One of the most brilliant simplifications I’ve ever come across is the term “the God Particle.” Physicists think this subatomic speck of matter, if it is ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God,” as Einstein wanted to do. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman wrote a book with that name 15 years ago that was so interesting that even a physics klutz like myself (I almost failed it in high school…) read and enjoyed it.
It turns out, though, that the physicist who launched the hunt for this elusive particle doesn’t like its nickname. “It embarrasses me,” Peter Higgs said in Geneva this week at a news conference our correspondent Robert Evans attended. “Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”
Higgs, now 78, first proposed a theory of the particle officially knows as the Higgs boson 40 years ago. CERN, the giant nuclear research centre at the French-Swiss border near Geneva, is building a vast underground particle collider to try to find it. “The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly … I’m more than 90 percent certain that it will,” Higgs said after visiting the collider due to start working early next year.
So the term “the God particle” may be coming to the religion blogosphere pretty soon. Instead of doing the homework and writing the essay, I’ll let others explain what it is — here are some good examples at National Geographic and Wired and a cartoon here.
Lederman, by the way, also seemed of two minds about calling the Higgs boson the “God particle.”
As he put it in his book:
“This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddam Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one…
Lederman then goes on to quote Genesis 11:1-9 , the Tower of Babel story about mankind dispersing. Finding the God Particle, he says, would be like undoing the confusion that followed.
Even if the physicists have qualms, I think the term “God Particle” is so expressive that I’m glad Higgs didn’t get his way. I know there are those out there who don’t agree, who do and who don’t say. There are also deep implications for science and religion. Still, some things are just so awesome that a reasonable comparison with the divine seems to me like a good way to put something so hard to understand into perspective.
Do you think it’s offensive?
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the name isnt very offensive to me because i do balieve in god and i believe in science i think god and science are the same thing so to say that isnt a god particle to me is like saying that god doesnt exist since in oone of the many verses of the bible it says thif yuo cut open a tree you will find me so in that sence god is all things so by saying that he must also be within the god particle as well. i go to church and they say god passes the ultimate power so that power to me must mean that he3 can creat something from nothing by using nothing to creat something for if you think about it nothing must be something or we wouldnt give it meaning so in this calling it the god particle wouldnt be offensive because gods child stated that he is everything.
- Posted by james evansA general law of probability states that the probability of a given evnet being due to chance is inversely proportional to the number of variables involved and the range of possible values for each of those variables.
It is reasonable to hypothesize that the Higgs boson was the initial result of the big bang. If these most elementary particles almost immediately transoformed into the subatomic particles that gave rise to atoms, the probability is very low that these subatomic particles formed by chance because of the virtually infinite range of possible particle types that could have been produced. Additionally, if the big bang was the initial event or cause of the physical universe and prior to that event there was nothing, a question arises of what was the first cause that resulted in something, even the Higgs boson, being produced from nothing? An increasing number of scientists are coming to the conclusion that the big bang was intentional and the resulting universe was intelligently designed. If these contentions are true, then an intelligent, living being did so. Such a being would be supreme and is normally referred to as “God.”
- Posted by Mike[...] Finding the Higgs particle will help solve and complete the General Unified Theory, now called Unified Field Theory, and also known as the Theory of Everything. Because of this it has been referred to as the ‘God Particle’. I personally do not believe that discoverying the ’secrets’ or interworkigns of the universe somehow either proves or disproves the existance of God. However there is apparently much hype on this topic. [...]
- Posted by The Large Hadron Collider, Tiny Black Holes, & The Higgs Boson, oh my! » 27 Keith - 729, 243, 81, 27, 9, 3Not offensive at all - they’re only words. There’s nothing wrong with trying to understand the nature of our existence, coming up with names, labels and classifications in the process. It also seems natural (to some) that God is in the center of it all anyway - in whatever state, shape or form. Plus, God doesn’t mind… it’s people who get offended for whatever reasons, not God.
- Posted by Patryk Ploszaj[...] via FaithWorld » Blog Archive » Is “God Particle” the right term for massive mystery in physics? |…. [...]
- Posted by Another Material Science Fairy Tale! | An Outsider's Perspective