Sure, but confirmation (or otherwise) of the Higgs boson is the canonical example of the types of higher-energy tests which will be possible, which will help to confirm (or improve, or replace) the Standard Model and may provide useful data for the GUTs.
To go back to the original point, a major purpose for these accelerators is to "prove" (i.e. try harder to confirm or falsify) the Standard Model, specifically in those areas where so far it's been impossible to verify.
The Higgs boson is basically the last untested facet of the theory - if it shows up in the expected region without any additional fuss, the model is pretty much entirely successful within present experimental limits and particle physicists are back to digging through the last few orders of decimal places to discover new effects.
I emphasized the "if" in the quote because that's a pretty big "if". If it was so certain that the Higgs boson is just going to be confirmed as expected, then it wouldn't be necessary to build multi-billion dollar accelerators to confirm it.
Despite all the correct predictions the Standard Model makes, the Higgs boson is not the only possible explanation for mass, and experiments could provide new information that could force changes to the Standard Model. Such changes could certainly have knock-on effects on GUTs, as morgan_greywolf suggested.
PS: emacs users, pls dont kill me.. I have not YET switched and still visit emacs church. Vim user, you dont kill me either for I am your potential convert. Thanks!
Too late - to paraphrase Agent Smith, you're already dead. If you decide to switch, emacs users will kill you. If you don't decide to switch, vi users will kill you. One of your lives had a future, but for some reason, you opened your mouth and picked the one that does not. Goodbye, Mr. NovaSupreme.
In addition to all that, the laws also have to be perfect. They can be rational as far as they go, but still leave important things unaddressed, e.g. due to changes in circumstances. This tends to lead to people falling through cracks and getting screwed by the system. Sometimes, breaking the law can be a sensible choice for an individual. In the extreme, this becomes civil disobedience, which can be a powerful form of protest.
The idea of every little law that's ever broken being detected and enforced would be the end of civilization as we know it: it would transform a complex distributed system of human judgement and adaptibility into a largely mindless and rigid monstrosity.
You make some very good points. My conjecture is certainly an enormous simplification, and I didn't mean to imply that religion is merely a placebo; I was suggesting only a partial explanation for the ongoing success of religion (and doing so quite lightheartedly, at that).
My conjecture could be restated to say that (among other things) religion allows those who have thought deeply on these matters (or have strong opinions) to propagate that information to others who are more inclined to accept what they're told. This latter group would still experience the benefits I mentioned; while it doesn't stop them from thinking about such matters, it can mitigate an otherwise potentially great existential burden.
It is something that erupts into the entirety of life and allows the human to perceive meaning in otherwise mundane things.
I mentioned something similar, along with a few other factors which religion encompasses, in another comment in this subthread. However, some of those features more generally fall under the heading of "spirituality"; it may not be necessary to be religious, in the sense of having faith in supernatural forces, in order to benefit from at least some of these things.
Supplying canned answers to problems (origins, etc.) is only a very secondary function of religion.
Oh sure, that's why I qualified my conjecture.
Religion is really about hierarchy, legitimizing authority, and filling our need for ultimate justice.
I'd say it's also about anthropomorphizing aspects of the vast and incomprehensible world around us, about having an agreed-upon and shared source of moral authority (a variation on your "legitimizing authority", about social identity, about providing a repository for all sorts of knowledge about how to conduct one's life (e.g. don't eat pork), about legitimizing a desire for the expression of spiritual feelings, about providing purpose, and so on. All these interacting "features" help keep religion so entrenched -- the anti-science religious types seem to miss that point, because they could concede the whole of what science says about the universe and religions would still contain way too much for most people to want to abandon.
ROFL. There'd also be the whole question of whether light bulbs and moths had an Intelligent Designer. Clearly, whoever created the light bulbs must also have created the moths...
I think you're confusing my comment with other kinds of things you've seen elsewhere. If you're looking for rigorous, peer-reviewed and tested scientific theories, Slashdot comments are probably the wrong place for that. Up-moderation doesn't mean "Theory Confirmed", and it doesn't put its author on the shortlist for the Nobel prize.
I made a conjecture, which I clearly phrased as such. New ideas have to come from somewhere. The upmods simply mean that a few other people found it plausible or interesting. To elevate it to the level of a hypothesis, let alone a theory, would require explicating it further, and ultimately trying to test it, even if only with thought experiments initially.
If the conjecture were worth taking seriously, it would also benefit from people arguing against it based on its specifics, rather than on the general basis that all ideas tend to be weakest when first proposed.
