God and the particles of doom

Terry, I took that comment as classically tongue-in-cheek so I would not over-analyze it. However it is true that there is “magical thinking” amongst scientists such as Murphy’s Laws and Clarke’s Third Law, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

further to my last post…..

Similarly one could ask why should nature find the Higgs Boson so abhorrent? What is it about this theorized but elusive particle that nature so despises? It should go without saying that the Higgs Boson is rather like life on Mars or elsewhere in the Universe a concept based on our current level or rather lack of, understanding. The theory is based on too principle assumptions, the first is that our models and past methods are both representative and true (the case for life elsewhere in the universe is believed to be a statistical certainty, yet we are devoid of any evidence whatsoever) and the second is that the universe is quantifiable and possible to understand in it’s entirety. However if history has taught us anything it is that most leaps forward are inevitably as a consequence of having first jumped in all the wrong directions until we are left with only the one possibility that remains and whilst there are exception, Einstein’s work being a prime example, such exceptions do not arise out of the standard scientific method. Einstein theorized relativity, he did not formulate a hypothesis and then test it; if he had then he would have based his hypothesis on what was understood and believed to have been true at the time and relativity as a theory would not now exist.

When we similarly look at the idea that the universe is quantifiable, that it can be understood in it’s entirety and thus as an experiment it can be repeated (this being one of the rigour tests of any theory; that it is repeatable) we find that unlike understanding the mechanisms within the universe, the universe itself is an anomaly; a one of event. What science generally argues is that once one has quantified all the components, that’s the bits that make up the universe that when correctly arrange these components reveal the whole picture; a bit lie a assembling a jigsaw puzzle. However any idea that we currently understand all the components is easy to blow out the water, for one component, one all of us are intimately associated with baffles us completely: ourselves.

Not one of us actually understands or can accurately predict our own behaviour and without knowing this component, chiefly the human mind, we can never hope to understand the near infinite variations and complexities of the components that are not us and make up the rest of the universe. Until one can completely quantify oneself then quantifying that which is not self will always elude us.

JD:
Physicists and God have had more time to work on their relationship. It’s only been 150 years since the Origin of Species came out — give it 200 more years, and biologist and God will be having a love fest.

Bob – I don’t think it there is hope that it will get better as time goes by. Physics is inherently less contentious, deism for instance fits snugly with physics. The trouble always starts when human origins, human nature, and ultimately morality are touched. Evolutionary biology can’t stop doing that.

Thing is, when Physicists start throwing aroudn terms like god it’s sometimes a bit tongue in cheek and sometimes a label put on a vague sense of wonder at the the crazy epic things going on in the natural world, that we still scratch our head over like the curious apes we are.

ie don’t take that as approval for the personal gods of Religion. When people ask questions like “did God play some meaningful role in the creation of heaven and earth” my usual first response is “define God”.

stoo,

by its very definition “God” is undefinable. The ony thing in the universe that comes close to this same problem is defining self. Similarly one of the things I find quite bizarre is the number of people who dismiss the concept of ‘God’ yet put faith in a theory like the standard model that relies on the existence of a theoretical particle (the higgs boson) to support it… no higgs boson no standard model… sadly none of us are devoid of faith just some are too ignorant to realize it.

This Overbye article in the Times kind of annoyed folks over here at CERN, partially because Overbye can usually be relied on to appropriately ignore fringe science. Yes, the scientists are from well-respected institutes but the theory itself is unpublished, untestable nonsense as far as any of us can tell.

As for the religious elements, I think this article as actually a case of an anti-”religion ghost”. Instead of a story with unrecognized or undiscussed religious or spiritual content, here we have a case of rather explicitly spiritual language that in fact points to nothing more than everyday science (at best) or a publicity grab by a couple of scientists who should know better.

malcolm, quantum theory and the Big Bang made predictions that experiments or observations might prove true or false. That is the nature of the scientific method. These notional speculations do not point to well-formed experiments to test them out; they are scientifically stillborn and any who continue to pursue them will be indulging in fringe science.

Perhaps science was once non-competitive when it was the pastime of upper-class gentlemen who could fund their own investigations. Now it depends on outside funding and there certainly is competition. For example, since the Sixties there has been competition between the space program and the rest of Big Science, and within the space program between missions with crews and missions with robots.

