The “God Particle”: A Short History for the Non-scientist.

by Brian Newman

The most important fact for the non-scientist to know about the so-called God Particle is that it has nothing to do with God: except that we might presume that God created this entity like everything else. The term was used as a brilliant marketing ploy simply to sell books: it is a more sexy term than either “the Higgs particle” or “the Higgs boson” which all physicists prefer, being embarrassed by the sensationalism evoked by the now ubiquitous and completely irrelevant media term. However it is also true that the media would not have paid much attention to the discovery of the “Higgs boson”.

The significance of the discovery goes back to before the 1960’s. At the beginning of the 20th century the concept of the atom had achieved acceptance by all scientists: the term “atom” originates from the Greek “indivisible.” However as we all know, it was soon found that the atom comprised other much smaller entities: electrons which were negatively charged, and a nucleus which was positively charged, and the nucleus contained positive particles termed protons and neutral particles called neutrons. Radioactivity showed that atoms could break apart and in the 1930’s the atom was “split.” So that now meant that there were different kinds of ‘indivisible units’: electrons, protons, neutrons and several others which were experimentally found or posited on theoretical grounds. The number of these sub-atomic entities, now termed “elementary particles” grew larger and larger until by end of the 1950’s it seemed an incomprehensible zoo of particles, and people not in the field were having trouble remembering their names. It was a time of confusion: what explanation could there be for all these particles of differing masses, polarities, spins and so on.

Symmetry theory was significant: for every negatively charged particle there was a positively charged particle, there were particles of either matter or anti-matter, neutrinos and anti-neutrinos for example, and there were other more subtle symmetry considerations. Clever ways of systemizing this particle zoo was found and in the 1960’s the Standard Model was proposed to do this and it successfully pointed the way towards predicting the existence of other unobserved particles, later confirmed. It was in this climate of discovery both theoretical and experimental that Briggs posited the “Briggs Boson” or the Briggs Particle.”

Empty space is not empty except of mass: there are gravitational fields, electric fields and magnetic fields in space, and fields all have energy: Einstein told us that energy and mass are quantities related by the equation E=mc2. So while a field has no mass, in a perturbed state it might manifest as a particle with a mass (related to the field energy) which it should be possible to experimentally observe. Briggs proposed a field which extended in all space “The Briggs Field.” It would provide a symmetry breaking mechanism in which it manifested itself as a particle with mass. He predicted the mass of the Briggs particle to be large and it was understood that high energies would be required to produce it. It would have a very short lifetime and would decay rapidly into other particles. The theory was widely accepted, but it was hard to confirm experimentally because the energies required were so high.

This limitation was famously overcome recently by the new high energy European particle accelerator at CERN, Switzerland and it seems at present to confirm the theory assumed for over the past 50 years. It will need to be carefully checked numerous times before final acceptance. All physicists deserve to celebrate this great accomplishment in physics: BUT IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD, except inasmuch as He appears to have thought of it well before modern man appeared. Some might regard this new discovery of physics as a brilliant feat of reverse engineering, but others might regard this view as “supernatural shenanigans” and use sensationalism and the attention of the press as an opportunity to put forward their materialist agenda.

Brian Newman is an American physicist.

© Brian Newman

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