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‘God Particle’ Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs Passes Away Age 94
(Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP)British physicist Peter Higgs, whose theory of a mass-giving particle – the so-called Higgs boson – jointly earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics, has died aged 94, the University of Edinburgh announced on Tuesday.
“He passed away peacefully at home on Monday 8 April following a short illness,” the Scottish university, where he had been a professor for nearly five decades, said in a statement.
It called him “a great teacher and mentor, inspiring generations of young scientists”.
“His family has asked that the media and public respect their privacy at this time,” the university added.
Higgs used ground-breaking theoretical work to help explain how the Universe has mass, thus resolving one of the greatest puzzles in physics and earning him a place alongside Albert Einstein and Max Planck in textbooks.
“His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.”
Remembered
CERN Director General Fabiola Gianotti paid tribute to Higgs.
“Besides his outstanding contributions to particle physics, Peter was a very special person, an immensely inspiring figure for physicists across the world, a man of rare modesty,” she said in a statement.
Fabiola also lauded him as a “great teacher” able to explain physics “in a very simple and yet profound way”.
“An important piece of CERN’s history and accomplishments is linked to him. I am very saddened, and I will miss him sorely,” she added.
Brian Cox, a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester and a science television programme presenter, said Higgs’s name “will be remembered as long as we do physics”.
“I was fortunate enough to meet him several times, and beyond being a famous physicist – I think to his embarrassment at times – he was always charming and modest,” he said on social media.
Britain made him a Companion of Honour in the 2013 New Year Honours list, handed out for service of conspicuous national importance.
I have just been reading about the exciting hunt for the Higgs boson—
a rather dramatic way to put it, since the scientists involved were not, actually, hunting for a boson, but looking to discover whatever was out there.1 In this case, however, they indeed found the particle physics had been waiting 40 years for. Yes, that’s right, combined data sets from the ATLAS experiment looking at two-photon mass distribution and four-lepton mass distribution, as well as other decay channels, gave a “5 sigma significance.” What? Well, a bump was seen on a graph, a lot of times. Or, in other words, the Higgs boson was discovered.
Peter Higgs and two others were eventually awarded a Nobel prize, but the experimental effort to confirm the theory that made Higgs’ name so famous was massive. Two major experimental groups—ATLAS and CMS—each involved thousands of people. Data was amassed that would amount to around 5 km of CDs stacked on top of each other. The ‘hunt for the boson’ also required the existence of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, a massive particle accelerator 27 km in circumference, around 100 m underground, built in collaboration between Japan, the United States and India, with many contributions from other countries. The machine cost nearly 5 billion US dollars to build, and costs around 1 billion US dollars to run every year.
The machine cost nearly 5 billion US dollars to build, and costs around 1 billion US dollars to run every year. Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
It’s “Big Science,” which increasingly attracts opposition from both within and without the scientific community. From within, scientists object that too much money is being spent on a small number of projects, starving funds from other, less spectacular, research efforts. From outside, the objection can be more general. “Higgs boson?”—many of the general public may well say. Big deal. And we spend billions on this?
Indeed. Finding the Higgs boson was a big deal, a multi-billion deal, at a time when the financial crisis meant thousands were out of work and losing homes, in a world where at any time millions go without food and live in poverty. Where children die of curable diseases or live as orphans scavenging rubbish dumps. Where millions of lives are a sheer drudgery of walking miles to find drinkable water, every day. How do we, as a race, justify spending so much money to find a blip on a graph?
Certainly the question needs to be raised by Christians. To what extent can we justify spending so much money on things that satisfy the intellectual curiosity of a few, when we are called to care for the poor? Triumphalist proclamations of the human spread of understanding do little to allay this concern. The scale of excitement was massive, people describing the Higgs boson as “the God particle,” no less. It was claimed that this discovery would extend human understanding in the quest that Stephen Hawking famously said years ago would eventually uncover the mind of God.
In practice, it seems that such fundamental research is trying to do the opposite. This quest, in the minds of many who undertake it, is specifically reducing the mind of God, claiming ground from those whose faith commitment to God is seen as irrational in the face of the mounting evidence for the physical understanding of the universe. Is this the project for which we want to spend millions of public money? The quest to extend the dominion of materialism?
Actually, my answer to all these questions is yes, we should.
How can I make that claim in light of what I’ve said above? To start with, at least I can say that there are worse things that millions get spent on. The personal indulgence of ultra-wealthy individuals, for instance. Did you know that you can buy a luxury yacht with two helipads for around 135 million euros? I’d rather increase the sum of human knowledge than have money spent like that.
