Where was it I read recently that science always eventually turns up with what it's looking for? Science has the uncanny ability to postulate the existence of a certain black hole or a particle, for example, and by golly, prove it right. Human beings are the same. We will eventually find what we're looking for.
Here's what's happening over the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN.) It developed a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in part to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson field. This theory has become popularly known as the search for the God particle.
From exploratorium.edu This clustering effect is the Higgs mechanism, postulated by British physicist Peter Higgs in the 1960s. The theory hypothesizes that a sort of lattice, referred to as the Higgs field, fills the universe. This is something like an electromagnetic field, in that it affects the particles that move through it, but it is also related to the physics of solid materials. Scientists know that when an electron passes through a positively charged crystal lattice of atoms (a solid), the electron's mass can increase as much as 40 times. The same might be true in the Higgs field: a particle moving through it creates a little bit of distortion -- like the crowd around the star at the party -- and that lends mass to the particle.
Today's NY Times article is found here.
By the time it shuts down in 2011, the CERN collider should have amassed about 20 times as much data as it now has, enough to make a dent in the Higgs hunt.
John Ellis, a CERN theorist, said the future looked bright.
“The vise is closing in inexorably,” he said of the Higgs. As for dark matter, he said the CERN collider would soon exceed the Tevatron in exploring for new particles: “I can hardly contain my enthusiasm.”
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They spent God knows how much on this. That money should have been spent on living human being suffering somewhere in the world. Making clean water and sanitation, or education for the children, or proper nutrition for the children so their brain has a chance to learn in school.
ReplyDeleteMaybe just condoms for the poor, who dont want ten children to feed and look after.
Re:Looking.
ReplyDeleteOr do you mean science is looking for something that doesn't exist in reality as a disease? like the Nazis looked for those wearing the yellow badge?
Or the Standford prison experiment, where the prisons and guards played their roles designated to them?
Looks like a prisoner > then must BE a prisoner. Prisoner has no other choice.
-Mark p.s.2
I was meaning more along the lines of physicists tending to find what they hypothesize. The context where I read it was about astrophysics. It tells you something about the mind or about how malleable our realities really are. I just can't remember where I read this. Just because an eminent scientist wrote this, doesn't mean it's the truth. The fact that the gene for schizophrenia has been so elusive, what does that tell us about the science behind it? Maybe that researchers have doubts about it being genetic in the first place? It is also said that lab results are dependent on the technician doing the analysis. All this is very weird, indeed. We really do create our realities.
ReplyDelete