In recent months, the world has buzzed with the discovery of the Higgs particle. But is it really what Joe Biden would describe as a big...deal?

Yes and no. It is a milestone, but not a breakthrough. It is the culmination of an enormous international effort over many years. However, the Higgs particle was predicted to exist by a theory that has passed many precise tests, and so it would have been a shock had it turned out not to exist. Therefore, unless the Higgs is discovered to have unexpected properties, simply finding the Higgs will not unlock any secrets.

What is the Higgs particle? It is an “elementary excitation” of the “Higgs field.” (Yes, the word ‘excitation’ is used in physics, not just in a Beach Boys song!) All of space is permeated by “fields.” They are the basic stuff of nature: all the matter and forces in the world are aspects of these fields. There are many kinds of them: electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields, electron fields, neutrino fields, quark fields, and so on. In our present theory, the Standard Model of particle physics, there are 18 types of fields, though there are many reasons to believe that others, as yet unknown, exist.

Fields give rise to forces. For instance, magnetic forces are due to the magnetic fields. A compass needle tells you in what direction the magnetic field in a particular place is pointing. Besides pushing on things, fields can have waves in them. For instance, light waves, radio waves, microwaves, etc. are all waves in the electromagnetic field. But one of the mysterious things that quantum mechanics tells us is that the waves in these fields can also be thought of as particles.

So the Higgs particle is the smallest amount (or “quantum”) that you can have of a wave in the Higgs field.

But there are 18 kinds of fields (and particles) in our present theory, so what’s so special about the Higgs field and the Higgs particle? First, Higgs particles were the only particles in the Standard Model that hadn’t yet been produced in the laboratory. Second, the Higgs field gives mass to many other types of particle. Other fields vary a lot in strength from place to place—magnetic fields are stronger close to a magnet than far away, for instance. The gravitational field is stronger near the sun than near the earth. But the Higgs field has an almost constant strength throughout the universe—and that strength is huge compared to that of any other known field almost anywhere in the known universe. Being immersed in this strong Higgs field is what gives most other particles their masses.

One of the biggest unsolved problems in physics is why the Higgs field has the strength it does. While it is certainly much stronger than the other fields we know about, theoretically one would expect it to be vastly stronger still—indeed, about 10¹⁷ (= 100,000,000,000,000,000) times stronger than it is. Why? Because there are certain known effects that would tend to make it that strong. So it seems that there must be some other, as yet unknown effects that almost exactly cancel the known effects to give the Higgs field the strength we actually see. That seems incredibly bizarre to theorists. For almost 40 years they have been wondering what those other effects are. Finding out is the real goal of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and truly would be a huge breakthrough with enormous theoretical payoffs.

The main contender for those “other effects” is based on an idea called “supersymmetry". If it is right, then every known particle would have a new kind of particle associated with it. For example, electrons would be associated with much more massive particles called “scalar electrons.” In effect, these new particles would cancel the effects on the Higgs of the known particles. What most particle physicists are hoping and expecting to see at the LHC is evidence for these new particles—or some other new effect that explains why the Higgs field has the strength it does.

What if no such new effect is seen? What if the only thing found at the LHC is the Higgs particle? It would be a disaster for fundamental physics. It would mean that the LHC was a flop.

One last thing: Why do journalists—not physicists—call the Higgs particle “the God particle”? It is because Leon Lederman, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, wrote a book in which he wanted to call the Higgs particle the “god-damn particle,” because it was so hard to find. Apparently his publishers thought “God particle” would sell better. So, thanks to the idiocy of publishers, we have to suffer one of the most inane pieces of media hype in history. Does the Higgs have anything to do with how the universe began? No. Is it the holy grail of physics? No. Is it the "God particle? No. But its discovery is, for those of us interested in particle physics, something to celebrate.
 
 
Originally posted at National Review Online. © 2012 by National Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
(Image credit: Extreme Tech)

"Today we are learning the language in which God created life." With these words, President Clinton announced one of the great feats of modern science, the mapping of the human genome. Standing next to him in the East Room of the White House was the leader of the Human Genome Project, Francis S. Collins.

Collins has now written a book, The Language of God, but it is not the sort of book one might have expected him to write, for only a small part is devoted to the genome project. Rather, Collins has written the story of his other great discovery: the discovery not of new truths but of old truths. It is the story of how and why he came to believe in God.

As such, this book is almost unique. There are many conversion stories and many scientific autobiographies, but few books in which prominent scientists tell how they came to faith. If nothing else, Collins' book gives the lie, in most spectacular fashion, to the claim made by Richard Dawkins in an interview not long ago: "You won't find any intelligent person who feels the need for the supernatural," Dawkins declared, "unless [he was] brought up that way."

Francis Collins was not brought up that way; his family's view was that religion "just wasn't very important." Almost the only contact Collins had with religion as a child was singing in the choir at the local Episcopal church, where his parents had sent him to learn music with the admonition that he shouldn't take the theology too seriously. After discovering, in high-school science classes, "the intense satisfaction of the ordered nature of the universe," Collins entered the University of Virginia at the age of sixteen to major in chemistry. Up to then, he had given little thought to religion, though in his early teens he had had "occasional moments of . . . longing for something outside myself," most often associated with profound experiences of nature or of music. Exposed to the challenges of "one or two aggressive atheists" in his dorm, however, he quickly concluded that no religion had any "foundational truth."

