Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of a class of particles, including photons, mesons, or alpha particles, that have integral spins and do not obey the exclusion principle, so that any number of identical particles may occupy the same quantum state.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A corruption of boatswain, representing its common pronunciation.
- noun A bolt for the crossbow, having a round knob at the end, with a small point projecting from it.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun obsolete See
boatswain . - noun (Physics) A fundamental particle that obeys Bose-Einstein statistical rules, but not the Pauli exclusion principle; the spin value of a boson is always an integer. Examples of bosons are alpha particles, photons, and those nuclei which have an even mass number.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun obsolete A
boatswain . - noun physics A
particle with totally symmetric compositequantum states, which exempts them from thePauli exclusion principle , and that obey Bose-Einstein statistics. They have integerspin . Among them are many elementary particles, and some (gauge bosons) are known to carry thefundamental forces . Comparefermion .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun any particle that obeys Bose-Einstein statistics but not the Pauli exclusion principle; all nuclei with an even mass number are bosons
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
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Examples
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I am on the record saying that the existence of the Higgs boson is yet to be confirmed experimentally.
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Finding the Higgs boson is probably the only thing many people outside physics know about the impending experiments at Cern.
Meet Peter Higgs: Father of the ‘God Particle’ | Disinformation 2008
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The Higgs boson is a component of the proposed Higgs field.
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The Higgs boson is the only particle left that has not yet been observed by experimental research in the Standard Model of particle physics which lists some 40 species of elementary particles.
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The Higgs boson is the particle that is thought to give everything else in the universe mass, but that bit of theoretical physics is unlikely to be the reason most people have heard of it.
Meet Peter Higgs: Father of the ‘God Particle’ | Disinformation 2008
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Where does the energy for string vibrations come from, if every boson is itself a certain type of string vibration?
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Scientists claimed progress in the search for the Higgs boson, which is considered the basic building block of the universe, Gautam Naik reports.
Physicists Close In on a Universal Puzzle Gautam Naik 2011
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A boson is a particle that obeys Bose statistics: when you take two identical bosons and switch them with each other, the state you end up with is indistinguishable from the state you started with.
Thanksgiving Sean 2008
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The resulting theory contains a spin -2 boson, which is just what is needed to convey the force of gravitation and thereby unite all physical interactions in a single theory.
Why 10 or 11? Sean 2006
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For a few months in 2010 it looked as though the Tevatron might get a reprieve in order to find the last and heaviest missing bit of the model-the Higgs boson, which is thought to give other particles their mass.
bilby commented on the word boson
"The $6.5 billion machine designed to recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time had to be switched off after a bird dropped a 'bit of baguette' into it, causing it to overheat. As a result, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland had to postpone their plans last week to emulate the universe's Big Bang.
The European particle physics laboratory near Geneva launched the LHC in September last year. Physicists hoped to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, or God particle, which gives matter in the universe its mass."
- Bird beats big bang with bit of baguette, theage.com.au, 8 Nov 2009.
November 8, 2009
bilby commented on the word boson
Strangely, I find it comforting that the beginning of the universe can be undone by a bird with a chunk of bread.
November 8, 2009
reesetee commented on the word boson
As do I. It seems right somehow.
November 8, 2009
chained_bear commented on the word boson
Seems very Vonnegutian.
November 9, 2009
strev commented on the word boson
I like that cb... Vonnegutian.
Kurt and to the point
November 9, 2009
reesetee commented on the word boson
Hee.
November 10, 2009