On Wednesay, physicists at CERN fired up the big ol’ Hadron Collider and are now waiting for the magical appearance of the haloed Higgs Boson. This theoretical elementary particle has been dubbed by some “The God particle”, a name physicists despise because it overstates the importance of the Higgs Boson. Good to know that Big Daddy with the Dice is still respected in theoretical physics circles.
This nicknaming is the work of the four-tailed sulphur-spewing demons of the physics world: popularisers of science. They call the Higgs Boson the “God Particle” because it makes it sound revolutionary and revealing, something to be feared, and loved, and feared. By comparison, the idea of a little labourer particle accounting for the existence of all mass in the universe by its interaction with an invisible lattice field all around us just sounds so, well, boring.
Rumours are circulating that God is not too happy about the naming either. Some of my more connected friends have let me know that they recently heard a grumble in a thunderstorm that sounded almost exactly like “What, are you saying I’m fat?”
So, as I write, physicists are standing around waiting for Higgs Bosons to drop out of the Collider (I always picture them having a smoke, talking about football, maybe passing a Playboy around to check out the new centrefold). And while this is happening not more than a few hundred kilometres from me (although it might as well have been a million), I do share a concern with many other people.
To look for the Higgs Boson, physicists try to replicate conditions very shortly (10-33 seconds) after the Big Bang. To do this they collide two proton beams with each other, carrying an energy of up to 7 teraelectronvolts per particle. (That’s a lot of teraelectronvolt). Getting these two to hit each other has been likened to firing two needles at each other across the Atlantic Ocean, or getting your key into the front door after a night in the arms of the Russian Bear.
Now I’ve read all the CERN reassurances. These things happen naturally elsewhere in the universe (although that is not all that reassuring, considering that nuclear explosions happen all the time in stars), that the protons each have the energy of a mosquito, and that yes, tiny little black holes might be created, but really, they’re quite harmless, once you get to know them. That is not my point.
While I’m as keen as anyone to get some closure on the theological whodunnit, I do wonder whether it’s really such a good idea to replicate conditions of the Big Bang. You know, that day when nothing became something, and then it exploded? When time was created as a by-product, kind of like the sawdust of the universe? I’m not too scared of explosions 23km under the French-Swiss border. My concern is similar to the one I have before every weekend (although today it is a bit more intense): that logic will collapse and we will enter a universe of paradoxes.
I trust physicists. I think they are some of the most upright standing homo sapiens on the planet. But at the same time, they tend to burn toast. And they’re the people who use the “barn” as a unit of atomic measurement — because during the Second World War American physicists described their research as throwing rocks into a barn, to see which animals ran out. (Let’s see which animals run out this time). They taught me all kinds of wonderful things, like how a particle can be in two places at the same time, how you can look for hemorrhoids without a mirror if you approach the speed of light, and that glass is actually a liquid. All of these add to my discomfort at their comfort with the idea of creating a singularity.
I’m not saying that frustrated geniuses who struggle to get dates would want to destroy the logical order of the universe. But seeing as almost no one else can understand what it is they’re doing, who is keeping an eye on the toast? A singularity is an event where the laws of physics no longer apply. Where matter can become a hot fluid of gluons infinitely dense and small. Where light becomes trapped by gravity, we all become our own fathers and walk around saying “This sentence is false.” In this situation, God is not throwing dice — he is doing the hula with a lei around his neck while playing Russian Roulette with Van Hunks.
So the question becomes: Shouldn’t we first try these kind of experiments in another chapter of the multiverse? Outsource it to one of those poor universes and save a bit of cash? We could always try it later, when we’re bored, as a party trick for ourselves. You know, after the World Cup, or when Malema is no longer funny.
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the self-inflicted apocalypse, if only on an aesthetic level. Bringing an end to it all, out the way we came in, a deus ex machina without the deus. Humanity as architect of our own downfall, all for the greater glory of knowledge and understanding, not for the stupid fire and virus ending we seem to be heading for at the moment. A tragic hero, not a fool. More Othello than Joost. I could live with that. Or die with that, as it were.
So I say go for it. Let’s give God a laugh, I think he deserves it after all the worry we’ve caused him. And I do love a surprise ending. Banana.
Actually, Malema has ceased to be funny for quite some time. But this blog entry IS very funny, thank God for small mercies.
Malema is already not funny.
Thechnically glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline) solid material, not a liquid. The misconception that glass is actually a high-viscosity liquid at room temperature came from the appearance of cylinder blown sheet glass. Cylinder Blown refers to the manufacturing method where molten glass was blown into a cylinder, then swung swung in a trench to increase its size. A seam was cut on the one side and, after reheating, the cylinder was flattended into a pane giving a sheet with varying thickness. Once fitted it can be mistaken that the glass had flowed into this uneven thickness after installation, but that is not the case.
Great column, though, Tertius.
Great stuff, let the fun begin!
My money’s on a no-show for the God particle..
