One of Pope Francis’ first unofficial acts in Rome was to demonstrate the action of the Higgs Field and its bosons on a formerly unattached photon, himself.
Back in 1964, Peter Higgs at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland suggested a secret invisible force field running through the universe that somehow imparts the aspect of mass or substance to subatomic particles and to us, because we are made up of zillions of sub-small pieces like protons, neutrons and electrons that stick together in substance and in total make the weight that we measure on the bathroom scale. Which is the long way of saying, he, Higgs, said our physics doesn’t make any sense unless we can somehow show that energy can become mass and keep us all stuck together and worried about our diet.
The search for the God particle was on. It’s called the God particle because its existence is portrayed by the popular media as explaining how the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago created something out of nothing. Of course, neither the physicists nor God looks at it that way. To the physicists, the Higgs’ field full of its bosons pre-dated the Bang — so something was already there from the view of physics. It’s just that the something was pure energy, and nothing was massing or sticking to anything or anybody and making planets and people and all of that, that is, us and the universe. (The last sentence may help explain why theoretical physics can be such an interesting field to some and such a fascinating mystery to others, me included.) And, even God in Genesis says He started with some thing before He made the earth, moon, stars and planets. So, the search was never to find no thing, it was to find the one thing that was used to make the some thing’s we see today and that hold us together.
6,000 scientists have found it. At least, they think they’ve found it. They found it last July, but they had to check the data from the CERN collider. CERN is a French acronym which loosely translates as Council Europe Research Nuclear. It’s a really big hole in the ground, more like a 17-mile dug tunnel circling around under the ground, where protons are launched at each other at 99 percent the speed of light. The thinking of 10’s of 1000’s of scientists for almost 50 years has been if you smash things together really hard, one of the original building blocks may pop out and help explain why we’re doing this. And, it has, we think — a Higgs boson has popped out, we hope.
So, here’s the way it works for the Pope:
Before he becomes Pope (think of this as before the Big Bang), Cardinal Bergoglio rides a bus to work in Buenos Aires in a simple black suit with no fancy hat. He’s a photon – he’s got all the energy in the world but no real mass because people don’t notice him in his humble attire and don’t push to form a big ball around him asking for autographs. The good Cardinal is not interacting and so he is, in effect, mass-less – he moves easily through the crowd. Now, Cardinal Bergoglio goes to Rome and becomes the Pope. The next day, this morning, he leaves the Vatican to catch a bus to a luncheon appointment in Rome. Of course, fans are watching every bus stop in the City for this very thing to happen. “That’s him,” one yells. “Papa! Papa!” 10’s scream as they rush to the scene. “The Pope is out!” 100’s and 1,000’s text and tweet as the crowd grows into a cheering mob. “It’s him,” the helicopter film crew flashes to the masses around the world. And, there you have it: a photon of pure energy (Cardinal Bergoglio) becomes a proton of great mass (Pope Francis) because of his interaction with those around him. As soon as we, the Higgs bosons in our fields of daydreams, see the Pope walking to the bus stop, the world explodes. That’s the Big Bang Roman style.
You wonder why those physicists didn’t skip CERN and go straight to the Eternal City.
For a humble man of prayer, Pope Francis sure has mass attraction.
See you later — I’m heading to the bus stop.
Who knows who we’ll see?
Grandpa Jim