However, other researchers independently came up with similar ideas and they, along with Prof Higgs, have long argued for the name of the particle to be changed. If not then we will have to live with whatever decision is made". Five spoke at a press conference last year to announce the discovery of a particle thought to be the Higgs, but it was only Prof Higgs who received a huge round of applause from the researchers present. A spokeswoman from Cern - which operates the Large Hadron Collider - told BBC News that it was not up to the laboratory to determine the name of newly discovered particles. I was a bit unhappy about the way it was being sold. Image caption Peter Higgs is open to a name change to "H Boson" 
 
 At the time, it was thought that this was because physicists wanted to be absolutely sure that the claimed particle really was the Higgs before naming it as such.
– Amid rumors that this year's Nobel Prize for Physics will go to the Higgs boson theory, some scientists say the particle's name should be changed so that all the glory doesn't go to British physicist Peter Higgs. At a press conference last year to announce the particle's discovery, Higgs "was treated as something of a rock star and the rest of us were barely recognized by most of the audience," American scientist Carl Hagen tells the BBC. Hagen is considered to have helped develop the theory, along with Higgs and four others. Most scientists, however, agree that calling it the Englert-Higgs-Guralnik-Kibble-Brout-Hagen particle would be too unwieldy—and the acronyms aren't much better. Hagen favors the name Standard Model Scalar Meson. In a BBC interview last week, Higgs himself argued that it should really be called the Goldstone particle after Cambridge physicist Jeffrey Goldstone. Higgs explained that the "God particle" nickname for the Higgs started out as a joke, after an editor rejected an author's plan "to call it 'that goddamn particle' because it was clear it was going to be a tough job finding it experimentally."