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The greatest scientific experiment ever, and religion
As the largest scientific experiment in human history practically got under way finally on 30 March this year at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva on the border between Switzerland and France, traditional religion as we know it may be facing its greatest challenge in history. One of the first core goals of the multinational experiment, which has been 25 years in the planning, is to prove (or disprove) the existence of a single particle known as the Higgs boson – a speck so precious that it has come to be called "The God Particle", a reference to the theory that Higgs gives mass to all matter in the cosmos.
The LHC is a circular underground particle accelerator in excess of 27 kilometres, which promises scientists untold insights into the mysteries of the cosmos. With a price tag of around $10 billion, the LHC officially began smashing together protons on 30 March. The goal: to answer the most fundamental questions about how the universe works.
The ATLAS particle detector at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) outside Geneva is almost 46 metres long, 25m high, weighs 7 000 tonnes and contains enough cable and wiring to wrap around Earth's equator seven times. It is a mammoth machine that occupies merely one small corner of the LHC, but is designed for the purpose of detecting particles so tiny that one could fit hundreds of billions of them into a beam narrower than a human hair – including the Higgs boson.
The significance of the God Particle is as old as time itself. Scientists believe that at the moment of the Big Bang when, according to them the universe was born, there existed a moment of incandescent beauty – of perfect symmetry – in which all things and all forces were in absolute agreement. The universe's four forces – the weak force, strong force, electromagnetism and gravity – yet had to differentiate, and the tiny particles that carried those forces yet had to emerge as separate entities.
As the explosion cooled and its contents scattered, complexity engulfed the universe, splitting its symmetry asunder – a cosmic parallel to Adam and Eve.
The goal of modern theoretical physics is to reveal the universe's lost elegance. A major breakthrough in that effort came in 1964, when Peter Higgs, a shy British scientist in Edinburgh, introduced a theory that could explain how particles which carry two of the four forces – those that carry the electromagnetic force, and those that carry the weak force – came to have different masses as the universe cooled. (In the moment after the Big Bang, of course, nothing had mass, existing instead in somewhat of a naked, ethereal beauty.)
Extrapolating from Higgs' theory, scientists were able to explain how all particles get their mass, which would explain, in turn, how everything in the universe – from scientists at CERN to the grand Jura Mountains that surround them – comes to have weight.
It works thus: Across the post-Big Bang universe, collections of Higgs bosons make up a pervasive Higgs field, which is theoretically where particles get mass.
Moving particles through a Higgs field is similar to pulling a weightless pearl necklace through a jar of honey, except imagine that the honey is everywhere, and the interaction is continuous. Some particles, such as photons, which are weightless particles of light, are able to cut through the sticky Higgs field without picking up mass. Other particles are bogged down, accumulating mass and becoming very heavy. Which is to say that even though the universe appears to be asymmetrical in this way, it actually is not – the Higgs field does not destroy nature's symmetry; it merely hides it.
But at this stage, it remains simply a theory. The Atlas experiments set out to change that – prove it as fact, or destroy it. One way or the other, it would hold fundamental implications for traditional religion that ascribes the existence of the universe to a creator god.
The way in which to find the Higgs boson is to create an environment that mimics the moment post-Big Bang. The powerful LHC runs at up to seven trillion electron volts (TEV) and sends particles through temperatures colder than deep space, at velocities approaching the speed of light. (The second most powerful particle accelerator, at Fermilab in Illinois, runs at 1 TEV.) The added 'juice' allows scientists to come closer to the high energy that existed after the Big Bang. And high energies are required because the Higgs is thought to be quite heavy. (In Einstein's famous equation E=MC2, C represents the speed of light, which is constant; so in order to find high-mass particles, or M, one requires high energies, E.)
It is possible, of course, that even at such high energies, the Higgs boson will not be found. It may not exist.
But if it exists, the Higgs would help plug a hole in the so-called Standard Model – the far-reaching set of equations that incorporates all that is known about the interaction of subatomic particles and is the closest thing physicists have to a testable "theory of everything".
But still, it may not be the final word on the universe's creation – or its coming into existence. Many theoreticians feel that even if the Higgs boson exists, the Standard Model is unsatisfactory; for instance, it is unable to explain the presence of gravity, or the existence of something called "dark matter" that prevents spiral galaxies such as our own Milky Way from falling apart. Even the mighty Higgs cannot explain those mysteries, although through telescopes and observation, we know they exist.
Given the problems with the Standard Model, some physicists have devised elaborate alternatives to explain the workings of the cosmos, including the existence of multiple, alternate dimensions, or hidden "supersymmetric partners" to all the universe's particles. To them, failure to find the Higgs – or finding the Higgs among an ensemble of strange and new particles – would be welcome, since it would suggest that more ambitious theories are required.
In most cultures and their legends, the concept or understanding of God has survived, often by way of adaption, despite dramatic changes in technological knowledge, social, economic and political organisation and globalisation.
In his 2009 book The Evolution of God, Robert Wright wrote about the long history of the “clash” between science and religion: “always some notion of the divine has survived the encounter with science. The notion has had to change, but that’s no indictment of religion. After all, sience has changed relentlessly, revising if not discarding old theories, and none of us thinks of that as an indictment of science. On the contrary, we think this ongoing adaption is carrying science closer to the truth. Maybe the same thing is happening to religion.
“Maybe, in the end, a mercilessly scientific account of our predicament... is actually compatible with a truly religious world view, and is part of the process that refines a religious world view, moving it closer to truth,” he wrote.
