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Search for Higgs "God Particle" Gets Interesing
holy_calamity writes "The Large Hadron Collider is in trouble again. It will start work sometime in spring 2008, not November this year as planned. The delay has been blamed on an 'accumulation of minor setbacks,' and comes on top of a 'design fault' that saw breakdown of magnets supplied by the competing Fermilab. Yesterday Slate nicely rounded up increasingly loud rumors among physicists that Fermilab may already have seen the Higgs particle, the 'holy grail of particle physics' the LHC was build to find."
"God"? What has god got to do with this?
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1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
I'm getting rather bothered by continuously seeing these /. posts implying that scientists are so non-cooperative. The last few stories about LHC have even nearly insinuated that it was somehow Fermilab's fault that there were design issues with the magnet structures, almost as if the mistakes had been intentional.
/. editors become aware of the slant they have continuously put on the LHC setback stories.
Perhaps the men and women working in the more news-worthy branches of accelerator physics have to try and defeat each other. My experiences have only ever been constructive and helpful; contemporaries offering knowledge, insight and advice to help my research succeed, rather than breaking the equipment so they can steal the glory.
I hope that
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They care about finding out one way or another so they can move on to other investigations. Many scientists are just as happy to find out the theory they are testing is *disproven* as they are when it's *proven*. It's about advancing the body of knowledge.
The LHC is not being built for the express purpose of finding the Higgs boson. It's being built to find whatever there is to find at very high energies, and the Higgs boson is simply one of the most anticipated possibilities. There are four main detectors around the acceleration ring, and each contains a bewildering array of instrumentation to detect all sorts of things that might occur. Even if Fermilab beats LHC to this particular confirmation, there is plenty of purpose to continuing LHC, contrary to the /. summary's implication.
You have the same exact problem with "God" explanations, as well.
How did the God come into being?
If God were self-existent, why not the Universe? Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a self-existent universe, than a self-existent God, who is by definition separate from the Universe? (by def: if not by def, then why use another term than "Universe" or "Nature"?)
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang
Why must we use physics to support atheistic antagonization of religious people? What relation does one thing have to another? I'll give you a tip here: If someone believes in God today, the discovery of a new particle tomorrow won't make the stop believing.
There's no room for argumentation; if you posit the existence of an all-powerful god, then it would be within that god's power to make the universe however he chose. He could have made it so that all scientific evidence and all possible human understanding would imply that the universe had always existed. If you held this belief, it would not be the sort of belief that science deals with, and therefore no amount of scientific discovery could take away from it.
And before you start flaming me, calling me a crazy zealot or whatever you like, it may be worthwhile to note that I don't hold the sort of belief I'm describing. I just wish that people wouldn't waste all this energy antagonizing each other for no reason. If your grand hope for science is to refute some religion's particular creation myth, then you'll only waste your own time and try other people's patience.
I really don't want to get into a very theological argument here (I tried to avoid it in my post because i think it goes off-topic), but since people are doing the exact sort of thing i was hoping they wouldn't, I'll say more.
I'd prefer to say it this way: Religious thought won't yield good scientific explanations, and neither will science provide good theological explanations. Religion is properly in the business of describing the natural world, but not in the business of providing scientific and "objective" explanations. In other words, using religious "explanations" to fill gaps in your scientific knowledge is improper, but using religion to increase your understanding of the world is not improper. These two different worlds offer two different types of explanations.
People seem to think that, since there is only one world, there should only be one explanation for that world. However, as the long history of philosophy clearly illustrates, there are many different things that can be said about the same object. If you asked me about a Coke can, I might say it's made of metal, and someone else might say that the same can is cylindrical; we would not be arguing. If that person said, "It's cylindrical" and I said, "No! It's metallic!" then my response wouldn't make sense. The "debate" between religion and science is similar to this-- they're talking about different things, but the debaters often fail to grasp that "science" and "God" conflict with each other no more (in fact less!) than "metal" and "cylinder".
So if we properly understand the religious claim that "God created the universe", then we would all see that no science could ever conflict with this claim. It's simply not a scientific claim, but instead it informs our relationship to the universe. It claims that the universe is planned by the source of all Good, and therefore the universe is itself "good". It's a claim that we properly have a place and a role within the universe, since we were made to be in it, and so therefore we are good too. It doesn't matter whether there was, at some point, a "big bang," because the religious explanation cannot be refuted by empirical facts or scientific theories.
Unfortunately, even the people arguing in favor of the "religious" description sometimes forget the purpose of the explanation. They mistake the explanation for a scientific explanation of the material creation of the universe. And also the scientists forget-- they start to believe that they can discover the goodness and meaning of the universe (or "disprove" the existence of goodness and meaning) if they find just one more particle, smaller than those that have been observed before. All these things are nonsense.
Are you going from "Don't use science to antagonise religious people" to "Religious people are insane and allergic to logic" in just one move?
Nice.
Religion proffers numerous unprovable, often flatly wrong, assertions about the natural world, and relates these unprovables to a supernatural world. References abound - here's one winner: "It still moves".
Your soda can analogy is faulty, as both participants in the discussion are describing testable observations of said soda can. Religion, on the other hand, offers no testable observations (not unlike certain modern cosmological theories, by the way).
You assert that religion "informs our relationship to the universe"; in fact, religion obscures our relationship with the natural world, by positing thunderbolt-wielding gods, fairies in the forest, and numerous ridiculous stories about reward or punishment in the "next world", or reincarnation as a cat. And noodly appendages, but that's another story.
Unfortunately, where your discussion finally fails is here:
Consistently and steadily, the diligent and careful application of reason and the scientific method have pulled away the veil religion and other superstitions have placed before humanity's sight. In the long run, religious explanations have repeatedly yielded to the supremacy of tolerance, reason and science, and they ever will.
Again, see: "It still moves".
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;