Thread: God??.....Particle?

Well I expect this is as good a place as any for this topic. It seems that we are closer than ever before (or not?) to understanding the beginning of life as we know it based on the potential of this upcoming experiment. How is the findings of this study going to effect the world in terms of religion? Will it? Could the findings of this study begin the 'end' as we have heard it? I feel it will be very contentious to say the least..



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Key scientist sure "God particle" will be found soon

By Robert EvansMon Apr 7, 12:27 PM ET


British physicist Peter Higgs said on Monday it should soon be possible to prove the existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible -- as he first argued 40 years ago.
Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson," which originates from the force, will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research centre on the Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year.
"The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly ... I'm more than 90 percent certain that it will," Higgs told journalists.
The 78-year-old's original efforts in the early 1960s to explain why the force, dubbed the Higgs field, must exist were dismissed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Today, the existence of the invisible field is widely accepted by scientists, who believe it came into being milliseconds after the Big Bang created the universe some 15 billion years ago.
Finding the Higgs boson would prove this theory right.
CERN's new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) aims to simulate conditions at the time of that primeval inferno by smashing particles together at near light-speed and so unlock many secrets of the universe.
Higgs was in Geneva to visit CERN for the first time in 13 years in advance of the launch.
Scientists at the centre hope the process will produce clear signs of the boson, dubbed the "God particle" by some, to the displeasure of Higgs, an atheist.
He came up with his theory to explain why mass disappears as matter is broken down to its smallest constituent parts -- molecules, atoms and quarks.
BIG BANG
The normally media-shy physicist, who has spent most of his career at Scotland's Edinburgh University, postulated that matter was weightless at the exact moment of the Big Bang and then much of it promptly gained mass.
This, he argued, must be due to a field which stuck to particles as they passed through it and made them heavy. If this had not happened, matter would have floated free in space and stars and planets would never have formed.
Higgs said he hoped the elusive boson -- which an earlier but less powerful collider at CERN and another at the U.S. Fermilab had failed to detect -- would be identified before his 80th birthday in 2009.
"If it doesn't," he said, "I shall be very, very puzzled."
But there may be no immediate visible proof -- despite some fanciful portrayals of what it might look like -- of the boson's appearance on the ultra-sophisticated computers used by CERN scientists to track the billions of collisions in the LHC.
"It all happens so fast that the appearance of the boson may be hidden in the data collected, and it could take a long time for the analysis to find it," said Higgs.

"I may have to keep the champagne on ice for a while yet." (Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Chloe Fussell)

Print Story: Key scientist sure "God particle" will be found soon on Yahoo! News

Originally Posted by Driventowin

Well I expect this is as good a place as any for this topic. It seems that we are closer than ever before (or not?) to understanding the beginning of life as we know it based on the potential of this upcoming experiment. How is the findings of this study going to effect the world in terms of religion? Will it? Could the findings of this study begin the 'end' as we have heard it? I feel it will be very contentious to say the least..

I doubt it will affect religion much at all. Science and the discovery of the god particle move us closer to understanding the how - but most of the time people now turn to religion to anwer "Why?".

Most people simply cannot be content with the idea that there is no master plan or that there is no purpose to the human existance. Many folks are so pretnetious that they feel there simply must be a reason for a being as advanced as the human race to exist.

Originally Posted by Bugs

I doubt it will affect religion much at all

I tend to disagree, Look at how people currently react to differing opinions and points of view on religion. If the scientific community comes out and says that science has now proven the birth of all existing solar systems in the universe and beyond and it's based on particle collision and it's not the Supreme being everyone has believed in since the dawn of civilized man, that's not likely to set very well with a world of extremists in every religion..

The fact that it's still not explained how that all came to fruition in the first place is going to be lost on those believers because they are mostly blinded strictly by faith anyway and have a tendency to reject any science to the contrary due to their own ignorance in many cases..

What I think is most eye opening here is that Nostradamus and other soothsayers have all been prophesizing that a contentious occurrence would happen that would be the final reason for the world war that does us all in.. But yet no one has been able to accurately decipher the cause of that predicted conflict and have only assumed it was due to some current world conflict and not something as seemingly benign as this sitting in the background, makes me pause and ponder..

Lets examine this from another angle for a moment. Say for the moment that we did confirm this theory and God was supposed to come back and the rapture was to occur. It seems that at the point of our complete rejection of the faith that he created the heavens and earth, that seems to be the time in which God would most likely choose to exert his influence and destroy the evil non believers and skeptics alike wouldn't it?? At the height of the devils influence as it were...Just another perspective....

Originally Posted by Norton

No matter what science discovers, religions as they have in the past will adapt their myths to integrate scientifically accepted fact.

Originally Posted by Driventowin

existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible

This ones easy. The force was created by god. So be a good person and do what we tell you or he will zap you with the force.

