“Yes,” the reporter said, “But what can it do? What difference
does the
Higgs boson make in the day-to-day lives of ordinary
people?”
The physicist on the radio stumbled over his words. He had
already
explained this once, but she had apparently not
understood. “I would say,” he said, “that you can’t do anything
with it, and it makes no real difference in the daily lives of
ordinary people.”
The Higgs boson is a particle that has been sought by physicists
for years. Named for physicist Peter Higgs, the particle is the
counterpart of the
“Higgs field” which is hypothesized to fill all
of space, and which lends to ordinary matter its property of mass.
The Higgs’ importance lies in this fundamental role it plays in the
behavior of the material universe, and also in the fact that it is
the final major component of the “Standard Model” of particle
physics, the basic framework that describes physicists’ current
understanding of nature at a fundamental level. If the Higgs is
found, it indicates that physicists are on the right track.
Failure to
find the Higgs would indicate that something somewhere
has gone astray.
Two weeks ago, researchers with the European organization CERN
announced the
discovery of a new boson “consistent with the
Higgs.” Two independent teams
working with CERN’s Large Hadron
Collider have detected signs, with significant confidence, of a
Higgs-mass boson in the showers of debris created by the collider’s
energetic experiments. While formal pronouncements have been
prudently guarded, the general consensus is that yes, indeed, the
Higgs has been found.
There are economical questions, to be sure, about such a
discovery. It takes a lot of money to smash protons together at
significant fractions of the speed of light and examine the remains
for long-hypothesized elements of nature. Not a lot of economic
revenue comes of it, either. Perhaps we might sell Higgs t-shirts,
but the payoff is finally in knowledge, not dollars.
Some, too, have complained about an unnecessarily religious spin
that has been put on the discovery of the Higgs boson, especially
in its nickname of the “God particle.” While I agree that the
nickname is misleading and largely used just to gin up interested
by the media, I have in fact been impressed by the propriety with
which the scientific community has handled the announcement. To
begin with, the team at CERN announced their findings with
excitement but also with scientific prudence, cautioning that
definitive identification of the newly-found boson as “the Higgs”
would take some time. Second, while I’m sure that some searchers of
the Internet might find a few examples to the contrary, the
scientific commentary on the
Higgs has largely been to present it
as exactly what it is: a milestone in particle physics, not a
revolution in theology. In fact, scanning both the scientific and
religious media, both of which have my sympathy, I have found in my
own reading more articles cautioning against over-theologizing the
Higgs than I have found by writers actually committing that error!
The “God particle” moniker has been bandied about, but no serious
attempts have been made, that I am aware of, to proclaim that the
discovery of the Higgs
boson actually plays a revolutionary
theological role.
The point is that the discovery of the Higgs boson, long awaited
as it has been, is important in the world of particle physics, and
remains important there. It changes nothing in the economical
scheme, provides no grand source of power of nature, and doesn’t
even serve any new philosophical or theological end. It is an
important scientific discovery which is forced to stand on its
own.
That doesn’t mean, however, that it cannot be viewed in the
broader light
of the human intellectual tradition. Fr. James
Schall, S.J., political science professor at Georgetown, writes in
his book The Order of Things:
”We are beings who are
moved by the ‘wonder of the world’ — that is, we wonder at the
world, how it is, that it is, why it is. Plato speaks of this
philosophic eros to remind us that seeking the truth of things is
no indifferent activity of our souls.… We are beings who want to
know — and to know the truth.… [W]e are made to be such beings
that our very unknowing challenges us, unsettles us so that we seek
to know the what is of everything we encounter, including
ourselves.” Fr. Schall would add that, if we are beings whose
nature it is to know, we are meant to finally know our Creator
“face to face,” as Saint Paul puts it. This religious aside is not
entirely out of place, for if it is true that human beings find
their ultimate fulfillment in seeing or in knowing, it is not
surprising that we find, in the meantime, some temporary
fulfillment in knowing things about the world in which we find
ourselves, even when those things we come to know serve no
immediate purpose. In other words, it may very well be that our
human drive to do science, to simply know about the world around
us, acquires its power from our nature as beings meant to finally
know the source of all things.
There are, in the final analysis, some things that we do simply
because it is good in itself to do them. Man is called to know. It
is his nature. Thus we cannot help but philosophize. Thus we find
in science, pure science which does not simply seek to exercise
power, some hints of the noblest aspects of ourselves. The Higgs
has no yet foreseeable service in furthering man’s economic mastery
of his environment. It plays no revolutionary theological role,
being particularly no more and no less a sign of the Creator than
any other element of nature. The Higgs boson is, in a sense,
useless. Yet it is still good to know about it, because it is a
human good just to seek to know.
