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guangzhou
Jul 5, 2012, 9:24 PM
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curt wrote: pinktricam wrote: No offense, but it's apparent you've either never really met Him, or if you did, you didn't actually want to know Him. If an individual has an imaginary friend who talks to him, it's a form of insanity. When millions do, it's a religion. Curt
Curt, I would like permission to add that to my signature block on my email.
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curt
Jul 5, 2012, 9:52 PM
Post #27 of 43
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guangzhou wrote: curt wrote: pinktricam wrote: No offense, but it's apparent you've either never really met Him, or if you did, you didn't actually want to know Him. If an individual has an imaginary friend who talks to him, it's a form of insanity. When millions do, it's a religion. Curt Curt, I would like permission to add that to my signature block on my email.
Fine with me. I'm paraphrasing something I saw awhile back and am uncertain of the original source.
Curt
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guangzhou
Jul 5, 2012, 10:44 PM
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Guess that's a common problem with those of us who read a lot, remembering where.
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sungam
Jul 6, 2012, 4:05 AM
Post #29 of 43
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pinktricam wrote: rrrADAM wrote: pinktricam wrote: Genesis Reality 1:1 In the beginning God the Higgs boson created... Fixed that for you, pink.  In fact, we may have to rethink even our idea of 'beginning' in that sense. When you start thinking outside the "box" of this four dimensional existence we occupy, that will be the beginning of your journey on the trail wisdom...carry on.
Edit: Yes, obvious bait is obvious.
(This post was edited by sungam on Jul 6, 2012, 4:08 AM)
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jt512
Jul 8, 2012, 6:05 PM
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rrrADAM wrote: pinktricam wrote: rrrADAM wrote: pinktricam wrote: Genesis Reality 1:1 In the beginning God the Higgs boson created... Fixed that for you, pink. In fact, we may have to rethink even our idea of 'beginning' in that sense. When you start thinking outside the "box" of this four dimensional existence we occupy, that will be the beginning of your journey on the trail wisdom...carry on. Interesting... Please, do tell what is outsidethe box of this 4 dimensional existence (aka the universe) we occupy.
Clearly, pinkie is a string theorist. Who knew?
Jay
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jt512
Jul 8, 2012, 6:07 PM
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scrapedape wrote: rrrADAM wrote: It looks like the God Particle Higgs bosan may have been found at LHC... We shall have to wait and see what the data shows. I, for one, am suprised... If this is the case, it will change almost everything, and will even have social and theological impacts... Well, for those who care to better understand reality, that is. Ok, serious question: why should I care? How is this going to improve my life? Whose life, if any, is it going to improve?
Why do you only care about things that improve your life?
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petsfed
Jul 9, 2012, 7:31 AM
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jt512 wrote: rrrADAM wrote: pinktricam wrote: rrrADAM wrote: pinktricam wrote: Genesis Reality 1:1 In the beginning God the Higgs boson created... Fixed that for you, pink. In fact, we may have to rethink even our idea of 'beginning' in that sense. When you start thinking outside the "box" of this four dimensional existence we occupy, that will be the beginning of your journey on the trail wisdom...carry on. Interesting... Please, do tell what is outsidethe box of this 4 dimensional existence (aka the universe) we occupy. Clearly, pinkie is a string theorist. Who knew? Jay
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petsfed
Jul 9, 2012, 7:36 AM
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In all seriousness, I have no idea what this discovery actually means, except that it is the most important experimental discovery in decades, and that physicists are right to celebrate it. Still, I think the real implications are lost in the naming. "God particle". pfft. It causes mass, or is mass, or whatever. All I see it really doing is providing a definitive mark of mass vs. energy and helps explain the relativistic equivalence of the two in a way that does not reduce to handwaving. Maybe knowing more about the higgs will allow us to make more efficient e.g. fusion systems but for now, its just interesting.
To paraphrase Feynman, science is a lot like sex: sure it has practical applications but that's not why we do it.
(This post was edited by petsfed on Jul 9, 2012, 7:37 AM)
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sungam
Jul 9, 2012, 2:16 PM
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It more or less tells us that we are not wrong at this point with the standard model. We may not be right, but we are not wrong yet.
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veganclimber
Jul 9, 2012, 9:51 PM
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sungam wrote: It more or less tells us that we are not wrong at this point with the standard model. We may not be right, but we are not wrong yet.
