Reaching into the fabric of the universe, closer to understanding the divine?
By Mark Vernon on Saturday, July 14 2012, 08:23 - Journalism - Permalink
I had this piece in The Tablet last week, on the discovery of the Higgs boson...
It began with a walk in the Cairngorms almost 50 years ago. The physicist Peter Higgs had an idea about the origins of mass in the universe. The Higgs boson was born in the human mind. And now, after spending billions of dollars – as well as all the creative energy that cash represents – scientists at Cern (otherwise known as the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) have discovered the subatomic particle. Or at least, they have seen the signature for something close to what they expect the Higgs to be.
It has been called the “God particle” because the Higgs plugs a crucial gap in what physicists refer to as the Standard Model. That has been successful at describing the behaviour of matter, energy and forces. Yet the discovery of the Higgs does not mean that physics is now over. Far from it. In the 50 years since Peter Higgs’ brainwave, cosmologists have discovered that the majority of the universe is made of stuff most probably unknown to science, the so-called dark mass and dark energy. The Standard Model will not be standard science for future generations.
Given those qualifications, it is striking that the Higgs has generated so much hype. This is partly because Cern, the organisation responsible for the Large Hadron Collider tests which discovered the particle, needs to justify the spend. So teams of spin doctors ensured the experiment produced regular headlines. But that only raises a further question: why are we so gripped by the weirdness of the subatomic world? Physics powerfully resonates with the notion of cosmic design. Physicists look for theories that can be described using mathematics. When tested, these theories reveal the hidden nature of reality. The mathematical and hidden element readily fires the theological imagination. As the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz put it: “When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made”.
It is as if science and religion are part of the same enterprise: revealing the ways of God. “Science appears as a collective effort of the Human Mind to reach the Mind of God,” writes the physicist and priest Michael Heller. “The Mind of Man and the Mind of God are strangely interwoven.”
It is a powerful intuition explored in a famous essay by the Nobel laureate for physics, Eugene Wigner. His title says it all: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. Wigner describes the descriptive and predictive power of mathematics as a “miracle”. He continues: “It is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.”
It is not so hard to believe if you believe that human beings are made in the image of God. The trumpeting of the discovery of the God particle flirts with the thrilling thought that we have taken one step closer to divinity. As the essayist Annie Dillard has written: “What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: ‘Hello’?”
But it is easy for the theological imagination to become overexcited by science. For one thing, it seems likely that life can only emerge in a universe in which matter and energy are patterned and constrained. It is this patterning that gives mathematics a grip on nature. A life-bearing cosmos would inevitably be a mathematics-friendly cosmos. Alternatively, you can ask what kind of God is revealed by the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. William Blake reflected on the deistic divinity implied by such an understanding of the cosmos and found it “soul-shuddering”. His“dark satanic mills” are the impersonal, cold machines that “grind out material reality”, much as the indifferent Higgs boson is said to generate mass. A tyrannical God would fix life according to laws of nature, Blake continued. A world of such determined domains of space and time would be a prison. Further, the scientist or theologian who overplays humankind’s capacity to understand the cosmos risks idolatry. “He who sees the Ratio only,” Blake mocked, “sees himself only.”
More generally, you could say that contemporary physics so captures our imagination because it is the way many now do metaphysics. As the scholastic theologians of the medieval period gazed towards heaven seeking the divine, so we gaze into the heavens seeking replies to our great questions. Both activities promise to reveal the nature of reality and so something of our own nature.
Only perhaps we need to learn not to be so concrete, so literal. If it is a mechanism you seek, then the God particle will thrill you. If it is life, then clues must be sought somewhere else.
Comments
The term "God Particle" came from the book "The God Particle / If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?," by Leon Lederman & Dick Teresi (first published in 1993 and reissued in 2006), which is in the bibliography of my free ebook on comparative mysticism.
In his 2006 Preface Dr. Lederman, a Nobel laureate in physics, wrote:
Now as for the title, The God Particle, my coauthor, Dick Teresi, has agreed to accept the blame. I mentioned the phrase as a joke once in a speech, and he remembered it and used it as the working title of the book. "Don't worry," he said, "no publisher ever uses the working title on the final book." The title ended up offending two groups: 1) those who believe in God and 2) those who do not. We were warmly received by those in the middle.
If you would penetrate and see through the things that you put in front of yourself, through your tendencies , you would see and feel directly what is present, which pervades all space and every atom. If you penetrate what is before you, if you could break through the obstructions of your mind-forged-manacles, or Ratios, you would see this profundity in the present.
All of space contains all of the Truth. Every fraction of matter and every part of light, if penetrated, reveals the Absolute. That which is to Understood and thus Realized is absolutely and eternally Present, and Omnipresent, All-Pervading. It need not be sought in a particular place inside ourselves or in the world. Wherever you would look inside, or outside, if you penetrated the limiting conditions that your mind creates and confronts, you would Realize the Revelation that there is only God, and only god is obvious.
In that free state of attention prior to the thinking mind all all of its ratios, everything is transfigured. Wherever there is free attention there is free energy. The world is seen to be free energy. not energy in bondage (to ratios). The world is seen through. Its absolute aliveness or blissfulness is Realized. There is simply the recognition of the ultimate Condition of every appearance.
Put more simply, all of this IS Conscious Light.
For us novices, could we have a brief explanation of why it's called the "God particle"??
Sigh. I'm waiting to see what philosophy has to say about the slaughter, as well as the people who refuse to let us outlaw semi-automatic weapons designed for nothing but killing mass numbers of innocents at once.
As the physicists themselves say, the standard model has been unsuccessful at describing more than about 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent--- 23 percent "dark matter" and the remainder "dark energy", is untouched by the standard model.
Physicists hope that higher energy collisions at the LHC will eventually
produce a particle candidate for dark matter. But "dark energy" is another name for " we don't know what the heck is going on". They haven't a clue yet, though there are theories.
In fact, if you read the accounts of the LHC discovery, you find that most all of the physicists hope that this new particle turns out not to be the Higgs that completes the standard model but rather something unknown that might indicate a new physics leading to a more encompassing model
than the current standard model applying to the mere 4 percent which is termed the visible universe.
In other words, physicists feel stuck, and can you blame them?
There will always be a story being told by way of discovery or thought or what have you, about what the universe does and how it works and how we can get what we desire.
But what is prior to story, prior to thought, to sense to any narrative? What does the story depend upon; what can it not exist without? What is ever present, narrative or no narrative?
That is God and God is ultimate being. In manifest form it is like pure space, complete and needing nothing, pure love, pure openess, and untouched by any aspect of the world; if the world the universe ended tommorrow it would yet continue. In its formless aspect it cannot, of course, be described, since description belongs to the world, the universe--and it is prior to the universe. Thus, it is what there is at the end of knowing and prior to it. We are that which all the universe depends upon---yet we have no form , no face. Rather the universe is our form, our face. This form is how what we are comes to know itself---it is the mirror without which there is nothing known of us. Take away the mirror and there is no form of what we are---for we are prior to form--- we are the foundation of all---unborn, undying
and ever present.
This in form is that pure space of being---this is what we call God. It is none other than our true nature in this manifestation and is our most fundamental mirror. This is a reason for joy.
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