![]() James Schall, S.J., political science professor at Georgetown, writes in his book The Order of Things: ”We are beings who are moved by the ‘wonder of the world’ - that is, we wonder at the world, how it is, that it is, why it is. That doesn’t mean, however, that it cannot be viewed in the broader light of the human intellectual tradition. It is an important scientific discovery which is forced to stand on its own. It changes nothing in the economical scheme, provides no grand source of power of nature, and doesn’t even serve any new philosophical or theological end. The point is that the discovery of the Higgs boson, long awaited as it has been, is important in the world of particle physics, and remains important there. In fact, scanning both the scientific and religious media, both of which have my sympathy, I have found in my own reading more articles cautioning against over-theologizing the Higgs than I have found by writers actually committing that error! The “God particle” moniker has been bandied about, but no serious attempts have been made, that I am aware of, to proclaim that the discovery of the Higgs boson actually plays a revolutionary theological role. ![]() Second, while I’m sure that some searchers of the Internet might find a few examples to the contrary, the scientific commentary on the Higgs has largely been to present it as exactly what it is: a milestone in particle physics, not a revolution in theology. To begin with, the team at CERN announced their findings with excitement but also with scientific prudence, cautioning that definitive identification of the newly-found boson as “the Higgs” would take some time. Some, too, have complained about an unnecessarily religious spin that has been put on the discovery of the Higgs boson, especially in its nickname of the “God particle.” While I agree that the nickname is misleading and largely used just to gin up interested by the media, I have in fact been impressed by the propriety with which the scientific community has handled the announcement. Perhaps we might sell Higgs t-shirts, but the payoff is finally in knowledge, not dollars. Not a lot of economic revenue comes of it, either. It takes a lot of money to smash protons together at significant fractions of the speed of light and examine the remains for long-hypothesized elements of nature. There are economical questions, to be sure, about such a discovery. While formal pronouncements have been prudently guarded, the general consensus is that yes, indeed, the Higgs has been found. Two weeks ago, researchers with the European organization CERN announced the discovery of a new boson “consistent with the Higgs.” Two independent teams working with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have detected signs, with significant confidence, of a Higgs-mass boson in the showers of debris created by the collider’s energetic experiments.
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