The God Particle: Higgs Boson is God?

The Higgs Boson walks into a bar wearing a t-shirt saying “God Particle”.

“Wass that?” asks the barman.

The Higgs Boson almost blinks off. “Where have you been? I am the God Particle. The world is agog with my discovery.”

“Eh?”

“You moron. I am the basis of the universe. I am the goddam base that gives substance to everything else.”

“Substance to what; base what?” The barman is genuinely puzzled. For all he sees is the t-shirt hanging on a black framework of subdued ethereal glow that threatens to go out and leave the t-shirt hanging in mid air.

The Higgs Boson sputters, pouts a pout that cannot be seen and orders a round of drinks for all the elements of the period table. The poor barmen is bamboozled and threats to resign from life.

The jokes edition of the ‘discovery’ of the Higgs Boson is making its rounds on the internet and the laughs are a plenty. Yet, for all the merriment – starting with the discovery announcement being heralded in Comic Sans font – the seriousness of this discovery cannot be understated. (The Higgs Bososn: Jokes edition can be found here - http://storify.com/notscientific/higgs-boson-the-jokes-edition)

Here is a particle, predicted over 40 years ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, that particle physics says is the basis of the universe. Its entrapment in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN gives us a glimpse on how the universe works. It is called the God Particle, although scientists themselves would prefer to call it the ‘goddamned particle’ – for the obvious reason that it is the most elusive of any sub-atomic particle that they have any specific knowledge of.

The elemental Stephen Hawking actually bet $100 that the Higgs Boson would never be trapped, so sure he was of its non-existence. This month he conceded defeat and paid up to Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan.

All and good in the rarefied fields of science but what does it mean for the man on the street? Zilch.

The world, or in this case, the universe goes on as before. What scientists have done is tap in another set of information about the way things work – putting firmly in place a structure of better understanding the processes of the universe. They have come just a little bit closer to understanding why almost all of the universe is beyond the observations of the likes of you and me.

What this means is:
1. The Universe is a gridwork of mass – 90 percent of which we cannot observe. The little we observe actually forms a minute part of the great mass.
2. Something is forming the base for this huge mass of planets, galaxies, stars and other heavenly bodies and the Higgs Boson could be it.
3. The universe is made of particles which by rights should be free-agents zipping all over the place. Yet something gives them mass and the culprit is seen as the Higgs Boson.
4. The Higgs Boson has a short life – we are not talking mayflies here. It lasts for one millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Apparently this is the reason it is so goddamned hard to trap. Evidence of its existence is seen by what it leaves behind in the collider rather than its actual capture.
5. The Higgs field theory explains why some elementary particles have mass – suggesting that a unseen field permeates all of space and the Higgs Boson is the smallest possible activity in that field.

It is easier to understand that an unseen field permeates space – or is it? I just hark back to what the ancients say of this and it makes perfect sense to me.

In explaining the universe, Hindus first talk of its vastness. The root ‘Brh’ means to swell, expand or enlarge. Brahman, accepted by Hindus as the actuality of godhead, the ultimate reality, the absolute, is the basis of the universe. It is the force/power/energy that permeates the universe, giving it its form and energy.

Originally – when science had just discovered the atom – Brahman was denoted as the vastest of the vast and smallest of the small, in this case the atom.

With the discovery of sub atomic elements and particles, the smallest of the small becomes the sub atomic particles. Now with the discovery of the

Right – so I am riding the crest of scientific discovery and adopting it as part of my religion. So, sue me. Big deal.

The fact remains that the ancients knew of the existence of this unseen field upon which the rest of the universe carries out its works.

This from the Upanishads.

1. Brahman is the one Absolute Reality behind the changing appearances of the universe.
2. Brahamis the universal substrate from which material things originate and to which they return after dissolution.
3. Sarvam khalv idam brahma - Brahman is everything, and all we see are His different energies — material or spiritual
4. Brahman contains within it the potentiality and archetypes behind all possible manifest phenomenal forms.
5. Brahman is the reality behind everything in this universe, the cause which sustains the effect.
6. Brahman is the ultimate essence of material phenomena

So, what does this mean in the grand scheme of things? Again, zilch.

Brahman cannot be worshipped, only understood. Its workings are beyond the ken of man – just like the Higgs Boson. As science strives to understand the Higgs Boson, the followers of Brahman try to do the same. The only difference is that one is material striving, the other spiritual.

