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12:52 April 9th, 2008

Is “God Particle” the right term for massive mystery in physics?

Posted by: Tom Heneghan
Tags: FaithWorld, , ,

Peter Higgs at CERN, 7 April 2008/poolOne 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.

Visitors inspect the new 27km long underground particle collider at CERN, 16 Oct 2004/Denis BalibouseSo 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…

The God Particle, by Leon LedermanLederman 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?

145 comments so far

The reason the God particle is so elusive? God will not allow you to know what he knows. You are wasting your money. You are like Eve, wanting to be as wise as God. But God is just silly superstition to those who try to find him through science.

- Posted by voice inda widdernus

The bible says “in the beginning was the word”. Therefor to inquire into the nature of the universe as these physicists are doing is to follow God’s will to understand his greatest book - the universe itself, which is the direct writing of God - the bible was “inspired” by God, the universe was created by God through his creative word. Physicists are the true holy men seeking to read the truest bible - the universe.

- Posted by jojobee

Yes, the “HIGGS BOSON” is refered to as the god particle. We should not seek the Scientific side of life.
We are no longer the leaders inthe world in science, math, health care, or anything else! But we lead the way in the Military Industrial Complex. Why spend billions on the trueth we we can spend it on BOMBS to take lives from those who do not agree with our religious beliefs.
A M E N !!!

- Posted by caveman

Updating my last comment, Everyone read Genesis 11:1-9 and then turn to Isaiah Chapter 47 and read 8-15. And then Isaiah 48&49. There will be No peace for the Wicked. Physicists who chase this have no inter peace. And the world needs to pray for them.

- Posted by Jason Helper

, These Physicists are about to understand finally, that there are two realms the Physical and the Angelical. Something had to start the bang. The God Partical which is the Divine natural cause. But the Divine will only allow them to know what he wants them to as in the scripture Genesis 11:1-9. Why do Physicists ponder on this like in Genesis? It is unclean spirts that are controlling the minds of the Physicists, but it is not there fault in perspective, they have been led astray by the unclean spirts to do this project. As crazy as this seems it is the cause and effect of the Divine nature

- Posted by Jason Helper

The big bang theory doesn’t say that there was a creator it just said that there was nothing,no time no space, than the quantum singularities was everywhere than there was always energy and matter and than it got spinned faster and faster and it explode and created one universe. i can’t say if this theory is true or not cause i wasn’t there. i always say that if it was just natural causes i believe it still doesn’t dismissed after life.

- Posted by Corné Botha

I personnally do not believe in the God Particle, the Higgs particle, because I think they should already have found it a long time ago. I also do not believe in a graviton to explain gravity … it is too easy : when you cannot explain something, you just create another something to imagine what happens, but that also does not explain anything.
Maybe the Higgs ” field ” exists, if we may call it aether, yes why not …. but particles moving in it and gaining mass ….. I think for exemple they then should slow down at some moment …
No ! I believe only in energy, it’s all about energy and vibrations/energy fields !! I think MATTER only is existing when mass particles come together to form atoms and molecules and matter is just the new vibration on a different level created by the protons and neutrons and electrons together … it is the vibration/energy field of the atom, of the molecule … Mass becomes matter only on atom scale, I think you have MASS particles ( proton, electron, neutron ) and massless ones ( photons ) and when you put mass particles together they form a atom, and that atom IS MATTER.
If I may explain it this way : it feels like matter in the same way that you can feel a resistance when you put 2 magnets North against North : you feel resistance, the more you want to put them together, the more resistance you feel … and MATTER IS resistance - it’s all a question of vibrations, energy fields.
Photons have NO MASS, but they can give energy to mass particles - electrons - to move on a higher level, and when the electron looses its energy again it gives birth to a photon …. When you knock on matter, you knock on a energy field !! do you really think that your feet are walking on the ELECTRONS ( around the nuclei ) of the stones ?? You surely also do not walk on the protons ! the electrons of your feet atoms are NOT touching the electrons of the stone atoms : you walk on a energy field created by the ATOM of the stone, the electrons around the nucleus !! otherwise you would smash and crush the atoms or you would be like a photon pushing electrons away !!!!! Not convinced ?

- Posted by george

[...] may prove the existence of the so-called “God particle,” the mysterious theoretical atomic fragment that lies at the heart of [...]

- Posted by Ubuntu Security » Blog Archive » Will the collider prove that God does not exist?

i can see the confusion between trying to figure out if the Boggs particle will disprove God. But science explains things scientifically and when you can look at undeniable prophecy that no group of the wisest scientists could have come up with- had they been transported back to Old Testament times- you come up with miracles that science can’t begin to try to explain. And they won’t try because they would look foolish. But these were simple men who were told what to write and yet they foretold things that would occur time and time again, never being wrong. It would be impossible for scientists with all they have at their disposal to be able to predict all this prophecy. So if these are miracles that had to have more than human influence or lucky guesses to take place, then it goes beyond science. As one scientist put it who is a Christian, taking even 10 of the prophecies out of hundreds and having them all turn out as predicted, the odds are overwhelming to happen by chance. There is more chance a cat could jump up on a taple where was was different colors of paint in on a eisel and knock it over and create the Mona Lisa, then for 10 of these prophecies to take place.

- Posted by burt ray

If people want to know the mind of God all they have to do is accept Jesus. He died for us so we may find the truth and not only know God but with him forever.

Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes to the Father, but by me. (John 14:6)

- Posted by Jane

Some things are better left untouched as I always say. Maybe us being the creatures we are shouldn’t understand what everything really is, maybe it was just meant to be there. Sure we could use this technology to create a better life for the people of tomorrow but ya know what if something goes wrong here and creates something bad. Think of hiroshima in 1945….we developed the atomic bomb. Now…..we’ve got even worse things. Though I look at it from a positive way of creating travel through time and space…..and a bad thing of creating a paridox and destroying anything and everything.

