On Morons and the Higgs Boson

The class of particles known as bosons is named after the Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose. The naming is done by some Western scientific institution. Had it been left to any of the Congress governments of India to name the class, no doubt the class would have been named “Gandhion” (take your pick from Mahatma, Indira, Rajiv, Sanjay, Sonia Maino or the rest of the clan) or perhaps “Nehruon”. Not that one needs any more proof, but the word morons must refer to the class of people who support the Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi-Maino family.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is named after another Indian, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

It was named in honor of the Nobel-prize winning physicist S. Chandrasekhar who worked for University of Chicago from 1937 until he passed away in 1995. He was known for determining the maximum mass for white dwarfs. “Chandra” also means “moon” or “luminous” in Sanskrit. [Wiki]

The naming was certainly done by American scientists. Had it been by the morons in the Indian government (the majority of it have either been Congress or Congress-led), the x-ray observatory would have been named as the Gandhi, or Rajiv, or Sanjay, or Indira, or Nehru x-ray observatory even though none of those idiots could have come within light years of any knowledge of physics (or any other subject of human inquiry.)

The number of schemes, institutions, plans, roads, ports, airports, public squares, etc., named after the Nehru-Gandhi family boggles the mind as they run into the thousands. It is both shameful and ludicrous to do so but Indians don’t seem to mind. They don’t seem to mind because they are ignorant (both about the thousands of things named after the morons and about the real people who have worked for the common good) and because they simply don’t care. It is as if they don’t have a sense of fairness. It is unfair that just five people who have done precious little good (and instead have done an immense amount of harm) get credited for things they didn’t do and the real people are ignored. The vast majority of Indians apparent don’t care that this is unfair.

If India ever has a non-Congress government, I hope they start removing the names of these bunch of jokers from the more important institutions, and — not just rename but — entirely eliminate all the schemes that are named after Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv & Sanjiv. If it is named after one of them, eliminate it. Thus the “Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme” or MREGS must not be renamed but totally scrapped because it is leading India deeper into poverty.

Anyway, back to the Higgs boson.

Read all about it on them interwebs. Here’s what I know from there: Particles come in different classes. The class called bosons has six members that are elementary: four gauge bosons (γ · g · W± · Z), the Higgs boson (H0) and the graviton (G). There’s somethings called the Higgs mechanism which depends on a field called the Higgs field. The Higgs field permeates space, and particles interact with it and thus gain what is called mass. That interaction between the field and the particle is mediated by another particle which is a boson. So the particle that is responsible for other particles having mass is called the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson had been conjectured to exist since the mid-60s but to discover it required very high energy physics experiments. That had to wait till the Large Hadron Collider was built by CERN in Europe. The LHC particle accelerator’s mission (in part) was to figure out if the Higgs boson was indeed what it was supposed to be.

Talking of CERN, you may wish to check out this previous post by clicking on the image below:

Author: Atanu Dey

Economist. View all posts by Atanu Dey