Posted on 07/06/2012 5:29:33 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Professor Peter Higgs admits he has "no idea" what the discovery of the Higgs boson will mean in practical terms.
The British physicist whose theories led to the discovery of the Higgs boson has admitted he has “no idea” what practical applications it could have.
Prof Peter Higgs said the so-called ‘God particle’, which is the building block of the universe, only has a lifespan of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second.
He refused to be drawn on whether the discovery proved there was no God, stating the name ‘God particle’ was a joke by another academic who originally called it the ‘goddamn particle’ because it was so hard to find.
The 83-year-old was giving his first detailed press interview since the discovery earlier this week of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
The Higgs boson helps to explain how fundamental particles gain their mass - a property which allows them to bind together and form stars and planets rather than whizzing around the universe at the speed of light.
Speaking at Edinburgh University, where he published his theory about the boson’s existence in 1964, he said: “It’s around for a very short time.
"It’s probably about a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second. I don’t know how you apply that to anything useful.
“It’s hard enough with particles which have longer life times for decay to make them useful. Some of the ones which have life times of only maybe a millionth of a second or so are used in medical applications.
“How you could have an application of this thing which is very short lived, I have no idea.”
But Alan Walker, a colleague from
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
There you go, the same one!
Herding WITH cats works far better than herding cats!
Wave Structure of Matter - The Most Simple Theory of Reality
As I said before, the answers are only several billion dollars of government grants away from being found. Until the next ones.
Helluva hand, as I say.
Had like six fingers on each one though...kinda creepy!
I agree. NASA launches a satellite that circumpolar orbits the sun. That's good search for knowledge. But it isn't long before every news outlet is spouting some gibberish about solar tsunamis engulfing the planet and reeking havoc on earth orbiting satellites and the airline industry. I'm a little of skeptical of the science/24 hour news complex and their alarmist hissy fits that's all.
You’re on to something. The Higgs boson might be useless, but if we can expel or nullify the matter-producing Higgs field, we could put Slimfast, Jenny Craig, and Weight Watchers out of business for good. Ka-CHING!
Why not vortices?
Our tax dollars should never support science that seeks to “discover” answers that can be found in scripture free of charge. Yet, I am constantly being FORCED to pay for university scientists who want to do things like measure the age of the Earth or find out the “nature of the universe.” We KNOW those things already. God WROTE A BOOK ABOUT IT. If atheists want to go off on a fool’s errand to “discover” something else, then they should pay for it themselves!
Yes, but for now the only way to say the field exists is to find the particle.
But are they goddamn particles like this one?
Tip of a platinum needle enlarged 750,000 times.
Field ion microscope image of a 'single crystal' tungsten tip.
Water standing waves formed with vertical oscillation in a circular dish
Interestingly enough, you can actually generate all the Platonic Solids and Kepler-Poinsot polyhedra simply by generating various 3 dimensional standing wave patterns in liquids. The number of vortexes of these shapes also just happen to coincide with the number of electrons that can fit in the various electron shells of particles, a key property of the elements of our periodic table.
Who knew what tech would come from discovering the chemical structure of DNA? Maybe that pseudo-gravity we see on Sci-Fi spaceships is a directional artificial Higgs field dragging objects to the floor of the ship.
Oops, that “number of vortexes” should read “number of vertices”.
Not all of that curiosity goes to outer space. Some of it goes to inner space. Most of today’s electronic marvels, including this very internet, would have been impractical had it not been for solid state physicists.
Also in the case of things like the Higgs field/boson theory, outer space and inner space phenomena overlap. Theories about how the universe of outer space spread forth once it was created can shed light on inner space which can lead to new ways to use the phenomena of nature — i.e. what we call technology. Only the grossest know-nothing pans technology per se. It is neutral and can be put to either good or evil uses.
Quite so, of course. The theory ties the two together.
Showing that a Higgs boson exists, which is what the supercollider experiments appear to have done to better than 99% certainty (with a small but measurable bump in the aggregate collision products data) gives credibility to the existence of a Higgs field.
Brilliant insight, Adorno. I happen to agree with you completely.
Scientists are also busy reverse engineering the human brain, which some of them believe will result in the final explanation that the human personality is simply a meat computer that is somehow self aware.
I suggest that (for the near term, at least) they'll discover the 'What', and 'How', but not the 'Who', or 'Why'. In time, they'll discover that the human personality is not the computer. There is an operator.
Classic Judeo-Christian theology posits the existence of a soul for humans, and hints that it may even be possible for some animals. If there are “soulons” that can interact with ordinary matter, they probably will be something that can never be found in supercolliders. “Soulons” would be possessed of a will and thus be able to defy the physical sciences.
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