Two people attempt to break glass by sining a high-pitch tone. Instead, wackily, the glass fills with blood. An anthropomorphized “Physics” then admits she is attempting to stop humans from finding the Higgs Boson - a particle whose discovery would explain much of the inexplicable aspects of modern physics.
This comic serves only as a medium to make a reference to a pop-culture physics concept.
I’m all for an anthropomorphic talking female “Physics.” But the references to Water-into-wine and wine-as-blood allude to Jesus Christ. So the voice in the sky, or at least in the upper-right corner of the last frame, is probably supposed to be God speaking.
The media have popularized the Higgs-Boson by regrettably calling it “the God Particle.” Incidentally, Peter Higgs and most respectable particle physicists don’t like the epithet. The search for the Higgs-Boson is currently conducted at Fermilab’s Tevatron and more famously, though recently, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The media have sensationalized claims about collisions at the LHC. And that it is capable of energies/ temperatures/ conditions “…not seen since the Big Bang,” possibly creating “micro black holes” and other wildly exaggerated safety concerns.
In this comic, God could be addressing the experimental efforts at the LHC because they are possibly disastrous. Or the discovery of the Higgs Boson might reveal too much and unveil some deep mystery, best left hidden. “Don’t peek behind the curtain.” God might even be offended by our hubris and that we dare call it “the God Particle.”
Metaphorically frustrating the efforts of our experimenters is analogous to God’s confounding the languages of the people in the story of the Tower of Babel.
I find it interesting that the two experimenters in this comic are depicted as trying to break a glass by singing. The Higgs mechanism is often described in terms of spontaneous symmetry breaking. Clever kid, this Randall Munroe.
On a more absurd take, one could imagine God directly chiding these two naive experimenters, conducting their own, either literal or metaphorical symmetry breaking Gedankenexperiment, not because it poses any real threat to God, but because it’s rather embarrassing to watch from God’s perspective. Our experimenter’s design an experiment, and expect a certain result. Just as our experimenter’s think they’ve got it. Just when they think they’ve confirmed their hypothesis, thereby bolstering the elegant model they’ve made, of how they think things work (i.e. the Standard model), God, in this comic, under this interpretation, messes with them (or us) a little, by screwing with the physics at the edge of our experimental horizon and our understanding. Rather than confirming our hypothesis, we must revise it. We design new experiments, and eventually have to develop new, more challenging models, to fit the data. God keeps us on our toes. But he has a sense of humor about it.
——————————————-
The Higgs-Boson had been called the “God Particle” in Leon Lederman’s 1993 book, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? (To which I, and countless other DA nerds/fans humorously reply, “42!”). The popular media has since perpetuated the epithet “God Particle” to the grief of many particle physicists, including Peter Higgs. While the book, the Nobel prize winner Leon Lederman, and his co-author Dick Teresi wrote was not trivial, it was not without humor. Though the name “God Particle” has become problematic, it should obviously not be taken literally, or too seriously.
You know, that ‘gigantonormous’ synchrotron in Geneva that’ll make mini-black holes and destroy the world. Well, while the popular media tends to laud CERN’s experimental efforts to confirm the existence of the Higgs-Boson, it sometime’s ignores Fermilab’s ongoing work at the Tevatron. Though it’s not a contest really (at least not formally), Fermilab still has a horse in the race. And the Tevatron is a worthy contender. Besides, searching for the Higgs is not the only thing these facilities do. Each have a whole host of important projects. So even if the Higgs proves to be beyond their energetic reach, they still have very important work to do.
