Hunting for God's most elusive particle

Journalists love it; particle physicists hate it: the Higgs boson named as the God particle.

Currently I’m reading an excellent book on the hunt for the Higgs boson: The Particle at the End of the Universe by American scientist Sean Carroll. It’s basically the story of the largest machine ever built, the Large Hadron Collider, a ring of 27 kilometres buried 100 metres underground on the French–Swiss border.

A huge enterprise, both in hard cash and personnel, such is the determination of particle physicists from around the world, united in this extraordinary endeavour to hunt down the elusive Higgs boson.

The problem is that it doesn’t hang around for very long — in fact for just one tenth-billionth of a trillionth of a second (i.e. 0.0000000000000000000001th), about the length of the attention span of the average listener to one of my better sermons.

However, this remarkable particle gives existence to the seen universe. No Higgs boson, no Higgs field, no blog this morning: as simple as that. It’s a big story, and so when journalists came to write it up it became the God particle — and the name stuck.

Hilariously, the origin of the term is rather more mundane than the headlines suggest. Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate, wrote a book intending to call it The Goddamn Particle — a joking nod to how elusive and frustrating it was to detect. His publisher decided the title was too strong and shortened it to The God Particle. And so a mischievous editorial choice became a global metaphor. But that’s life.

However, while journalists love the title, physicists cringe at the theological overtones. It is not as if once the Higgs boson is finally detected they have proved the existence of God, any more than the detection of gravity or electromagnetism. It’s just science.

Nevertheless, the phrase highlights something curious: our human fascination with ultimate questions.

Give a glimpse of the deep structure of reality, and we instinctively reach for words that transcend the laboratory, however big and expensive. It’s as if the more we understand the physical world, the more we wonder about meaning, purpose, and the One who holds all things together.

Bishop Augustine, who lived some sixteen centuries before Peter Higgs — who in 1964 first posited the existence of the boson named after him — made the astonishing assertion: “If you understand it, it is not God.” God is not a gap in our scientific knowledge, nor a particle buried in an accelerator. Discovering the Higgs boson didn’t replace God — it simply revealed yet another layer of the astonishing universe he has given us to explore.

And in a curious way, the whole enterprise of the Large Hadron Collider becomes a kind of parable. You have thousands of highly trained individuals, collaborating across languages, nations and cultures, all devoting years of their lives to understanding something they can neither see nor hold. They chase traces, signatures, infinitesimal disturbances in fields most of us will never grasp — and yet they persevere, because truth matters.

For this is how God has made us — to explore, to search for the pearl of great price. In the words of the Hebrew author: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

Fundamentally, truth is not a set of equations, however elaborate: truth is a Person. Jesus makes this clear, unambiguously, in a verse which appears in nearly every funeral service I conduct: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” (John 14:6). When faced with the most basic of all human questioning, Jesus is the answer.

This God-searching instinct appeared this week in a surprising context. Juman Al Qawasmi, described as a daughter of a Hamas leader, has found Christ. It seems (and you can never be too sure of the accuracy of such reports in the Christian media) that following a period of disillusionment and searching, she had a dream or vision during a night of air-strikes of Jesus speaking to her in Arabic: “You are my daughter; don’t be afraid.”  This led her to becoming a disciple of Jesus.

But this is how we have been made, all of us. Of course this longing, this searching, can be repressed, even denied. But then it just comes out in another way. Theologian Os Guinness explains: “Each human being is on a quest, whether they know it or not, and the quest is for truth — a truth big enough to live and die for.”

Strangely, those who would oppose the Christian message the most are often those who become most open to God’s forgiveness and love. The apostle Paul is the most luminous example. Once a fierce persecutor of the early Church, he later wrote with disarming honesty: “Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly.” (1 Timothy 1:13f).

And so, whether in the vast tunnels of the Large Hadron Collider or in the quiet chambers of the human heart, the search for truth goes on. In the end, all our searching leads us not to an equation or a particle but to a Person — to the One who holds the whole universe together.

So Paul makes the astonishing claim about the Jesus who grabbed him en route to Damascus: “We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels — everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him.” (Colossians 1:16f, Message)