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Good grief.
Oct. 19th, 2009 03:58 pmScientists are speculating that the Large Hadron Collider is being sabotaged from the future.
In a bizarre sci-fi theory, Danish physicist Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Japan claim nature is trying to prevent the LHC from finding the elusive Higgs boson. Called the "God particle," the theoretical boson could explain the origins of mass in the universe — if physicists can find the darn thing.
The scientists say their math proves nature will "ripple backward through time" to stop the LHC before it can create the God particle, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
“One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” Dr Nielsen says in an unpublished essay. “He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
Oh, the things that are wrong with this idea....
1) You cannot have a finite model of an infinite being. It just. Won't. Work.
2) The reason the standard model relies on the Higgs boson is that it cannot account for the mass of subatomic particles otherwise. One reason for *that* is that it also relies on quantizable forces and gravity can't be quantized. So rather than admitting that the theorists had done the math all wrong, Higgs posited a completely theoretical particle that *somehow* produces mass in everything else. There's no other evidence that the thing exists. (Unlike God, Whose fingerprints are everywhere in creation for eyes to see that can. Cf. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum.)
3) Standard theory isn't the only possible Theory of Everything that science has produced. But I haven't tried to read up on string theory or technicolor theory or any of the really exotic ones yet, so I'm not sure how they work. I do know that they generally don't rely on the Higgs boson.
4) Even if standard theory is correct, even if there is a particle out there that can prove that "in Him we live and move and have our being"--is anyone surprised that we can't find it, given that one of the world's most monumental acts of hubris resulted in the instantaneous fracturing of human language? There doesn't need to be any time travel involved, either. "God is not a man, that He should lie, nor the son of man, that He should change His mind," nor a particle, that He should be conquered by science or constrained by time. And in my experience, it's only when you're willing to seek God with your heart that you'll find Him with your microscope.
[/soapbox]
Job interview went well. Haven't heard yet if they want me to come for an in-person interview, so I'm trying not to let myself fret over the possibility of moving. (It doesn't always work.)
In a bizarre sci-fi theory, Danish physicist Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Japan claim nature is trying to prevent the LHC from finding the elusive Higgs boson. Called the "God particle," the theoretical boson could explain the origins of mass in the universe — if physicists can find the darn thing.
The scientists say their math proves nature will "ripple backward through time" to stop the LHC before it can create the God particle, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
“One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” Dr Nielsen says in an unpublished essay. “He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
Oh, the things that are wrong with this idea....
1) You cannot have a finite model of an infinite being. It just. Won't. Work.
2) The reason the standard model relies on the Higgs boson is that it cannot account for the mass of subatomic particles otherwise. One reason for *that* is that it also relies on quantizable forces and gravity can't be quantized. So rather than admitting that the theorists had done the math all wrong, Higgs posited a completely theoretical particle that *somehow* produces mass in everything else. There's no other evidence that the thing exists. (Unlike God, Whose fingerprints are everywhere in creation for eyes to see that can. Cf. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum.)
3) Standard theory isn't the only possible Theory of Everything that science has produced. But I haven't tried to read up on string theory or technicolor theory or any of the really exotic ones yet, so I'm not sure how they work. I do know that they generally don't rely on the Higgs boson.
4) Even if standard theory is correct, even if there is a particle out there that can prove that "in Him we live and move and have our being"--is anyone surprised that we can't find it, given that one of the world's most monumental acts of hubris resulted in the instantaneous fracturing of human language? There doesn't need to be any time travel involved, either. "God is not a man, that He should lie, nor the son of man, that He should change His mind," nor a particle, that He should be conquered by science or constrained by time. And in my experience, it's only when you're willing to seek God with your heart that you'll find Him with your microscope.
[/soapbox]
Job interview went well. Haven't heard yet if they want me to come for an in-person interview, so I'm trying not to let myself fret over the possibility of moving. (It doesn't always work.)
