The Higgs Boson God Particle: All Things Visible and Invisible

In 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider detected the elusive Higgs boson, a subatomic particle dubbed the “God Particle” explaining the origin of matter.

February 4, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

“Two Higgs boson particles walked into a bar. Over drinks one said, ‘I hear Stephen Hawking bet $100 that we don’t exist. What if he’s right?’ The other replied, ‘No matter!’ ”

Get it? No matter? Get it? Well, hopefully you will in a few minutes. I didn’t get it either until I did some heavy-duty reading.

If this post is creating a touch of déjà vu, a sense that you have seen it before, it’s because you probably have. Something quite unusual happened here at this blog in recent weeks. In the earliest days of this blog in 2010, I was contacted by a reader in Australia about a new book by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow entitled The Grand Design (Bantam Books, 2010). The letter writer was concerned that media outlets in Australia and around the world were citing aspects of the book out of context in an attempt to demonstrate that Stephen Hawking declared that God does not exist. That was a faulty interpretation and the reader wanted me to set the record straight. It was a tall order, but I had time on my side to ponder and present a contrary point of view. So on October 6, 2010, we published “Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?”

A lot of work went into that post, but to my chagrin it was met by most of our readers with a yawn the size of a giant black hole. Fifteen years later, someone (not me) submitted that post to an advanced artificial intelligence model requesting an analysis of it. The results were then read to me by our Editor. AI scoured the Internet and then referred to me as “a Catholic priest with a background in science” while singling out that post as “a significant example of bridging the gap between science and faith.”

So of course, I thought that was the nicest thing any AI had ever said about me (There was very little to compare it to.). Given this new interest in a bridge between science and faith, I decided to haul out this 15-year-old post and rehabilitate it for a new audience. On July 30, 2025, we republished “Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?” The result was mind boggling, but it was not immediate. A few months later that post started showing up in our stats and then it began a viral spread. By January it was outpacing my regular weekly posts in popularity. And then by mid-January it spread all over the world in unprecedented numbers for this blog.

I cannot pretend to know why this happened. I do not understand the global attention to this one post on the space-time continuum. Perhaps my only conclusion is that when I post a bomb, just wait 15 years and post it again.

The Discovery

There is another post of mine that also bridges the gap between science and faith. I do not have an explanation for why or how, but another of my posts, this one from 2012, also began to show up in unusually large numbers with that other post. I have long wanted to repost this one with some updated information so that those who are currently reading and spreading it can see the updated version. It is “The Higgs Boson God Particle: All Things Visible and Invisible.”

I first wrote it in September 2012. It, too, was met with a rather extended yawn, but today it shows up often and everywhere. It profiles the work of the late physicist Peter Higgs who rose to prominence in the scientific community in 1964 when he theorized that the Higgs boson exists as a necessary subatomic particle which explains the existence of matter. After my post was first published, the Higgs boson was experimentally demonstrated again and Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. He died on April 8, 2024 at the age of 94 knowing that his life’s work was a major addition to the scientific understanding of the Universe.

A boson in physics is a component of subatomic particles such as protons and photons, which exist in every atom of matter. As a class of particle, a boson is so-called in honor of Indian physicist, Satyenda Nath Bose, who collaborated with Albert Einstein. The existence of a then-theoretical Higgs boson resolved a puzzle in the Standard Model of physics, a widely accepted model for how particles interact. The thinking in the Standard Model was that particles such as photons — particles of light — have no mass. They should move throughout the Universe unhindered. The mathematics of the Standard Model explained successfully the existence of particles, but not mass or matter. The Higgs boson proposed by Peter Higgs in 1964 was an explanation for how particles could attain mass, and thus bring into being a Universe filled with matter that we can see or otherwise detect.

