Probing the God Particle

Almost six years ago headlines throughout the world declared the discovery of the "God Particle" at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The name "God Particle" is not used by any physicists but is the popular name in the press for the particle that physicists call the Higgs Boson or simply the Higgs, named after Peter Higgs, one of the theoretical physicists that proposed its existence in 1964. In an earlier post, I discussed the discovery of the Higgs Boson and its significance within the standard model of particles and fields. Although the discovery of the Higgs made international news, there has been a lot of hard work that has been done since that discovery was made. In experimental particle physics the discovery of something new is often the easiest part of the process and the hard part is trying to really understand what has been discovered. Much of my research life since 2012 has been dominated by further studies of the properties of the Higgs Boson.

Why do physicists spend so much time and effort studying something that has already been discovered? What is the motivation and the expected outcome? There is a complex and comprehensive mathematical model of nature that particle physicists use. This model makes detailed predictions about what we should expect to find in our experiments. One of the most exciting possibilities is to discover something in the data that does not fit the models. When that happens, and the discovery can be confirmed and verified, it means that we have found something new that we did not know before. That is the most thrilling outcome for an experimental physicist. It is always nice to confirm something that has already been predicted. But it is even more exciting to find something not predicted and then have to figure out what previously unknown secret of nature has been discovered.

The Reports of the Death of String Theory may be Greatly Exaggerated

In a recent podcast, Dr. William Lane Craig discusses my blog post about the book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. In his remarks, Dr. Craig says that he is surprised by Hawking's reference to String Theory because String Theory seems to have some fatal flaws. I have heard from others that String Theory has not lived up to the promise it seemed to show about 10 or 20 years ago. In this post, I will describe what String Theory is, why some people think it may be in trouble, and some theological implications of String Theory.

String Theory is a theoretical idea in physics that proposes that the most fundamental objects in the universe are one-dimensional objects called strings. In String Theory, the fundamental particles that we currently know make up the structure of the universe including leptons, quarks, and bosons, are composed of one-dimensional objects that are described as vibrating strings. Just as different vibrational modes of a guitar string will give different musical tones, so the different vibrating modes of the strings give rise to different particles.

The World at CERN

And now for something completely different...  The main focus of this blog is to discuss issues relating science and reason to Christianity and God.  However, I have spent the last week at CERN attending meetings, talking with people, trying to develop computer code to analyze data, and other such activities.  So I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about how experimental particle physics research is done within large collaborations like those at CERN.

I am a member of the ATLAS collaboration.  ATLAS is the name given to both the detector that we use to analyze data from proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider and the group of scientists who use the data from that detector to try to understand the fundamental particles and forces in the universe.  There are currently about 5000 scientists from about 180 institutions in 38 countries who are members of the ATLAS collaboration, with 1200 of those scientists being students working toward their Ph.D.  It takes that many people to operate the ATLAS detector and to analyze all of the data that we take with the detector.

The God Particle...and God

On July 4, 2012 two collaborations of over 3000 physicist each independently announced the discovery of a particle colloquially known as "The God Particle."  Where did this elusive particle get its name?  Why did its discovery make international news?  And does it have anything to do with God?

Every scientist I know dislikes the moniker "The God Particle."  Physicists, instead, have named the particle after one of the six people who predicted its existence in 1964, the British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.  Thus, it is the "Higgs particle" or "Higgs boson."  (For those of you who don't know but care about such things, a boson is a subatomic particle with an intrinsic quantum mechanical property of spin equal to an integer value times the Planck constant, named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.)

In 1993, Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, wrote a book about the search for the Higgs boson and named the book The God Particle at the urging of his publisher in order to maximize sales.  So the nickname "The God Particle" is mostly a marketing gimmick to sell books.  The name doesn't give any insight into the particle's properties or its place in the ensemble of fundamental particles.