty sure the vast majority of the population still has no clue what the Higgs Boson hullaballoo entails. It's easy for misinformation to propagate on this subject because the audience has virtually no context.
Re:Not mutually exclusive. (Score:5, Informative)
That's why lots of sites had articles like this. [theatlantic.com]
If you ignored the obvious idiot sites, I thought the general reaction to the Higgs Boson was pretty good. Idiot sites like ABC, CBC, MSNBC and CNN.
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Three Words (Score:3)
Science journalism sucks.
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Allthough in the case of
Two words (Score:4, Insightful)
Journalism sucks. But let me qualify. Science journalism and journalism in general suck when they're written to beat the deadline in attempt to be "fresh" or "hot off the press" (conference). You can picture the reporter emailing his or her story to the editorial department and the editor, finding the report, a bit dull decides to sex it up just a little, adding "factoids" lifted from Google or Wikipedia (the two not being mutually exclusive) or making snappy generalizations that can reduce to two or three words WTF the whole event is about.
Let's be honest, which would you rather read: "God particle may explain creation" or "CERN scientists discover new subatomic particle"?
A common trick in newspaper headlines is to give off the impression of certainty where there is none. When you read something like "500 feared dead" the day after a disaster, you can be sure that the "500" is an approximation that most likely came from some random bloke or bureaucart.
Wait a few more weeks or months, and the science reporting will get more sober.
Re:Two words (Score:4, Informative)
I don't read most science journalism anymore. It's too infuriating. Following the exploration of the Higgs particle, I've going to Professor Matt Strassler's blog http://profmattstrassler.com/ [profmattstrassler.com] where he has gone over a good many of the issues in reasonably easy to follow language. Since he's at CERN, he's well placed to write sensible articles on the matter.
Because Lederman nicknamed it "the god particle" (Score:5, Informative)
And journalists are morons.
Re:Because Lederman nicknamed it "the god particle (Score:5, Insightful)
When it comes to quantum physics, almost everyone is a moron.
Re:Because Lederman nicknamed it "the god particle (Score:5, Funny)
Everybody is actually both a moron and a genius at the same time, until observed.
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"Si tacuisses, philosophus fuisses" - Because this quantum wave easily collapses in the presence of human voice ;-)
Btw.: Since English is not my native language, can anyone tell me an appropriate English proverb?
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"Si tacuisses, philosophus fuisses" - Because this quantum wave easily collapses in the presence of human voice ;-)
Btw.: Since English is not my native language, can anyone tell me an appropriate English proverb?
Maybe if you translated it first.
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Si tacuisses, philosophus fuisses
I'll make a stab at it, quoting Mark Twain:
It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.
Re:Because Lederman nicknamed it "the god particle (Score:4, Informative)
I wish I has karma to give you, as I was coming to say the same thing.
The wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] on the Higgs Boson has some quotes from the author who nicknamed the Higgs Boson "the god particle":
While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest, many scientists dislike it, since it is sensational and overstates the particle's importance. Its discovery would still leave unanswered questions about the unification of quantum chromodynamics, the electroweak interaction, and gravity, as well as the ultimate origin of the universe. Higgs, an atheist himself, is displeased that the Higgs particle is nicknamed the "God particle", because the term "might offend people who are religious".
Lederman said he gave it a nickname because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive," and added that he chose "the God particle" because "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."
I understand he did it so his book had a catchy title, but the media decided to go crazy when talking about it. Sure, it's a big discovery to physicists and understanding how our universe works, it really shouldn't be receiving the coverage it's getting. There is just too many ignorant reporters trying to explain something, which is creating a lot of mis-information.
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Why? (Score:2)
It's been a slow news Summer.
Unless you have a thick enough skin to get involved in the US election campaigns, which are like droning, dull soap opera.
Come to think about it .. that's probably why Higgs-Boson was so exciting - it's a diversion from the horror or the rest of the news.
Higgs-Boson Party at my house! Beer! Party hats! Quantum Physics! Whooo!
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Higgs-Boson Party at my house! Beer! Party hats! Quantum Physics! Whooo!
...I'm uncertain about Quantum Physics...
Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
Higgs-Boson Party at my house! Beer! Party hats! Quantum Physics! Whooo!
...I'm uncertain about Quantum Physics...
That is just her stripper name.
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God particle (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:God particle (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't the decision of the physicists. Leon Lederman originally wanted to title his book [wikipedia.org] the goddamn particle, but the publisher wouldn't allow it.
Peter Higgs [wikipedia.org] isn't happy with the name either.
Slashdot editors could do the world service by revising the name to its original whenever it appears here. Perhaps the rest of the world will pick up on the change.
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Of course the publisher wouldn't allow "the goddamn particle." You wouldn't want Batman suing you for infringement.
