God particle found according to reports in ABC Star Stuff, BBC News, ScienceNOW and ScienceDaily (and numerous other media sources) 4 July 2012. Scientists working with the world’s largest, most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have found a particle they believe is the long sort-after Higgs boson particle. The name Higgs boson is derived from physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the universe was permeated by a field that interacts, via ‘force carrying particles’ called bosons, which interact with other particles in the universe, and this gives the other particles mass. It was nicknamed “The God Particle” because people assume that it explains the origin of the universe. However, the nickname actually comes from the title of a book named The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question? by Leon Ledermann and Dick Teresi, published in 1993. Higgs is an atheist and is not impressed with this nickname. In an interview with The Guardian 30 June 2012, he said: “I find it embarrassing because, though I'm not a believer myself, I think it is the kind of misuse of terminology which I think might offend some people”.

The LHC experiments aimed to create Higgs bosons by firing beams of protons (a type of sub-atomic particle) at each other, at speeds close to the speed of light. High energy collisions of sub-atomic particles are believed to recreate conditions that occurred very soon after the Big Bang. According to ScienceDaily, “The Higgs boson is an unstable particle, living for only the tiniest fraction of a second before decaying into other particles, so experiments can observe it only by measuring the products of its decay”. Two separate particle detectors looked for and found the expected decay products, and the scientists are more than 99.99 percent sure they came from the Higgs boson. Joe Incandela, one of the physicists involved in the project commented: “We're reaching into the fabric of the Universe at a level we've never done before”.

ABC (audio), BBC, ScienceDaily

Editorial Comment: Whatever this particle is called, it may help us reach into the fabric of the universe and learn about what’s in matter and maybe how it works, but just as smashing a Lego block building never tells you where Lego came from, neither will smashing matter that already exists into tinier and tinier bits ever tell you where the bits came from so you can unlock the origin of the universe.

The Big Bang theory claims matter came into existence by itself from nothing, for no reason, and organised itself into atoms and molecules, which through time self-organised into stars, planets, plants and people and everything else in the physical universe. Designing a machine to smash already existing matter into bits as close to nothing as possible, will never tell you how nothing turned into something in the first place. What’s really the issue here is the atheism of most Big Bangers who want a particle instead of Person at the origin of the universe.

Lastly, did you catch the anomaly? Let us congratulate the physicists who have found Higgs bosons in their atom smasher, but mostly because they “created” the very sophisticated atom smasher in the first place. The creative designers and builders of the Large Hadron Collider have no excuse for failing to recognise that it must take infinitely more power and wisdom to create matter from nothing, as well as endow it with properties, and use it to create all the wondrous things we see in the universe and on the planet we live on. (Ref. physics, cosmology)

Evidence News 11 July 2012