The God Particle

See the Higg's boson in there? or God? This is one of the collisions that went into the discovery of the poorly named "god particle". Courtesy of wikimedia commons.

Some of you may have heard over the summer the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the so called "god particle". Surprisingly for a particle given that name it has very little to do with god or religion or Christianity in particular. Here's an article with a christian take on it:
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2012/07/why-scientists-dont-like-the-term-god-particle-for-the-higgs-boson.html

As you see, the title god particle is just a misnomer given to it because an editor wouldn't put up with the verbosity of one physicists frustration with it. God is at best incidental to the particle bearing his title.

For the curious among you as to what this discovery actually means, the physics behind it is actually much more godly than anything about its detection or naming. The idea behind the Higgs (as i understand it so give me some leeway) is why things are so dense. why do they have mass? why are atoms heavy and other things not? professor Peter Higss (an atheist by the way) proposed in the 60's that this is because particles have an interaction with a field, known as the Higgs field. This interaction is a lot like dragging string through syrup where the field likes to clump around around whatever is going through it depending on what it is and how big (the other analogy is a celebrity and a nobody walking through a party, you see people clump around the celebrity but not the nobody). This field, because of quantum weirdness, can be expressed in smallest terms as a particle, known as a boson, in this case, Higgs' boson. I don't know about you but even as an agnostic something seems ... perhaps divine... or at least amazing about that.