John Williams Gary, Ph.D from U.C. Riverside
That is a silly name made up by Leon Letterman, a Nobel-prize winning particle physicist and former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for his popular book written some time ago. No scientist calls it that, and it has nothing to do with spirituality. I suppose that it refers to the fact we have been looking for it many decades, without success until now, so it has taken on sort of a mystique. Also, it is a very special particle in that it explains how particles acquire mass, so it is essential to the theory and is the only particle of the standard model that had not been yet observed.
That is not an accurate characterization. The reason it took so long to find the Higgs (or rather, a Higgs-like object, because we haven’t yet proven that what has been found is the Higgs) is that we didn’t have the experimental facilities to do it. Earlier accelerators didn’t have enough energy to produce it. (The Tevatron accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory probably could have found it eventually, but the energy of the Tevatron is lower than the LHC, making the rate at which a Higgs is produced lower, and it would have taken a few more years for them to get enough data to establish a convincing signal). The big bang has incomparably more energy than the LHC and so it (and many other, much heavier particles) can and would have been created no problem.
3) Evolutionists believe that the universe is formed out of luck and chaos, but with the discovery of the new particle, does it prove the universe to be constructed under the laws from something greater than our understanding, considering it only took one try for it to work in the Big Bang and matter to be created?
Again, this is a mischaracterization. We believe that nature is ruled by physical laws, and that those laws are understandable. This is as true for biological science and evolution as it is for physical science and particle physics. There are elements of randomness, in evolution through gene mutation and in particle physics though lack of determinism in quantum mechanics (e.g., we can’t precisely say when an unstable particle will decay, but we can predict the distribution of decays times). Luck does not play a role, and the laws of nature are not beyond our understanding. We believe the big bang is subject to the same physical laws. It is difficult to understand all the way back to the very instant of the big bang, because the energies are so large they exceed the masses relevant for our current framework: the standard model. However, we believe we can understand more and more, and push back our understanding closer and closer to the instant of the big bang, and discoveries like the one made at CERN of the new particle are key to progress in this area.
4) Is this the beginning of a new realm in science? And where is it headed?
The Standard Model of particle physics, of which the Higgs is the last missing piece, has been put together over the last 50 years. It is a great intellectual achievement for mankind. In that sense, the Higgs might be considered an end, rather than a beginning, i.e., if what has been found is the standard model Higgs, it completes the Standard Model. However, the Standard Model is incomplete. It is ad hoc in many ways and requires artificial fine tuning of parameters to make it work. Therefore we know there must be a deeper theory. It is our hope that what has been found is *not* a standard model Higgs but rather something beyond the standard model, so that it shows us the way to extend the theory. In this case the new particle would indeed represent a new realm in particle physics. In the future, we will study the properties of the new particle to determine whether or not it is a standard model Higgs, and potentially even build new accelerators, colliding electrons and positrons at the new particle’s energy of 125 GeV, to precisely determine its characteristics.
No. It is the development of the same field, the description of matter at its most fundamental level, that began with the discovery of atoms, the nucleus, etc. in the first years of the 20th
