The God Particle? What the Higgs is Going On? Rev. Becky Edmiston-Lange June 10, 2012

Transcription

1 The God Particle? What the Higgs is Going On? Rev. Becky Edmiston-Lange June 10, The heat is on this summer for the scientists at Europe s nuclear research laboratory. It s make or break time, as the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC for short), the most powerful atom smasher in the world, makes a frantic rush to corner the elusive Higgs boson. Back in December, Cern had tentatively announced, but with a palpable sense of excitement, that it had found hints of the Higgs, but because the LHC will be shut down later this year for a major overhaul, Cern s Director general has given his scientists only until autumn to confirm or rule out the existence of this so called God particle. What, you may ask, is the Higgs Boson, and why is it called the God particle? And what s the big deal about it anyway? In essence, the Higgs boson may be what gives all that is its isness. Scottish physicist, Peter Higgs, first theorized its existence some fifty years ago to explain how particles obtain mass. Immediately following the Big Bang, fundamental particles had no mass, but were simply zipping around in space at the speed of light. According to Higgs theory, these fundamental particles gained mass by interacting with an invisible energy field that permeates all of space. As particles zoomed around in this field, they attracted other particles, the Higgs bosons to varying degrees, giving them varying degrees of mass. Picture it this way: Imagine the universe is like a huge cocktail party with lots of people standing around in one room. Now, suppose an ordinary Joe or Jill enters the room. None of the other people pay much attention and so this ordinary Joe or Jill can move rather quickly through the room relatively unimpeded. But suppose someone famous enters the room - say Angelina Jolie. As she tries to make her way through the room, other people are attracted to her, want to talk to her, touch her. Fairly quickly she has groups of people clustered around her, slowing down her movement. You can think of the groups of people that cluster around as like the Higgs bosons and the speed of particles moving through the Higgs field as working in much the same way as someone trying to make their way through the crowded room. Certain particles will attract lots of Higgs bosons, other particles will attract fewer -- and the more Higgs bosons a particle attracts, the greater its mass will be. If those post Big Bang elementary particles had not acquired mass, they would have continued whizzing around the universe at the speed of light and atoms would never have formed. And then neither would have anything else, let alone us. If the theory is right, the Higgs boson was the agent that made the stars, planets, and life itself possible by giving mass to the building blocks of matter. That s why it s called the "God particle." At the Cern lab in Switzerland, scientists are attempting to prove its existence once and for all by simulating the conditions that occurred in the early universe a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, when the Higgs Boson is theorized to have been abundant. If the Higgs Boson is found, scientists will be one step closer to unlocking the secrets of the universe. Pretty exciting, wouldn t you say? Well, not everyone is thrilled. More than a few religious conservatives have condemned both the Higgs nomenclature and the attempt to find it. One