Agreed. The Vatican quickly endorsed the Big Bang theory when it was first proposed, as well. More from this thread:

https://teakdoor.com/the-teakdoor-lou...tml#post534672

What's even stranger is the Holographic Principle

The holographic principle is a speculative conjecture claiming that all of the information contained in a volume of space can be represented by information which lives in the boundary of that region. In other words, if you have an empty sphere, all of the events within can be explained by the arrangement of information on the surface of the sphere. In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a two dimensional information structure "painted" on a boundary surface, and that the three dimensions we observe are illusory.

Holographic principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Begbie

Some similarities with Buddhism are apparent.

Very true, especially the concept of cause and effect, how everything interacts. One example would be the difficulty in measuring something accurately without changing it in the process. For instance, how would you measure the temperature of a glass of water without causing some interaction, and thus changing the initial state of the very thing you wanted to measure? The mindblowing fact that everything you observe has already happened, and that everything surrounding us consists mostly of empty space (between the atom core and the surrounding electrons)? The idea that all mass is basically concentrated energy (a heck of a lot of it!). The concept of time.......

Time for a drink.....

Originally Posted by kingwilly

I totally disagree, a weird ass scientific experiment will totally prove it once and for all, and if it does all muslims, christians and jews will suddenly abandon their religion overnight!

This is inevitable. Historically, religions no matter how popular have been cast aside to make way for new more appealing religions. In the distant future our current mainstream religions will be looked upon as quaint rites performed by uninformed savages. The basic appeal of our religions can be reduced to the promise of everlasting life without suffering. In the future, faith in science and technology to provide blissful immortality will supplant religions based on all knowing all powerful supreme beings. Actually it is already taking place as we look more and more to science to fix all our problems and extend our lives.

Errm, this is about the Higgs Boson, right? The theoretical mass particle? How, outside a journalists mind, does that have anything to do with God? This God particle crap comes from the title of a book about the Higgs Boson, it was a joke. Now it's just PR flim-flam used by people who can get no further into a physics book than the title and the blurb. The big deal is that if there's no Higgs Boson the Standard Model of Physics is probably wrong and if there is a Higgs Boson knowing it's size will tell us sort of cool stuff about the Universe. It's got bugger all to do with God or religion. I'm wondering if some of the posters here wittering on about religion even know what a boson is


This is the simplest explanation I could find of the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson;

Ripples at the Heart of Physics

By Simon Hands Theory Division, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.
The Higgs boson is an undiscovered elementary particle, thought to be a vital piece of the closely fitting jigsaw of particle physics. Like all particles, it has wave properties akin to those ripples on the surface of a pond which has been disturbed; indeed, only when the ripples travel as a well defined group is it sensible to speak of a particle at all. In quantum language the analogue of the water surface which carries the waves is called a field. Each type of particle has its own corresponding field.
The Higgs field is a particularly simple one - it has the same properties viewed from every direction, and in important respects is indistinguishable from empty space. Thus physicists conceive of the Higgs field being "switched on", pervading all of space and endowing it with "grain" like that of a plank of wood. The direction of the grain in undetectable, and only becomes important once the Higgs' interactions with other particles are taken into account. for instance, particles called vector bosons can travel with the grain, in which case they move easily for large distances and may be observed as photons - that is, particles of light that we can see or record using a camera; or against, in which case their effective range is much shorter, and we call them W or Z particles. These play a central role in the physics of nuclear reactions, such as those occurring in the core of the sun.
The Higgs field enables us to view these apparently unrelated phenomenon as two sides of the same coin; both may be described in terms of the properties of the same vector bosons. When particles of matter such as electrons or quarks (elementary constituents of protons and neutrons, which in turn constitute the atomic nucleus) travel through the grain, they are constantly flipped "head-over-heels". this forces them to move more slowly than their natural speed, that of light, by making them heavy. We believe the Higgs field responsible for endowing virtually all the matter we know about with mass.
Like most analogies, the wood-grain one is persuasive but flawed: we should think of the grain as not defining a direction in everyday three-dimensional space, but rather in some abstract internal space populated by various kinds of vector boson, electron and quark.
The Higgs' ability to fill space with its mysterious presence makes it a vital component in more ambitious theories of how the Universe burst into existence out of some initial quantum fluctuation, and why the Universe prefers to be filled with matter rather than anti-matter; that is, why there is something rather than nothing. To constrain these ideas more rigorously, and indeed flesh out the whole picture, it is important to find evidence for the Higgs field at first hand - in other words, find the boson. There are unanswered questions: the Higgs' very simplicity and versatility, beloved of theorists, makes it hard to pin down. How many Higgs particles are there? Might it/they be made from still more elementary components? Most crucial, how heavy is it? Our current knowledge can only put its mass roughly between that of an iron atom and three times that of a uranium atom. This is a completely new form of matter about whose nature we still have only vague hints and speculations and its discovery is the most exciting prospect in contemporary particle physics