Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Julie Carter on August 26, 2011 at 9:47pm

That sounds like a contradiction to something I read by Michio Kaku today: http://bigthink.com/ideas/38079

Permalink Reply by ROMAN ROMACH on August 26, 2011 at 10:17pm

I have not seen any contradition.  The Higgs has not been found, and the Kaku paper does not say that it has.  Some promising readings were concluded to be statistical anomlies.  The CERN results were presented at an international symposium in Mumbai on August 22.

Permalink Reply by Julie Carter on August 26, 2011 at 10:35pm

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but Kaku's post seems to say that the memo indicated that the search for the Higgs Boson was over, because they had found it, though they didn't explicitly state that, that's how people were interpreting the leaked memo. But maybe the memo has been misinterpreted, and they were saying the search is over, because they're not going to find it.

Permalink Reply by ROMAN ROMACH on August 27, 2011 at 12:20pm

 

His paper does seem to imply that something was found, but his enthusiasm made things a bit confusing.

Permalink Reply by Steven Paul Leiva on August 26, 2011 at 11:30pm

Does Kaku have to be so melodramatic and use the term, "The mind of God?" It has become a useless metaphore.

Permalink Reply by Julie Carter on August 26, 2011 at 11:42pm

He has gotten that way lately. I think he's gotten too famous and on tv too much...he's too Hollywood now! Ha! But in the after-show discussion after the Stephen Hawking episode of Curiosity, he disappointed me by basically saying that we couldn't know if there's a god or not, that science can't address that question. I mean, he's a brilliant guy, but it almost seems like he's playing his part too much, trying to make all his "fans" happy.

Permalink Reply by Steven Paul Leiva on August 26, 2011 at 11:45pm

It does seem that way, doesn't it?

Permalink Reply by Chris Thompson on September 17, 2011 at 11:32am

Well LHC has now confirmed that there seems to be no mind of God. It kind of makes sense.

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on August 27, 2011 at 2:12am

"Are all the billions that have spent on this [Higgs boson] project spent simply to satisfy the curiosity of the physicists - or is there something more?"

If spent to satisfy physicists' curiosity, don't tell the Tea Party Repubs. They know their god did it and will want to cut the funding.

Something more? For a good read, try Eric Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened. He said LeMaitre, a Catholic priest who studied math, started the creation from nothing story, which a later astronomer ridiculed by calling it the Big Bang. The name stuck.

The Big Bang story (with later fixes: inflation, dark energy, dark mass) requires the entire mass of the universe to have been concentrated in a point smaller than the head of a pin. It requires a similarly fantastical claim that both space and time began then. It has similarities to Ptolemy's idea of planets moving in circular paths around the earth--needing one explanation after another to silence the people who were pointing out differences between the concept and the measurements.

A bright school child can see a flaw. If the universe's mass is moving away from where the Bang allegedly took place (visualize the spokes on a bicycle wheel but in three dimensions), what forces caused the galaxies to change their directions and/or their velocities so much that they (the galaxies) collide?

Lerner's explanation (as I understand it, a universe of plasma with on-going supernovas) makes more sense. It also doesn't depend on a mathematics whose equations can only approximate reality.

 

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on August 27, 2011 at 10:14am

Sounds like he's trying to say that galaxies can only move in straight lines. No reason that two galaxies moving in approimately parallel lines can't curve in towards each other and eventually collide. I don't understand what he's getting at, talking about galaxies colliding.

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on August 27, 2011 at 10:35am

That's what I meant. If everything emerged from the singularity with perfect symmetry, you'd have nothing but a thin film spread across reality. But it wasn't, so you get the galaxies clumping together, then stars, etc. Then you get interaction between the various masses. You wouldn't have things moving in straight lines for very long.

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on August 28, 2011 at 6:58am

"...two galaxies moving in approximately parallel lines...."

Joseph. not approximately parallel lines. Radial lines, like the spokes on a bicycle wheel but in three dimensions. The Bang would result in galaxies moving away from each other. Forces that could change the directions of two galaxies to put them on a collision course would have to be enormous.

 

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