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Good morning.

So, as was widely predicted, the Nobel prize for physics was awarded to Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University and Francois Englert from Belgium. Back in the sixties, they and others proposed a mechanism which would explain what was then a theoretical puzzle – how is it that the basic building blocks of the universe have mass? Their answer to that problem predicted the existence of a particle - and after some fifty years of vast intellectual effort and investment, its existence was confirmed at Cern in Geneva last year. The particle is referred to, of course, as the Higgs boson, or somewhat more sensationally as ‘the God particle’.

I quizzed a distinguished colleague at Trinity College about all this yesterday. Judging perfectly fairly the limits of my powers of comprehension, she told me that all I needed to know is that the particle is ‘the stuff that makes stuff stuff’. But she also told me how the term ‘God particle’ came to be. A former Nobel prizewinner, Leon Lederman, wanted to call his book on the Higgs boson ‘the Goddamn particle’ – just because the particle was proving so very difficult to track down – but his publisher wouldn’t have it. So the title became ‘the God particle’ - which probably wasn’t bad for sales, even if the nickname was otherwise misleading.

From the point of view Christianity, the naming of the particle was bad news just because it perpetuated a misunderstanding of what the Bible, and in particular the book of Genesis, is about. Contrary to what some maintain, the book of Genesis was never meant as a contribution to the higher physics. If the best quick way to explain the Higgs Boson is to say that it is the ‘stuff that makes stuff stuff’, the best way known to me to explain the book of Genesis in short order is to say that it is about what happens, not about what happened. And what happens, in biblical and other history, is that humans are often very far from being – well - human.

The Higgs Boson particle, like the other stuff of the universe, is what it is – like planets, like trees, like beasts and birds, it does what it says on the tin (even if in the case of the Higgs Boson, the instructions on the tin are pretty complicated). Humans, however, are different, and are perilously positioned, with the extraordinary capacity for freedom – which wrongly used renders us inhuman. Read past the first verses of Genesis and you will find that if it were filmed for television, it would have to go out after the watershed – there is fratricide, rape, incest, oppression and all the rest.

The discovery of the unfortunately nicknamed ‘God particle’ may make the universe a bit less mysterious, but we humans remain a mystery and problem to ourselves and to each other. Notwithstanding the achievements of Higgs and his colleagues in fathoming why particles are as they are, we are left with the biblical task of trying to fathom and respond to the fact that humans are so often less than they could or should be.

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