Vatican Observatory physicist reflects on ‘God particle’ discovery
CWN – July 06, 2012
Scientists’ discovery of the Higgs boson, sometimes known as the “God particle,” should not detract from belief in God, an official of the Vatican Observatory told a Vatican Radio audience.
The dramatic discovery of the Higgs boson illustrates the “harmony in nature,” said Father Gabriele Gionti, a Jesuit theoretical physicist. “If you assume faith and believe in a good God who created the Universe you do not see any conflict between science and religion.”
Father Gionti said that he had visited CERN, the Swiss laboratory where evidence of the Higgs boson was first uncovered, and could sense the excitement about the new discovery. He explained that physicists had referred to the Higgs boson as the “God particle” because for many years they had believed in it without having any physical evidence to prove its existence.
Additional sources for this story: The God particle: Believing and seeing (Vatican Radio) www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?c=602485
New particle may unlock new discoveries, says Vatican astronomer
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
7/5/12
www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1202832.htm
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The discovery of a new sub-atomic particle — the so-called Higgs boson — may help scientists discover how the hidden structure of all matter in the universe works, a Vatican astronomer said.
“It indicates that reality is deeper and more rich and strange than our everyday life,” U.S. Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno told Catholic News Service.
When people go about their everyday business working or relaxing, they don’t think about the tiniest building blocks of physical matter, but “without these underlying little things, we wouldn’t be here,” he said.
Physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory in Geneva, announced July 4 that they were 99.999 percent certain they found evidence of a new particle that might be key to the structure of the universe and to understanding nature.
British physicist Peter Higgs first hypothesized the existence of the particle in the 1960s as the final missing element in a framework called the Standard Model, which explains how sub-atomic particles and forces interact.
Over the decades, with the help of increasingly powerful and sophisticated high-energy particle accelerators, scientists have been searching for what atoms are made up of, what the smaller components of atoms are made up of, what the nature of those smaller components is, and so on, Brother Consolmagno said.
But it wasn’t clear why some materials, such as protons and electrons, have mass and therefore are attracted to each other by gravity, while other materials, such as photons, have no mass, he said.
“Higgs, 50 years ago, worked out a model called the Standard Model, that would provide reasons for attraction and why there is mass,” the Jesuit said.
Higgs predicted that if a particle that produced the effect of mass existed, it should be “visible” after two atoms were smashed together at high enough speeds.
Experiments at CERN have revealed that “there is something that looks something like the Higgs-boson,” Brother Consolmagno said. The new data “will be used to test the Standard Model and how sub-atomic particles work,” he said.
The Higgs-boson had been nicknamed “the God particle” as “a joke” in an attempt to depict the particle as “almost like a gift from God to help explain how reality works in the sub-atomic world,” he said. Because the particle is believed to be what gives mass to matter, it was assigned the godlike status of being able to create something out of nothing.
But such “God of the gaps” conjectures are not only bad reasons to believe in God, they are also bad science, Brother Consolmagno said.
“You’ll look foolish, in say 2050, when they discover the real reason” for a phenomenon that was explained away earlier by the hand of God, he said.
However, another kind of faith and hope do exist in the scientific community, he said.
“No one would have built this enormous experiment,” tapping the time and talents of thousands of scientists around the world, “without faith they would find something,” he said.
“My belief in God gives me the courage to look at the physical universe and to expect to find order and beauty,” he said. “It’s my faith that inspires me to do science.”
The term “God particle” is a creation of the media and has not been used by the scientific community. I don’t see how the discoveryof another particle which imparts mass is supposed to harm one’s belief in God. On the contrary, when I see these new discoveries I am always amazed at the order and splendour of creation.
Those in the “New Atheist” crowd will hitch their cart to anything that they feel can soothe their obstinate unbelief.