The discoverers of the Higgs boson, also known as the God particle, were recently co-awarded a Nobel Prize (at least, two of the researchers were—more than 3,000 worked on the project, including a University of Minnesota physics professor). The Higgs boson, if particle physics papers are not on your bedside table, is believed to enable all the mass in the universe. Without the Higgs boson, there would be no sun, no earth, no us. But it’s unlikely to replace the god of popular imagination much less popular belief, as depicted in this engraving from the MIA’s collection (“God Creating the Animals,” by an unknown artist in 16th-century Italy).
Collisions between protons at the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland, offer evidence for the existence of a Higgs boson.
This god is one of wonder, his creation filled with “living creatures of every kind” (Genesis 1:24), even, apparently, a unicorn. And why not? This was the Age of Exploration, when Europeans were discovering exotic animals all the time—why not a unicorn? The animals even look a bit tentative, as though still adjusting to their materialization. In fact, it was Europeans who were adjusting to them, and it served their purposes to suggest that the world was fresh and naive, ready to be bent to their will.
God may have made man in his image, but artists have made God in theirs. He reflects our ongoing discovery of this place we call home and our presumptive place in it—our destiny, and our conviction that there is such a plan. But the discovery of the Higgs boson contradicts the idea of a plan. It doesn’t have the mass predicted by our laws of physics, and scientists didn’t find the complementary particles they expected, further endangering Albert Einstein’s notion of “naturalness,” the dream that the laws of nature are what you’d expect from a creator with a plan: sublimely unified, inevitable, and elegant. Instead, it suggests a universe that is much more arbitrary—and much less beautiful.