2 2 fundamentalist minister blogged, scientists blaspheme in referring to God as an atomic particle and God will have the last word, destroying (the LHC) on the day of judgment and bringing to nothing their presumptuous attempts at understanding. Now, to be fair, particle scientists don t like the term the God particle either - some out of respect for religious sensibilities, but others because they feel that the term doesn t do justice to the Higgs! One Cern scientist noted that the word God smacks of superstition rather than scientific inquiry and that as scientists learn more about what holds the universe together there is less and less need for a supernatural concept of God. Other physicists have offered conciliatory ideas for a new nickname, ranging from "masson" and "OOM", to "Super Cool Non- Denominational Particle." But, whatever it s called, won t proof of the Higgs existence provide even more evidence to the religiously skeptical that religion is no longer necessary - and more fodder for the fire and brimstone types that science is the enemy of religion? And why should we, here in this congregation, care one way or the other? I think the pursuit of the Higgs boson is fascinating and quite the stuff of the religious enterprise. Think of the level of dedication to truth involved. These scientists are not just looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, but for an infinitesimally microscopic needle in a cosmic haystack. Or the extent of the human quest for understanding - that scientists know enough about quantum physics to postulate the existence of the Higgs in the first place. Or what a cooperative engineering feat the HLC represents - taking ten years and 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries to build, it is able to whip protons up to such high energy levels that they make over 11,000 laps of its seventeen mile circumference in one second! And even if the Higgs is not found, the LHC researchers have still other mysteries to plumb - supersymmetry; dark matter; there s even a proposal to test for time travel! Think about how much more we know about our universe now than just fifty years ago when the Higgs was proposed - and not only on the quantum level. New technologies have given us much more powerful telescopes and computers to scan the cosmos. We ve been to the moon; sent probes into space far beyond our sight. Astronomers have identified more than 700 planets circling stars other than our own. And, as new discoveries have come to light, these discoveries in turn have led to new speculation about how the universe was formed. Just thirty years ago, we thought planets formed gradually out of coalescing dust and gas; we now know they formed through a violent process of collision and accretion. And now with the LHC we have the opportunity to glimpse what the universe was like just moments after it began. How can you not marvel at these discoveries? How can you not be moved that, even as our understanding of the universe advances, the field of scientific inquiry, what there is yet to discover, expands also? Is this not the stuff of wonder and praise? The stuff of reverence and awe? Doesn t it give you spiritual goosebumps? Of course, for many people scientific advances are decidedly not the stuff of religion. Almost half of Americans believe that the earth was created about 4,000 years ago as a literal interpretation of the Bible would have it, rather than that the earth is 4.5 billion years old - a fact

3 3 100% certain scientifically (astronomy, geology, chemistry, physics and biology all converge on this same conclusion). And, when Americans are asked, If scientific and religious explanations conflict, which explanation are you more likely to accept?, an overwhelming majority choose religion. The idea of an evolving universe which came into being some 15 billion years ago from a mathematical singularity that contained all that exists today is not just unfathomable to many Americans, but anathema. Not only do many people want to cling to the outdated cosmology of the Old Testament, there are even those who conjure up vast conspiracies of mass deception to explain away scientific discoveries. Of course, conflict between science and religion is nothing new. Copernicus and Galileo were persecuted by the church; their work deemed heretical. There always have been those whose world-view trembles with every great scientific advance. And, since the Enlightenment, there always have been those on the scientific side who find little of value in religion. Marx declared religion the opiate of the people; Freud considered religion a mass delusion, one perhaps necessary for civilization, but delusion nonetheless. There were even nineteenth century Unitarians who thought that, once we knew enough, science would replace religion as a new universalizing force. Currently, there are scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, who denounce religion as a virus and a vice. Is it possible to embrace both the truth of science and the claims of religion? I concede that any arguments for rapprochement will most likely fall on deaf ears for those already persuaded of the truth of their fundamentalist argument - and I include fundamentalists of both religious and scientific stripe - those for whom science is a priori fallacious simply because it does not jive with Genesis, and those in the scientific community who by definition equate religion with superstitious supernaturalism. But isn t there a way to be citizens of the 21 st century and still call ourselves religious people? There is a long history of discourse about how religion and science need not compete because they occupy separate spheres and attempt to answer different questions. The classical argument is that science tells us the how and what of things, whereas religion tells us the why and to what purpose of things. While this division is helpful to a certain extent, too often it leads to a rigid compartmentalization, both within the individual psyche and in terms of human discourse. And so, for example, from this perspective, it is perfectly permissible that one part of my brain wrestles with Big Bang theory and digs the view of deep space revealed by the Hubble telescope and another part of my brain could believe in a heaven which is somehow out there defying the laws of physics. Or, of even greater consequence, from this perspective science has nothing to say in relation to ethical debates about social issues - what we know from science is deemed irrelevant to questions of how we should act as people faithful to ideals of love and justice.

