Is God hiding in a particle?

In the novel Angels and Demons, the prequel to Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code, a scientist claims to be able to find proof of the existence of God through his research on particles, which are the smallest building blocks of all matter since they cannot be broken down into any other particles.

Does God exist or not? A gigantic physics facility in Switzerland might bring us a step closer to the answer. Yet do Rwandans really want to know?

A simulated event in the CMS detector, featuring the appearance of the Higgs boson.

In the novel Angels and Demons, the prequel to Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code, a scientist claims to be able to find proof of the existence of God through his research on particles, which are the smallest building blocks of all matter since they cannot be broken down into any other particles.

The physicist is working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where he uses a particle collider to trace the Higgs boson – also known as the God particle.

In the end he finds his evidence, but he is murdered in a gruesome way before he can reveal his secret. In comes Robert Langdon, the hero of The Da Vinci Code, to solve the mystery and prevent the Vatican from being annihilated.

Angels and Demons is a good read, yet it is more than just fiction. CERN actually exists near Geneva, Switzerland, and it is indeed one of the biggest research centers in particle physics worldwide (it is, by the way, also the place where the Internet was invented).

Currently, the construction of the underground Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is in its final stages; with a circumference of about 27 km, it is the world’s most powerful such machine.

Colliders are used to explore atomic nuclei, allowing scientists to identify new elements or particles, and to explain phenomena that affect the entire nucleus. In these machines, particles are smashed into each other at high speed, and new particles can appear amongst the debris.

One of the particles that physicists all over the world would die for to discover is the Higgs boson. So far, it is a theoretical element, since nobody has ever been able to observe it.

In 1964, Peter Higgs, a shy scientist in Edinburgh, proposed the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to all things – a speck so precious that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman called it the “God particle”.

Without it, there would be no mass at all (for instance, light is made up from photons, which are particles without mass; therefore, you can move your hand through a beam of light).

Thus, finding the elusive Higgs boson is worth quite a lot: the LHC was specially built to trace it, at a cost of US$ 6 billion.

“The Higgs boson is interesting because it is the only reasonable explanation we have for the origin of mass,” says Dave Rainwater, a researcher at FermiLab, a physics research center near Illinois, USA, which also has a particle collider.

“Without the Higgs, all fundamental particles would be massless, and the universe would be very different. The weak nuclear forces wouldn’t be weak at all, for instance, so the elemental composition of the cosmos would be radically different, stars would shine differently, and we probably wouldn’t exist.”

“I suppose I’ll open a bottle of something if they find it,” Peter Higgs himself said modestly after visiting the CERN facility.

However, if finding the Higgs boson would earn you a Nobel price, disproving its existence would make you a real scientific superstar. “What would shake the foundation of physics much more than finding the Higgs, would be a definitive ‘ruling it out’.

That would upset all of our conceptions about how the universe works. It would require new forces or new laws to explain masses, in the absence of a Higgs,” says John Womersley, a spokesman of Fermilab.

So, although finding the Higgs boson is not really equal to discovering God, it might bring us a step closer. But would it really matter? Talking to people in Kigali, it seems it does.

“God has many different ways of manifesting Himself; I think that He will not let this mission take place. Or, He can simply let them start the mission and later prevent them from coming back to Earth,” says Désiré Gatete, a devout Christian from Restoration Church, who erroneously thinks the LHC is some kind of space program.

“Ya Rabi (Oh Lord), that’s total madness! How can they go and find Allah? Allah can’t be seen with physical eyes and even the Prophet Muhammad didn’t see Him. Allah is great”, is the reaction of Yunus Nduwimana, a Muslim who embraced the religion just two years after the genocide.

Others don’t see things that way. They are convinced that Allah can’t be seen by human eyes but they wish, just dreaming, that science finds Him and He tells them that there’s no other true religion but Islam.

“Au’dhu billah mina shaitan rajim! (Arabic for: May God protect me from Satan the outcast, ed.) You know, we’re always told that there’s no other god but Allah and that Islam is the sole religion for humanity.

First, I wish they that they find Allah, even though it seems impossible, so that they have evidence that He really exists. Also, I want Him to tell scientists to join Islam,” dreams Jasmin Mukeshimana, daughter of a sheikh (a Muslim scholar).

Peter Mukasa feels very strongly about God – he hates him. During the genocide, he lost his mother and brother in Saint Charles Lwanga church where they were hiding, and his grandparents were murdered in Kibeho, burned alive while kneeling before the statue of Marie Notre Dame de Douleurs de Kibeho.

“God is impassionate if it is really Him who created Interahamwe,” Peter says. “How could he create those Satans to match His image? I pondered this for a long, and finally decided to believe what I have been taught about evolution. Man is a product of evolution, he wasn’t created by God and I don’t believe in Him.

All I need now is scientists to come with evidence that there’s no God. It would make me happy to see those priests and pastors losing their jobs. Religion will become humiliated and the Church’s property will be our orphans’ schools of science.”

Peter Musaka condemns God for staying powerless during the genocide. He started protecting old women and children as soon as Interahamwe began killing, actively fighting them.

“And I wondered why God couldn’t send angels to my side to defend my people as He did in the time of King Hezekiah (according to the Old testament, God send an angle to destroy the Assyrian army attacking the city of Judah in 690 BC, ed.).

We defended ourselves and didn’t waste our time waiting for Him because He doesn’t exist. Let science show people that they believe in a non-entity.”

Posted by The Rwanda Focus on Apr 21 2008. Filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry