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Growing Consensus: The Higgs Boson Exists
It's a long, slow road from tentative discovery, to various forms of peer review, to wide acceptance, never mind theory and experimental design, but recent years' work to pin down the Higgs Boson seem to be bearing fruit in the form of cautious announcements. FBeans writes with excerpts from both the New York Times ("Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.") and from The Independent ("Cern says that confirming what type of boson the particle is could take years and that the scientists would need to return to the Large Hadron Collider — the world's largest 'atom smasher' — to carry out further tests. This will measure at what rate the particle decays and compare it with the results of predictions, as theorised by Edinburgh professor Peter Higgs 50 years ago.")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatswain A boatswain (pron.: /bosn/, formerly and dialectally also /botswen/), bo's'n, bos'n, or bosun is an unlicensed member of the deck department of a merchant ship.
I believe they exist!
Yes, but what's the point of that? They're already believing in something that doesn't make any sort of rational sense, presenting them with further evidence isn't likely to do anything than cause your blood pressure to spike.
But believing in the Big Bang is logical? 13+ billion years ago everything sprang forth from a singularity of infinite density (lots of rational sense to be found there). Where did it come from? What caused it to explode? If it was infinite, where's the rest of it? Because we live in what appears to be an expanding universe, we take a leap of faith and assume that it all spring forth from a single point. I'm fine with this as we really don't have a better explanation, and it seems to be a workable theory to for now. But it takes some faith to believe it, even if many people don't like to admit it.
Personally, I believe in god. I know, that's a sure way to get modded as a troll on /. However I don't know if he/she exits for sure. I can accept that god may have been an alien, was even created by the mass consciousnesses from the belief of enough people, or even some sort of reality dysfunction that is left over from the big bang itself. Regardless, most religions tend to worship a god that tells us to be good to each other, so I don't really find this to be a bad thing. Generally it's power crazed nutjobs that pervert religions to commit acts of violence, which is a shame.
I really don't see how it's so hard to find a way to reconcile ones religious beliefs with their scientific ones. Anyhow, my point is, is that there is nothing wrong with what anyone believes, so long as they aren't hurting anyone else. If you want to believe that the universe just popped into existence for no apparent reason, I'm not here to argue with you. But I would also appreciate the same respect for my impossible to prove beliefs too.