There is something and not nothing

The mind of a theoretical physicist must be a wonderful place. It can consider things that for me are only words, and will always be words. It can make play with multiple dimensions. It can contemplate black holes. It can not only theorize the existence of the Higgs boson, but can devise an experiment to find it--an experiment that succeeds.

This has been called the God Particle, but the one thing it doesn't establish is the existence of God. It proves the existence of something that is capable of being observed by scientific experiment, and this something is said to account for the existence of matter.

Obviously you are not here today to learn anything useful from me about the Higgs boson. I am unqualified. What I am is a curious person who, like all thoughtful people possibly from the dawn of thought, have asked myself:

Why is there something instead of nothing?

The answer, "because God made it" reminds me infuriating things I was always being told as a child:

"It's to make little boys like you ask questions."

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."

That answer is all the more unsatisfactory because there are so many different peoples and cultures, and they have so many definitions of God. What they're really saying is, "There is something instead of nothing because my particular God made it." From the Baltimore Catechism, I memorized the first words of the Apostle's Creed: "I believe in God, the father almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth." From Colossians, I learned he created "all things visible and invisible." Why should I believe? The problem is that belief comes before a reason for belief.

Yet the Higgs boson is also inspires questions. Let us assume, as we are told by Lawrence Krauss in The New York Times, that "it makes even more remarkable the precarious accident that allowed our existence to form from nothing." Yes, but why was there an accident instead of no accident? Krauss continues: "...if there exists an otherwise invisible background field permeating all of space, then the particles that convey some force like electromagnetism can interact with this field and effectively encounter resistance to their motion and slow down, like a swimmer moving through molasses. As a result, these particles can behave as if they are heavy, as if they have a mass."

You and I behave as if we have mass. And therefore we have mass, because otherwise we wouldn't behave that way.

I am in way over my head here, but these are the kinds of questions ordinary people wonder about. I am nothing if not ordinary. If you explain it as God, and Higgs explains it as his boson, what has been explained?

Here is where we get to the heart of the question. The scientific method has no interest in belief. What you believe is of interest only from an autobiographical viewpoint. Scientists (1) regard a phenomenon they would like to explain, (2) suggest a hypothesis to explain it, and (3) devise an experiment to test their hypothesis.

One enigma of matter in the universe, scientists found, is that there doesn't seem to be enough of it. Since their observation of gravitational forces on celestial objects seems to make the missing matter necessary, they hypothesize the existence of matter they cannot see. They call it dark matter. Calling it "dark matter" does nothing to explain it, however.

Look again at Krauss's words: "...if there exists an otherwise invisible background field permeating all of space..." If. If. There is the mind of the scientist. The existence of this invisible background field is a hypothesis, suggested by its effect on the visible. We can tell by our observations in the tangible world that something must be there. Common sense suggests it is smaller than anything we can see, even with our most advanced instruments. The scientific method suggests devising an experiment to look for it.

That is why the Large Hadron Collider was constructed outside Geneva. It accelerates particles through a 17-mile tunnel at such high speeds that when they collide their pieces might be visible. Not visible to the eye, of course, but to the most sophisticated tools we can devise. Krauss again: "Every second at the Large Hadron Collider, enough data is generated to fill more than 1,000 one-terabyte hard drives -- more than the information in all the world's libraries. The logistics of filtering and analyzing the data to find the Higgs particle peeking out under a mountain of noise, not to mention running the most complex machine humans have ever built, is itself a triumph of technology and computational wizardry of unprecedented magnitude."