In the late 1940s astronomer and writer Fred Hoyle coined the phrase big bang as a colorful way to describe the then controversial idea that the universe had a beginning. Our cosmology—or story of the universe—has fully embraced that descriptor ever since: all of our theories about the nature of the material world tracks back to the concept that everything evolved out of that singular event. 

This leads to the belief that the structure of the universe reveals its history and that we can expose how it came to be by dissecting the material world. It is interesting that the task of understanding the vast cosmos requires the ultimate in reductionist science. To discover the smallest ingredients, we smash things together to get a fleeting look at their constituent parts.

The Standard Model of physics has been developed through this collision/detection process. According to this model, at the instant of the big bang all particles and forces were unified. Only as the universe cooled and expanded did the various individual subatomic particles come into being. In time these coalesced into simple atoms. By using high-energy particle accelerators/colliders, such as the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, physicists believe they are recreating the initial conditions of the early universe where these particles can be identified and their existence confirmed.

REDUCTIONISTS AT WORK

Most of us tend to think of atoms as the smallest substances of the universe. These are the practical pieces of matter which interlock to build molecules and cells and, in fact, all the materials we know. Chemists categorize atoms on the Periodic Table and call pure collections of single types elements. But they are not “elementary.” An oxygen or carbon atom, for example, can be divided into smaller pieces. Even the simplest atom, hydrogen, is not actually so simple.

The “everything,” to the physicist, reaches into the atom itself and down into its subatomic particles. So while other people might first think of atoms in terms of protons and neutrons, the physicist seeks even more fundamental levels of structure. This is the reductionist mission: to discover the truly elementary particles and forces that build atoms. The big bang event did not create atoms per se; it created the ultimate primordial energy soup that gave rise to the exotic, elementary particle zoo. Filling the cages in this zoo is the goal of particle physics.

In taking apart that “simple” hydrogen atom of one proton and one neutron, for example, we begin to stock the particle cubicles. Within it we find quarks (of various “colors” and “flavors”) that come together to form the atomic nucleus. One combination creates the positively charged proton; another combination creates the neutral neutron. These are called hadrons (thus the LHC is a large machine for smashing protons). Around the nucleus is the familiar electron. (Electrons are categorized as leptons, as are neutrinos). These compose matter.

But there are also force-carrying particles. Photons, W and Z particles, and gluons mediate the actions of the other particles. These force carriers are called bosons and are responsible for the fundamental quantum forces that hold atoms together: electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Another boson, the graviton, a particle believed responsible for the force of gravity, is theorized but has not been discovered. 

MISSING LINK FOUND

This array of relationships between quarks, leptons, and bosons is known as the Standard Model. But the model is missing more than the graviton. A key piece, another boson that could account for the mass characteristics of the other particles, has also been missing.

Theoretical physicist Peter Higgs along with several other physicists in the 1960s helped develop the mathematical model that explains why some particles have mass and others do not. Their model added what has become known as the Higgs boson; they suggested that particles get their mass by interacting with the Higgs—more interaction, more mass. But it would take more than 40 years for the high energy colliders to be built that would have the power to expose such a particle.

According to Fermilab press materials, “Only high-energy particle colliders such as the Tevatron, which was shut down in September 2011, and the Large Hadron Collider, which produced its first collisions in November 2009, have the chance to produce the Higgs particle. About 1,700 scientists from U.S. institutions, including Fermilab, are working on the LHC experiments.”

“Without the Higgs,” physicist Tom LeCompt told Vision, “atoms certainly wouldn't exist: electrons would go zipping off freely because the electric fields of atomic nuclei would be unable to hold them in.”

On July 4, 2012, scientists from CERN and the LHC made official announcements concerning the discovery of the Higgs boson. “Positive identification of the new particle’s characteristics will take considerable time and data,” noted the CERN press release. “But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward.” CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela noted, “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

THE GOD PARTICLE

Because this missing piece theoretically influences the others and therefore has universal impact, it has become known not only as the Higgs particle but also as the God particle. For scientists, or for those seeking the Creator, this is an unfortunate moniker.

This confusion was not the work of religionists. It was no less than Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman who originated the term. Lederman shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of a type of subatomic particle called the neutrino. In his book The God Particle, Lederman lent the Higgs an ethereal air, a mysteriousness that has made the quest for finding it of great scientific and even mythological importance.

“There is, we believe, a wraithlike presence throughout the universe that is keeping us from understanding the true nature of matter,” Lederman mystically wrote. “This invisible barrier that keeps us from knowing the truth is called the Higgs field. Its icy tentacles reach into every corner of the universe, and its scientific and philosophical implications raise large goose bumps on the skin of a physicist. The Higgs field works its black magic through—what else?—a particle. This particle goes by the name of the Higgs boson.”

Lederman went further, imaginatively using the account of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) to envision the quest back from confusion to unity. Just as God had confused human language from a previously unified state, Lederman toyed with the idea that the discovery of the Higgs particle would be a way back to unity of the physics of creation; he did not propose that this would actually reveal the Creator’s relationship to creation, but that taking another step toward completing the Standard Model would help us discover the conditions of the big bang.

He cleverly wrote in a fashion he called Very New Testament:

 And the whole universe was of many languages, and of many speeches.  

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Waxahachie, and they dwelt there.  

(At the time Lederman was writing in 1993, the Superconducting Super-Collider was being constructed in the Waxahachie area of Texas. Federal funding for the project was soon cancelled, however. The LHC was funded and completed partially in response to the SSC’s demise.) 

And they said to one another, Go to, let us build a Giant Collider, whose collisions may reach back to the beginning of time. And they had superconducting magnets for bending, and protons had they for smashing.  

 And the Lord came down to see the accelerator, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold the people are un-confounding my confounding. And the Lord sighed and said. Go to, let us go down, and there give them the God Particle so that they may see how beautiful is the universe I have made.  

 And so it appears that another missing piece has been found. The power of human imagination—able to theorize a universe of law and structure and then to find technological means to confirm it with physical reality—is itself incredible, God-like in some ways. Answering the question of how to put this knowledge to good use, however, is an all-too-human struggle. 

 “We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”  

But Lederman aside, please don’t call it the God Particle. “Whenever you say that to a physicist, he or she will roll his or her eyes,” LeCompte says. “This is like calling San Francisco ‘Frisco.’ It's a stupid name, nobody in the field uses it, and it's hard to find a good justification for it.”

DAN CLOER

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