4 4 Need we say that never the twain shall meet? The biggest stumbling block for many people is that recent discoveries, particularly those in the cosmological arena, threaten their sense of the significance of human life and the majesty of God. More than one person confronted with the fact that there are some 500 billion galaxies, each consisting of hundreds of billion of stars, has felt not a sense of awe but rather a painful humbling of human aspiration. More than one person trying to wrap their mind around a theory of the universe that says all that is came from nothing, has wondered where is there room for God in this cosmos. And so it has seemed that the only recourse is to either deny the validity of one or the other of these two fields of human endeavor or to hold them in strictly separate compartments. But what if we hunger for synthesis? What if we believe that these two disciplines of necessity must have something to say to one another because both, after all, encounter the same phenomenon - what is. And what is, what is real, what is true, does not vary no matter what lens we view it through. Is it possible to integrate the truth of science with an appreciation for something transcendent? It helps to remember that both religion and science originated out of the same impulse - to understand reality and to live in accordance with that reality. The Old Testament stories of the Creation were attempts by earlier people to describe reality as they understood it so that they would know how to comport their lives and what to celebrate as worthy of gratitude. In telling the stories, they used metaphors that came from their limited observations of the forces of nature. If they were writing today, they wouldn t use those same metaphors, but would construct narratives with images drawn from modern science. Religion gets into problems when it equates its stories with reality itself. And the best scientists also know that scientific explanations do not exhaust reality. As the physicist Paul Davies writes, a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that if you explain something, you explain it away, but that is not at all the case with religious experience. Even if physics is able to offer a Grand Unifying Theory explaining all the forces of the universe, the universe will not be diminished as a source of spiritual contemplation, nor will that theory by itself answer the question, what then should we do. At their best, both religion and science know that mystery is not the enemy, but rather ignorance is. Both, at their best, have a healthy appreciation for the limits of our knowledge, for where mystery begins. Mystery understood not as a door through which we dare not venture, as when the church condemned as heresy any discovery that threatened its world view; nor mystery as something which has to be eradicated. But rather mystery as the ever expanding, never to be exhausted, asymptotic horizon of our knowledge which beckons us ever onward to new discoveries and new understandings of what it means to be human. Biologist E. O. Wilson writes, Our sense of wonder grows exponentially; the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery.

5 5 To my mind, modern cosmology gives us an even more magnificent story of Creation than that of old. Who are we? Where do we come from? We evolved over hundreds of millions of years from primitive organisms, on a planet formed from a gassy nebula 4.5 billion years ago near a star that is just one of a trillion stars in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Yes it is, on the one hand, humbling. But consider that the universe, through the process of its unfolding, brought forth creatures with consciousness and with minds capable of discovering and contemplating this reality. We are remnants of primordial star dust, but such remnants as can invent telescopes that peer into deep space and decode light that originated billions of years ago and build hadron colliders that expose the most fundamental components of matter. Consider not only this, but also that we can love and write poetry and make music - and that we hold the fate of this planet in our hands. Our lives are fleeting, mortal. The stuff that flows through our veins is the same stuff from which all else is made. And yet we are part of the cosmic unfolding, flickers of a universal flame, whose actions have ripples that redound through an almost infinite web of connections. Is this not significance enough, awe inspiring enough? And is there not room for God in this view of the cosmos? Not God standing outside, separate from Creation. But God that came into existence at the same moment and in the same entity as everything else - God inherent in all that is - and yet somehow the transcendent potential for all that would unfold from that original singularity. Whether the Higgs boson is discovered or not, the universe has not been diminished and neither have we. The earth is still majestically orbiting the sun and we still possess within our bones he elements of stars which burned millennia ago. When we gaze up at the night sky we need not be threatened by new understandings of the origins of the universe. Rather we can stand amazed that there was contained in that first moment which was the beginning the potential for the scientific genius of Peter Higgs and the musical vision of Dvorak. We can still marvel that here upon this tiny planet, spinning in the vastness of space, life arose to love. And in that reflection is cause to sing.