Peter Higgs in the spotlightAmong other things, he sensibly says that others may deserve to appear in the name for the Higgs mechanism but it's probably OK for the boson to be called after Higgs himself because he was the unique guy who promoted the boson's existence around 1964. He reviews some history involving a rejected paper etc.
At the end, he also endorses the analogy between the Higgs boson and Margaret Thatcher:
Margaret Thatcher appears in the room and things become heavy. Higgs just emphasizes that it is wrong to compare the process of acquiring mass to a syrup because the deceleration in a syrup is a dissipative process while the Higgs mechanism isn't.
If you don't know, the explanation of the Higgs boson as Margaret Thatcher was presented to the U.K. science minister in 1993 by David Miller from a university in London.
The Hunt for Higgs, BBC, 2012
By being so kind, Higgs is actually repaying a debt to the Fe Lady, a famous British chemist. Her defense of the LHC may have been crucial for the survival of the LHC project – and therefore for the looming discovery of the Higgs boson.
Margaret Thatcher was more circumspect when she wrong-footed sceptical Cabinet colleagues with her defence of public spending on the Large Hadron Collider. "Yes, but isn't it interesting?" was enough to stifle their objections. And her interest in the work at CERN was rewarded by Tim Berners-Lee establishing the groundwork for the World Wide Web. I've seen the original computer server with a note from Tim attached, instructing fellow scientists not to switch it off. Our lives have truly been revolutionised by his inventiveness.Her soulmate Ronald Reagan initiated the SSC; however, that project had to continue through some more hostile years in the U.S. and it died.
Today, Google Czechia celebrates the birthday of Josef Ressel, the Czech-Austrian inventor of the propeller (and other things). He wasn't bad for a forest warden.
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