… explosions 23km under the French-Swiss border.[?] That’s a BIg hole; big enough to blow a bigger hole.
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for. The evidence of things not seen”. The big bang theory is just that – a theory or Faith. The Bible too is full of faith but the creation is something that we have physical evidence of. Look around you at all the wonderful things that God created, The flowers, the birds and the bees and the trees and – most of all look at your family and friends, and although some of them may appear to have crept out of some green slime 4 or more billion years ago, there is just no way that we all came from a slimy lifeless chemical.
How big was the thing that went bang in the first place? The universe is infinite and with new and better telescopes we are finding that it contains billion of galaxies There is no proof of the big bang there is only a theory or a faith. Today we seem to take the theory of evolution as a fact. Well it is not a fact it too is faith or a theory that I suspect will be disproved sooner rather than later. I object to TV in general and National Geographic in particular sounding off about how this evolved and how that evolved. There is no proof – only a theory or a faith. Which faith is the true Faith – only God knows for sure?
Oh God! And I thought I’d read somewhere that the big bang theory had already been disproved? How slow am I? The barn will be no more by the time I have got up off my butt!
Great article, right up my alley! I am so sick and tired of all the mundane worries on planet earth that it would feel great to be a little bit shit scared wondering when our future descendants are going to pop out of the white hole matrix and stop us from fiddling with the fabric of space/time before we get a little bit too uppity for our own good. It would be interesting if some of science’s more ludicrous predictions actually happened though wouldn’t it?
Peter Joffe, faith is belief without evidence. A scientific theory, on the other hand, is a model that best fits the available evidence.
For example, you believe that God created the birds and the bees because the writings of some anonymous, bronze-age, desert nomads assure you of this fact. What did these unknown tribal people (who thought that a bat was a bird, and that the earth was created before the sun) base this assumption on? They provide no evidence whatsoever. Neither has any such evidence come to light. You require faith, because there is *no* evidence for your belief.
The Big Bang theory, on the other hand is substantiated by masses of evidence from physics, chemistry, and astronomy – with proven predictive value. The scientists currently subscribing to this theory require no faith, because they are not invested in whether they’ve got it all right. They simply want the theory to fit the facts. If they find they’re wrong, they go, “Hey! Wow! It’s totally different to what we thought. Awesome!” That’s science.
They may be wrong about the details, but they’ll never be anywhere near as wrong as you are.
Call me a miserable old sod, but such is the state of the world right now – all caused by Man, his greed and downright arrogance – that I half wish that God will use the Hadron Collider as the perfect opportunity to roll everything up, pack it all into a nice tidy black hole, dust His hands off and quietly walk away with a determination not to make such a cock-up again.
Just keep jacking up the power, boys.
Great article.
A fun read thank you…. isn’t there some element of string theory that suggests the existence of parallel universii [sic].
Perhaps we already blew ourselves up in that other ‘nicer’ world and now we are continuing with our miserable lives in this ‘new’ parallel one.
On balance i’m with Nguni on a “no show for the god particle” and as for the sad Mr Joffe he really should learn the difference between a theory and an Hypothesis.
Excellent. This reads like Carl Sagan and Douglas Adams swigging whiskey in a jacuzzi ontop of The Restaurant At The end of The World.
Goeie werk.
Hey, man, it’s all very exciting, but I just regret that the physicists tend to support my wife’s supposition that if it is not expensive it cannot be worth it – whereas I, poor sod, tended to believe in more bang for the buck. Small correction, the 27 km circumference accelerator is not buried very deep. Alan, you certainly scored a good point against Peter Joffe’s type of faith based faith, but the type of world the theoretical physicists are conjuring up, and have been for the past 25 years or so, does make one wonder about a prize for the fairest of fairy tales. With string theory they have been spinning a yarn of dizzying proportions, and it is clear that all those extra dimensions come at a price. According to some critics it is up in the air, all smoke and mirrors, but unfortunately so complicated that not a single testable quantity has been calculated in all this time with all the effort involved. The Higgs Boson is apparently a last gasp to complete the ‘old’ theory of matter into a consistent whole, only excluding the gravity interaction. In latter years the gravity of excluding gravity has increased considerably with the presumed existence of invisible dark matter, comprising more than 90% of the universe, and unrelated dark energy which is pushing the universe apart at an increasing rate. Figuratively we seem to be sitting on the submerged hippo’s ears. So much physics still to be done.
Great comments all, especially the ones saying things like ‘great article’. Clearly some well informed people here – thanks for the corrections, I did research my facts, but seems even that was a little loopy here and there. Blogroid, the idea of parallel universes emerge in different theories from quantum physics and cosmology. And yes, Malema is not funny, and unfunnier by the minute.
Imagine if the CERN project produced a black hole that sucked us all up and spewed us all out at the other end minus politicians and religon. Next step Utopia!
Oh yes. Lets keep theism and science seperate. The two are incompatible.
Wasn’t it Galileo that said “The one teaches you how to go to heaven and the other how the heavens go.”