I think there is a Christian case to be made for supporting fundamental research, even expensive fundamental research. Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Yet even more than this kind of grudging admission, I think there is a Christian case to be made for supporting fundamental research, even expensive fundamental research. The reason is not just the utility that emerges from basic research. Researchers are quick to point out that even very esoteric particle physics has led to extremely useful applications. Antimatter is used in PET scanners, very handy for medical diagnoses. Accelerators can generate X-rays for sterilization of food or instruments. Proton beams can be used to target cancer far more successfully than earlier radiation therapy. Also, the technology designed to study high-energy particles is in itself amazing. The detectors that pick up signals from the Large Hadron Collider can also pick out individual photons in X-ray imaging or monitor a person’s exposure to radiation.
That is an impressive list of applications; but even without considering practical utility, as Christians we should say that trying to find out about the most tiny particles at highest energies is a good thing to do. Why? Because truth and knowledge matter. It is a privilege to increase dominion in this way.
But what about the hungry? That is a question for my next post.
Kirsten Birkett (PhD University of New South Wales) has served as Lecturer in Philosophy, Ethics and Church History at Oak Hill Theological College, Research Fellow with the Latimer Trust, and Associate Minister of an Anglican parish in London. She is the author several books, including The Essence of Darwinism (Matthias Media, 2001), The Essence of Feminism (Matthias Media, 2003), and her most recent, Living Without Fear (2022).
On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:
…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:
Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend, Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross, Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman, Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison, Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann, Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert, Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku, Stuart Kauffman, Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus, Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow, Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff, Jonathan Parry, Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse, Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees, Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg, Lee Silver, Peter Singer, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple, Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson, .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and Lewis Wolpert,
In the third video below in the 150th clip in this series are his words and my response is below them.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
________
Below are two letters I wrote to Dr. Higgs and in the letter from September 2015 I respond to his quote:
_
Enjoy the pictures of an amazing life
Harry Kroto with his father above
Margaret with David and Stephen
leaving Liverpool for Canada 1964
Kroto and his wife, Margaret.
______________
June 11, 2016
Dear Dr. Higgs,
Since I wrote you last I was very sad on April 30th to learn of the passing of the great scientist Harry Kroto. Not only was Harry Kroto a Nobel Prize winning chemist but judging from comments of his close friends, Kroto was an even better man personally.
Tim Logan, chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida State: “What always brought out the best in Harry was his wife, Margaret. Margaret and Harry were always together, until the end of Harry’s life. She served as his business manager, scheduling his many speaking engagements around the world, organizing the travel, and supporting him in many, many ways. What I found so remarkable is that even after 57 years together, they were so obviously in love. Harry would include photos and sketches he made of her in his lectures, and he always acknowledged her as his moral compass.”
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY I WAS PROMPTED ORIGINALLY TO WRITE YOU? It was because Harry Kroto took the time in 2014 to correspond with me. After I wrote him in the spring and summer of 2014 he emailed me twice and then sent me a letter in November of 2014. In that letter he referred me to a film series Renowned Academics talk about God that featured your comments.
Furthermore, your full interview appears on the VEGA website which Kroto founded, and he was so proud of his videos from the VEGA website that he played some of them during his speech at a BEYOND BELIEF CONFERENCE (he actually spoke there in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and all those speeches are on You Tube). I have always been fascinated by brilliant individuals and recently I had the opportunity to come across a very interesting article by Michael Polanyi, LIFE TRANSCENDING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, in the magazine CHEMICAL AND ENGINEERING NEWS, August 21, 1967, and I also got hold of a 1968 talk by Francis Schaeffer based on this article. ISN’T IT AMAZING THAT JUST LIKE KROTO’S FAMILY POLANYI HAD TO FLEE EUROPE BECAUSE OF HITLER’S INSANE GRUDGE AGAINST THE JEWS!!!!I know you don’t believe in God or the Devil but if anyone was demon-possessed it had to be Hitler.
Polanyi’s son John actually won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This article by Michael Polanyi concerns Francis Crick and James Watson and their discovery of DNA in 1953. Polanyi noted:
Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of in
animate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.
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Francis Schaeffer (30 January 1912 – 15 May 1984[1]) and his wife Edith (November 3, 1914 – March 30, 2013)
James Watson (1928-) and Francis Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004)
Michael Polanyi, FRS[1] (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976)
John Charles Polanyi, (born 23 January 1929)
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John Scott Haldane (2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936)
| J. B. S. Haldane | |
|---|---|
Haldane in 1914
|
(5 November 1892 – 1 December 1964)
Maurice Wilkins (15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004)
Erwin Schrödinger (12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961)
Sir Peter Medawar ( 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987)
Barry Commoner (May 28, 1917 – September 30, 2012)
I am sending you this two CD’s of this talk because I thought you may find it very interesting. It includes references to not only James D. Watson, and Francis Crick but also Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Schrodinger, J.S. Haldane (his son was the famous J.B.S. Haldane), Peter Medawar, and Barry Commoner.
