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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i dont read a lot about somethings like this one. because it makes me too curious that i might even find something strange due to curiousity. For me, as a Catholic myself, believes that God is all about SCIENCE, He is biology, He is physics, He is astronomy, He is history, He is everything that civilization had learned.
- Posted by Ding ColumnsI read a few short pieces of the articles on above-mentioned website. The general point of one of the articles on the origin of life was: The chemical and physical processes that are required for life forming the darwinian way are not completely understood and some are only hypotheses, without any conclusive scientific proof.
- Posted by SavageFXNow, this might be true. I know that darwinism has quite a few open questions so up to this point the article could be right in saying that darwinism can’t be proved, because the causes can’t be scientifically proved. However, the writer than goes on to state that the only conclusion is that “The Creator” must have done it. This is however doing exactly the same as what he is telling the darwinist off for. He’s stating that a theory is true, without any scientific evidence of its causes. If darwinism is not acceptable if the chemical processes are not scientifically proven, then intelligent design is not acceptable if the existence of God is not proven scientifically.
Of course God probably can’t be proven to exist in a scientific, which is a very reason for denying funding into intelligent design research. If it is impossible to proof the correctness of your causes, then you can never be certain of anything in a theory.
So at the most, the conclusion of the article should be that neither darwinism nor intelligent design are proven theories and at this moment in time. To accept either one, you have to believe in something rather than knowing something. Either unexplained chemical processes or an intelligent creating God… Given this choice, I do not find it surprising that most scientists would rather stick with the unexplained chemistry than introducing a God into their theories.
“Creationstists who are willing to take the scientific approach are more than welcome to write papers and conduct experiments that proof their theories fit in with the rest of the scientific theories.”-SavageFx
Creationists use the scientific method. They, afterall, are the ones who invented it. However, they are denied publicaction of their research, denied tenure, denied research grants all because they challenge darwin.
The documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” chronicles how Darwin-dissenters have been ruthlessly expelled, or otherwise persecuted, in their professions. This movie does not promote creationist or even intelligent design theories(they are different just ask them). This movie goes to theaters in the USA on the 18th.
All of these questions posted here to mock the creationist have long been answered. The answer and the evidence suports ceation. You just need to look at rhe research. If you want to see the answers to most of the anti-creationist questions that have been getting posted here go to http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/are a/qa.asp But only do this if you want to be chalanged in what you believe with the evidence.
- Posted by justinThere are so many gods. Thor is one. The monkey god is another from chinese lore. Shiva? I personally like the hindu ones, so colourful. It’s okay to name something after a myth. We have planets and stars named after gods, why not a subatomic particle?
- Posted by veggiedudeI do not find the term “God particle” offensive, merely unhelpful. Like most other references to God it helps obscure rather than explain.
- Posted by Roy BrownI believe the rebirth of the Creationist argument was created to irate secular and Atheist people plus other Christians who don’t believe in latter day doctrines.
- Posted by Trevor LoginOscar Wilde wrote ‘to understand how stupid someone is, Ask them the unanswerable?’The Creationist will give you an answer.
Why do Atheist and strict secular people engage in an debate were their view is blasphemous to their audiences ear?Why do Creationist bring their argument to the scientific table and not to Theologians? This debate from the foundation is complete rubbish and incoherent. thats my view and thank you.
First of all I would like to let you know my philosophical views on God would tend to be deist, but changes with circumstance like any open minded human. This Creationist Argument that was created by fundamental Christians in America, I think is flawed. No one can make me believe that the world is 6000 years old. When it comes to evolution, Darwin or Dawkins can’t explain to you the evolution of the eye either. My view is that both theories are bogus, they are both incorrect. Also, Darwinism is responsible for Eugenics.God particle?don’t know enough to comment!
- Posted by Trevor LoginTo SavageFx - I accord people of faith the respect that they deserve, which is exactly the same respect that I accord to those who believe that the world is flat or that the sun goes around the earth. I can’t see why any respect at all is due to people who purvey fiction as fact.
- Posted by KieranThere’s nothing offensive about the term, at least to this non-believer, and it does convey some of the fundamentality and mystique around the search. But there seems to be fallout from the references to divinity in physics - the references are ripe to be picked and misappropriated by people who want scientific support for theist agendas.
