The Fishcamp Glory Particle and The End of Wonder?
Do you know those moments when the air shreds into a thousand gulls,
When the clouds are on fire,
when the mountains launch a ghosting moon,
and the ocean lays poems of kelp on your beach?
What do we say in those moments? What do we see?
When “the missing cornerstone of particle physics” was finally discovered this last week, scientists cheered and thanked “nature.” Others praised God for yet another window on his presence in the world. Others applauded the proof that God is no longer necessary to explain the universe. Lawrence Krauss, director of the Origins Project at Arizona University, is one of the exultant ones, who is sure the Higgs particle will erase the need for God. “The Higgs particle is now arguable more relevant than God,” he writes. His explanation for the universe, beyond the scientific particulars, is now this: “Everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space. “
I will not argue with Krauss, who is clearly investing his scientific career in making God disappear, but I will present my own evidence gathered just this week in favor of the God of the particle, or the Glory particle, evidence I did not have to wait 500 trillion collisions to collect. I needed only open eyes and a camera. The rest was provided----for nothing. I share it with you here:
Near midnight, the sun blazing before it sets.
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| We frighten each other with the wildness of our presence . . |
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| Calm seas, and a SW wind that sails the clouds to the horizons |
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| The parent eagles devote all their waking hours to their young . . . |
Whose glory is it? It’s not mine—or yours. We don’t own it, we can’t buy it or schedule it. We are lucky if we can witness just pieces and moments of it, and the luckiest ones of all are those who know whose it is, who absorb all the beauty and astonishment, and give it all back, as they can. As I am trying to do now.
The scientists are far from done. Indeed, they are just beginning. "The dream is to find an ultimate theory that explains everything. We are far from that," says Fabiola Gionatti, the head of the ATLAS team of scientists.
I won’t be waiting for them to find an “ultimate theory.” I’ll cheer them on, but I’ll simply look out my window, eyes and soul open to the One who Made it All, the God of Everything, who somehow filled us as well with particles of glory. I see them in you. I feel them in me. Maybe our witness and our wonder, in some small way, helps to bind the world together as well.
I'll do my part. And you?