The mathematical elegance of physics drew him into physical chemistry, where he was "immersed in quantum mechanics and second-order differential equations" and "gradually became convinced that everything in the universe could be explained on the basis of equations and physical principles." Discovering that Einstein, one of his heroes, had not believed in the God of the Jewish people, Collins concluded that "no thinking scientist" could take the idea of God seriously, and he "gradually shifted from agnosticism to atheism."

While working on his doctorate at Yale, Collins happened to take a course in biochemistry and was "astounded" by DNA and proteins "in all of their satisfying digital glory." It was a "revelation" to him that mathematics and "rigorous intellectual principles" could be applied to biology, a field he had previously disdained. Around this time, however, he began to wonder how he could "make a difference in the lives of real people" and whether he was cut out for a life of research. And so, just before completing his degree in chemistry, he switched to medical school.

It was in medical school that his atheism suffered a blow: "I found the relationships [I] developed with sick and dying patients almost overwhelming." The strength and solace so many of them derived from faith profoundly impressed him and left him thinking that "if faith was a psychological crutch . . . it must be a very powerful one." His "most awkward moment" came when an older woman, suffering from a severe and untreatable heart problem, asked him what he believed. "I felt my face flush as I stammered out the words 'I'm not really sure.'" Suddenly it was brought home to him that he had dismissed religion without ever really considering-or even knowing-the arguments in its favor. How could someone who prided himself on his scientific rationality do that? He was deeply shaken and felt impelled to carry out an honest and unprejudiced examination of religion. Attempts to read the sacred scriptures of various world religions left him baffled, however, so he sought out a local Methodist minister and asked him point-blank "whether faith made any logical sense." The minister took a book down from his shelf and handed it to him. It was C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.

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In reading Richard Dawkins I am reminded of an anecdote told by Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg and several other great physicists were sitting around one evening talking about God and religion. The discussion ended up being dominated by Paul Dirac, who went into a long diatribe declaring religion to be the opiate of the masses. At the end of the evening someone turned to the brilliant Wolfgang Pauli and said, "You have been very quiet tonight, Pauli. What do you think of what Dirac has been telling us?" Pauli responded, "If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet."

Richard Dawkins was not always a prophet. In his early days he wrote well–regarded papers on the rules for grooming in flies and the nesting strategies of digger wasps. It was while toiling in the vineyards of zoological science that he apparently heard the call to preach. His pulpit is an endowed chair in "the Public Understanding of Science" at Oxford, and the message he proclaims in his elegantly written, if somewhat waspish, books and articles is that the universe and life have no meaning. "The universe we observe," he says, "has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference."

The root of Dawkins’ philosophy is the insight, derived from neo–Darwinian theory, that life has no ulterior purpose, biologically speaking. Mosquitoes exist to replicate mosquito DNA and dung beetles to replicate dung beetle DNA. The whole drama of life is a meaningless genetic competition. Not surprisingly, many people find Dawkins’ vision of a pointless universe rather repellant. He has been accused of spreading a cold and joyless message, a pessimistic nihilism. The present book seems to have been written to respond to these charges. Its preface begins thus:

"A foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book, because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless."

This preface filled me with the keenest anticipation. I had always wondered what consolations could be found in a philosophy like Dawkins’. What would he have to say to that sleepless publisher or that desperate girl? Not what you might have expected. Here is a passage from chapter one, in which he is describing the time–line of life on earth:

"Fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip. All across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria."

"Many–celled, invertebrate life flowers somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole history of Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail clipping. As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of the Medes and Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks, Helen and Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napoleon and Hitler, the Beatles and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust of one light stroke of a nail file."

Vivid, striking, accurate, but hardly consoling.

Indeed, what Dawkins has to say to troubled souls is, basically, to grow up and stop snivelling: "The adult world may seem a cold and empty place," he writes, "with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels—guardian or garden variety. . . . Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive."

Dawkins believes that the charge of nihilism and coldness leveled against his philosophy stems from a certain view of science which sees it ridding the world of poetry and romance by explaining things previously steeped in wonder. The title of his book is taken from Keats’ poem "Lamia": "Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy? / . . . / Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— / Unweave a rainbow . . ." The word "philosophy" here refers to "natural philosophy," i.e., science, and the "unweaving" to Isaac Newton’s explanation of the rainbow as being due to the prismatic effect of raindrops.
 

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While much apologetic effort has been spent arguing for the existence of God, relatively little has been spent defending the reasonableness of belief in an afterlife and the resurrection of the body, despite the fact that these are among the hardest doctrines of biblical religion for many modern people to accept. D’Souza brings to the task his renowned forensic skills. (By all accounts, he has bested several of the top New Atheists in public debate.) He understands that persuasion is less a matter of proof and rigorous argument than of rendering ideas plausible and overcoming obstacles to belief.

One obstacle to belief in bodily resurrection is the difficulty of grasping that there could be places that are not located in the three-dimensional space we presently inhabit, or that there could be realms where our intuitions about time, space, and matter simply do not apply. D’Souza rightly points out that modern physics has broken the bounds of human imagination with ideas of other dimensions—and even other universes—and has required us to accept features of our own universe (at the subatomic level, for example.) that are entirely counterintuitive. He shows how blinkered, by contrast, is the thought of many who think themselves boldly modern, such as Bertrand Russell, who asserted that “all experience is likely to resemble the experience we know.”

Another impediment to belief in life after death is our experience of the disorganization of thought as sleep approaches and the mental decline that often precedes death. While near-death experiences do not prove as much as D’Souza suggests in his interesting chapter on the subject, the discovery that many have a surge of intense and coherent experience near the very point of death does counteract to some extent the impression of death as mere dissolution.
 

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