cientists at CERN, using the Large Hadron Collider, think they may soon have proof of the long sought for Higgs, or “God Particle”. Scientists have been looking for the existence of this particle that has long been suspected to exist, but could not be detected. The Higgs particle is important to physicists because it is believed to be responsible for “mass”. It is called the “God” particle because all that exists is dependent on it for mass. Without mass, matter in the universe would never have formed at the beginning of creation or have structure, because there would be no gravity, inertia, or energy. Einstein proved that mass and energy are equivalent with E=MC^2. It is interesting that it is called the “God” particle because science is usually atheistic in its outlook. For science to have a “God” of any kind seems to discredit all the attacks and allegations that have been thrown at people of religion for centuries. You might argue that the “Higgs” particle, known also as the “God” particle, is not really a “God”, but then you have to explain what a God is. Christians and other people of religion believe in an omnipotent God for everything that exists. Without God, according to the Bible, the universe would never have come into existence. Without God the planets would not orbit the sun. Without God, time would be meaningless and there would be no purpose to man’s existence. It is well known and accepted by scientists that our belief in God is based on faith, not on laboratory experiments. God is something we all accept as being present in our lives but we cannot physically prove that He is around. We accept the way He interacts in our lives as proof enough of His existence.
Scientists believe that the Higgs particle is necessary for everything in the universe to exist. Without it the universe would never have come into existence. Without it the planets would not orbit the sun. Without it time would be meaningless and there would be no purpose or meaning to anything in the universe. Scientists have long accepted the existence of the Higgs (God) particle as being present in everything around us but cannot yet prove that it exists physically. The way matter behaves and interacts is proof enough of its existence. They accept its existence base on “faith” that it exists. I hope you noticed the subtlety of the two above descriptions. What do they have in common? One thing. FAITH in the existence of something that is unseen and has not been proven. Science is considered by most people to be anti-religion because most scientists never fail to seize an opportunity to attack people of religion as being superstitious and foolish for believing in something as intangible as a God. History has shown many reasons for believing in an omnipotent God from the way men and nations interact, and the records kept in the form of the Bible to record God’s interaction with man. Yet scientists do exactly the same thing.Very precise records are kept of laboratory experiments and the results, and conclusions and interpretations are made based on those experiments.
Only in the last 25 years has science run into a wall in trying to explain the universe and everything in it. It seems that all of Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, The Big Bang, and all other eloquent theories of the structure of the universe have come to depend on the existence of one tiny object. The Higgs particle. They say it is present in all matter, controls the universe and even has control of time itself. Can they prove it exists? No, but they have faith that it does exist. Am I the only one to see an element of hypocrisy here? The Large Hadron Collider has been constructed in Europe by CERN specifically to try to prove the existence of the “God” particle. You might say that the LHC is a kind of “Temple to the God of Science”. If there is any communication that takes place there between their machine and the Higgs particle it may prove the existence of their “God” but it does not diminish the importance of the “spiritual” God that we believe in and serve. It does serve to prove just how alike Christians and Scientists are when it comes to faith in their respective “religions”. Both are based on faith in the existence of an unseen force that controls the universe. ( By Allen J. Epling ).
The Higgs Boson is often referred to as “the God particle” by the media, after the title of Leon Lederman’s book, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?. While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest in particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider, many scientists dislike it, since it overstates the particle’s importance, not least since its discovery would still leave unanswered questions about the unification of QCD, the Electroweak interaction and gravity, and the ultimate origin of the universe. In a renaming competition, a jury of physicists chose the name “the champagne bottle boson” as the best popular name. The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics.
The existence of the particle is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in current theoretical physics, and attempts are being made to confirm the existence of the particle by experimentation, using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Tevatron at Fermilab. The Higgs boson is the only Standard Model particle that has not been observed in particle physics experiments. It is a consequence of the so-called Higgs mechanism which is the part of the Standard Model that explains how most of the known elementary particles become massive. For example, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the mass-less photon, which mediates electromagnetism, and the massive W and Z bosons, which mediate the weak force.
If the Higgs boson exists, it is an integral and pervasive component of the material world. If it exists, it is of a class of particles known as scalar bosons. Bosons have integer spin, and scalar bosons have spin 0. The photon is a kind of boson, and so is the less-familiar gluon, along with the W and Z particles mentioned above. But these particles are all vector bosons, with spin 1. At present there are no known elementary scalar bosons in nature, although many composite spin-0 particles are known.
Theories exist that do not anticipate the Higgs boson, described elsewhere as Higgsless models. Relatively model-independent arguments suggest that any mechanism which generates the masses of the elementary particles must be visible below 1.4 TeV. Therefore the Large Hadron Collider is expected to provide experimental evidence of the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson. Experiments at Fermilab also continue previous attempts at detection, albeit hindered by the lower energy of the Tevatron accelerator, although it theoretically has the necessary energy to produce the Higgs boson.The Higgs mechanism (or “Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble” ) is a mechanism by which vector bosons can get a mass. It was proposed in 1964 independently and almost simultaneously by three groups of physicists: François Englert and Robert Brout, by Peter Higgs, (who was inspired by the ideas of Philip Anderson); and by Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble.
The three papers written on this discovery were each recognized as milestone papers during Physical Review Letters’s 50th anniversary celebration. While each of these famous papers took similar approaches, the contributions and differences between the 1964 PRL Symmetry Breaking papers are noteworthy. These six physicists were also awarded the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for this work. Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam were the first to apply the Higgs mechanism to the electroweak symmetry breaking. The Higgs mechanism not only explains how the electroweak vector bosons get a mass, but predicts the ratio of the W boson and Z boson masses as well as their couplings among themselves and with the Standard Model quarks and leptons.
Many of these predictions have been verified by precise measurements performed at the LEP and the SLC colliders, thus confirming that the Higgs mechanism takes place in nature. Out of the three seminal papers on the Higgs mechanism, only the paper by Peter Higgs mentioned, in a closing sentence, possible existence of the Higgs boson (“… an essential feature of the type of theory which has been described in this note is the prediction of incomplete multiplets of scalar and vector bosons.”). Peter Higgs added this sentence when he was revising the paper after it was rejected by Physics Letters, and before resubmitting it to Physical Review Letters. The first detailed description of the Higgs boson properties was given in 1966, also by Peter Higgs. The Higgs boson existence is not a strictly necessary consequence of the Higgs mechanism: the Higgs boson exists in some but not all theories which use the Higgs mechanism. For example, Higgs boson exists in the Standard Model and the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Yet it is not expected to exist in Technicolor models or, more generally, Higgsless models. All of these models realize various forms of the Higgs mechanism. A major goal of the LHC experiments is to distinguish among these models and determine if the Higgs boson exists or not.
