I shall begin by saying that being a musician first and foremost, sorry to disappoint, but what I know about the technicalities of particle physics could be inscribed on an ant's ball-bag and still leave enough room for War and Peace, in every language - that said..
I believe it was the Nobel Prize winning physicist
Leon Lederman
who, much to
Peter Higgs' annoyance, coined the phrase the ‘God Particle' to describe the Higgs boson so named after Peter Higgs and of course a photon of light. Lederman wrote a book about it entitled
The God Particle: If The Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?. As I understand it, very simply, the hypothesis put forward is that the Higgs boson gives mass to all other particles in what scientists describe as the Standard Model. So basically, if this is true then the Higgs field, as it's also known, is literally in everything we see and touch. Heady stuff indeed and you can see why Lederman would associate the particle with God, if indeed you subscribe to the concept that a God exists in the first place, which of course many scientists don't. I suppose it rather depends on how you view God doesn't it. If you believe that God is up there directing traffic and generally interfering, in a third party Ten Commandments sort of way, then all these physics based theories would cause consternation. However, if you believe God exists in everything we see and touch then this surely raises some fundamental theological questions.
There are many theologians e.g. the Bishop of Durham, and I suspect the Reverend
Sir John Polkinghorne
who used to be a theoretical physicist and worked with Professor Peter Higgs, who believe that the bible or the vast majority of stories contained within it are symbolic. If this is the case then Lederman's conjecture would seem to have some merit, although I can't help thinking that calling the boson the God particle was a cynical manipulation to whip-up media hysteria. Incidentally, Lederman apparently refers to the elusive particle as ‘she'. This would certainly explain a great deal wouldn't it…train crashes, hurricanes etc..- only kidding!
I think it's worth pointing out that if the re-naming of the boson was not cynical then it was a statement of faith, which of course many scientists also claim not to have, even though saying categorically that you do not believe in God is a statement of faith in of itself. I happen to think that one of the biggest spin-offs of this so-called experiment will be to cause people to re-evaluate how they perceive God, whether they believe in God or no. This is using science to rationalise religion and vice versa, clever?
As to the scientific merit and the cost of this project currently being conducted at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) which claims to be one of the world's largest centres for scientific research and that its business is finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works etc. Anyway, I have noticed that they talk a great deal about the scientific benefits but they don't actually say what the benefits will be. This is curious isn't it; given that particle physics is purported to be an exact science based on violence (smashing particles together at high speed) and maths? You would have thought that when the politicians agreed to hand over 12 billion dollars someone would have asked the question; what are we going to get out of it? Of course they did ask that question but it wasn't quite meant in the same way. What exactly are going to be the benefits to mankind - not just the science community? That is the question; they could then present these benefits in the form of say a list, so we would all be absolutely clear as to what exactly we are paying for. I mean, if this is going to procure similar benefits brought about by the moon landings then errr Houston, I have a problem.
I'm told the only benefit to mankind as a result of the Moon landings was Teflon - other so-called benefits include:
1. Development of 4GL relational database language.
2. Development of Fuel Cell power.
3. Development of rocket designs that are now used to launch satellites and the Hubble telescope.
4. Medical CAT scan
5. Cordless power tools
6. Mylar
7. Cool suits (used by race car drivers)
8. Adhesive bondings
9. Various detectors for gases, infrared, cosmic rays, and many more used in various industries today
10. Heat shielding used today in high performance cars.
Could we not easily live without most of these things? In any case it would not be that long before some geek in a garage invented half this stuff anyway. The American government spent millions of taxpayers' money on developing a ball-point pen that would write in zero gravity, the Russians used a pencil!!!
The Space Program; for me it's about the justification of spending huge amounts of taxpayers' money. I just think that the money would be much better spent on trying to save this planet rather than spending trillions on trying to get a 'chosen few' to another? If the BBC are to be believed, scientists actually think that NASA will have us all star-trekking around various quadrants of the galaxy at warp speed, by next year! Well not quite but it really doesn't get anymore delusional. Or does it?
Talking of moon landings and space travel. I'd like to say at this point that landing two men on the moon in 1969 was the most impressive thing humans have ever done. In my view the greatest achievement was not getting there, it was getting three men back, alive. Anyway, the whole exercise lulled us into a sort of false sense of what is actually possible - programs like Star Trek don't help matters either. More recently we had
Professor Stephen Hawking saying that we should strive to colonise
Proxima B - a planet so far away, at current speeds would take about 250,000 years to get there. On the other side of the debate we have
Professor Brian Cox saying that when our Sun dies, we die. Cox went further on BBC Radio 4 by saying that Mars is the only other planet we humans will visit. As soon as Cox said this, the interviewer immediately closed him down - I wonder why?
Scientists have clearly gone completely mad. Apparently, the discovery of the Gliese 581 super-Earth in what scientists call the "Goldilocks Zone" where temperatures "are just right" for life to have a chance to exist, has created tremendous excitement - really? Commenting on the discovery, Alison Boyle, the curator of astronomy at London's Science Museum, said: "Of all the planets we've found around other stars, this is the one that looks as though it might have the right ingredients for life." It's 20 light-years away and so we won't be going there anytime soon, (you don't say) but with new kinds of propulsion technology that could change in the future. And obviously we'll be training some powerful telescopes on it to see what we can see," she told BBC News.
Thought: even if we could travel at the speed of light, travellers/astronauts would be confined in a glorified metal tube for many, many, many years - no escape! And here's another tit-bit: it only takes one person to ruin life for everyone - imagine that, stuck on-board with a nutter, driven mad by isolation as the Pale Blue Dot disappears completely.
I don't doubt that there are going to be some desperate attempts to ensure the continuation of our species at some point in the future - very sad, but I'm afraid the distances are just too great for us to dwell on the numerous alleged possibilities. The plain truth is that the circumstances that brought us into being are so fantastic that I doubt there's another planet like our Earth anywhere in our galaxy. Well, let me clarify, there might be billions of planets in the so-called 'Goldilocks' zone, but even then, why waste precious Earth resources when this planet is the only one we have, or will ever inhabit?
