Following Whiteson’s lead, Cham’s comic is replete with oversizd magicians’ hats. Instead of producing bunny rabbits out of thin air though, they emit particles—different particles than those first inserted… And, of course, the most obvious resort to supernatural language is the notorious label with which physicist Leon Lederman baptized the Higgs boson particle: “the God particle.”

There is a widely-held notion that the more we learn about the universe (or better, the more science teaches us about the universe), the less use we’ll have for religious and supernatural concepts. An apocryphal story illustrates this train of thought: Napoleon supposedly asked Pierre Laplace, a famed late 18th and early 19th century French scientist, why the word “God” hadn’t appeared in his Celestial Mechanics. “Sir,” Laplace is supposed to have responded, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

With the purported discovery of the Higgs boson particle, you’d think the explanatory urge to turn to supernatural concepts has been further mitigated, but coverage of the event seems to suggest otherwise. Here is some of CERN physicist Daniel Whiteson’s explanation of a particle accelerator:

The magic of a collider is that you can make kinds of matter that you don’t have around… It’s a kind of quantum magic where it sort of disappears into pure energy… We haven’t seen anything crazy yet, but there could still be strange pink elephants in there, waiting to pop out.

Whiteson’s brief talk, accompanied with illustrations by PhD Comics’ Jorge Cham (a PhD in Mechanical Engineering himself), appeared in a recent NY Times post, “What in the World is a Higgs Boson?”

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