- Posted by Kieranit is very unhelpful to talk about the god particle, just like (dare i say it) Einstein got himself in a needless muddle by ever mentioning God. Of course Einstein did not believe a theist God who answers prayers, cares who you sleep with, what you eat and on what day. I dont think Einstein even meant a deist God, he used God to signify the wonder of the universe in a slightly Spinozian sense. This was a mistake and the word should not be used for secular enquiry, like in the case of the particle search.
- Posted by Mark[...] says in his book: “This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final [...]
- Posted by The Rogues Gallery » Blog Archive » The Higgs HububMany important scientists (such as Einstein) do not believe in the stories told in the Bible, they do not believe Jesus to have walked the earth and performed miracles. Most do not believe that God can change anything in the world as it is right now. They simply acknowledge the fact that science can not explain the fact that the universe has always existed. Somehow the universe IS. human logic implies that a fact has a cause so we search for a cause of the universe. Einstein and Newton and many others choose to call this ’cause’ God. I am a university student and last semester we had a course about religion, given by a (religious) professor in theology. He pointed out that people like Einstein are not called theists but deists. They do not belief in the God of any particular religion that had a son who walked the earth and whom you could pray to etc, but more vaguely a ’something’, a big mystery which can be seen as the cause of the universe but which is currently disconnected from the universe. Deists believe in something but they do not believe in praying, do not believe that ‘god’ loves you or encourages you to do anything at all. Einstein stated that ethics is a purely human affair, with no connection to religion and I believe this to be true. I do not believe there are any religious people who help their fellow man because they’ll go to hell if they don’t. You help because you care, not because you have to, wether you’re religious or not.
Please do not mix religion and science. Science is a different approach to life and the universe than religion. Science is based upon experiments and rational building of theories upon previous theories. If creationism wishes to be a scientifically based theory, then it should step out of the realm of the religous and into the realm of science. In the realm of science the Bible and God mean nothing. Accept that, or if you can’t, stay out of science, believe in your theory as much as they like but do not call it a scientific theory. Creationstists who are willing to take the scientific approach are more than welcome to write papers and conduct experiments that proof their theories fit in with the rest of the scientific theories.
A theory is really just a theory, not a fact. For example Newton’s theory of gravity was corrected by Einsteins theory of general relativity. Note that word: “corrected”, because it’s a key word. A hypothesis is an educated and professional guess. A hypothesis becomes an accepted theory when all (or a large majority) of experiments fit into it. for example Newton’s law of gravity gives correct results for just about any movement or action on earth. However when you apply it to high-energy, high-speed or atomic-scale problems it fails. So Newton’s theory is ‘wrong’. But it is not wrong like it is a wrong of the old egyptians to say that the sun rises because a scarabee is rolling it up into sight on the edge of the earth…
So yes, existing scientific theories can be wrong, but they’re hardly ever totally wrong and it’s not because someone comes up with a new theory, that he automatically deserves our attention. As Stephen Jay Gould put it so nicely: “In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”
A theory is always just a theory because to be absolutely sure you’d have to test the theory on every particle in the universe at any time past,present,future..and that’s kinda hard
As to the original subject of this discussion: “The mind of God” is just a poetic name for something that is ungraspable, but believed to contain the explanation for many important questions. As stated before, many scientists do not even believe in a god that has any human attributes such as a ‘mind’.
To all religious people: I have no problem respecting the fact that you believe in God and do not believe that you are any more wrong or right than I am. I hope however that you too can accept that many people do not believe in a god and do not think of us as being wrong.
- Posted by Ronin aka SavageFXAnd to all non-believers: Please accept that some people do believe in a God and respect that. Religion has no place in science, but to many people religion is important for their spiritual life and we have no right to judge over that as long as it has no negative implications for the outside world (such as religious-based terrorism)
The creationist Edward Blyth discussed natural selection 25 years before Darwin, but recognized that it was a conservative, not a creative, force. In other words that natural selection has been used to show creation for 25 years longer then it has been clamed to help evolution.
The reason that germs become resistant to antibiotics is that they loose DNA and thereby loose what the antibiotic reacted with. This can be by loosing a pump in the cell wall, change a control gene, or loose the enzyme the antibiotic atacked.
A loss of information is not evolution (in the molicules to man sense) but is natural slection as shown and predicted by the creationists. Dogs are artificial selection so that this would not happen in the wild but as man chose.
