On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 12:12 PM, Stephen
<ndungustephen@gmail.com> wrote:
The Higgs boson, also known as the "God Particle" ? Which when confirmed shall supposedly prove or disprove the existence of God ?
The Higg's is named the "god particle" not because it is supposed to prove the existence or non-existence the being we refer to as God. It is named so because it so difficult to detect, it has taken brilliant minds very many decades to try and find it, yet they have not done so
ENOUGH TIMES in experiments to make it a formal Scientific discovery that it exists or not [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance ]. So instead of calling it the
goddammed particle some journalist decided to call it the '
god particle' most likely to cause a lot of speculation and sensational reporting about it. [
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/higgs.boson.cern ]
If there were anything other than the Higgs', now the BEH scalar particle referred in the recent past and hence forth after the three people who did the theoretical work behind its prediction, Peter Higgs, Robert Brout and Franois Englert the other thing that should be referred to as god is Gravity and perhaps the weak + strong interactions.
Any who - I close the discussion. Let's give the scientists more years as it seems current tests on the Higgs have been unsuccessful (or they need more time)
Probably I should also mention that this is the year (2012) that Scientists at CERN have been given a deadline to determine if the BEH scalar particle is a reality or not. I think sometime in June or July that should be a done deal and we should be moving on to other things.
The other thing I would like to say is that the
Higgs' mechanism will exists whether the boson is there or not. The mechanism is basically a reaction that creates a disturbance in such a way that makes different fundamental forces of nature like gravity and electromagnetic radiation acquire different values. What am saying is that maybe its not the boson that does it, it could be something else that is responsible, who knows?? The guardian [
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/dec/13/higgs-boson-lhc-explained ]
P.S: Belief in God is independent from the pursuit of Scientific ideas. They are completely orthogonal. In fact a good number of Scientists are "believers" including people like Galileo Galilei, Sir. Isaac Netwon and Rev. Bayes, Larry Wall among many others. Its only a few who see conflicts in the two :D
Martin.
:-)
Sent from some iPad
..... Well, @Steve,
On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Stephen
<ndungustephen@gmail.com> wrote:
If Anti-electron = Positron; and it probably makes it the only discovered anti-particle,
Now electrons surround the nucleus of an atom, thus responsible for the elements and quantity of matter we have in the known universe.
There are many un/discovered particles and their partners. As far as I know each and every sub-atomic particle has a super-partner. So in theory there is an opposite of the known Universe filled up with anti-matter or rather what you call anti-atoms. Read this for more [
http://cool-antihydrogen.web.cern.ch/cool-antihydrogen/Story/Story-en.html ], I think this is done at CERN under the LHC-b experiment and some of the anti/matter particles they detect are anti b-mesons (vs b-mesons) among others.
In contrary, they haven't found an Anti-atom, that positrons probably surround giving various hypothetical anti-elements from which we would harvest quantity to give us that high energy supply :-(
I do not know if this is convincing but as it is the cosmos is full of *immense energy*. It is only that our technology may not be advanced enough to fully utilize it. The best example I can give is the fact that the "Big bang'" came from a really small particle which people like to think of a concentrated point with extreme amounts of pressure and energy. This is what made everything else in the vast Universe to exist.
The other evidence of antiparticles is that if the laws of nature were to be followed in their most perfect / symmetric forms, life would not exist at all. Nothing would be there since the cosmos would collapse (cancel itself out) as soon as it began to expand. In other words there would be no distinction between gravity and electromagnetism, light and dark, matter and forces so everything would look the same. This paradox (current existence) can only be explained by kicking into play antimatter and leaning back onto the fact that it also exists in our world but in extremely small quantities. Not all of it was destroyed moments after our Universe began to inflate.
The main notion is that the Higgs' boson is what created a field through the Higgs' mechanism that broke the whole balance. The slight disturbance brought about an imperfection which brought the Universe into lower energy states. The forces split apart and the particles of the standard model became distinct. That is why we exist here and now.
Martin.
Sent from some iPad
Hehehe!
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:47 PM, ndungu stephen
<ndungustephen@gmail.com> wrote:
Lets wait for the Large Hadron Collider to accelerate those particles to near speed of light collide them - analyze the results - then they can tell us whether anti-matter, dark matter and other particles we need to theorize exists or not.
@Stephen,
Antimatter exists. It is in things like bananas which have potassium in them, and a very small amount of potassium is radioactive. That particular radioactive decay produces an antimatter version of an electron, a positron. So every 75 minutes or so, a banana emits a positron. Of course, almost instantly it hits a regular electron and they annihilate, producing two photons! More info here [
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/07/23/antimatter-from-bananas/ ]
I happen to know a guy who worked on an experiment involving dark matter at Stanford for his post doc work in 2008. He says that they were looking at something called the Baryon number violation (BNV). This is new Physics beyond the Standard model and simply says that protons if given enough time decay into lighter particles. This is a condition that explains the matter / antimatter asymmetry (imbalance) in the known Universe although the cause for BNV has never been observed.
They have a detector deep underground in an old mine and they are looking for dark matter that interacts with their detector. These are very difficult experiments because standard radiation can mimic the dark matter interactions. The experiment itself is called CoGENT, you can Google it further. It might also be important to note that its dark matter that keeps Universe from violently tearing apart. It also account for *A LOT* of unobservable mass in the Universe that cannot be measure from the stars and galaxies.
Lastly there is a thirty year plan to build an international linear collider project after the LHC that will be used to study the super symmetric particles. The idea is to collide electrons and positrons at very high energies (1 TeV). The financial costs involved are astronomical, find more details here [
http://www.linearcollider.org/ ]. CERN's in-house project [
http://clic-study.org/ ]
Martin.
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