CERN, the European agency for nuclear research, operates and oversees the Large Hadron Collider. It is a donut-shaped laboratory 27-miles in circumference on the French-Swiss border. Two beams of protons were set on a collision course moving at close to the speed of light. Their collision resulted in an explosion that recreated the conditions of The Big Bang, the scientifically accepted origin of our Universe. During the collision, a supercomputer detected the presence of the Higgs boson particle and a Higgs field for a trillionth of a second. It was the first time its existence had ever been established in a laboratory

On July fourth in 2012, physicists announced that they had a momentary glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson, the subatomic particle long theorized to exist, and without which matter itself would not exist. The physicists who reported that they only found “evidence” of the Higgs boson were just being careful scientists. The discovery had a 99.9999% rate of certainty. There is no doubt left. The Higgs boson does indeed exist and that experiment has since been ratified.

So what exactly does this mean? Many scientists grimaced every time someone in the news media referred to this discovery as “the God particle.” Using science out of context to debunk religious faith is a favorite pastime of some in the media, but the reverse should also not happen.

I took a hard look at the interaction between faith and science in “Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?” After publication of  The Grand Design, some in the news media speculated that Hawking’s book demonstrated that gravity — and not God — is responsible for the creation of the Universe. My conclusion was simply that Stephen Hawking has thrown in with the wrong “G,” and the pundits misreading his book have confused the tools of God with God. I cited in that post a vivid example. If you were an archeologist digging in ruins in Florence, Italy and you discovered a worn chisel that was used by Michelangelo to create the Pietà, one of the most celebrated examples of sculptured marble in art history, would you then conclude that Michelangelo did not create the Pietà, his chisel did?

What I find most interesting about the recent discovery is that the Higgs boson appears nowhere in Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design. His analysis of the science of cosmology omitted it entirely. In fact, two decades ago Stephen Hawking wagered $100 that the Higgs boson would never be detected. He lost the bet.

The discovery of the Higgs boson is a big deal in science because it presents a purely scientific explanation for how matter exists, but not why. The model for creation it implies is that a primordial atom exploded in what we call The Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. As the explosion cooled, a force known as a “Higgs field” — which contained the Higgs boson — was formed and permeates the Universe. As other particles interacted with this field, they acquired mass allowing gravity to bring particles together. It acted sort of like a dam slowing particles so that they would mass together. The result was matter as we know and see it — everything from stars to us. It’s sort of the yeast with which God bakes bread.

A Day Without Yesterday

The Higgs boson was detected by the Large Hadron Collider’s super computers in July 2012 for a fraction of a trillionth of a second. The tiny collision sent particles in every direction producing the energy equivalent to 14 trillion electron volts and blistering temperatures. The collision recreated a tiny model of the instance of The Big Bang. Some theorize that it was the presence of the Higgs boson particle within the primordial atom that caused The Big Bang itself, and the explosion of all matter in the Universe.

I find this all fascinating, but what is most fascinating is that the entire model was first mathematically predicted, and then demonstrated to even Albert Einstein’s satisfaction, by a Catholic priest. I wrote of the Belgian priest and physicist, Father Georges Lemaitre, in “A Day Without Yesterday:” Father Georges Lemaitre and the Big Bang. As a result of that post and others related to it, I began a correspondence with Father Andrew Pinsent, who prior to priesthood had been a physicist at CERN. We collaborated on a very special post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.”

If ever you bristle about the typical anti-Catholic mythology that religion attempts to hold back science, remember that the originator of all the science behind this model of creation was a Catholic priest, and many of the great scientists of his time did everything they could to suppress his ideas. They failed because they could not successfully refute either his faith or his science. In the end, even Einstein bowed to Father Lemaitre, declaring that his model was “the most satisfactory explanation of creation I have ever heard.”

Pope Pius XII applauded Father Lemaitre’s discovery of The Big Bang because it challenged the acceptable science of the time which claimed that the Universe was not created, but always existed and is eternal. Einstein later acknowledged that his “Cosmological Constant” was his greatest error.

Perhaps the greatest miracle of all for me was receiving the photo below of Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather, the late Pierre Matthews, whose mother was a close friend of Father Lemaitre, who became Pierre’s Godfather. The odds that my roommate in Concord, New Hampshire would turn out to be the Godson of a man whose own Godfather discovered the Big Bang are as great as the odds of the Big Bang itself.

Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York, wrote a brilliant and (unlike this post) brief commentary about the Higgs boson for The Wall Street Journal (“The Spark That Caused the Big Bang,” July 6, 2012). Professor Kaku wrote:

“The press has dubbed the Higgs boson the ‘God particle,’ a nickname that makes many physicists cringe. But there is some logic to it. According to the Bible, God set the Universe in motion as He proclaimed ‘Let there be light.’”

“So why did the Higgs boson particles hurry to church?
Because Mass could not start without them.”

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: For open minds and enlightened souls bridges are taking shape between the realms of science and faith. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?

Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang (a must-read by Father Andrew Pinsent)

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

For Those Who Look at the Stars and See Only Stars

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And then there was this: xAI Grok on Higgs Boson, God Particle, Science and Faith.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

The innocent in prison live in an incubator of dark dreams and nightmares. A recent terror was a confrontation with an evil presence that evoked an Angelic Advocate.

September 25, 2024 by Fr Gordon J. MacRae

I have had my share of nightmares and dreamscapes as an unwilling guest of the State, but I have been hesitant to write about most of them. Our dreams reflect the reality of our conscious lives — both our hopes and our fears. Few of mine are worthy of note, but those few also feel a bit risky to write about. I am not certain that I want to let anyone wander willy-nilly into the chasms of my psyche, a place where even I do not wish to wander alone. It is not because there is anything nefarious to be found there. It is because people who do not have actual evidence to throw will weaponize just about anything to justify their causes. We have seen this at work most recently in the weaponized lawfare in our politics.

To wander “willy-nilly” is an interesting term. It comes from 17th Century New England, a time and place when concerns about the devil dominated the literature and thought of the period. The term is a derivative of “Will I, Nil I,” meaning, “whether I wish it or do not wish it.” That is really the essence of dreams. They enter our psyche through no conscious will of our own while everything in them reflects our perception of ourselves and our place in this world, “our hopes and fears o’er all the years.”

Most of our dreams are quickly forgotten. This has more to do with biology than the content of our dreams. They are experienced differently from other mental processes and are thus not encoded in memory in the same way as conscious experience. A minority of our dreams are frightening and unforgettable. I had one of those recently, and I cannot forget it despite wanting to. It haunts me still. So I will take the plunge and just narrate it without judging either its reality or its sanity. I can only assert that the dream is true.

What made this particular dream most unusual is that I was dreaming that I was asleep and having a dream within the dream. I know this is convoluted but bear with me. In the dream, I was awakened in the night by something unknown. I arose from my bunk and took a walk. I was walking through doors that my conscious mind knew to be always locked. This is, after all, a prison. Outside the locked doors on a walkway at the top of the four-story prison building where I live, I descended alone down the 52 stairs to the ground level. And it was night.

That last sentence is important, and I write it with foreboding. Those same words appeared in another post of mine that described the presence of the Evil One. In “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light,” I wrote of the Gospel account of the betrayal by Judas Iscariot that led to the Crucifixion: “After eating the morsel, he went out. And it was night” (John 13:30). My awareness of night reveals the spiritual setting of my dream. To live in wrongful imprisonment is to live in perpetual night.

At the bottom of the 52 stairs are a few steel doors that are storage areas. They are always locked, but in the dream one door was ajar. As I approached it in the night it opened, and I stepped in. Outside was a hot summer night, but in this room I could see my breath even in the dark. The door slammed shut behind me leaving me in pitch blackness. The room was filled with castoff debris, and lurking among it in the far left corner was what I can only describe as sheer terror. I could feel it more than I could see it.

I could not flee, so I prepared to fight. “I am stronger than you,” I said boldly, but stupidly. We do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. In this one, those were the only words spoken, but they were not the only thoughts. I felt panicked terror from the Presence I was in. I felt this unseen thing overtake me in the dark, and I feared that my soul would be ripped from me. I invoked Saint Michael in the dream, and then I passed out.

