Leader: Catching a glimpse of God

YESTERDAY, excited scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva revealed they had caught a tantalising, fleeting glimpse of what they believe to be the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle”.

The image their computers generated as a result of collisions inside the mighty atom-smashing machine are a colourful representation of the presence of the particle, which is necessary to make what is called the Standard Model of physics work. Put simply, it gives everything in the universe mass. The trouble was that although the boson was essential to the theory, no-one had ever been able to prove its existence, predicted by Edinburgh-based physicist Professor Peter Higgs.

Yesterday, that changed. Or to be more accurate, it may have changed, with two separate experiments producing results that hint at the presence of this will-o’-the-wisp phenomenon that provides the answer to, well, life, the universe and everything.

Scientists, including Prof Higgs himself, dislike the “God particle” designation, but if these experiments are confirmed by further work, we will have a theory that comes much closer to explaining how our universe works.

If we are, therefore, in the realm where physics meets philosophy and theology we might, in one sense, be catching a glimpse of God.