Dave…

Lets just say I’ve been through this argument more times than I care to remember so I’ll be curt. You state “ quantum theory and the Big Bang made predictions that experiments or observations might prove true or false.”

Quantum theory was born in the 1920’s as was the ‘exploding cosmic egg’ theory that you better know as big bang. In the quantum physics field many researchers got ahead of themselves and begun to formulate hypothesis based on limited and indirect data; a good a well constructed argument was proposed by Bridgeman in his book the logic of modern physics and through which he gave a warning that in doing this we risked ‘prejudicing the future’. As we are now 80 years on I refer to this as the prejudice of the past. If you want to explore and understand the argument further then I suggest you do some research (much of Brigdemans work is available on line.. try google) because I wont be copying it here. So whilst you note that the theories may be true or false you as many in this field have, particularly in the absence of methods to test them, accepted them as ‘true’. Similarly the methods by which science is taught ensures that all current researchers largely accept these theories as being correct.. failing to do so means failing your finals. It is one of the flaws of this kind of indoctrination; a point not missed by Einstein who once stated “that nothing new ever came out of a classroom”

Big Bang was coined by Fred Hoyle in order to ridicule the theory of the Jesuit priest George Le Maitre (1927) who proposed that God created the universe in a great explosion. As a Jesuit priest a belief in God is I would aver rather fundamental.. thus big bang is not an alternative hypothesis to creation but an attempt to understand the mechanism by which it occurred. Fred Hoyle at the time was an atheist but later had a realisation and revised his views. When Edwin Hubble (1929) observed the red shift it gave rise to the idea that the universe was expanding and, if one extrapolated backwards, one could arrive at a point where the universe was but the size of a proton, so added weight to Le Maitres theory. The fact that the universe had nothing to expand into was not identified until later but still children are taught this theory using the balloon exercise I referred to in my earlier post. It is a complete an utterly false analogy and if you are a physicist and don’t realise this then frankly you are intellectually lacking. Similarly because you were taught it as such a young age it has prejudiced your thinking and as an adult you have failed to free yourself from such prejudice. Its much more a process of increasing complexity, what I refer to as a ‘fracturing process’ I give a far better understanding of this process in the youtube videos that can be accessed via the link that is my name (the lesson of the lights and aum to allah; both have playlists).

As regards competition, it is a human trait. Confucius once noted that the wise man competes only in sport. Science itself should not be competitive and when it is it lead to individuals deliberately attempted to pervert the course of understanding. Again I’m not the first to identify this and as you point out the big shift came in the 60’s, a good and still very relevant book on this is Brian Fords nonscience (1971). CERN, which is funded by more countries that I care to list is supposed to be an attempt to prevent this competition; but given its race with fermilab it has sadly failed completely in this objective. When it comes to competing for funding the big winner of them all is defence research, sometimes loosely disguised as space research as was the case with Reagan’s star wars program.

Anyway we are digressing considerably from the article that these comments are meant to be in relation too. So I take issue with the comment that Nielsen and Ninomiya are practical jokers that have put forward a theory in order to have a laugh. Perhaps they are both coming up to retirement and so have no worries about the integrity of their careers and similarly are happy with the contributions they have made being relegated to ‘papers you don’t quote’. They have or will in this exercise, assuming the paper is a joke, destroyed their careers but I suspect regardless of what reputation they have for placing buckets of water over doors or banana skins in entrance halls they are not so foolish as to throw everything away just so they can declare “had ya fooled there” . Perhaps it serves your purpose to claim it an early or late April fools but I fail to see how two eminent scientists stand to gain anything but the destruction of their life’s work. They can, if one approaches this logically, be saying only what they genuinely believe to be a real possibility.

