A comment to HPCwire "HTC, Big Data and God Article"

How to take the wind out of the sails

Post #1 Submitted by wmartinusa on Apr 4, 2013 @ 11:35 PM EDT

Wonderful article. I'd like to make every Big Data salesperson read it and then tell me, what's OSG and HTC? And can you match them? But the attitudes out there don't leave room for the thoughtful reflection this article wants. Ah well, maybe the God particle will leave me an epiphany.

The name "God Particle" for Higgs boson - got another confirmation three weeks ago,  at the Moriond Conference in La Thuile, Italy, from scientists at the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid experiments. CMS spokesman said:

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," 

The term "God particle" comes from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman who  wrote the  1993 book   The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?   You can buy it on Amazon. Dr. Lederman was born in New York. His father operated a hand laundry. He is a one of the top physicists in the world and a former Director at Fermilab, where the search for Higgs' started.

Dr. Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize
Ex Director of Fermilab

Scientists in great majority did not like a name in physics with God into it. See " For Chrissakes, Stop Calling It 'God Particle' ". But everyone else loved it, and the name stayed. Actually not everyone. The atheists and the very religious rejected it. But everyone else, liked it.

You call it epiphany. This is what it is and I hope the Big Data community will pay attention. One can not discover God Particle simply by using commercially backed tools, like Hadoop :) But one day these HTC Big Data methodologies will pay off and reach the mainstream.

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