By now you’ve probably heard or read some of the incomprehensible reporting on the discovery of the Higgs boson by physicists at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva (CERN). Higgs boson (aka the God particle) was the theoretical missing link that explains (or should explain) the DNA – not just of our universe, but of others that might be out there….
Certainly watching scientists behave at Wednesday’s news conference announcing this discovery like little girls at a Justin Bieber concert indicates what a big deal they think it is.
These results mark a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the fundamental laws that govern the universe.
(John Womersley, chief executive of the United Kingdom’s Science & Technology Facilities Council, Reuters, July 4, 2012)
But, frankly, not since Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988) has there been so much media hype about a subject so few people know anything about. Hell, the C my college professor gave me in Physics 101 was an act of charity.
Meanwhile, here’s how no less a person than one of those scientists who were celebrating like giddy teenagers threw cold water on the significance of this discovery in their Sisyphean search for the origins of the universe:
[There’s] still much we don’t know about particles – this is only the beginning of a new journey. We have closed one chapter and opened another.
(Sir Peter Knight, president of Britain’s Institute of Physics, The Telegraph, July 4, 2012)
Therefore, whatever benefits it might lead to at some point in the distant future, I suspect this discovery will have about as much impact on our daily lives as the pre-historic discovery of Halley’s comet.
As for the media touting this Higgs boson as the God particle, I have no doubt that any scientist worth his salt would disavow any relationship between this discovery (or any scientific discovery) and either proving or disproving the existence of God.
And so the mysteries of the universe (and of the hand of God in creating it) continues….