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Is "Higgs boson" a creative particle or energy
field? Can we thus infer an
"anti-God particle," as anti-matter opposes matter, or dark energy battles
gravity?
Any covenant with Godhead, in my book, comes down to
Creation. Genesis, the source of
time, space, and being; in short, existence. Especially our piddling existence. Without creation as we know it, we'd be deficient in mass,
not even rocks; or with multiverse speculations, we could also be someone else,
who knows where, gabbing with utter aliens. Because we esteem existence (over all the sorry
alternatives), let us greet the New Year by honoring the force that could well
have made something real out of, well, something not. The "God Particle." Hallelujah!
If this particle is a particle. Could be more an energy or force field, but let's not
quibble yet about what stabilizes mass, from atoms to black holes. Hark, this herald angel sings, glory to
the brand-new king, the Higgs boson "God particle," as the media (and
some scientists) sing forth. And
good news, too, for all of our enlightened defiance of the noxious rearguard,
a.k.a. Biblical literalism -- folks "born-again" looking backwards,
stuck in an outdated 2000 year old, flat, earth-centered time warp.
Without creation, what sort of enduring covenant could exist
between the consciousness that dies, in short us, and something greater,
higher, farther out? And more
permanent we hope than rocks. Science is "tantalizingly close" to
explaining man's ultimate free-lunch quandary -- what makes something from
nothing (or chaos)?
Fundamentalists, beware -- here's an ever-present catalyst that
refudiates that humanized, Old Testament figure notorious for bad temper,
non-negotiable demands, and playing favorites. On the line, if physics identifies the source of creation,
boom goes the creditability for our most famous creation myth, part of
moralistic dogma to make tribes pray, shamans honored, and offspring obedient.
Outside is inside
Happily, the God Particle evokes no impatient, abstract
father figure but the very catalyst that facilitates mass, as the glue-like
Higgs boson, as one scientist puts it, "surrounds us and penetrates us,
binding the galaxy together." Does
not reality depend wholly on something that gives mass to the otherwise
massless? Not Darwin, Freud nor
Einstein introduced this ultimate root of the root, delivering a big-time,
dope-smack to outdated Bronze Age creation fables.
Alas, even this breakthrough will not free fundamentalists
from their most onerous fallacy. How can one tribe's assemblage of texts,
inscribed by fallen men as specified by the Eden story, be declared inerrant
because they say so? How can anyone
take on faith alone what every century since 1500 has progressively discredited
as fable? Not only is the earth not fixed, flat nor immobile, we're not
the center of anything (except human ego); further, there's no "up there" there
for heaven, no species (with or without souls) that was created perfect and
immutable, and DNA stamps our link to all other life. We are, in defiance of
zealotry, the offspring of this earth, linked by proteins (and atoms, thus
Higgs) to everything, and especially to everything that reproduces. All
else is noise.
What rational being proposes a humanoid first mover who "in
the beginning" out of the void "created the heavens and the earth"?
That's just so Old Testament, signaling the true "void" was human knowledge,
lacking the technology, mindsets, and hard-won evidence that conveys orderly
creation. We don't look to the
Bible for medical cures, shape of the earth, structure of our solar system,
genealogical precision, geographic accuracy nor historical veracity. Why then swallow its take on creation
hook, line and sinker?
Epic Battle: Knowledge vs. Ignorance
First breakthrough insight from the God particle: truth is
not "out there, up there or far away," but inside our elemental core, every
atom, and every process that ultimately defines what human means. We exist only because quantum stuff,
like quarks, got ordered into the push-pull of strong and weak forces in
universal play. We think because
something like the God Particle (or its cousins) organized energy (or fields)
into mass, starting the pinball game of life, its own "ineluctable modality of
the visible," in James Joyce's phrase.
The Bible isn't only wrongheaded about the origin and
structure of the universe, for me it presents an intellectual dead end. If some humanoid simply created
everything -- as a gift to his self-regard -- then creation becomes an effect
without an engaging, revelatory cause.
Science now suggests "creation" is far older, and far more
bewitching, than today's novelty, that 19th C. marvel called
Creationism. In the epic, unending
battle between knowledge and ignorance -- the only battle truly worth fighting
for -- science now takes on Creationists and the Rapture. The real, adult intellectual and
spiritual action is not fixating Genesis, but distinguishing reality from
delusional, solipsistic leaps of faith.
Confirmation of the Higgs boson (or related forces)
complicates creation in all the right ways, without demolishing what we already
know. Further, the Higgs, by informing mass, advances the great, remaining
mystery -- what causes gravity -- allowing tantalizing peeks inside the
inside. For those mystic-minded,
the God particle reinforces notions of supersymmetry, proposing every known
type of particle has an undiscovered twin. That helps physicists explain how elemental forces behaved
when the universe was young. We're
not talking 5000 years ago either, but when stuff tussled across primordial,
contending battlegrounds -- some forces favoring connectedness (the order
of the cosmos) and some "darker," expansive, more entropic backing random
movement.
Science the Great Unifier
This discovery so transcends Genesis we could have a whole
new narrative bridging science with philosophy, even religion, for we embrace
the architecture of order itself, with mass, direction, even implied values
called meaning. Intriguingly
enough, finding this God particle answers to predictions from the 1960s, just
like anti-matter, predicted in 1928, was confirmed by 1932. Of course,
attributing god-like attributes to quanta doesn't disprove the existence of an
ultimate power (a galactic force field) but we happily leave behind that
paternalistic master of ceremonies evoking light and day and night as if a stage
director with an infinite budget.
I have for years made noises that Godhead relates to
electro-magnetism and thus atomic valance, for I come from an industry (high
end audio) that applies electricity, electron flows, and shifting energy
fields. Loudspeakers, for example,
translate tiny electric pulses into the physical motion of sound waves re-created
in your very room. Now we explore well
beyond to ponder special catalysts, without any big guy in the sky, but how
sub-atomic smithereens became you and me -- and even those rigid fundamentalists
down the street. Now that's a
unifying, reassuring winter solstice miracle that gets my blood flowing and my
head reassured we may be more than just chemicals colliding. We are insightful creators
ourselves.
