Last night I was watching a television program on the Science Channel about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which is being built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The program speculated on how the LHC might be used to investigate what happened in the microseconds following the big bang - before atoms existed and elementary particles transitioned from pure energy to taking on mass.
The most important discovery that scientists are hoping for with the LHC is proof as to whether or not the Higgs boson particle exists. This particle is predicted by the Standard Model of elementary particles which predicts how quarks, electrons and so on came into existence. Finding the Higgs boson particle is crucial to taking the Standard Model from the status of just a model to that of a real theory. The Higgs boson is theorized to interact with all the massive particles and transfer to them their masses through a state change from energy. If the Higgs boson cannot be found, it will be the undoing of the Standard Model as well as to all the presently held theories like "grand unified theory of everything" and theoretical systems like "superstring theory", "quantum loop gravity", "process physics" and so on.
To put it into simple terms, if the LHC cannot produce a Higgs boson, then most of what we know and understand about the earliest formation of matter in the big bang will be proven as wrong. Indeed, we will realize that the universe is far more mysterious and strange than we could have imagined.
Featured on the program was the brilliant physicist, Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winner, who wrote about the beginning of all things. He is quoted as saying; "In the very beginning, there was a void, a curious form of vacuum, a nothingness containing no space, no time, no matter, no light, no sound. Yet the laws of nature were in place and this curious vacuum held potential. A story logically begins at the beginning, but this story is about the universe and unfortunately, there are no data for the very beginnings - none, zero. We don't know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billion of a trillionth of a second. That is, some very short time after creation in the big bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe, someone is making it up - we are in the realm of philosophy. Only God knows what happened at the very beginning."
I was intrigued by the nickname given to the Higgs boson by many physicists, the “God Particle”, because essentially it is believed to be the “creator” of all that we know around us. It is the force that, according to the Standard Model, caused all things to come into existence. When I heard the scientists refer to the Higgs boson with terms like God, creator, and Lederman’s use of the phrase “In the beginning”, I was suddenly struck with where I’ve read the same language before - the first verse of the Old Testament which states “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...” This passage, written almost 3000 years ago, describes the exact same process in the same terms as those used by Lederman, Einstein, and Hawking (Einstein and Hawking made similar references in other contexts of the big bang).
This all poses some very interesting thought for me concerning the LHC. In our quest to understand our creator, we’re building a really huge machine that we hope will either prove or disprove our core understandings of creation - that moment in time when nothing gathered itself together, invoked the untried laws of nature, and suddenly existed - creating a complex system having incredible mass, physical forces, and new laws which govern its continued existence.
If the Higgs boson is proven to exist then what does it say about creation? It it will say that prior to the moment of creation the universe was void and without form - a nothingness. Then, suddenly and miraculously all things came into being. This is a very old concept borne long before modern science sought to grasp its implications.
Science and modern theology both use the same terms to describe what we, in our humble and limited understanding, attempt to describe as a singular entity that caused all things to come into existence - God. God is a symbol of language, a term to describe the creator and the causation of the laws and processes invoked at the moment of creation. Whether Higgs boson exists or not doesn’t change our quest. It is an innate, built-in, uniquely human need to know our creator. If the "God Particle" exists, it may well shed light on what happened in the moments following creation. It is at the point just before creation, an eternity where neither time or matter exist, that we can no longer look to science for understanding. Only God knows what happened at the very beginning.