The Devil’s Best Trick

And then I was again in my bunk in my cell on the top floor of the building. I was awake. Was I awake then too? I do not know. It took awhile for the terror to leave me. I looked at my alarm clock. It was just a little after 3:00 AM. I did not sleep again that night, and I did not want to be in the dark. So I went out of the cell into a day room. There are four prisoners who sleep out there due to overcrowding and a shortage of cells. I sat there until sunrise.

For the rest of the day and for many days to follow, the dream shadowed over me like a dark cloud. At the other end of that day, at mail call around 6:00 PM, I received my copy of The Wall Street Journal. I usually turn first to the Journal’s Editorial Page, a habit likely born from the fact that I was in it several times. The Journal has a daily, and prominent, book review on the top right of its main Opinion Page. On this day (May 28, 2024) the Review was by Micah Mattix entitled, “In Search of the Unseen Evil.” It was a review of a book by Randall Sullivan entitled, “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared.”

The review was thoughtful and considerate, and perhaps only slightly skeptical of the subject matter. After my experience of the early morning hours of that same day, I was not skeptical at all. But there are many other factors that diminish my skepticism about the existence of personified evil. The image on our Home Page, reproduced atop this post, makes that as clear as it can be.

Randall Sullivan is no stranger to the Catholic mystical. A previous book, The Miracle Detective (2004) is reported to have profoundly changed him. His current book cited above, opens with a question: “Does the Devil exist, or is he a figment of our imagination?” The second question follows: “If he is real, who or what are we describing when we refer to ‘the Devil’”? Sullivan concludes his book with a statement of personal conviction: “There is a Devil, a force of evil that human beings can best comprehend by personifying it. To acknowledge this, he says, is to throw open the door “the Devil hides behind.”

That certainly got my attention. I was stunned to read this in the WSJ on the same day as my haunting dream. Replaying the dream in my mind, one of my first thoughts was to wonder whether the location of the Evil entity — a “far left” corner — was actually a metaphor for a present trend in our culture. It is a trend I wrote about in my recent post (published just a week before my dream) “Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age.” There is a lot there that I imagine the Devil would prefer you and I did not ponder.

Today many people no longer believe in the Devil — Randall Sullivan gives it an uppercase “D” throughout — and many of those also no longer believe in God. This is a cultural phenomenon that the Devil finds most promising. It’s the theme of a psychological masterpiece by C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I wrote of it in Holy Week this year in a post that I am certain the Devil would also prefer that you did not see. In his book, C.S. Lewis laid out the long, subtle descent upon which humans travail a slippery slope away from God:

“It does not matter how small sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge a man away from the Light and out into the Nothing... . Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

— The Screwtape Letters, pp. 60-61

Getting you to look away by altering your belief system to discard his very existence is, as Randall Sullivan entitled his book, The Devil’s Best Trick. Don’t fall for it. We have seen the face of evil many times as it overtakes human beings lured to act on its behalf. Two recent and vivid examples are “Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing,” and Pornchai Moontri’s striking “Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.”

Angelic Justice

I'm sorry if this gets a little weird, but at 3:00 AM on another dark night — this one in 2016 — I had a prequel to this mysterious dream. It was preceded by all manner of dark clouds gathering on the horizon of my life in a time of chaotic upheavals. It was early in the morning of October 2, 2016 the day the Church honors our Guardian Angels. Had I ever really believed in them? I do now.

In the dream, I found myself gazing out the small barred window in the prison cell in which I lived then with Pornchai “Max” Moontri. It was four years before his deportation to Thailand. A small stretch of sky was all that I could see beyond our cell window. There was an older man standing with me. I could see my friend, Max, fast asleep in his upper bunk. The older man was eerily familiar and someone I felt I knew, but in recalling the dream I could not recall what he looked like.