The process of natural selection encompasses any activity which can affect the survival and genetic propagation of individuals and groups. You'll need to make a more specific point if you actually have one.
So that we could be created in God's image, obviously. Otherwise, we'd have no way of getting nutrients while we're in our mother's womb, and God would have to create us personally on every generation, which would be a huge PITA for God.
Everyone constantly "presupposes" that because there's plenty of paleontological and other evidence for it, and no evidence for Genesis as a literal account.
Why do people constantly presuppose that Genesis should have any literal meaning whatsoever, other than as one of many quaint creation myths from human history?
"Philosophize themselves to death" is a simplification, of course. But would the chieftains or best hunters have been the most philosophical ones? Would the cavechicks go for the guy with the most furs, or the guy who's always deep in thought in the back of the cave? Generalizing, the ones propagating their genes most effectively tend to be quite practical. There's a probability distribution, of course, so none of this is black and white, and different people play different roles in a society.
A more sophisticated version of my conjecture would acount for an agnostic/atheistics/philosophical streak as being inevitably held by a minority throughout humanity's history. One way to test the conjecture would be to establish a test economy in which people don't have to work to survive, and see how that affects religious adherence. Let me be the first to volunteer as a subject for that experiment...
The problem is intelligence. Unrestricted intelligence is difficult for natural selection to control, since it's so malleable. A moth with a hardwired reaction to fly towards a light source doesn't stop and think to itself, "hey, should I really be doing this?" as it flies towards a lit 300W halogen bulb. However, if you gave a moth intelligence, that questioning would suddenly become an option. Intelligent moths might still feel a hardwired compulsion to fly towards light sources, but they'd also be able to question it, and you'd get fewer accidental suicide-by-frying in the moth community. But you'd also get moths starting to wonder about life, the universe, and everything, which can be a big distraction.
If religion enhances a group's survival for the reasons I gave, that would help explain the establishment and continued hold of religion. However, because humans are intelligent, new humans always have the option of questioning and rejecting religion, even if (for the sake of argument) they have some kind of hardwired predilection towards religion. (Theologians would talk about free will here.) Now that our societies can support people who are only very indirectly involved in the group's survival, devoting what would otherwise be valuable "survival time" to pondering such topics becomes viable.
Perhaps you've hit on one of the ways that religion is an asset from an evolutionary biology perspective. By giving nice canned answers to these unsolvable problems, you free people up to focus on things that are more directly relevant to their survival.
Any pre-religion cavemen who were sitting around wondering where we all came from probably either starved or got eaten pretty quickly...
Most commonly, the taking of fingerprints is associated with (a) what the police do to criminals and (b) totalitarian regimes. It's reasonable to question the motives of a company that's asking for your fingerprints. There may be valid reasons for it, but often also these things are sheer unconsidered bureaucracy. Where do you draw the line? If Dunkin Donuts wanted your fingerprints before you bought a cup of coffee, would you be OK with that? Of course, in that case the free market would work and Dunkin Donuts would lose a lot of business. Would that be because people all irrationally want to keep their fingerprints private?
Can you show a link detailing the accusation you bring up?
Here's one that may have had to do with "the probe he opened into alleged corruption by Republican officials in Missouri amid a Senate race". Here's another related to "search warrants on a high-ranking CIA official as part of a corruption probe the day before a Justice Department official sent an e-mail that said Lam needed to be fired."
I can guarantee that he didn't turn around and curse people and mock them and say that the world would have been better off without them just because he didn't agree with them.
But he came pretty close to doing just that! He said that the terrorist attacks on September 11th were a consequence of God having abandoned the United States because of gays, lesbians, feminists, and the ACLU. Rather than saying the world would be better off without them, he said that the world was now without 3,000 innocent fellow humans because of them. Talk about hate speech.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but confirmation (or otherwise) of the Higgs boson is the canonical example of the types of higher-energy tests which will be possible, which will help to confirm (or improve, or replace) the Standard Model and may provide useful data for the GUTs.
To go back to the original point, a major purpose for these accelerators is to "prove" (i.e. try harder to confirm or falsify) the Standard Model, specifically in those areas where so far it's been impossible to verify.
Pfft. Your puny planet is no match for my interstellar ballistic black hole launcher.
In addition to all that, the laws also have to be perfect. They can be rational as far as they go, but still leave important things unaddressed, e.g. due to changes in circumstances. This tends to lead to people falling through cracks and getting screwed by the system. Sometimes, breaking the law can be a sensible choice for an individual. In the extreme, this becomes civil disobedience, which can be a powerful form of protest.