Simple: Stupid sells (Score:3)
Stupid sells even better than sex.
Crazy (Score:2)
Seriously. Check out this crazy: (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/q-and-a-the-higgs-boson-and-you.html [nytimes.com]
Don't even try to read the rest of it, unless you like wasting your time.
Based on this famous quote:
“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
That would put this sort of annoying Higgs boson chatter squarely in the realm of average minds.
They can usually come up with something good to say about events most of us understand. But they can't understand the Higgs boson. Doesn't matter: the media is all about generating copy, this is the highest imperative. Making sense is secondary. And so not understanding doesn't prevent them from trying to say something. Nor should it, according to the logic of their profession, since the logic of their profession says the editorial has to be filed on time, the column must fit so many square inches of space, the front page must have timely links about today's news.
And so they all come up with this WHARRGARBL like the NY Times story above. Welcome to the media industry.
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“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
Surely this counts as irony?
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absolutely. we are here on slashdot, doing the same thing
but we pretend at least to understand the topic
having said that, now that you've pierced the irony... please don't pierce the hypocrisy! ;-)
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that new york times article was the best article about it I've read, beyond the news of the original discovery which essentially boiled down to one line, that they found it (with good probability).
seriously, how many valuable discussions about higgs-boson have you had ever, before or after this? even if you hang out with university faculty the chances are pretty much nil, you probably read and understood as much as you can from an article and the discussions boil down just to "cool shit man!".
at least it's
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“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
They can usually come up with something good to say about events most of us understand. But they can't understand the Higgs boson
Oh I see what you did there. You do get satire! ... Right?
Re:Seriously. Check out this crazy: (Score:4, Informative)
It was in the Opinion section, written by a prolific satirist [wikipedia.org]. Can't take a joke, can you?
Next Frontier (Score:2)
The science is above the heads of many folks (Score:5, Insightful)
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we're on the right track with the Standard Model after all
Well, several models that describe the Standard Model get thrown out, and a few remain. Zero or one of them can be correct, so now the next experiments can be drawn up to eliminate each of them.
AIUI, all we definitely know is that there is a particle at one of the predicted energies for the Higgs, and it exhibits some Higgs-like properties. We don't know yet whether any of the higher-predicted energy Higgs also exist, though since the one that has
Next Headline (Score:2)
SCIENCE JOURNALISTS KNOW LESS SCIENCE THAN GEORGE W BUSH
But it's not exactly news, is it? Science journalism works like this:
1 Scientist writes paper about the biodiversity of the average suburban house
2 Press officer at scientist's institution is bored and decides to read paper
3 Press officer gets through three words of the paper before going to ask scientist for a canned summary
4 Scientist writes a 20 word canned summary highlighting the unexpected variety of creatures to be found in the average househol
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And, anyway, they all seem to have missed the point that finding the Higgs thingy isn't very interesting in itself, except that it proves that the Higgs Field exists.
What's in a name... (Score:2)
It's obviously because of the name, I think it would have been better for the name to remain "Goddamned particle"... also prepare for similar reaction if they call a particle "the Devil's particle".
Because... (Score:3)
American journalists are idiots when it comes to science reporting. They even fail at the "Mr. Wizard" level of science. It's truly abysmal.
And I took so long typing this, because I could not find the series of physics programs I grew up with as a kid in the early 70s. They involved a quite intense physics professor, and he used phrases like "boys and girls" when explaining things like magnetism and diamagnetism or thermal expansion and had this ... unique way of pronouncing "thermometer" as "thermal meter"
It was on WGBH and it was a Canadian import.
Halp. This is driving me nuts.
But anyway, I was going to say that journalists also fail at that level too.
--
BMO
Remember this the next time (Score:2)
Remember how horribly stupid the media/news is about things they don't understand next time there is a story about the "right-wing" or they use eye-grabbing words and phrases like "fundamentalists" and the like. Chances are facts are blown out of proportion, details distort or flat out omitted, and everything is phrased in the most extreme way possible.
Just as most scientific discoveries (like the Higgs boson) are rather mundane (by comparison to what the media/news tries to sell us) so are most people. Tha
Craziness proportional to lack of understanding (Score:2)
The concept of the Higgs Boson is undeniably part of a branch of physics that the average person barely understands. In a society where concepts and values have to be expressed in terms of "real world" metaphors, like "The length of 6 football fields", or "The amount of concrete used could build a sidewalk from Boston to New York", or "Faster then NASCAR!", instead of just reporting on the fact that Higgs Boson was discovered reporters felt obligated to "enrich" their reporting by suggesting what could be
Both (Score:2)
The options presented in the post here are not mutually exclusive, and are probably both true. The general population is uneducated about science. News reporting sucks; science reporting is especially dumbed down, if not saturated with speculation and lack of comprehension of the topic.
