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 ...
Foolicals! :) You have made my day!
Actually The Superconduction Super Collider was killed politically when the Fermilab in Illinois didn't win the competition to build it in Illinois. The political coalition pushing it then fell apart. While it was a big project, it did not compare to the effort to put a man on the moon. Compared to food stamps, it was cheap. :)
Actually The Superconduction Super Collider was killed politically when the Fermilab in Illinois didn't win the competition to build it in Illinois. The political coalition pushing it then fell apart. While it was a big project, it did not compare to the effort to put a man on the moon. Compared to food stamps, it was cheap. :)
Actually The Superconduction Super Collider was killed politically when the Fermilab in Illinois didn't win the competition to build it in Illinois. The political coalition pushing it then fell apart. While it was a big project, it did not compare to the effort to put a man on the moon. Compared to food stamps, it was cheap. :)
Very interesting in this regard is an Isaac Asimov story titled “The Billiard Ball.” It is about two scientists between which there is an enmity, and one scientist discovering a way of nullifying mass. He invites the other scientist to his demo, which consisted of introducing a billiard ball into the anti-mass field. Said billiard ball, rather than floating in space as predicted, immediately assumes the speed of light and neatly drills a hole in his rival. A film of the demo shows that the ball had been introduced to the anti-mass field in the direction of said rival.
Asimov knew nothing about Higgs fields or Higgs bosons, but if the Higgs field could be canceled in a region, maybe something like that WOULD result.
How could it? The bible makes no pretense to being a tell all of the mechanisms of nature.
I’m reminded of a verse of a familiar hymn (When I Survey The Wondrous Cross) that goes
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine
Demands myself, my soul, my all.
What physical scientists do has absolutely squat to do with the bible’s theological message (except that it is in pursuit of the general divine command to subdue the earth), and many devout Christians agree on some kind of old earth creationism rendering the most contended dispute well into the realm of common literary metaphor.
Wait! The good professor is selling himself short. You see with the EZ current financial crisis it's gonna be a lot harder to find some quasi-government agency to pay a bunch of overfed long haired bespectacled birckenstocked frat boys at CERN to collide particles against anti particles for fun and profit. Not while the greeks are jumping out of windows over their pensions. But all this loose talk about the deity is bound get the attention of some grant writing committe at Harvard, Princeton or maybe NASA itself. The practical application is separating us from our taxpayers money!!!
Well, I KNOW. But if you ask a fish what’s useful, water might be among the last of its answers.
Don’t you just LOVE the hubris of science? They spend their lives and BILLIONS of dollars to find out the “nature of the universe” when the whole answer is right there in Genesis — if they would just accept it.
Oh, how MIGHTILY these liberal atheists fight against God, only to make no headway at all. At the end, everything comes back to the Bible and THEY CAN’T STAND IT! LOL!
All their theories (evolution, the big bang, etc.) have been discredited and Genesis STILL STANDS! I love it!
“God particle” gets better publicity than “damn particle”.
Some terms are just so catchy it doesn’t matter what it means or whether it’s accurate, people just like it and use it to sound smart. You know, like “free universal health care”.
Antigravity fields might result from perturbing the Higgs field in the right manner...
Or perhaps "artificial gravity" fields for long term space flight (to eliminate bone decalcification). If the ability to manipulate mass is found to be possible then we may someday be able to accelerate to 'photonic' velocity! C would no longer keep us bound to the solar system.
Regards,
GtG
No scientist can ever figure out how to make a universe appear in a test tube. God particle, pfah. You might as well call the atmosphere of the earth a God gas, or the rain and oceans a God liquid.
Many a scientist, however, has successfully figured out the presence and characteristics of the forces of nature, making way for future efforts to harness those forces. That is perfectly proper. Like fire or water or tools or weapons, such capability can be put to good or evil uses.
Back in what may not be so fictional science fiction visions, the noted atheist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov hypothesized that the Red Sea split due to an antigravity ray. Now Asimov further hypothesized an exterrestrial being applying this ray, but if such a thing as the Higgs field exists then you could just as well speculate that the omnipotent God canceled the Higgs field there. And so what. It simply gets into relatively trivial issues of how... and does not answer who or why.
They make the leg of a dead frog twitch with a battery and that allows them to fantasize they can 'create' life.
Hey, Lucy...
splain this to me...
If Higgs Boson has a lifespan of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second, how does it stick around long enough to give everything around us the property of weight? If it goes away so quickly, why do we still have weight all around us, in anything that we see and feel and touch?
Lucy? Where you going???
Which they can’t. But it does allow them to usefully trace the forces of nature which help existing life to keep itself up.
Even theories of evolution call for more and more improbable things to happen as the creatures involved rise above the level of insects. The deck is obviously stacked in such processes when you get up into animals like whales, yet no “respectable” science wants to talk of a Deck Stacker.
The “God particle” is really the one that gave rise to the Higgs Boson particle, if that Higgs Boson really exists.
So, onward we continue, to find the real “God” particle.
The questions will continue, and the research will then have to concentrate on the “What” and “Why” and “How”, and most importantly, the “Who” particles.
The particles may come to be understood, and even “seen” or detected”, but, the bigger questions will remain, and science alone WILL NOT have the answers. What is really happening right now, is the attempt to understand the universe through “reverse engineering”. Reverse engineering the universe, will not answer the questions of “WHO”, or why, about its creation. The engineering of the universe, started with something that cannot be reverse engineered.
Higgs Boson, will only add more questions, and won’t even begin to explain how the universe really began.
I’ve delved into this enough to see that the theoreticians are talking about two different entities. A Higgs field, which is kind of like an ether filling all creation, and then an associated Higgs boson, consisting of a perturbation in this Higgs field, which only makes an appearance when sufficient energy is poured into a sufficiently small region (as the supercolliders do). It’s the Higgs field that makes other particles seem “massy.” According to this theory.
Horace Cat?
Rode with him many years in Montana.
Helluva good hand. Always landed on his feet.
Sometimes disappear on ya though. Get a paycheck, a little whiskey, go to start chasin’ p—...aah, never mind.
http://www.digitalbusstop.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Cat-Riding-a-Horse.jpg
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