Physicists directing research through the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) have announced that the existence of the sub-atomic "God particle" will be decided by the end of 2012.
For many years, scientists have speculated the existence of the particle, also called the Higgs boson particle, but have not been able to provide any proof to corroborate the fact.
However, at the International Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics in Grenoble, France, this past weekend, researchers presented some curious data bleeps that could hint the existence of such a particle.
So far, the physicists stated that after conducting particle-smashing tests in the LHC, reaching speeds up to 99.99 percent of the speed of light, they were only able to determine the location the particle was not found, adding that with more tests and more data they would be able to determine whether the particle exists within 18 months.
If the particle was found to exist, then it would explain how all matter, including creatures, in the universe have come to have mass. Additionally, it would complete the puzzle for the Standard Model of physics that was first established in 1970, a theory that explains the Big Bang as well.
“This experiment is one of the most significant of this third millennium,” Dr. Karl W. Giberson of the BioLogos Foundation said earlier. He called the LHC experiment an “extraordinary event for Christian to contemplate” and said it might lead to further experiments that will one day answer some of man’s deep questions regarding the universe.
“What is most exciting in this experiment is that it lets us push back a bit closer to that mysterious moment almost 14 billion years ago, when our universe emerged in the Big Bang,” he stated. “What the LHC might demonstrate is a piece of the grand puzzle: where does mass come from? If Christians can embrace the Big Bang theory, instead of inventing odd and implausible reasons to reject it, they will be drawn into a most wonderful world of grandeur that will greatly enlarge their concept of God."
Giberson, who teaches at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Mass., is a theistic evolutionist – someone who asserts that classical religious teachings about God are compatible with the modern scientific understanding about biological evolution.
While Dr. Jason Lisle of Answers in Genesis believes the experiment may give some insight into how God upholds the universe today, he said the LHC cannot confirm the Big Bang nor prove anything.
“Just because something can be done today doesn’t mean it has ever happened in nature in the past,” he has argued. Lisle is a creationist astrophysicist.
Physicists in the past believed that protons and neutrons were the smallest particles of an atom's nucleus, but these large giant colliders have shown that more miniature quarks and gluons exist in addition to forces and particles.
