A very intriguing story is unfolding this week with the announcement of the probable discovery of the Higgs boson by the scientists managing the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), made possible by its Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border. I’m way over my head here in the physics, but I have read enough to know that this is a very big deal, probably one of the great moments in scientific history, because it will provide new insights into what the universe was like in the trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. For the long sought-after Higgs bosons are the particles responsible for the conversion of the energy of the Big Bang into the mass of the universe. With this discovery, a new chapter in physics opens, leading to who knows what next.
I was not very well exposed to sub-atomic physics in school, but I have encountered it since, most prominently in philosophy, where the concept of “theoretical constructs” was first introduced to me by Mortimer Adler in his exploration of what we can know beyond that which is perceptible to the senses. In explaining the notion of theoretical constructs in his terrific book, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, he notes that “many of the conceptual constructs that we employ in scientific and philosophical thought concern objects such as black holes and quarks in physics, and God, spirits, and souls in metaphysics. These are objects about which it is of fundamental importance to ask about their existence in reality……………….The real existence of instances of such objects can be posited only on the grounds that, if they did not exist, then observed phenomena could not be adequately explained………………The idea of God, for example, and the idea of the cosmos as a whole are not concepts derived from sense experience. They are instead theoretical constructs…………{which} apply to some of the most important ideas in 20th century theoretical physics”.
Adler would probably agree that it is premature to think that the discovery of the Higgs boson will lead to our theoretical constructs becoming empirical, but this major breakthrough seems almost certainly to have moved us to the next threshold. And I’m convinced that whatever we find there will be orderly for, as Albert Einstein said, “God does not play dice”.
