I wrote last week how my mind changed on what I was going to write about as I began writing. I started with the recent passing of Peter Higgs and his discovery of the Higgs boson but switched to Apostle Paul’s writing about the gospel in Romans and how some could be offended by it. Read last week’s if you want to know more about how the gospel could offend some. But this week I’m writing about Mr. Higgs’s boson.
You may wonder why I am intrigued by Higgs and his Higgs boson. The answer is going to cause me to go down a bit of a physics rabbit hole. I hope you’ll stay with me Alice.
If you’ve read even a few of the articles in my growing series, you’ll know how I’ve written about science’s estimation that ninety-five percent of our known existence, or the entire universe, is made-up of dark matter and dark energy. I’ve called this the unseen part of our existence. I’ve likened it potentially to the unconscious and even eternity. We exist in the seen part, which is referred to as visible matter. Visible matter exists in three states—solid, liquid and gas—and is made up of atoms and molecules, which are made up of one or more atoms. A level down from atoms is what science considers the subatomic level, or what makes up atoms: protons, neutrons and electrons. From there, what I’ll call another level down, are what protons and neutrons are made of—quarks. It is at this level that we meet the elementary particles (particles which supposedly are not able to be broken down further into smaller particles), which include the electron, quark, lepton, photon, and boson, and in particular here—the Higgs boson. In simple terms, it is Mr. Higgs discovery of his boson and its related Higgs field, which is responsible for the masses of all elementary particles and could potentially be responsible for the mass of the so far undiscovered dark matter particles and the universe. Hence, my interest in Peter Higgs’s discovery of the boson that bears his name.
Now stepping back up the rabbit hole for a moment to where I referred to protons, neutrons and quarks, these are all part of what physicists call the Standard Model. The Standard Model of particle physics is science’s current best theory to describe the most basic building blocks of the universe. For instance, the theory explains how particles called quarks, which protons and neutrons are made of, and leptons, which make up electrons, are what all known matter is made of. (I wrote briefly on the name quark in “Cormac.” Murray Gell-Mann a founder of the Santa Fe Institute and the Nobel Prize winner for physics in 1969 coined “quark” from James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake.) The theory didn’t really become recognized until the 1970s and originated from a simple model of matter that John Dalton is credited with developing in the early 19th century. This first atomic model consisted of three elementary particles. Those particles known as subatomic particles were the proton, the electron, and the photon (a packet of light responsible for the fundamental force of nature called the electromagnetic force). I’ve also written about the electromagnetic force as one of the four fundamental forces in nature—gravity, electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces—in a few articles including “Freewill: Use It Well.” Interestingly, when Peter Higgs was born in 1929, only the simple model of matter was understood with protons, electrons and photons. By 1932, the neutron was added to that model as another elementary particle. But midway through Higg’s life, the Standard Model for physics became the recognized standard with the addition of quarks and leptons making up protons, neutrons and electrons. What was still missing, however, was how these elementary particles got their mass.
Enter Peter Higgs. As Martin Bauer explained in his article in The Conversation, Higgs would supply the heart of the Standard Model theory. The neutron as discovered in 1932 was found to be a neutral partner of the proton only heavier. The neutron was found to decay rather quickly into a proton and electron when ripped out of an atomic nucleus. A new force and particle were required to explain this decay. Physicists knew some particles had mass but could not explain it. How could particles be given mass in a way that was compatible with everything known about the laws of nature? Higgs started working on how elementary particles acquired mass. When scientists began to recognize that a background field permeates all of space, Higgs was first to predict it with his “Higgs Field” that must also be assisted by a “Higgs particle.” Discovery of such a thing would make the Standard Model theory consistent with nature. For the next fifty years physicists searched and it wasn’t until the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern was completed—largest experiment ever built—that the Higgs boson was discovered on July 4th 2012.
The universe is fundamentally shaped by the unique properties of the Higgs boson. Being similar to the solid, liquid and gaseous states of visible matter, the Higgs field theoretically corresponds to a phase of the universe that can be determined by measuring the way the Higgs boson interacts with other particles. Physicists want answers to whether the Higgs field really explains all the masses of the elementary particles as predicted by the Standard Model. But for many of the Higgs bosons produced at the LHC, physicists still can’t always tell what other particles the bosons decay into. If and when they can, speculative theories could be linked to dark matter. Further to that, with the elementary particles in our universe such as protons and quarks acquiring their mass through the Higgs field, the Higgs boson may be a unique way of discovering signs of dark matter due to its own distinctive characteristics and properties.
Turning the science POV a little on its side, however, this does make me question whether the idea of an elementary particle actually exists by definition. History has demonstrated and continues to through advances in technology that no matter how deep we go with life, another level always seems to exist. Will quarks and leptons eventually give way to be made up of something even smaller? When Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a cell was thought to be basically a glob of jelly. A single-celled organism, or organisms made up of one or more cells, consist of atoms and contain life, which in itself I like to think of as infinity, which science has yet to get to the bottom of. It’s this idea of infinity that haunts those who are attempting to understand life. Potentially this is why humanity will never create actual life, or as I’ve heard discussed in technology circles, make machines sentient. Humanity doesn’t know how to, nor do I think is capable of, creating life or that infinity. Infinity may exist in every cell—or maybe every atom. We can dig and keep digging, thinking we’ve found the bottom—or that elementary building block—but even with the creative thinking of the likes of scientists like the late Peter Higgs, history seems to demonstrate, there’s always another level.
I can’t help but be reminded of the Tower of Babel story in that we’ve been here before. In Genesis 11:4, “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.’” Does building a tower to the heavens not ring of this infinity? I also remember hearing Jordan Peterson say something akin to this about the Bible, that no matter how deep one goes in reading and studying the Bible, there’s always another level.
Interestingly, in 1905, though Einstein proved mathematically that atoms existed, we couldn’t see them. Today, molecules and atoms can be seen using electron technology but a lower order is still invisible. Sub-atomic particles are four orders of magnitude smaller than the nucleus of an atom. The Higgs boson cannot be seen by finding it somewhere but has to be created in a particle collision (hence the Large Hadron Collider above).
It's staggering to think in the time that Peter Higgs lived, he saw the understanding of physics grow from a simple model of what scientists saw as three elementary particles into the Standard Model for particle physics and an understanding of the building blocks of the universe. It’s staggering to think about what we’ve learned in the last hundred years compared to what science tells us was when life first emerged on the earth 3.8 billion years ago, 750 million years after Earth was formed. A lot has happened, all but instantaneously, when looking at the proportion one hundred years to 3.8 billion. What will take place in the next century? Will we be any closer to that understanding of life?
Science argues about how life originated and how the first cell came into being because the events cannot be produced in the laboratory. It’s doubtful they ever will be because of the human inability to understand the reality of infinity and quite possibly what exists in the invisible, that dark matter and dark energy stuff I mentioned at the beginning of the article.
So why do I see the Mr. Higgs discovery as important?
Eventually science, maybe through Peter Higgs discovery both of the boson and the field, will reveal a connection with the invisible, the unseen part, that something of existence that dark matter and dark energy may contain. Potentially that something will be understood as eternity, or said another way, the unconscious. The Higgs boson has been called “the God particle” as it’s physical proof of an invisible, universe-wide field that gave mass to all matter right after the Big Bang, forcing particles to coalesce into stars, planets and everything else. I can’t help but be reminded of Apostle Paul’s Romans 1:20, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” Jeffrey Kluger at TIME said, “No Higgs, no mass; no mass, no you, me, or anything else.”
So, we celebrate the one who discovered it.
But what about the One who created it?