A Perhaps Religious Moment in an Otherwise Cynical Time

Scientists at CERN using the Large Hadron Collider announced they have discovered the traces of a new particle consistent with the elusive Higgs boson. Some have described it as the "molasses" that holds the universe together at a level so infinitesimally small we can scarcely conceive it.

This is a BIG. F'ING. DEAL.

What is the Higgs boson? In 1993, a British minister of science offered a prize for the best lay explanation which was won by David Miller of University College London. In essence, a Higgs field accounts for why things have mass.



I believe we have no real understanding how big (and I use the term advisedly) this discovery—if, in fact, it is replicated and confirmed—is and what it means for let's call it the "human project". For example, the discovery of the electron ca. 1897 by J.J. Thomson paved the way for all the electronic conveniences we enjoy today, including that computer or smart phone you're using now. I'm not sure any fin de siècle 'bloggers' or their equivalents could have predicted we, 115 years later, would be walking around with a device that could, at the same time, connect us with just about anyone on the planet, videochat with anyone anywhere, take sharp and accurate color pictures instantly, carry around enough music to listen to continuously for up to a week non-stop, access more information than was contained in all the libraries of the world at the time, upload information to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit around the earth, etc., etc. All in a device that fits in a man's trouser pocket.

It's very exciting to be living in this day and age. But, it's worth remembering that we are only just dipping our toes in the water in terms of understanding the world we miraculously inhabit and somehow have come to perceive.

In the span of a few short years, we've seen images of a deep field of space which capture light from the state of the universe over 13 billion light years ago, near the time of the creation of all time and space as we know them.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

And now our instruments have detected evidence of the basic stuff of matter.

An agnostic person, but one who holds out the possibility of some entity so much greater than we can possibly conceive, might say we humans could be on the verge of experiencing the first real inkling of the immensity of something truly worthy of being called deity, one that doesn't rely on mystification and primitive myth and hierarchy to make us experience abject awe at the magnificence of the world we find ourselves in. Frankly, for me, it raises what I consider to be the true religious question, first raised in the song of the Biblical Psalmist: What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and his children, that Thou payest them any heed?

That is to say, what is our place, the place of humanity—nay, of life itself—in this unfathomable vastness?

More Stuff I Don't Understand—Like Everything

You can play around with the E8 image here. It's a PDF. This is an explanation of the image. Here's another.

I don't think they drew that thing with this:



So, some 'surfer dude' named Garrett Lisi comes up with a real simple theory of everything based on the E8 projection above. Here's a copy of his paper. The beauty of it is that the CERN Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator might (or might not) produce some of the elementary particles his theory predicts once they get that thing back up online, assuming the whole planet isn't sucked into a black hole. Testability: that's the key. If you want to play around with your own elementary particles, look no further.

Here's my stupid/ignorant/amateur question: If everything's so symmetrical, why does time appear to move only in one direction?

Speaking of CERN, here're some more people who look like they want to blow the world up with a "laser".



Hey? What if they put the NIF star in the CERN black hole? Kaboom?

Quark, Quark Muster Mark

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake Book II, Ch. 4

10 September: The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). This historical event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch, and distributed through the Eurovision network. See http://www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam for further details.

Is this the end of the world as we know it? Some seem to think so: "skeptics have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Hawaii and in the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project."

Big Science.