The “God Particle”
by: Tikkun Intern -- Sarah Ackley on January 10th, 2010 | 10 Comments »
This is the first post in a series about science and spirituality that Dave Belden introduced here.
The so-called “God particle” and the search for it at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, has spurred a lot of hubbub.
There are many reasons for this, I’m sure. To name but a couple, the LHC is the largest modern science experiment, costing billions of dollars, and, in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, antimatter is developed at the site of the LHC in order to destroy the Vatican.
But I think a good deal of the hubbub has to do with the name “God particle” itself. Here a particularly ridiculous YouTube video claims that the particle was so-named to promote atheism and that the LHC heralds the end of the world. Others seem to take the name of the particle a bit too literally, claiming it won’t be found since God is immaterial. It’s funny because non-scientists so rarely pay so much attention to the ins and outs of particle physics.
The irony of this is that scientists don’t use the name “God particle,” much less approve of its use in the media. In the scientific community, the “God particle” is more aptly called the Higgs Boson, after Peter Higgs, who hypothesized its existence in the sixties. Higgs hates the name “God particle”: “I really, really don’t like it. It sends out all the wrong messages. It overstates the case. It makes us look arrogant. It’s rubbish.”
Apparently, Leon Lederman, the scientist who coined the term “God particle,” wasn’t excited about it either. According to Higgs, Lederman came up with it at the urging of the editor of his book, The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?. Science writers pounced on the name because it was provocative and inspiring enough to be a big attention grabber.
The complicated relationship between scientists and non-scientists, particularly in the realm of spirituality and religion, has certainly been explored at length (here’s one such example from Tikkun). However, the God particle controversy introduces a third player to the game–the media–and highlights the complicated ways in which it interacts with both science and religion.
Journalists are looking to portray science in a way that’s understandable and exciting; their first priority is rarely accuracy. On the other side of things, non-scientist readers aren’t always the critical consumers of such journalism that they should be, reading into a jingoistic expression significant implications where there are none. We all would do well to be vigilant of the role, good and bad, that the media plays in filtering science for public consumption.
Thank you, Sarah Ackley, for this article. As a non-scientist, student of spirituality, I found your thoughts and your references to back-up material very helpful. I do worry about the media. They seem to be getting worse. I wish they wrote like you do.
Hi Sarah,
A pleasure to meet, and I’m looking forward to reading more on your take on the intersection between science and religion, a subject very near and dear to my heart too. (Taught world religions for 20 years, and MIT ‘70 (so we’ve both walked the infinite corridor)).
Fina and clear article and absolutely dead on analysis of media overhyping research. The Tikkun example is a dead link, btw.
More to follow
peter
I think the media’s habit is to use “God” for whatever is on the frontier of science’s exploration, i.e. at the level of basic explanation of the order of reality. Thus, “God” serves to name those things which would get closure for science in a “total” explanation” of reality. “God” thus has a function. Needless to say, this does not at all work for science.
For those who believe or experience God this seems silly and, actually, disrespectful. Is it?
I think using “God” to point at what we can’t explain yet but are hoping to soon is not disrespectful. It just doesn’t recognize that there are methodologies, technologies if you will that explore and engage a reality that some of us call the divine. While rigorous, those methods aren’t empirical in the everyday sense of that word.
I’ve read Lederman’s book. His use of the term is very tongue-in-cheek; he spends significant time and energy in the book debunking efforts to collapse particle physics into theology (books like The Tao of Physics).
Since the Higgs boson almost certainly does not exist, one will be able to have headlines, “The God Particle is Dead!” when the real physics comes out. Four dimensional spacetime has an exotic topology with eight underlying dimensions: 3 rotational, 3 counter-rotational, time, and temperature. The evidence for this is in the temperature patterns of the cosmic microwave background. They show that the 3-D topology of the universe is a Poincare dodecahedral space formed by “gluing” opposite pentagonal sides of a dodecahedron to each other with a 36 degree twist. The 6 rotational/counterrotational dimensions correspond to topologically distinct circles on the surface of a doughnut related to the electromagnetic field with which we observe the universe. Though there is no Higgs boson with this topology, “Cold Fusion Lives!”. If you want to know more about this, come to the American Chemical Society’s New Energy Technology Symposium March 21-22 in San Francisco. Experimental evidence and theory for low energy nuclear reactions will be presented and discussed there.
@Larens: Can you post links to any site or sites with additional information about this theory? Who has developed it and where have any prospective empirical tests or other results been published? And are there any abstracts that educated nonphysicists like me could understand?
In the case of the “God particle,” there is actually a nonsensationalistic reason for the name. The Higgs boson is predicted by the so-called Standard Model of elementary particles developed in the 1970s by Weinberg, Glashow, and others. It was dubbed the “God particle” because according to current theory, it is what gave *mass* to all the particles (like protons and neutrons) that now possess it in the first instants after the Big Bang. If the Higgs boson is not found via the LHC, it will be a huge blow to our current understanding of fundamental physics. But physicists often like to talk about God, even when (as in most cases) they don’t believe in God in the conventional sense. It’s their way of talking about the majesty and glory of the universe.
Actually, the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles, but the proton and neutron are not elementary, being composed of three quarks apiece. About 90% of the proton mass comes from the energy of the gluon field binding those quarks together. Frank Wilczek has written entertainingly on this subject.
If I recall correctly, Lederman wanted to emphasize how the Higgs breaks the symmetries between fundamental forces, making one distinct from another. The Higgs mechanism gives mass to the W and Z bosons, but not to photons, making the weak nuclear force carried by the W and Z distinct from the electromagnetic force carried by photons. Lederman’s analogy was that this was like all the people at the Tower of Babel starting to speak different languages; hence, after the editor went to work, “the God particle”. Personally, I think “the Babel particle” conveys the same analogy, has less risk of misinterpretation and sounds cooler too.
Good piece, and recommended by your brother (which is how I found it). Interesting to see some journalism done on the role of journalists in filtering the communication between various groups within a culture, and the problems introduced by the media as a third party with it’s own commercial agenda. Nice work.
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