To mark the 80th birthday of the man behind the elusive particle, we're holding a competition to rename the damned thing

I once asked a brilliant physicist at Manchester University what he thought of the name the media use for the Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that is regarded as the universal origin of mass. That name, of course, is the God particle.

It is partly with thanks to names like "God particle" and spurious end-of-the-world scenarios that the Large Hadron Collider at Cern near Geneva got so much coverage when it was switched on last year. And broke.

Cern is just one lab that is in the business of hunting for the particle. The other is the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. That machine is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world (that works).

But back to the physicist in Manchester. He paused. He sighed. And then he said: "I really, really don't like it. It sends out all the wrong messages. It overstates the case. It makes us look arrogant. It's rubbish." He then added: "If you walked down the corridor here, poked your head into people's offices and asked that question, you would likely be struck by flying books."

Today it's the 80th birthday of Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh-based physicist whose work pointed to the existence of the particle in the early 1960s. In previous interviews, I've asked him what he makes of the name, God particle. He hates it. He worries it might offend people who are religious, but I think he hates it for other reasons too.

When I've written about the God particle here before, I've suggested we might do well – or more accurately that physicists might do well – to think up another name for it. So today, in honour of Peter Higgs entering the realm of the octogenarians, we're launching a competition to rename the God particle. Who said Friday can't be fun?

Below I've set out the best criteria I can find for how to come up with a good name for a new particle. Depending on the number of entries, we'll select the winner by: consulting physicists; testing the entries on the humanities graduates who run the Guardian's newsdesk, aka "The Gate Keepers"; or by printing them out on a sheet of paper and asking the chef to throw a dart at it*.

The winner will receive a copy of Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara, and a surprise Higgs boson-themed gift.

But first, some history. The line of progress is rarely straight and clear in physics, as Sheldon Glashow said in his Nobel lecture in 1979. Peter Higgs did not pluck the idea for what is officially called the Higgs boson out of thin air. His work was influenced by several scientists, including the Nobel laureates Werner Heisenberg, Phil Anderson and Yoichiro Nambu.

Peter Higgs wasn't the only one to come up with the idea either. Two Belgian physicists, Francois Englert and Robert Brout, published very similar work a week or two earlier than Higgs. And a third group, including Gerald Guralnik, Richard Hagen and Tom Kibble at Imperial College in London followed soon after.

The particle became known as the Higgs boson in 1972 after Ben Lee, a former head of theoretical physics at Fermilab, used the name to describe the idea. Even Higgs often distances himself from the name, referring to it as the "so-called Higgs boson".

For physicists, the name seems to have stuck, but not for the media.

For the origins of the name so loved by journalists, we have to go back to Fermilab. In the early 1990s, the former director of the lab, Leon Lederman, wrote a great book on particle physics that he called "The God particle", which was to be the main target for an enormous but ultimately ill-fated machine called the Superconducting Supercollider. In the book, he justifies the name by saying the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname ..."

So that's how we got to where we are today. Physicists call it the Higgs boson, but it could easily be the B-E-H-G-H-K boson (make an acronym out of that if you can). And we in the media just can't stop ourselves calling it the God particle.

So, it's time for another name, and Higgs' birthday seems as good a day as any to start searching for one.

The best rules for naming new phenomena in physics I can find come courtesy of yet another very smart Fermilab physicist, Joe Lykken.

He has three simple rules:

1) Names should be serious and accurate

2) It is good to name things after people, but only if you can resist the pressure to hyphenate with two or three extra names

3) Names should be evocative and inspiring.

The Higgs boson scores well on 1 and 2, but in my view fails miserably on 3. Equally, God particle fails spectacularly on 1 and 2, but does rather better on 3.

I'm off to think up a name now. Where's Bill Watterson when you need him?

The closing date is midnight Monday 1st June 2009

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* The winner will be chosen by a team of independent physicists. Their decision will be final. The winner will be notified via the email address registered to their username.