The Higgs boson plays such an important role in the underlying nature of matter that some in the media have referred to this as the "God particle." So, is this designation accurate? Have we really discovered the single phenomenon that underlies everything else in the universe?
Well, the short answer is, not really. First of all, more experiments will need to be performed to determine whether this particle created in the Large Hadron Collider really is the Higgs boson, or just an impostor particle with similar properties. But the results still look promising. However, this uncertainty is not what I want to focus on in this post. Instead, I'm going to focus on what the implications would be, assuming that this discovery is indeed the Higgs boson.
First, a more detailed explanation of what the Higgs boson is and how it fits into the known laws of physics. I'm not a particle physicist, so I'd probably get something wrong if I tried to explain it myself, but I found the following video to be pretty helpful (skip ahead to 0:36):
This is a good intro for those new to particle physics, but there are a lot of things it doesn't explain well, so here are a couple more videos:
So looking at the science, it is pretty clear that even though the Higgs field/particle completes the Standard Model, we still haven't figured out the nuances of how it works, including such questions as why different particles interact with the Higgs field to different degrees. In addition, even though we're closer to figuring out why particles have mass, there's nothing in this theory that explains why massive objects attract each other gravitationally (we do have general relativity to explain that, but we still haven't been able to combine general relativity with quantum mechanics/the Standard Model). There is speculation that gravitational force may be mediated by other particles called "gravitons," but these are merely postulated and currently are not part of the Standard Model. The study of physics is not finished!
The ultimate goal of theoretical physics is to discover a model of the universe that is both mathematically consistent and which elegantly explains all phenomena--a "theory of everything." According to Stephen Hawking in The Grand Design, the best candidate we have so far for this theory (though it is still incomplete) is M-theory, a.k.a. "superstring theory." Put very simply (hopefully I'm getting this right), this theory states that there are 11 dimensions that can curl up in various ways to form many parallel universes, which together form the "multiverse." In our universe, we only experience 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension because all the other dimensions are too curled up (similar to the way a straw is 2-dimensional but appears 1-dimensional because it is curved so thin). Other universes can have more or fewer active dimensions (within the constraint of 11 total dimensions), giving them different sets of particles and different values for physical constants, but the fundamental underlying physical laws of the multiverse are the same for all universes.
Let's pretend, for now, that we have proven M-theory to be true and have smoothed out all its mathematical uncertainties. This still leaves many mysteries to be resolved. The main one, I think, is why are there 11 dimensions and not 0 or 5 or 46,924,564,684 or infinitely many? Could there be other multiverses with different numbers of dimensions (which would, I guess, comprise a multi-multiverse)? And finally, the age old question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Perhaps it is impossible for science to know all the answers, because (assuming M-theory is true) there may be another completely unknown set of laws that underlies the multiverse with its 11 dimensions, and other laws that underlie those, and so on, so that there is no first cause that exists in and of itself without having a more fundamental explanation. Or perhaps there IS a fundamental first cause (a "God"), but it is beyond the capability of human understanding. Or perhaps this "God" is not beyond our capacity to understand, and science, if it is allowed to progress far enough, will eventually find it.
I have to ask myself which of these scenarios I would prefer to be true. Many people hope that science will eventually prove that there is a God from which everything originates. This would be analogous to the last scenario I mentioned in the previous paragraph, in which science eventually finds and understands the most basic cause of everything. But to me, this scenario would be the most limiting, as it would mean that science would eventually reach a point where there was no more mystery and no more reason for curiosity. This doesn't mean that scientists should intentionally avoid looking for a God-like first cause--far from it, for if this is the truth, then the truth shouldn't be ignored--but I do privately hope that they don't find one. However, if the second scenario, or even better, the first, is true, then the universe would be infinite (or seemingly infinite, in the second case), with infinite possibility. So, unless "God" is instead defined in a pantheistic manner as "everything that exists," a "creator" God actually makes the universe more limited (and more bleak, in my opinion) than if every phenomenon is underlain by another phenomenon in an infinite chain of causality. Atheism suddenly doesn't sound so bleak and meaningless after all!