The standard model is certainly right. Maybe not completely, but it is one of the most successful theories of all time.
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dan2see
Jul 9, 2012, 10:43 PM
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petsfed wrote: In all seriousness, I have no idea what this discovery actually means, except that it is the most important experimental discovery in decades, and that physicists are right to celebrate it...
The CERN announcement was not a discovery. Higgs proposed the particle 50 years ago. In those years, thousands of physicists and mathematicians have spend millions of hours working on the idea, or around it. The LHC team needed about 20 years of designing, building, and fixing their monster machine's tubing, hardware, and computers. Finally the organizers worked for months trying to refine the Sigma value of the skimpiest, noisiest, high-energy data you could imagine.
No it's not a "discovery", but the announcement last week was certainly an important "milestone".
petsfed wrote: ... Still, I think the real implications are lost in the naming. "God particle". pfft. ...
Scientists never used that silliest of labels "God Particle".
In my opinion, the really important idea is not the "Higgs Boson" but the "Higgs Field", and the interaction with the other force fields, and with the structure of the fundamental particles.
So it's not enough to claim that it "generates mass" -- it must have some real influence on the rest of the Standard Model, and that influence must be expressed with some kind of math.
In all the publicly available stories, I have yet to see a description of the Higgs Field itself. For example, is it something like a complex electromagnetic field, where the two charges twist around each other, to propagate its energy across space, until it gets absorbed by a particle? Does it carry the weak charge too, like a third component? Or what? It's gotta do something, to get its job done!
This bothers me -- there's so much ballyhoo about whether the HB exists -- doesn't anybody care about what it does?
petsfed wrote: ... It causes mass, or is mass, or whatever. All I see it really doing is providing a definitive mark of mass vs. energy and helps explain the relativistic equivalence of the two in a way that does not reduce to handwaving. Maybe knowing more about the higgs will allow us to make more efficient e.g. fusion systems but for now, its just interesting....
In all the publicly available stories, I have seen some illustrations of how the Higgs Field is supposed to generate mass, but never any explanation about the quantity. For example, why the particular spread of masses among the electron, muon, and tau? And why are quarks so much heavier than that? Is it the strong force? Or something else? And why?
Also, the Higgs Boson is too heavy to be found in our current universe, but the Higgs Field is supposed be everywhere. So it generates mass? Something important is not being said.
petsfed wrote: ... To paraphrase Feynman, science is a lot like sex: sure it has practical applications but that's not why we do it.
Now that's what I call realistic!
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rrrADAM
Jul 10, 2012, 12:56 PM
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Very well said, Dan. 
dan2sew wrote: In all the publicly available stories, I have yet to see a description of the Higgs Field itself. For example, is it something like a complex electromagnetic field, where the two charges twist around each other, to propagate its energy across space, until it gets absorbed by a particle? Does it carry the weak charge too, like a third component? Or what? It's gotta do something, to get its job done!
As it is with all quantum objects (aka "quantumstuff", or as Nick Herbert calls them, "'quons") like electrons, quarks, gluons, photons, etc... Quantum theory doesn't say what any of it "IS"*, but what experiments will show when performed... And it is right, all the time.
*Example: WHAT is an electron?
Sure, we can state what some of its attributes are, but what really IS it? Just like with gravity.
The more we learn in one area (quantum theory), the more questions we have in another (quantum reality)... Quantum randomness is what keeps us quatumly ignorant about the physicle reality of unmeasured individual quons.
(This post was edited by rrrADAM on Jul 10, 2012, 1:14 PM)
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pinktricam
Jul 12, 2012, 5:37 AM
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styndall wrote: pinktricam wrote: veganclimber wrote: It's an important scientific discovery, for sure, but I can't imagine how this could have any social or theological implications. Because the "scientific community" is slowly catching up with God. Seriously, what do you mean by this statement?
Have you ever been on a lost hares bike hash (if you haven't, google it)? It's a lot of fun, actually and you'll meet some really cool peeps.
Well, anyway, it's sorta like that. In this case, the dude (the hare), leaving the marks on the trail for the pack is "God" and that pack that's following are the "scientists."
The scientists are trying to catch up with the hare and God Bless them for it, too! But only the hare knows the actual path...the pack just follows.