He pointed to the sky and asked,“What do you see?” I replied, “I see only the prison lights.” “Look beyond the prison lights,” said the Guardian. Then in the dream my vision suddenly changed. I was able to see far, far into the vast darkness, and there in the center of my field of view I saw a constellation, a triangle of three stars. Within the triangle, the stars were joined by streams of glowing light connecting them. “It looks like neon,” I said stupidly in the dream. And again, we do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. Then the Guardian said just one sentence before departing my dream: “Michael dwells within the light.”

I stood there for a long time, mesmerized by this vision. Then I awoke in my bunk. It was very dark. I got up and walked to the window wondering whether it was a dream or real. I saw only the invasive prison lights, but I have since learned to look beyond them. I could not forget the simple statement that “Michael dwells within the light.”

Later that morning, I called a friend. I was embarrassed to relate the dream, but I asked her to search an astronomy database to see if a triangular constellation actually exists. This was what was sent to me:

“1998 — The Most Distant Object Yet Discovered: Astronomers have stumbled upon the most distant galaxy ever found, an object 12.2 billion light-years from Earth. It was announced on March 12, 1998. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. A light year is thus a distance of 5.6 trillion miles. [It’ s a difficult calculation, but the distance of this object in miles is 12.2 billion times 5.6 trillion. Good luck with the math!]

"A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Arjuna Dey of Johns Hopkins University was analyzing the light from a distant galaxy inside the Constellation Triangulum when the team noticed the spectral signature of a faint and far more distant galaxy at its center. By taking longer exposures with the Keck-II telescope they were able to identify the new galaxy as being 90 million light years farther than the previous most distant galaxy ever before discovered. They dubbed this discovery, ‘RD1.’

“Based on knowledge that the universe is approximately 13 billion years old, [knowledge first discovered by famed physicist and mathematician, Father Georges Lemaitre] Galaxy RD1 was formed soon after the Big Bang gave birth to the Cosmos. By studying it, astronomers hope to learn how and when the earliest galaxies formed. Little is currently known about these early galaxies. A report on the discovery was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.”

This, of course, rocked my world. You might recall from our post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang,” co-written by me and Oxford priest-physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, that the Church and science are on the same page about the origin of the Universe born in an instant, “out of nothing.”

In the early Fifth Century, Saint Augustine proposed that in the Genesis account of Creation, God’s declaration, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) was the moment the angels were created. In the next verse (Genesis 1:4), “God separated the light from the darkness.” For Saint Augustine, this was the moment the angels fell and were driven from Heaven by Saint Michael in the battle of the Heavenly Hosts. Is this all metaphor or is it real? On a spiritual level it is very real.

This all left me with a profound sense that our stories are not just our own, nor are dreams or our struggles or pain. We are individuals, but we are also a collective part of an immense tapestry God has woven toward a specific end. And within the threads, we can find allies. I could no longer face the darkness without them.

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From The Prayer of Pope Leo XIII against Apostate Angels :

“Most Glorious Prince of the Heavenly armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness. Come to the aid of man whom God has created to His likeness, and whom He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and protector. To you the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. Pray therefore the God of peace to crush Satan beneath our feet, that he may no longer hold us captive and do injury to the Church. Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us. Take hold of the dragon, the ancient serpent which is the devil and Satan. Bind him and cast him into the abyss so that he may no longer seduce the nations.”

— An Excerpt from the Prayer of Pope Leo XIII, 1878-1903

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. We hope you will also visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls. And please subscribe if you have not already done so. It’s free, and we usually only haunt your inbox once per week.

A Devil in the Desert for the Last Temptation of Christ

Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light

Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed

Michael, Gabriel, Raphael: Allies in Spiritual Battle

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Thank you for your readership and support of this blog. As annual fees become due, Father Gordon could use your help if willing and able. Additionally, we have been notified that the National Center for Reason and Justice is ceasing operations after over two decades of sponsorship of the defense of Father MacRae and other wrongfully convicted.

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Thank you. May the Lord Bless you and keep you .

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”