The God Particle

There is a passage in The Book of Colossians that in my mind nicely links the Christology of early church teaching with the cosmology of recent scientific speculation: “In (Christ) everything in heaven and on earth was created, not only things visible but also the invisible order of thrones, sovereignties, authorities, and powers: the whole universe has been created through him and for him. And he exists before everything, and all things are held together in him.” (1:16-17, NEB). Right now, it is the cosmology rather than the Christology of this passage that intrigues me. What has re-ignited my interest in the idea of a substance holding everything in the universe together is what I am learning about the Higgs boson—named for the scientist who first dreamed it up—and why some people cannot seem to avoid the temptation to call it the “God particle.”

The physics of bosons eludes my comprehension about as much as does the physics of leptons and quarks, all teenier by many orders of magnitude than the electrons, protons, and neutrons into which they come together and around which I can still get a small part of my rapidly aging mind. However, I do think I still have enough functioning neurons and synapses to grasp why particle physicists are positing the existence of at least one kind of boson to account for other particles in the universe having mass and coming together to form every-thing else. And why we expend time, money, and effort to build particle accelerators that will crash enough protons and anti-protons into one another with enough speed to set off enough fireworks to enable our seeing this elusive particle in all its glory. Or to determine once and for all that there is no such particle.

I only wish I could have gotten closer to this research myself than the fates allowed. In the early 1990’s I was doing some work for the Provost of Southern Methodist University that included helping coordinate the development of a new physics department with the world-class people who at the time were building a supercollider in, of all places, Waxahachee, Texas. Just when things were moving along impressively enough to guarantee US supremacy in particle physics research for a generation, Congress got cold feet and killed the whole project. As a result, the axis of the research shifted to Switzerland, and our country ended up helping to subsidize the building of the Large Hadron Collider just outside Geneva. Ironically, in the time it will take to repair a recent break-down with the LHC, physicists at the much smaller but no less venerable Fermilab near Chicago just may complete the search for the Higgs boson all on their own.

It is fascinating to contemplate the greatest particle physicists of our time repeatedly colliding with one another in a frantic effort to be the first to explain how, as one scientist friend found a way of putting it to me, atoms “congeal” into matter after the Big Bang. When I first began struggling to grasp the nature of elements, molecules, and atoms, the notion of a “Big Bang” was still generating more big yawns—and even big laughs—than big ideas. The prevailing wisdom was that things were made up of atoms and whatever sub-atomic particles there were, and that all of them had been here together, forever. Religious types like me were struggling against getting closed out of the cosmological action altogether, but about all we had to draw on was the very difficult to grasp idea that all the stuff of the universe was created out of—are you ready for this?—nothing, absolutely nothing at all. In short, we were trying to squeeze in a place for God the Creator.

But now comes the God particle discussion, grounded in the certitude that atoms and their components have not in fact been around forever, and focusing intently not on what happened before the Big Bang and how, but on what’s keeping the furniture of the universe now in place from disintegrating before our very eyes (if, indeed the process saves our eyes for last so that we can view the final collapse). The God particle is not a that- from- which- everything- else- material- comes, but rather a that- which- holds- together- everything- which- has- already- come. The writer of Colossians could not leave it at that with respect to Christ; he had to bring in the the idea of Him as agent of the universe’s creation as well. But what the writer also left us is a very present God in times of chaos, whose nature may be less to originate and more to bind, hold, and sustain.

If the search for the Higgs boson is any indication, people are now taking such an idea to their comfort just as much in science as they always have in religion.