Science now appears to know of this particle that imbues others with some potential and is seeking to understand it more. I can’t wait for more. It just validates what I have learnt as a follower of the religions.

But most religions are getting defensive over the discovery – finger pointing about science setting out to destroy religion is happening all over the world.

The only thing I can say to that is: “Why would God – the omnipresent, the omniscient and the omnipotent – require to be defended? Especially by the likes of puny humans.”

Leave be – get on with your faith, and leave the faith of science alone. They have done great in making the lives of human better – why not allow them a little fun in making a discovery any Hindu (with a little thinking) already knows?

Or maybe it is just an over-reaction to the nickname. Some see the Higgs Boson’s nickname as the God Particle as a direct attack on faith in God.

If the particle had been nicknamed Nick, it may not have aroused so much antipathy amongst the religious.

So, Nick walks into the bar and says “I am Higgs Boson.”. The Barman would probably say: “What are you having, Mr Boson?”

An analogy:

For decades, experts have been trying to come up with analogies to illustrate how the Higgs mechanism works. One of the best-known was proposed in 1993 by David Miller, a physicist at University College London. Imagine looking down from a balcony in a ballroom, watching a cocktail party below. When just plain folks try to go from one end of the room to the other, they can walk through easily, with no resistance from the party crowd. But when a celebrity like Justin Bieber shows up, other partygoers press around him so tightly that he can hardly move ... and once he moves, the crowd moves with him in such a way that the whole group is harder to stop.

The partygoers are like Higgs bosons, the just plain folks are like massless particles, and Bieber is like a massive Z boson

