Physicists Glimpse God (Particle)?

Eureka! Physicists celebrate evidence of particle

"We have now found the missing cornerstone of particle physics," Rolf Heuer, director of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), told scientists.

He said the newly discovered subatomic particle is a boson, but he stopped just shy of claiming outright that it is the Higgs boson itself — an extremely fine distinction.

"As a layman, I think we did it," he told the elated crowd. "We have a discovery. We have observed a new particle that is consistent with a Higgs boson."

The Higgs boson, which until now has been a theoretical particle, is seen as the key to understanding why matter has mass, which combines with gravity to give an object weight. The idea is much like gravity and Isaac Newton's discovery of it: Gravity was there all the time before Newton explained it. But now scientists have seen something very much like the Higgs boson and can put that knowledge to further use.

CERN's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate dark matter, antimatter and the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

$10 billion for the apparatus (not to mention labor) to discover a particle that weighs approximately  10 to the -25th grams.  Doing a little elementary math, we find the value cost of the Higgs Boson to be...  $3,570,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 per ounce (I think I have the number of zeros right).  Even correcting (upward for the labor costs, and downward for the detection of multiple particles), that's one expensive, uh, whatever it is.

Speaking of which, why is it called the God Particle?

The Higgs boson is often referred to as the "God particle" by the media, after the title of Leon Lederman's popular science book on particle physics, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest, many scientists dislike it, since it overstates the particle's importance, not least since 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.

Leaving plenty of work left for the  physicists.  Darn, I was hoping they were done, and we could pour all that money into whatever it is I do.

Lederman said he gave it the nickname "The God Particle" 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," but jokingly added that a second reason was 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."

So I'm not the first to notice?

A renaming competition conducted by the science correspondent for the British Guardian newspaper chose the name "the champagne bottle boson" as the best from among their submissions: "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 [it] has some physics connection too."

 I would guess they're uncorking a few champagne bottles now at CERN.