Simple answers (Score:2)
1. it's the current buzzword
2. it's cool
3. it's (mostly) European stuff
4. there's nothing more interesting at the moment
Because people are stupid. (Score:3)
Case closed.
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Somewhat Boring: Our model predicted it correctly (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, what was found is a particle with the same MASS as that predicted by the standard model. They haven't yet confirmed spin or other properties. But what this amounts to is confirmation of what was already suspected. Unfortunately, this isn't all that helpful, because we already know that the standard model doesn't predict everything correctly. If we hadn't found the Higgs Boson, then perhaps it would have helped us to fix the standard model. As it is, this can't help us improve the standard model. In other words, this is great, and it's nice to know that brilliant scientists in the past century were right, but it isn't any kind of revolutionary progress.
It's all about an imposter Higgs Boson (Score:2)
http://www.thebunsenburner.com/news/a-higgs-boson-impostor-thats-the-theory-put-forward-by-physicists/ [thebunsenburner.com]
Besides if the Higgs Boson verified no energy is lost than in our ever increasing expanding universe no new energy is created and we will eventually expand into nothing as we stretch and thin out all the energy to where its ... well no one to notice it.
Sensationalism knows no bounds (Score:2)
As if this kind of sensationalistic ignorance is confined to the Higgs discovery. Here [nasa.gov] is a similar example of a recent article by a NASA "science" writer. I can't even fathom what kind of leap of ignorance it takes to frame the relatively banal topic of connections between the Earth and Sun's magnetic field in terms of sci-fi "portals" (as in wormholes), but there you have it.
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Journalists are over the edge (Score:3)
"We interpret the new particle at the Large Hadron Collider as a CP-even scalar and investigate its electroweak quantum number. Assuming an unbroken custodial invariance as suggested by precision electroweak measurements, only four possibilities are allowed if the scalar decays to pairs of gauge bosons, as exemplified by a dilaton/radion, a non-dilatonic electroweak singlet scalar, an electroweak doublet scalar, and electroweak triplet scalars. We show that current LHC data already strongly disfavor both the dilatonic and non-dilatonic singlet imposters. On the other hand, a generic Higgs doublet and a triplet imposter give equally good fits to the measured event rates of the newly observed scalar resonance, although a Standard Model Higgs boson gives a slightly better overall fit. The global fit indicates the enhancement in the diphoton channel could be attributed to an enhanced partial decay width, while the production rates are consistent with the Standard Model expectations. We emphasize that more precise measurements of the ratio of event rates in the WW over ZZ channels, as well as the event rates in bb and tau tau channels, are needed to distinguish the Higgs doublet from the triplet imposter. "
http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.1093 [arxiv.org]
Michio Kaku Syndrome (Score:2)
Where does the Higgs get its mass?
6 reasons you should loathe this article. (Score:2)
It did?
Hilarious. To bad i have not re
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Of all people, samzenpus (Rob Rozenboom) should know. /. community, but the /. news is no more.
He's jumped to 3th place in most active authors: http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml [slashdot.org] but all i see is slashdot going down the drain. There is a
Graduate Reloaded (Score:3)
Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you - just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: 'Higgs Boson.'
Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in the Higgs Boson particle. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Ben: Yes I will.
Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That's a deal.
Re:Could be... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Could be... (Score:4, Funny)
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I would rather call it the Ninja Particle, because it's only there for a little while and we don't detect it directly, only its effects as it disappears.
--
BMO
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I propose we rename the Higgs Boson "the spaghetti particle" or "the noodley particle" or to be truly sensational, "the pirate particle." Though I do suppose that "the invisible pink particle" would also be appropriate.
I like "Pirate Particle."
Maybe the RIAA will try and sue it.
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In modern field theory a "particle" could just as well be described as "the tip of a noodly appendage, poking through into reality."
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What are noodly appendages but strings?
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Re:What the Higgs confirmation means (Score:5, Funny)
(besides assembly, but who does assembly?)
Re:What the Higgs confirmation means (Score:4, Funny)
Learn to assembly.
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Building on your analogy: this probably means that it was built to last, and is hard to overturn. In other words, we've doomed to be fed news stories by ignoramuses.
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I imagine it may have had something to do with the number of articles that talked about the role Linux played in the discovery of the higgs.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/07/05/1855212/linux-played-a-vital-role-in-discovery-of-higgs-boson [slashdot.org]
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&site=webhp&source=hp&q=linux+higgs&oq=linux+higgs&gs_l=hp.3..0i8i30.1397.8592.0.9661.15.12.3.0.0.0.391.2274.1j7j3j1.12.0...0.0.JkXqKuaocrQ [google.com]