And like I said before evolutionists have yet to show that Pasteur was wrong. They continue to hope and insist that maybe, eventualy, posibly, sometime in we MAY be able to show that he was wrong. That seems to me to take a lot of faith to belive in something that the evidence goes agianst.
Oh by the way most of those experiments that you are talking about also created cyanide and other key eliments to Embalming Fluid. That sounds like the perfect environment to create life?
- Posted by justinPerhaps it should be called the “Lederman Particle Theory”, and recognize that before we start calling God believers idiots and forcing this on them in school. LET’S FIND IT FIRST.
I’m Catholic, and not offended. I think if anything it shows the lack of insight on the person naming it, although he sounds remorseful (albeit for the wrong reason).
God is independent of particles, so the term is contradictory. That’s the only thing that bothers me about it.
Why do they keep naming things that they haven’t proven exist yet, and neglect to attach “theory”? Sounds like faith.
Reminds me of the “Archaeoraptor”.
- Posted by mawstThat Pasteur could not produce something one would consider “life” from something one would consider “non-life” is not sufficient to disprove evolution — it only indicates that a more detailed experiment may be needed.
After all, it was only in the middle of last century that it was shown that a mix of primitive non-living gases, in a flask with high voltage electrodes, could produce the basic compounds that lead to amino acids… Pasteur’s time had little to no knowledge of the internal workings of cells — and don’t even consider the nature of a virus (which many do not consider to be “living” — a free virus is just a chemical coating around a chunk of rna or dna, with nothing available to take in energy or process matter… but let a virus contact a cell wall, and chemical reactions dissolve the coating, drawing the rna/dna into the cell, where the cell’s own production systems start treating the virus as if it were its own).
I’m not sure how this thread went from cosmology to evolution, but evolution is probably the hardest theory to disprove: lack of evidence does not disprove something — if one seeks to disprove evolution, one must produce overwhelming AND TESTABLE evidence of an alternative process that covers the same situations. We see evolution in action (look at all the disease causing “bugs” that are becoming tolerant and immune to formerly effective antibiotics); we can trace changes through the fossil record. We can produce components of “life” (amino acids, etc.) through chemical reactions… That we haven’t produced a strand of functional rna from a raw chemical soup /yet/ does not prove it can never happen.
A counter to evolution is going to have to explain why germs become resistant to antibiotics, how snarly wild silver foxes can become tame floppy eared pets in just a few generations (and why this has not occurred in the wild), explain the changes seen throughout history in the fossil record… and at the same time explain why — given time and energy, some primordial mass of chemicals can never produce components of life… And then offer up testable experiments to support this counter proposal
- Posted by WulfraedThis ise’nt about religion. It is about someone trying to play God. It has been said that we all have the god particle in us, good luck when people start to jack it around…smiling…what’s next????
- Posted by Darcy DrogorubYes Religion does offend me!
- Posted by Billy BosonWhy do people still believe in evolution when it was disproven over 140 years ago by Louis Pasteur. Pasteur proved that life comes from life, life cannot come from nonlife. Omne vivum e vivo. Evolution requires spontaneous generation in order to have the “first cell”.
Like Pasteur said in Sorbonne, Paris (1864): “It is dumb, dumb since these experiments were begun several years ago…Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment! “No, there is now no circumstances in which it could be affirmed that microscopic beings come into the world without germs, without parents, similar to themselves.”
Why do evolutionists, who have yet to prove that Pasteur was wrong, continue to believe a disproven theory? They do fallow his proof when it comes to medicine and pasteurization of food. so they know the proof to be correct. They (the evolutionist) just chooses to believe in what they know to be impossible.
- Posted by justinIts in switzerland, not france. For you (who else) americans Switzerland is the capital of Australialand.
Calling anything scientific the “god” something is always going to attract the crazies and the idiots, as can be easily seen by the sometimes hilarious posts here. It was fashionable at the end of the twentieth century to suggest something of the miraculous or divine was implied in modern physics but sadly since “the war on terror” the forces of unreason and religiosity are rearing their witch burning heads again. Bottom line: unless you want to attract drooling morons (american ones more often than not), leave “god” out of physics.
- Posted by WisdoThere is some good news here. If the CERN scientists do manage to create the “God” particle and our universe folds into itself or goes up in a second “big bang”, at least the French will be the first to go!
- Posted by nick