IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

Searching for the 'God particle' in a giant underground cavern (Steve Connor, 09 June 2003, The Independent)

Deep below the Franco-Swiss border lies a giant cavern big enough to house Canterbury Cathedral, and grand enough to be part of the greatest scientific experiment on Earth. At the weekend, engineers began the delicate task of preparing the snow-white cavern for the giant machine that will take up residence in its subterranean home.

If all goes to plan, the Atlas instrument - five storeys high and weighing 7,000 tonnes - will lead the search for the holy grail of physics, an elusive subatomic phenomenon formally called the Higgs boson, but nicknamed the "God particle".

The theoreticians have for years predicted the existence of the Higgs but no instrument has yet been able to find it. If scientists do detect it, the discovery could answer one of the biggest questions in science; why do we, and all other matter in the Universe, exist? [...]

The search for the Higgs, Dr [Jim] Virdee[, a project scientist on the compact muon solenoid (CMS) detector,] said, was part of a wider quest to find a single, unified explanation for all the forces of nature, whether they operated at the level of the atomic nucleus, or at the level of stars, planets and galaxies.

"This quest to get to an understanding of the unified theory is the underpinning of most of science, if not all of science," he added. "Our notions of space and time will change, our notions of fundamental forces will change, just like the revolution that took place at the beginning of the last century [with Einstein]." [...]

Although Dr [Roger Cashmore, Cern's director of research] and his colleagues cringe when they hear anyone talk of the God particle, they are effusive on its possible discovery.

"What the Higgs does is give you a mechanism for generating a mass. It would be spectacularly good to find the Higgs," he said. "To get the mechanism or the underlying theory how this will work would be an enormous step forward. But let's leave God out of it."

What's most interesting here is that the metaphor of unification and simplicity that drives the search is so directly related to our faith in God. We know in our souls that they will find what they seek because it must be so. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 9, 2003 11:04 AM