Comments on: The “God Particle”

By: Grand Theft Auto

Grand Theft Auto — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 07:50:15 +0000

Just want to say your article is striking. The clarity in your post is simply striking and i can take for granted you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with forthcoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the ac complished work. Excuse my poor English. English is not my mother tongue.

By: Blake Stacey

Blake Stacey — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:35:35 +0000

Actually, the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles, but the proton and neutron are not elementary, being composed of three quarks apiece. About 90% of the proton mass comes from the energy of the gluon field binding those quarks together. Frank Wilczek has written entertainingly on this subject. If I recall correctly, Lederman wanted to emphasize how the Higgs breaks the symmetries between fundamental forces, making one distinct from another. The Higgs mechanism gives mass to the W and Z bosons, but not to photons, making the weak nuclear force carried by the W and Z distinct from the electromagnetic force carried by photons. Lederman's analogy was that this was like all the people at the Tower of Babel starting to speak different languages; hence, after the editor went to work, "the God particle". Personally, I think "the Babel particle" conveys the same analogy, has less risk of misinterpretation and sounds cooler too.

By: Kevin Warner

Kevin Warner — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:01:30 +0000

Good piece, and recommended by your brother (which is how I found it). Interesting to see some journalism done on the role of journalists in filtering the communication between various groups within a culture, and the problems introduced by the media as a third party with it’s own commercial agenda. Nice work.

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:09:01 +0000

@Larens: Can you post links to any site or sites with additional information about this theory? Who has developed it and where have any prospective empirical tests or other results been published? And are there any abstracts that educated nonphysicists like me could understand?

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:16:37 +0000

In the case of the “God particle,” there is actually a nonsensationalistic reason for the name. The Higgs boson is predicted by the so-called Standard Model of elementary particles developed in the 1970s by Weinberg, Glashow, and others. It was dubbed the “God particle” because according to current theory, it is what gave *mass* to all the particles (like protons and neutrons) that now possess it in the first instants after the Big Bang. If the Higgs boson is not found via the LHC, it will be a huge blow to our current understanding of fundamental physics. But physicists often like to talk about God, even when (as in most cases) they don’t believe in God in the conventional sense. It’s their way of talking about the majesty and glory of the universe.

By: larens

larens — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:00:27 +0000

Since the Higgs boson almost certainly does not exist, one will be able to have headlines, “The God Particle is Dead!” when the real physics comes out. Four dimensional spacetime has an exotic topology with eight underlying dimensions: 3 rotational, 3 counter-rotational, time, and temperature. The evidence for this is in the temperature patterns of the cosmic microwave background. They show that the 3-D topology of the universe is a Poincare dodecahedral space formed by “gluing” opposite pentagonal sides of a dodecahedron to each other with a 36 degree twist. The 6 rotational/counterrotational dimensions correspond to topologically distinct circles on the surface of a doughnut related to the electromagnetic field with which we observe the universe. Though there is no Higgs boson with this topology, “Cold Fusion Lives!”. If you want to know more about this, come to the American Chemical Society’s New Energy Technology Symposium March 21-22 in San Francisco. Experimental evidence and theory for low energy nuclear reactions will be presented and discussed there.

By: Seth Kahn

Seth Kahn — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:23:59 +0000

I’ve read Lederman’s book. His use of the term is very tongue-in-cheek; he spends significant time and energy in the book debunking efforts to collapse particle physics into theology (books like The Tao of Physics).

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:56:38 +0000

I think the media’s habit is to use “God” for whatever is on the frontier of science’s exploration, i.e. at the level of basic explanation of the order of reality. Thus, “God” serves to name those things which would get closure for science in a “total” explanation” of reality. “God” thus has a function. Needless to say, this does not at all work for science.

For those who believe or experience God this seems silly and, actually, disrespectful. Is it?

I think using “God” to point at what we can’t explain yet but are hoping to soon is not disrespectful. It just doesn’t recognize that there are methodologies, technologies if you will that explore and engage a reality that some of us call the divine. While rigorous, those methods aren’t empirical in the everyday sense of that word.

By: Peter Marmorek

Peter Marmorek — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:59:03 +0000

Hi Sarah,

A pleasure to meet, and I’m looking forward to reading more on your take on the intersection between science and religion, a subject very near and dear to my heart too. (Taught world religions for 20 years, and MIT ’70 (so we’ve both walked the infinite corridor)).

Fina and clear article and absolutely dead on analysis of media overhyping research. The Tikkun example is a dead link, btw.

More to follow

peter

By: Tom McGurk

Tom McGurk — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:42:36 +0000

Thank you, Sarah Ackley, for this article. As a non-scientist, student of spirituality, I found your thoughts and your references to back-up material very helpful. I do worry about the media. They seem to be getting worse. I wish they wrote like you do.