Sabbath 19/4/30/120

Dear Friends,

Some twenty odd years ago I wrote a work on the philosophy of Creation and the necessity of Singularist Causation (see Cox, Creation: From Anthropomorphic Theology to Theomorphic Anthropology (B5) in chapter 1). In that work, as well as philosophically analysing the theory of Causation and demonstrating the necessity of Singularist Causation and hence the logical necessity of God as the Causal Singularity or Creator, it was necessary to examine the physical creation and the potential for the physical Universe to be underpinned by a non-physical or Spiritual structure of matter as is implied in the Bible text.

In that work we began to look at the sub-atomic structure and the existence of quarks and other sub-structures. It was not necessary in that work to isolate the complete structure and examine all of it including the postulated but as yet undiscovered Higgs boson section of the structure.

This week scientists have finally announced the isolation of what appears to be the Higgs boson element.  They are excited about the implications for Quantum Physics and the certainty or otherwise of whether it is the Higgs boson or other like element and whether it has explained the structure of matter in any significant way. The fact of the discovery in no way alters the necessity of Singularist Causation and nor does it undermine the necessity of a non-physical sub structure to the Universe; nor is it likely to be the so-called God Particle which is the way the Higgs boson has been described.

In the article “Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHCComments (1665)” By Paul Rincon Science editor on the BBC News website, Geneva relevant comments were made. The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass. The current theory of the Universe really only accounts for about 4% of its mass.

Cern director Rolf Heuer confirmed the Higgs results on behalf of Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

Both of the Higgs boson-hunting experiments at the LHC see a level of certainty in their data worthy of a "discovery". However, more work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs.

The results announced at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research), home of the LHC in Geneva, were met with loud applause and cheering.

Paul Rincorn reports that “Prof Peter Higgs, after whom the particle is named, wiped a tear from his eye as the teams finished their presentations in the Cern auditorium. “ He added later:

‘I would like to add my congratulations to everyone involved in this achievement,’

‘It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime.’

Prof Stephen Hawking joined in with an opinion on this often discussed topic.

‘This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize,’ he told BBC News, although there were approximately six others on the initial postulations concerning the Higgs boson which was named for Professor Higgs. Professor Hawking also said:

“But it is a pity in a way because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn't expect."  This indicates that there are other more complex issues operating that affects the Model and there are things we do not know and perhaps a lot more that the Higgs boson and its structure.

Paul Rincorn reported:
“The CMS team claimed they had seen a ‘bump’ in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 133 times heavier than the protons that lie at the heart of every atom.

The BBC's George Alagiah explained the Higgs boson for the process.
It was reported also that: “They claimed that by combining two data sets, they had attained a confidence level just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.

However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-two million chance.”  Five Sigma probability is required for an accepted scientific discovery.

Prof Joe Incandela, spokesman for the CMS, was unequivocal: "The results are preliminary but the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle," he told the Geneva meeting.

It was reported also that “Atlas results were even more promising, at a slightly higher mass: ‘We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV,’ said Dr Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment at the LHC.”

Peter Higgs joined three of the six theoreticians who first predicted the Higgs at the conference
Prof Rolf Heuer, director-general of Cern, commented: "As a layman I would now say I think we have it."

"We have a discovery - we have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson. But which one? That remains open.

"It is a historic milestone but it is only the beginning."

Commenting on the emotions of the scientists involved in the discovery, Prof Incandela said: "It didn't really hit me emotionally until today because we have to be so focussed… but I'm super-proud."

Dr Gianotti echoed his thoughts, adding: "The last few days have been extremely intense, full of work, lots of emotions."

A confirmation that this is the Higgs boson would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the century; the hunt for the Higgs has been compared by some physicists to the Apollo programme that reached the Moon in the 1960s.

To be accepted as a discovery the discovery must possess certain attributes. Particle physics has an accepted definition for a discovery:
A "five-sigma" (or five standard-deviation) level of certainty
The number of sigmas measures how unlikely it is to get a certain experimental result as a matter of chance rather than due to a real effect
Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a "loaded" coin
A "three-sigma" level represents about the same likelihood as tossing eight heads in a row
Five-sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
Independent confirmation by other experiments turns five-sigma findings into accepted discoveries
BBC: Higgs boson collection

Scientists would then have to assess whether the particle they see behaves like the version of the Higgs particle predicted by the Standard Model, the current best theory to explain how the Universe works. However, it might also be something more exotic.

What makes this so important is that all the matter we can see appears to comprise just 4% of the Universe. The rest is asserted to be made up by mysterious dark matter and dark energy.

It is thought that a more exotic version of the Higgs could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the Universe that remains obscure.

Scientists will now have to look at how the Higgs decays - or transforms - into other, more stable particles after being produced in collisions at the LHC.  In the work Creation etc. above, it was shown how there is a directionality in time through the decay of K Mesons. There may well be other implications coming from the examination of this postulated Higgs particle and may well provide keys to the further understanding of the Universe by showing the further nature of the sub-atomic structure.

Dr Pippa Wells, a member of the Atlas experiment, said that several of the decay paths already showed deviations from what one would expect of the Standard Model Higgs and thus it may well point to further explanations or variations on the underlying 96% of the postulated Dark Matter and even the further complexity of the Creation.

It was argued for example that: “a decay path where the Higgs transforms into two photon particles was ‘a bit on the high side’", as she explained.

These could get back into line as more statistics are added, but on the other hand, they may not.

"We're reaching into the fabric of the Universe at a level we've never done before," said Prof Incandela.

"We're on the frontier now, on the edge of a new exploration. This could be the only part of the story that's left, or we could open a whole new realm of discovery."

There seems little doubt that this is an exciting discovery at least equivalent to the discovery of the Atom.

The Standard Model and the Higgs boson are shown in the appendix below.                              

It is important that we understand the sub-atomic structure which was the Standard Model in Quantum Physics. Because that did not account for the known structure of the Universe it was postulated that there must be another particle that explains the 96% we do not see or as yet understand by mass.

So what we have in effect is that the 4% we do see is explained by the Model but the 96% we do not see is postulated as this part structure termed the Higgs boson. Thus the mass induced by the boson must be far in excess of the structure we do see and its underlying Quantum Physical Structure.

It may well be that this sub-structure may be more involved than was postulated and make the model more complex. This will no doubt be the subject of intense study over the period ahead of us and may give us new leads into the Spiritual realm. If this Higgs boson is spread throughout the Quantum physical Model then the substructure of the Higgs boson itself may shed light into the way in which the non-physical or spiritual element ties the Universe together. As we believed before, the Universe is made from the spiritual and it exists outside of time and what exists in the physical was made and exists inside of physical time.

The Model is comprised of Fermions and Bosons. The Fermions are split into Quarks and Leptons with the Bosons being affected by both Photon and Gluon and Z and W bosons with the unknown element being that of the now discovered Higgs boson or bosons depending on the complexity of the Dark Matter. Force carriers are the third element of the Model.

Of what we can be sure is that this discovery does nothing to remove the necessity of the Spiritual or non-physical elements of the Universe. What it does do is merely confirm the Glory of God and His Power and Wisdom which is His Omnipotence and Omniscience. It does, however, add to the understanding of Christ’s comments re the power of the faith on the physical and its interaction with it.

Wade Cox
Coordinator General

Appendix on page 4. Standard Model of Quantum Physics
See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18708741 and the paper Creation v. Evolution (No. B9).