Looking for God in the Particles

A thousand physicists working together at the National Accelerator Laboratory, draped in lab coats and standing in a dignified line, reported in Paris on Monday that they had not found the "God particle"—yet. But they are beginning to figure out where It is not.

One by one, the physicists in the line offered places where It is not found: in the dripping rocks of caverns underground, said one; in the visible breath emitting from a warm mouth on a sunless winter day, said another; and It most certainly could not be found on a beach at night watching the reflection of the moon play across on the tips of the waves. The scientists as a group, all 1,000 of them nodding their heads in unison, can confirm that the God particle was completely undetectable from a sidewalk on a hill watching the sun rise.

They can say with 95% certainty that Its mass—in the units preferred by physicists—is not in the range between 158 billion and 175 billion electron volts. They can confirm that the Grand Canyon was untouched by the God particle, the Amazon rainforest barren. And even though it is theorized that the particle created the mass for all these things to exist, It was found in none of them.

Over the last decade physicists working on two separate experiments have combed the debris from a thousand trillion collisions of protons and anti-protons looking for signs of this God particle, the Higgs boson, which is said to be responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass. In 1964, Peter Higgs, a shy scientist in Edinburgh, explained how two classes of particles which now appear to be different—energy and mass—were once one and the same. His theory proposed the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to all things—a speck so important and precious It has come to be known as the "God particle," the particle that set the universe in motion. This imbuing of mass happened in the moments after the Big Bang, as the universe expanded and cooled, and thus eventually led us to the Big Bands of the 1930s. Yet so far no one has been able to find the Higgs boson in the stream of debris emitted when two particles are smashed together at high speeds, or at the top of a mountain above the clouds on a crisp windless day.

Rumors abounded in recent months that God could be found in the fossil record, in shapes left in ancient rock by trilobites and jellyfish, crocodiles and ferns. That It could be found somewhere deep in the human brain, buried under mountains of grey folds and pulsing with electricity. That It could be found in math or language, in music or in dance. And yet the scientists on this small stage in Paris debunked them all.

The new results, combining the data from two separate experiments, narrow the range in which the Higgs, if It exists, must be hiding. Physicists had previously concluded that It must lie somewhere 115 billion and 200 billion electron volts. By comparison, a proton, the anchor of ordinary matter, weighs in at about a billion electron volts. Other previous predications by physicists included that It might lie somewhere between the scales of a fish, or in the air beneath the wings of a falcon, that God could perhaps be found in the darkest, deepest, densest part of the bottom of the bottom of the sea, in a hole somewhere miles below civilization, hidden from the light.

Theories do exist that do not anticipate the God particle at all, described elsewhere as the Higgsless model. Scientists who supposed the Higgsless model explained that perhaps we are free to our own fate, to make our own decisions. Perhaps we are free to indulge our whims and find the embodiment of God, Its very idea, to exist only in ourselves and our desires, to exist in the ecstasy we can generate in our own lives.

But the scientists on the stage in Paris that night refused to believe this existential notion, that we could possibly be alone in this world, unwatched by the Higgs boson or anyone else, unobserved by the heavens. One of them—in the back near the end of the line, outside the illumination of the stage spotlights—chimed up to posit the possible existence of whole families of Higgs bosons, as opposed to a single Higgs particle of the Standard Model—whole families of gods existing together, flocks of angels and cherubs, swarms of demons and imps swimming together in the cosmos, breathing mass into benighted particles. Another scientist mentioned that perhaps there is some kind of Higgs trinity, that perhaps Higgs boson has a son.

Proof of the Higgs boson would provide us with some hope and solace that beauty and unity really do exist—however rare they may seem in our world—at the very foundation of the universe, at the very center and source of all has existed and all that ever will. And so, said the lead scientist downcast, his lab coat drooping nearly to the floor of the stage, the most intensive particle hunt in the history of physics must go on.