True physicists may or may not believe in God, but they certainly believe in the power of physics.
Physics is the one science that is truly rational.
“There’s physics and then there’s stamp collecting” a famous physicist once said. (Rutherford)

Peter Martel,
(author of “Memoirs of a Hayseed Physicist”)

(Even hayseeds can become physicists if they learn how physics works. They don’t necessarily have to believe in God)

Peter, not totally convinced that an abstract concept can itself be called rational, I would aver that rationality is an attribute of reason that manifests in action. The statement you attribute to Rutherford, himself a Nobel prize winner for chemistry (sorry stamp collecting) being a prime example of an irrational and frankly arrogant statement and as a species we have likely gained more from the contributions of chemists, microbiologist and agronomist than we have and ever will from particle physicists and cosmologists. The LHC is a prime example of a failure to demonstrate any practical gain to humanity… seems rather irrational to me at least to pursue something as expensive and energy consuming as the LHC for which no benefits have been postulated.

at the risk of getting stuck in symantics the word physics as it applies in the current context is largely bound by particle and cosmological sciences. Sure you could claim that physics is how I am currently communicating and physics is operating even when I use more traditional forms of communication such as speech. So whilst you cannot divorce it completely from existence (everything is bound by Newtons laws) you can’t if you want a discussion to progress use it as a catchall. And true there is research performed for which there is no obvious or identifiable benefit outside the research itself; but then that research doesnt have a $10 billion price tag nor are there significant concerns about the dangers of that research. In this respect the LHC is unique and regardless of what you determine the possible chances of the LHC actually damaging the universe when weighed against the gains (zero) it fails any logical risk analysis

It’s ok, I don’t think the LHC will punch a wormhole through to the dungeon dimensions.

I posted this in another thread but thought it might be of interest here…

at the end of your article you correctly identify the principle flaw with CERN’s safety reports: none of the scientists involved are independent of their beliefs, faith and total reliance on the maths at CERN being correct less they fail to justify their own work and careers.

It’s not just a case of commissioning a report into a project to determine whether the project satisfies acceptable safety parameters that have been determined through historically gained knowledge and experiences, (for example the commissioning of a nuclear power plant), but whether the science and mathematics that underpins it is itself valid: thus it brings into question not the project itself but the mathematical reasoning behind it.

Under such conditions a report that was to give credence to the fears and dangers would similarly question the validity of the standard model and undermine the very foundations of the whole field of particle physics: thus for an ‘Expert’ to determine that CERN was wrong the expert would similarly determine that he/she was also wrong…and confine particle physics to the same draw that the fields of flat Earth and geocentric astronomy now reside in. Clearly such career suicide is highly unlikely.

Furthermore the claim that these types of collisions take place in space all the time is false. Sure collisions take place, collisions take place all the time and not just in space: but the collisions planned at CERN are unique, they will not occur under any currently existing environmental conditions found anywhere in the Universe.

The collisions will occur in an environment kept at temperatures lower than that found in the most empty and vacuous place in the Universe; this is considerably warmer than the temperatures of our outer atmosphere: where these collisions are claimed to be observed. In a sense it is like claiming the physics associated with the properties of a gas (i.e water vapour) are similarly valid for the properties of a solid (i.e. ice). Furthermore this temperature; absolute zero, is known to afford some unique properties to materials; in particular metals become super conductors with no loss in energy, thus allowing the high intensity magnets which clad the main chamber to operate and offset, effectively cancel the gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear forces that would ordinarily act on these protons. Even in the most empty and vacuous part of space a particle is still above this temp and under the influence of the gravitational forces of the universe and whilst these may be minute, from a relative perspective: the gravitational influence of two protons to each other (0/0) to a proton and the Universe (0/0+); this difference is infinitely greater and yields the following relative differences:

Gravitational influence of PP = 0/0 . therefore relative difference = 0
Gravitational influence of PU = 0/0+ . therefore relative difference = 1

The conditions under which the collisions at CERN will take place have a relative value of (0) compared to the relative value of the collisions that may occur in space (1); thus when compared to each other the relative difference between the LHC’s conditions and natural conditions is 0/1. There is absolutely no comparison. The conditions are so unique as to have never occurred previously or to have only ever occurred once, when the universe consisted of nothing but two.

It is a bit like comparing the collision of two super tankers on the high seas with the collision of two similar sized meteorites in our atmosphere or one with our planet. The former may cause a localised environmental incident whereas the latter would result in an explosion, one so great that the destruction of all life on this planet would be the inevitable consequence. Remember it is the conditions under which a collision takes place rather than the collision itself that determines the outcome.

Given such it is clear that we cannot rely on reports which are produced by people who have a vested interest in the outcome and conclusions and similarly bases its claims on atmospheric collisions which occur under completely different environmental conditions.