Stephen Hawking needs to know what God is

Stephen Hawking has declared that God did not create the Universe.
In his latest book, The Grand Design, Professor Hawking said: ''It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.''
The respected scientist claims that no divine force was needed to explain why the universe was formed. That I cannot agree with.
What Hawking does is take the model of God as shown by the Judeo Christian religions and state that this God cannot have created the universe. And he means create in the sense to come into being, as in an external force moulded the universe into something from some material.
I find Hawking’s statement to be based an assertion that does not take in account the sublime philosophies of Hinduism, or the philosophies of any other religion that has plumbed the depths of the mystery of God. Here is a scientist who dismisses God, maybe based on his experience of religion. Maybe religion did not work for him (as it does not for many, many people) and he found some solace in science - enough solace to come up with the assertion that God does not play a part in the universe.
Here is a scientist making an assertion that people will take as a fact based on the reputation he has. This is highly irresponsible of someone of his standing.
Has Stephen Hawking’s understood God as depicted in religions other than Christianity, or maybe Judaism? Has he spent time trawling the depths of the philosophies that make up the foundation of all religions? He has not. He cannot have for the simple reason the mystical aspects of Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism has apparently escaped his notice.
While science has been around in its present form for about two centuries, a science of another kind that looks into the mysteries that surround us has been around for millennia.
This science tells of the immanence of God in the universe, of a power indescribable, almost unknowable, of a universe guided and guarded by a supreme intelligence. This Absolute Entity is the material that shapes the universes, in which the universes exist, in which takes place the so-called creation of universes.
It is a designer of such unsurpassed intelligence that the full brunt of human reasoning makes nary a dent in the knowing of it.
In declaring that God has no place in the creation of the Universe, Hawking goes a step further than that great scientist Albert Einstein who also did not believe in the Judeo Christian religious concept of God creating the universe, or anything that sits on high passing judgement on mankind. Yet Einstein believed in a power that governed the workings of the universe. Einstein’s quote is below:
• I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
o In response the telegrammed question of New York's Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein in (24 April 1929): "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words." Einstein replied in only 25 (German) words. Spinoza's ideas of God are often characterized as being pantheistic.
o Expanding on this he later wrote: "I can understand your aversion to the use of the term 'religion' to describe an emotional and psychological attitude which shows itself most clearly in Spinoza... I have not found a better expression than 'religious' for the trust in the rational nature of reality that is, at least to a certain extent, accessible to human reason."
 As quoted in Einstein : Science and Religion by Arnold V. Lesikar
Einstein posited a governing power that ‘did not play dice with the cosmos’. To him God was the underlying order of the universe, something that is demonstrated ably in the Vedantic philosophies of Hinduism. And Einstein trusted in the rational nature of this reality.
Spinoza equated God (infinite substance) with Nature, consistent with Einstein's belief in an impersonal deity. (See notes below on what Spinoza thought of God)
Hawking, on the other hand, seeks to isolate the universe into a thing of spontaneity, where things happen because some elements or aspect come together, governed by laws of science. There is no design as such, just the universe coming together haphazardly and blurting out new substances according to ‘scientific’ rules of engagement.
Hawking makes the mistake of taking ‘God’ at face value of the religions, if any, he has ‘studied’. Here is a man blinkered by his intellect to the extent he is unable to see an alternative. He believes the universe is governed by the laws of science, clearly forgetting the so-called science is an evolving thing and laws keep changing.
Findings in quantum mechanics in recent times show a different view of the universe than what classical physics has been offering us for the past 150 years.
In their quest of a theory for everything, science has been going through theory after theory to explain the universe: string theory, brane theory and quantum foam theory being some of the takes on how the universe works.
While these problems remain unsolved, even with giant strides in quantum mechanics/physics:
Is there a preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics? How does the quantum description of reality, which includes elements such as the "superposition of states" and "wavefunction collapse", give rise to the reality we perceive?(Wikipedia)
But not for Vedanta. The jnana yoga aspect of Hinduism has been mulling the question of the universe, the reality of it, and the part we play in it since time immemorial. The answers found in this yoga has been accepted as supreme even by some Western scientists.
The universe originally is a singularity, a point: as depicted in the bindu of the Om . While science is debating the wave function collapse, Hindu seers have been accepting it as a fact, on a very large scale. The universe expands out of the singularity and then collapses back into it periodically. The time frames here are massive but this function can also be seen in its minute form when a wave function is reduced to a single point after interaction with an observer.
What we see at quantum level is a replication of how the universe works (according to Vedanta) in which all the possibilities of an event is encompassed into a singularity upon observation.
The universe operates, according to Vedanta, a like the obverse and reverse (head and tail) of a coin, the flip of which decided whether the Absolute Entity is in action or in abeyance. Comes the flip when the Absolute Entity is at rest and the active element of the Absolute Entity, what Hindus call Maya, comes into play. Maya has two aspects: first of veiling the Absolute and then superimposing something ethereal onto it. This veiling projection is the universe as we see it.
Thus starts the day of Brahma, a colossal 4 plus billion years in which Maya manifests as the tangible and expanding universe. The collapse of this, the laya, results in everything enfolding on itself as the night of Brahma starts.
This time span is told of in our shastras as a night and day of Brahma, equating to some 8.6 billion years in total. And science says the universe started about 4.3 billion years ago, which makes it a day of Brahma?
The reality that quantum mechanics is striving towards is explained by Vendanta as the mind and senses working together to ‘make sense of the superimposition that shrouds the Absolute Entity. As Swami Vivekananda pointed out, if humans had a sixth sense - maybe an electrical sense - they would see the world totally differently from what we perceive it with our present five senses and the analysis of the sense perceptions by the brain.
The concept of the universe as a hologram, rather than a substantial thing of matter, does a better job of explaining the universe than many of the scientific theories around.
‘This superimposition of states’ equates to the lokas that even we as Hindus have trouble getting our heads around. The Brane theory talks of dimensions and the Hindu loka is a dimension that actually exists within another dimension.
This Absolute Entity is known by many names and yet is unknowable. For Maya shrouds its reality and only through understanding Maya can one know of this Entity. All of the forms and names associated with ‘knowledge’ that we know stops short and within this field of Maya.
This sublime thought that everything is God comes the ‘fact’ that the material of the universe is the Supreme Entity in its active mode. This is what Hawking should have looked at in understanding God before he made his statement.
Spinoza’s God
For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world. According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus sive Natura" (God or Nature) Spinoza meant God was Natura naturans not Natura naturata, and Jaspers believed that Spinoza, in his philosophical system, did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence.
Even God under the attributes of thought and extension cannot be identified strictly with our world. That world is of course "divisible"; it has parts. But Spinoza insists that "no attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided" (Which means that one cannot conceive an attribute in a way that leads to division of substance), and that "a substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible" (Ethics, Part I, Propositions 12 and 13). Following this logic, our world should be considered as a mode under two attributes of thought and extension. Therefore the pantheist formula "One and All" would apply to Spinoza only if the "One" preserves its transcendence and the "All" were not interpreted as the totality of finite things.