The idea of every little law that's ever broken being detected and enforced would be the end of civilization as we know it: it would transform a complex distributed system of human judgement and adaptibility into a largely mindless and rigid monstrosity.
My conjecture could be restated to say that (among other things) religion allows those who have thought deeply on these matters (or have strong opinions) to propagate that information to others who are more inclined to accept what they're told. This latter group would still experience the benefits I mentioned; while it doesn't stop them from thinking about such matters, it can mitigate an otherwise potentially great existential burden.I mentioned something similar, along with a few other factors which religion encompasses, in another comment in this subthread. However, some of those features more generally fall under the heading of "spirituality"; it may not be necessary to be religious, in the sense of having faith in supernatural forces, in order to benefit from at least some of these things.
I think you're confusing my comment with other kinds of things you've seen elsewhere. If you're looking for rigorous, peer-reviewed and tested scientific theories, Slashdot comments are probably the wrong place for that. Up-moderation doesn't mean "Theory Confirmed", and it doesn't put its author on the shortlist for the Nobel prize.
I made a conjecture, which I clearly phrased as such. New ideas have to come from somewhere. The upmods simply mean that a few other people found it plausible or interesting. To elevate it to the level of a hypothesis, let alone a theory, would require explicating it further, and ultimately trying to test it, even if only with thought experiments initially.
If the conjecture were worth taking seriously, it would also benefit from people arguing against it based on its specifics, rather than on the general basis that all ideas tend to be weakest when first proposed.
The process of natural selection encompasses any activity which can affect the survival and genetic propagation of individuals and groups. You'll need to make a more specific point if you actually have one.
Everyone constantly "presupposes" that because there's plenty of paleontological and other evidence for it, and no evidence for Genesis as a literal account.
Why do people constantly presuppose that Genesis should have any literal meaning whatsoever, other than as one of many quaint creation myths from human history?
"Philosophize themselves to death" is a simplification, of course. But would the chieftains or best hunters have been the most philosophical ones? Would the cavechicks go for the guy with the most furs, or the guy who's always deep in thought in the back of the cave? Generalizing, the ones propagating their genes most effectively tend to be quite practical. There's a probability distribution, of course, so none of this is black and white, and different people play different roles in a society.
A more sophisticated version of my conjecture would acount for an agnostic/atheistics/philosophical streak as being inevitably held by a minority throughout humanity's history. One way to test the conjecture would be to establish a test economy in which people don't have to work to survive, and see how that affects religious adherence. Let me be the first to volunteer as a subject for that experiment...
The problem is intelligence. Unrestricted intelligence is difficult for natural selection to control, since it's so malleable. A moth with a hardwired reaction to fly towards a light source doesn't stop and think to itself, "hey, should I really be doing this?" as it flies towards a lit 300W halogen bulb. However, if you gave a moth intelligence, that questioning would suddenly become an option. Intelligent moths might still feel a hardwired compulsion to fly towards light sources, but they'd also be able to question it, and you'd get fewer accidental suicide-by-frying in the moth community. But you'd also get moths starting to wonder about life, the universe, and everything, which can be a big distraction.
If religion enhances a group's survival for the reasons I gave, that would help explain the establishment and continued hold of religion. However, because humans are intelligent, new humans always have the option of questioning and rejecting religion, even if (for the sake of argument) they have some kind of hardwired predilection towards religion. (Theologians would talk about free will here.) Now that our societies can support people who are only very indirectly involved in the group's survival, devoting what would otherwise be valuable "survival time" to pondering such topics becomes viable.
Perhaps you've hit on one of the ways that religion is an asset from an evolutionary biology perspective. By giving nice canned answers to these unsolvable problems, you free people up to focus on things that are more directly relevant to their survival.
Any pre-religion cavemen who were sitting around wondering where we all came from probably either starved or got eaten pretty quickly...
Which of course makes humans important. Funny how it always works seems to work out that way.
Most commonly, the taking of fingerprints is associated with (a) what the police do to criminals and (b) totalitarian regimes. It's reasonable to question the motives of a company that's asking for your fingerprints. There may be valid reasons for it, but often also these things are sheer unconsidered bureaucracy. Where do you draw the line? If Dunkin Donuts wanted your fingerprints before you bought a cup of coffee, would you be OK with that? Of course, in that case the free market would work and Dunkin Donuts would lose a lot of business. Would that be because people all irrationally want to keep their fingerprints private?
Ski masks? I think you're getting your law enforcement agencies confused with ninjas or terrorists.
Buh-bye.