Thank you for your time. I know how busy you are and I want to thank you for taking the time to read this letter.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher,
P.O. Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, United States, cell ph 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com
September 21, 2015
Dear Dr. Higgs,
On You Tube I saw this quote from you:
I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past. I certainly know a lot of scientists in my field who are believers and I accept that. I don’t happen to be one myself, but maybe that’s just more a matter of my family background than that there’s any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two.
I like your attitude towards the subject of God. You seemed to keep an open mind.
Recently I had the opportunity to come across a very interesting article by Michael Polanyi,LIFE TRANSCENDING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, in the magazine CHEMICAL AND ENGINEERING NEWS, August 21, 1967, and I also got hold of a 1968 talk by Francis Schaeffer based on this article. Polanyi’s son John actually won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This article by Michael Polanyi concerns Francis Crick and James Watson and their discovery of DNA in 1953. Polanyi noted:
Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of in
animate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.
I would like to send you a CD copy of this talk because I thought you may find it very interesting. It includes references to not only James D. Watson, and Francis Crick but also Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Schrodinger, J.S. Haldane (his son was the famous J.B.S. Haldane), Peter Medawar, and Barry Commoner. I WONDER IF YOU EVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO RUN ACROSS THESE MEN OR ANY OF THEIR FORMER STUDENTS?
Below is a portion of the transcript from the CD and Michael Polanyi’s words are in italics while Francis Schaeffer’s words are not:
My account of the situation will seem to oscillate in several directions, and I shall set out, therefore, its stages in order.
I shall show that:
- Commoner’s criteria of irreducibility to physics and chemistry are incomplete; they are necessary but not sufficient conditions of it.
- Machines are irreducible to physics and chemistry.
- By virtue of the principle of boundary control, mechanistic structures of living beings appear to be likewise irreducible.
4. The structure of DNA, which according to Watson and Crick controls heredity, is not explicable by physics and chemistry.
5. Assuming that morphological differentiation reflects the information content of DNA, we can prove that the morphology of living beings forms a boundary condition which, as such, is not explicable by physics and chemistry (the suggestion arrived at in the third item).
…The relationship between the two controls–the devices of engineering and the laws of natural science--is not symmetrical. The machine is a machine by having been built and being then controlled according to the principles of engineering. The laws of physics and chemistry are indifferent to these principles; they would go on working in the fragments of the machine if it were smashed. But they serve the machine while it lasts; machines rely for their operations always on the laws of physics and chemistry.
You can think of it for example in an automobile. The man building the automobile must take in account the structural properties he uses. But when the automobile is junk and put into the automobile graveyard and smashed by the giant press into a small piece of metal it is still open to the same analysis and it has the same chemical and physical properties. The mere fact of these same chemical and physical properties existing does not mean we still have the automobile.
____________
Stephen C. Meyer, Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute; on October 7, 2008 wrote the article, “A Scientific History and Philosophical Defense of the Theory of Intelligent Design,” and here is a portion of it:
Just as the mathematicians at Wistar were casting doubt on the idea that chance (i.e., random mutations) could generate genetic information, another leading scientist was raising questions about the role of law-like necessity. In 1967 and 1968, the Hungarian chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi published two articles suggesting that the information in
DNA was “irreducible” to the laws of physics and chemistry (Polanyi 1967: 21; Polanyi 1968: 1308-12). In these papers, Polanyi noted that the DNA conveys information in virtue of very specific arrangements of the nucleotide bases (that is, the chemicals that function as alphabetic or digital characters) in the genetic text. Yet, Polanyi also noted the laws of physics and chemistry allow for a vast number of other possible arrangements of these same chemical constituents. Since chemical laws allow a vast number of possible arrangements of nucleotide bases, Polanyi reasoned that no specific arrangement was dictated or determined by those laws. Indeed, the chemical properties of the nucleotide bases allow them to attach themselves interchangeably at any site on the (sugar-phosphate) backbone of the DNA molecule. (See Figure 1). Thus, as Polanyi (1968: 1309) noted, “As the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the base sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule.” Polanyi argued that it is precisely this chemical indeterminacy that allows DNA to store information and which also shows the irreducibility of that information to physical-chemical laws or forces. As he explained:
- Suppose that the actual structure of a DNA molecule were due to the fact that the bindings of its bases were much stronger than the bindings would be for any other distribution of bases, then such a DNA molecule would have no information content. Its code-like character would be effaced by an overwhelming redundancy. […] Whatever may be the origin of a DNA configuration, it can function as a code only if its order is not due to the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically indeterminate as the sequence of words is on a printed page (Polanyi 1968:1309).
________
Thank you for your time. I know how busy you are and I want to thank you for taking the time to read this letter.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher,
P.O. Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, United States, cell ph 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com
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