That's basically what I mean in an analogical nutshell.
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sungam
Jul 12, 2012, 7:17 AM
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Don't you think this would all kinda imply that the people leading the chase might have a higher proportion of christians (or even, hilariously, creationists)?
It doesn't bother you that the opposite is true?
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xmesox
Administrator
Jul 13, 2012, 1:50 AM
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Your analogy has a fundamental flaw from the get go, if you're likening God to the hare, you're already assuming that God exists in which case. Granted your inverted commas around the word God may leave you a loop hole to say that you were merely using it in a broad sense to describe the origins of the universe, though from previous posts it is clear this is not the case.
Currently there is no reason to assume that the marks left on the path are created by a 'hare'. They are merely marks. The scientists are trying to figure out the origins of the marks on the trail.
The assumption that the origin of the marks was a hare would merely be ignorance, though of course very easy to claim considering that there is no direct evidence that it was a hare in the first place. Further more, as long as the scientists that are following these tracks do not see the hare itself it would be easy to claim that since they cannot prove it is not a hare, it must be a hare. Which is the typical illogical religious thinking.
To add an additional element which makes it far more accurate in comparison to the current situation, is that the scientists continue to follow the marks left on the trail, sometimes they find traces of hair and maybe a scent of the 'hare'.
Meanwhile the religious followers started to follow the trail in the beginning, they came across the first foot print and said "That's it, we've got it... It's a hare - and don't let anyone else convince you otherwise."
It never ceases to amaze me how the religious insist on basing their arguments around the assumption that God does exist and relying on the flawed idea of "if you can't prove it doesn't exist, then it must."
Furthermore, the religious will always change their tune and adapt their original texts merely to fit in to the advances of science. The same has happened time and time again, most recently with things like evolution where originally it was a vile, evil and ungodly view. Then they realized that they can merely make it out as though God was the one who created the evolution, and they get to not look like complete morons in the modern world, while keeping their religious views.
Even if we end up discovering exactly how the universe formed and narrow it down to a single molecular event. The religious will merely state it was God who put that in motion, as so few of them can grasp the theories about the concept of time.
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jomagam
Apr 23, 2013, 7:38 PM
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rrrADAM wrote: I, for one, am suprised... If this is the case, it will change almost everything, and will even have social and theological impacts... Well, for those who care to better understand reality, that is.
The Higgs boson had exactly the properties that were predicted. Not sure it changes anything. Finding it is important, but in some sense the experiment was a bad outcome for the scientists because they didn't learn anything fundamentally new.
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petsfed
Apr 23, 2013, 8:21 PM
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jomagam wrote: rrrADAM wrote: I, for one, am suprised... If this is the case, it will change almost everything, and will even have social and theological impacts... Well, for those who care to better understand reality, that is. The Higgs boson had exactly the properties that were predicted. Not sure it changes anything. Finding it is important, but in some sense the experiment was a bad outcome for the scientists because they didn't learn anything fundamentally new.
Clearly you don't understand the interplay between theoretical prediction and experimentation. While yes, it implies that the existing theory was correct, additional experiments to map out the region of applicability for the theory transition from quixotic to worthwhile.
The Higgs Field was hypothesized, then theorized, now it is confirmed and we can start to really explore the implications of its existence. For a layman, yeah, that's boring. For a scientist, this is exciting, since now we have an understanding of the *scope* of our ignorance.
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jomagam
Apr 23, 2013, 8:34 PM
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petsfed wrote: jomagam wrote: rrrADAM wrote: I, for one, am suprised... If this is the case, it will change almost everything, and will even have social and theological impacts... Well, for those who care to better understand reality, that is. The Higgs boson had exactly the properties that were predicted. Not sure it changes anything. Finding it is important, but in some sense the experiment was a bad outcome for the scientists because they didn't learn anything fundamentally new. Clearly you don't understand the interplay between theoretical prediction and experimentation. While yes, it implies that the existing theory was correct, additional experiments to map out the region of applicability for the theory transition from quixotic to worthwhile. The Higgs Field was hypothesized, then theorized, now it is confirmed and we can start to really explore the implications of its existence. For a layman, yeah, that's boring. For a scientist, this is exciting, since now we have an understanding of the *scope* of our ignorance.
That's my point too. It was a step forward, but not a paradigm shift like the OP suggested.
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