What’s in a name?

Juliet answered her famous rhetorical question with: “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Romeo, her besotted interlocutor, promptly agreed.

But the recent kerfuffle over who might be honored with a Nobel Prize if the Large Hadron Collider discovers the Higgs boson shows that particle physicists care about names and the provenance they imply. The Higgs boson was proposed more or less simultaneously in three papers that came out in 1964. How the particle acquired the name of only one of the papers’ six authors, Peter Higgs, was recounted last month in a letter to Nature.

The letter’s author was Ian Sample, a science reporter at the Guardian. According to Sample, it was the particle theorist Benjamin Lee who coined the name Higgs boson. Lee was asked to provide the closing summary at an international conference held at Fermilab in 1972. For Lee, “Higgs” was just a convenient shorthand to refer to the mechanism that the six original authors had described in 1964 and its later elaborations. “From there,” wrote Sample, “the name stuck and the Higgs boson was born.”

The single-parent name of the Higgs boson is somewhat awkward. In the more equitable case of the J/ψ meson , both groups that simultaneously discovered the particle are represented: Sam Ting’s, which bestowed the name J, and Burton Richter’s, which bestowed the name ψ.

As far as I know, the Higgs boson and the J/ψ meson are exceptions. Most particles bear uncontentious names. Indeed, my favorite particle name is perhaps the least contentious of all because it’s the most literal: the gluon .