- Posted by Dominic

or rather, they mean something only to us….hmmmm….

- Posted by Kelly

1. I like the thought of revealing a particle that produces mass - but then, that particle must also be made up of something…I wonder how minute we can go? Fascinating.
2. When my mother was dying, she said, “There is only one thing I know for sure: things change.” This statement sucked me into a vortex of clarity that made my eyes burn with tears. Everywhere I look I see change, and evidently, everywhere I can’t look, also. Motion and interaction seem to be key in everything, even vacuum states. The only time I have witnessed “nothingness” was when my mum’s soul left her body. Or, as she said, was that merely a “change?”
3. I envy you believers and you non-believers. At least you KNOW something. I, on the other hand, know nothing…
4. “What will be, will be.” -Doris Day
5. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Juliet as written by William Shakespeare (translation - it is what it is - our names are meaningless)

- Posted by Kelly

and biblically speaking, the earth is anywhere from 14-20,000 years old, with rougly 150 generations from Adam to the present. Somewhere in the middle, there was a theological monkey wrench thrown in the spokes of archaeology called the deluge, which is a biblical term for what may explain why neither side has an answer that can be backed. It was all (biblically) destroyed by a great flood. To talk this down some more, a surviving remnant would have been capable of re-populating the earth to it’s present proportion within about six to ten thousand with a little elbow grease. None of these claims the bible makes are anywhere nearly as ridiculous as the contemptible theory that we will find God wrapped around a particle, or that we will build a machine that could tear a controlled hole in space-time. Are they? Maybe when you find God, you can ask his opinion on the matter.
Until then, it might not be good to look a gift donkey’s colt in the mouth.

- Posted by Matthew

if there is a God, it woul be preposterous to believe This God did not create the universe, Himself being the only thing allowing something possibly capable and by definition of God,supreme, and if there is a God, it is also preposterous to believe that we can assume to understand Him without having observed, and then say that He can only be found in the non particle, or the “un-” substance of His own creation cannot be justified. Whether the potter is also the clay, the potter but not the pot, will be the only conclusion from the god-particle. Either way this creation being that, must reflect, as every creation, its creator in some way.

oh and yes there is a car that makes about 300 mpg modestly. However technological capability does not neccessitate nor finance the implementation of that kind of an innovation to date, it will become practical when a corporate body must advance in this way to survive, or competition escalates to this level. Otherwise, read about it in popular science, and then don’t read about how its trial in Socal was shut down by giant corporations because the innovator lacked the economic power to compete. That’s life.

- Posted by Matthew

If there is no God, then what created the God particle and what gave it the power to create mass?

- Posted by Gail Quick

So where did the God particle come from? Are there yet smaller and smaller particles? Will this answer all of our questions of life the universe and everything. I doubt it. But all these projects sound cool and keep the money in the pockets of those who have and out of those who have not. Let’s use our money for better projects.

Yea we can figure out how the universe works but we can’t make a freaking car that gets 100 mpg. What a joke. We don’t know jack. Yes people some science is a wast of time and money IMO.

- Posted by Unclesharkey

Correction: conditions not seen in Nature since the first fraction of a second AFTER the big bang…

- Posted by JTankers

… as long as finding the God particle does not create a hell on earth…

CERN predicts the creation of up to 1 micro black hole per second in the Large Hadron Collider and references the 1999 RHIC safety study as proof of safety. (But the 1999 RHIC safety study only ruled out any possibility of colliders creating micro black holes based on knowledge at that time.)

CERN’s web site predicts that micro black holes will evaporate. (But Hawking Radiation has been disputed by no less than 3 peer reviewed studies that found no basis in science for such conclusions).

CERN’s web site and Steven Hawking state that much greater energy cosmic ray impacts with Earth prove safety. (But higher energy cosmic ray impacts with stationary particles have net collision speeds less than the speed of light and send all particles created safely into space, while head-on collider collisions have net collision impact speeds at almost twice the speed of light and are designed to focus all the energy to a single point in space and particles created may be captured by Earth’s gravity).

CERN promised to create and release an new safety report before the end of 2007. (CERN’s LHC Safety Assessment Group has concluded that cosmic ray impacts do not prove safety and they do not assume that micro black holes will evaporate, but CERN never released any safety reports created by their LHC Safety Assessment Group.)

Professor Otto Rossler calculates that a single micro black hole could accrete the Earth is as few as 50 months and Dr. Rossler is world recognized as one of the most prestigious, most eminent, award winning scientists alive. (But CERN has not scientifically refuted his calculations that I am aware of, CERN only promised Dr. Rossler that if they create stable micro black holes that they will stop the experiment. Will that be too late?)

Even though the Large Hadron Collider will create conditions not seen in Nature since the first fraction of a second prior to the big bang, CERN asserts that there is no risk to the planet. (But the legal action contends a 75% probability of risk with very high degree of uncertainty calculated by a scientist with a masters degree in statistics, and alleges that Chief Scientific Officer Mr. Engelen passed an internal memorandum to workers at CERN asking them regardless of personal opinion to affirm in all interviews that there were no risks involved in the experiments, changing CERN’s previous assertion of minimal risk).

We could delay the experiment until the promised safety studies are completed and per reviewed, and this might prevent a catastrophy. (But then some scientists may not be the first to discover new science and some Nobel prizes may be lost.)

JTankers
LHCConcerns.com

- Posted by JTankers

this partical collider stuff is a waste of money and they need to get rid of it cuz i dont feel like dieing any time soon …

- Posted by allen

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