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IS THE "GOD PARTICLE" A MYTH? STEPHEN HAWKINGS BET AGAINST IT'S DISCOVERY.

The Higgs boson, the Higgs, the God Particle is the hypothetical particle believed to give matter it's mass. Proposed by Peter Higgs and other physicists it has been the object of search at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). After running the LHC continually for five months, "CERN scientists declared that over the entire range of energy the Collider had explored...the Higgs boson is excluded as a possibilty with a 95% probability."

Although there is still a 5% chance that it may still be found in this range (the search will continue until the end of the year), and the lower ranges have been explored by smaller colliders, it is possible that the Higgs does not exist. And this would be a blow to the unification theory of electromagnetic and weak forces and how the universe came into being.

I don't know why, but I was disappointed at the news. But then I thought, what does it really matter? What would have been accomplished that would have had a positive impact on humanity? Are all the billions that have spent on this project spent simply to satisfy the curiosty of the physicists - or is there something more?

I believe that pure, undirected research, is important - but this search makes me hesitate.

(Scientific American, Guest Blog by Amir Aczel)

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on August 28, 2011 at 7:12am

... such as the gravitational attraction between two galaxies.

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on August 28, 2011 at 7:30am

Gravitation is by FAR the weakest of the four fundamental forces. The others are stronger by about ten to the 25th power.

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on August 28, 2011 at 7:35am

Close up, yes. At greater distances, not so much.

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on August 28, 2011 at 7:58am

"At greater distances, not so much."

Gravity weakens by the square of the distance.

Twice the distance, one fourth as strong. Four times the distance, one sixteenth as strong.

Do you really think gravitation would change the directions of galaxies that are moving farther apart, along their radial lines, at really HIGH speeds?

Permalink Reply by Joseph P on August 28, 2011 at 8:21am

Wouldn't know. I'm not an astrophysicist.

One of the big objections I have with your statements is that every galaxy was heading out at absolute radial lines, relative to every other galaxy. The interactions within the mass of the universe, early on before matter clumped into galaxies, would have spun things off into all kinds of directions, still mostly headed more-or-less outward, but at all sorts of angles.

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on August 28, 2011 at 6:43am

Where has Lerner's work been refuted? Sure, everything from nothing trumps it.

Gravity? Cosmologists couldn't explain the formation of clumps of matter so that gravity could act. They invented the fiction we know as inflation. Where's the evidence for it? Not in their equations, which are but approximations. Try writing a differential equation that explains the gravitational attraction of just two bodies when their densities vary. Remember, the earth wobbles and your equations will have to account for the wobble and what causes it.

With the clumps moving away from the claimed singularity at hyper-enormous speeds, their changing direction to get onto collision courses would require hyper-enormous forces.

Do you accept the cosmologists' claims that both space and time began at the Bang? It's their take on the Xian story and has as much evidence supporting it.

Kaku? Several years ago he said on one of the science shows he emcees that plugging a point mass (another fiction) into Einstein's equations led to black holes.

Fiction begets fiction.

Permalink Reply by Chris Thompson on September 17, 2011 at 11:44am

Universe's mass is not moving "away" from a certain spatial location - in the beginning, the energy density just corresponded to something we might call a point. During expansion the energy density became lower, mass was generated and started flying in random directions, which led to all kinds of clustering phenomena, such as galactic collisions.

Permalink Reply by Littlejohn Dellar on August 27, 2011 at 7:25am

Although this chap Stephen Hawkings has bet against it being found, I really think they ought to ask the opinion of the famous physicist, Stephen Hawking. *grin*

Seriously though, although the Higgs has not been found so far, we have not yet looked at the higher energies which the LHC will be getting to in the future.

Permalink Reply by ROMAN ROMACH on August 27, 2011 at 12:28pm

Oops. : ) But in fairness, I recently was afflicted with vertical diplopia (IVth cranial nerve palsy), so don't pick on me.

So you're betting on Peter Higgs and not Hawking? From an esthetic point of view the unification theory would be much more elegant if it had a grander bridge than an elusive particle.

Permalink Reply by matt warren on August 27, 2011 at 12:55pm

has anyone here bothered to contact Kaku and ask HIM what the fuck he ment?

i mean isnt that the way we find things out by asking the person involved?

BTW the particle was originally called that "god damn" particle because of its elusiveness.

saw that on a panel discussion with neil degassi tyson and a host of others.

Permalink Reply by Greg LeGore on August 29, 2011 at 7:03am

Roman,

On the contrary, the rational, thoughtful manner in which recent reports (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14680570) cast doubt upon the Higgs particle and even supporters of supersymmetry agree that it creates significant difficulty for them is in direct contrast to the response, within religious/political/economic/other belief systems, to disconfirming information. In belief systems, the bearer of bad news may be criticized, ostracized, mocked, mentally or physically harmed, excommunicated/shunned, or all of the above. History provides countless examples of each - sadly, we humans will go to any length to protect beliefs and will continue long after anyone not immersed in the belief system would have stopped. Note that few if any of us believe in Zeus...no gods are on Mount Olympus, after all.

And disconfirming research is needed to find out what doesn't work (at least in the conditions under test) while pointing the way toward a hypothesis which might be proven valid.

Please remember too that pure, undirected research may lead to direct benefits or indirect benefits. Quantum theory is now being applied in information technology: storage, cryptography and trust, computation, and more. Sometimes the benefits take a while to be realized.

One final point, of many that could be made, is that much or most of what was known to be true a hundred years ago has been supplanted by new data, facts, knowledge, insights, and theories. I hope that this trend will continue or even accelerate (as so ably predicted by Toffler, Kurzweil, and others) - may we look back in a hundred years and look in disbelief at our current versions!

Permalink Reply by ROMAN ROMACH on August 29, 2011 at 7:31pm

Very well said - and points out how sound, convincing theoretical arguements can become widely accepted dogma without any evidence. This kind of theorizing has led us to quickly accept multiverses, parallel universes, nine, ten or eleven dimensions, wormholes, etc. We will never get the chance to prove that they exist - nor ever see them. But, of course, they will become part of the language and accepted as much as the "Big Bang."