The great quantum physicist Niels Bohr once said a colleague’s new theory was crazy, but perhaps not crazy enough to be correct. Two scientists seem to have taken that approach to heart when they speculated that God may have shut down the
Large Hadron Collider
in Geneva to keep it from discovering the elusive
“God particle.”
(Photo: Part of the Large Hadron Collider, 22 March 2007/Denis Balibouse)
According to an essay in the New York Times , the scientists are trying to explain why the collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator turned on with great fanfare in September 2008 by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), was closed down for major repairs just over a week later. The 3 billion-euro collider was supposed to track down the Higgs boson , a subatomic particle believed to have given mass to the universe milliseconds after the Big Bang created it some 15 billion years ago.
Physicists think this minuscule speck of matter, if ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God” , as Einstein put it. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman dubbed the Higgs boson the “God particle” in a book of the same name 15 years ago.
Now, Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen has reached back to the God symbolism to explain what went wrong at CERN. He and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto have suggested, as Times science writer Dennis Overbye put it, that “the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather” .
This is heavy stuff, and it gets heavier.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,”
Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail to Overbye. In an unpublished essay, Overbye relates, Dr. Nielson said of the theory,
“Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.”
It is their guess, he went on,
“that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
(Photo: Part of the Large Hadron Collider, 29 Nov 2006/Denis Balibouse)
We usually report about scientists who say there is no God and ridicule those who believe in Him ( like the biologist and “neo-atheist” Richard Dawkins ). But at the cutting edge of physics, some kind of faith seems to reappear (as in the case of Templeton Prize winner Bernard d’Espagnat ). Isn’t it strange that these scientists turn so often to a “God option” to explain what they’re investigating?
