Stephen Weinberg Omits God in Explaining Value of Higgs Boson
Stephen Weinberg explains the Higgs Boson and its value to humanity. Getting us closer to God wasn't mentinoed.
Stephen Weinberg Omits God in Explaining Value of Higgs Boson
Apparently I’m the laughing stock of certain Philadelphia neighborhoods – or so says a reader who called this morning to complain about the Higgs Boson story that ran Monday in print and online over the weekend. He said his neighbors usually enjoy laughing at me for being an “atheist” and “evolution freak” but this week they got an extra shot of mirth over my taking God out of the God particle. He pointed out that it was front page news that they’d found the God particle and I’d purposely omitted the very important connection between particle physics and the almightly. What was I thinking? Physicists just proved there’s a God and I’m trying to cover it up! Ha Ha.
My trusted co-blogger and I have dealt with the “God Particle” moniker in previous posts. Physicists treat the term like flatulence in an elevator. Unable to blame the dog, some point at “the media”. The original source is apparently a 1993 book about particle physics by University of Chicago physicist Leon Lederman. He’s known for repeating the tired line that he originally wanted to call it the “God damned particle” but his editor wouldn’t let him.
Another piece that omitted the lord appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times. The author was Stephen Weinberg, a theorist and one of the key architects of the current theory of matter known as the standard model. He’s a Nobel laureate and also an accomplished popularizer of his field.
In his piece, Weinberg explained something about standard model, what it is and how the Higgs field fits in. He also answered one of the questions that several readers have posed – what good is a Higgs Boson?
…..those who do have to ask whether learning the laws of nature is worth the billions of dollars it costs to build particle accelerators. ….A case can be made for this sort of spending, even to those who don’t care about learning the laws of nature. Exploring the outer frontier of our knowledge of nature is in one respect like war: It pushes modern technology to its limits, often yielding new technology of great practical importance.
For instance, the new particle was produced at CERN in collisions of protons that occur at a rate of over a hundred million collisions per second. To analyze the flood of data produced by all these collisions requires real time computing of unmatched power. Also, before the protons collide, they are accelerated to an energy over 3,000 times larger than the energy contained in their own masses while they go many times around a 27-kilometer circular tunnel. To keep them in their tracks requires enormously strong superconducting magnets, cooled by the world’s largest source of liquid helium. In previous work at CERN, elementary particle physicists developed a method of sharing data that has become the World Wide Web.
On a longer time scale, the advance of technology will reflect the coherent picture of nature we are now assembling. At the end of the 19th century physicists in England were exploring the properties of electric currents passing through a near vacuum. Although this was pure science, it led to our knowledge of the electron, without which a large part of today’s technology would be impossible. If these physicists had limited themselves to work of obvious practical importance, they would have been studying the behavior of steam boilers.
Read the whole piece here. There is no mention of God.
Why do people even respond to the wing-nuts? Why do you care Faye? Let it go.— varsity- It's funn that "All That Is" (aka: God) is omitted from his own creation.— tulipwalk
- I believe in God, I don't hide it and I don't apologize for it. To your point about God being omitted from his own creation your point is meaningless. God created many things (through evolution); would you prefer every named thing on the planet be called the God-xxxxx? The God-salmon, the God-tulip, the God-hawk, the God- hydrogen, the God-oak tree.... You get my point, I hope. What is in a name? Live and let live (which is basically what I said to Faye too)
— varsity - ugh, yet another pushy, intellectually superior atheist on the internet. shocking— astroqueen0
- Why in the world should anyone mention gods in connection with the Higgs discovery? No gods were involved.
None of the physics which predicted the particle has any dependence whatsoever on gods. Not a single one of the engineers and technicians who labored for years to construct the large hadron collider had the slightest need for the supernatural in his work. Not one of the mathematicians who analyze the statistical plausibility of the evidence has any use at all for gods.
There is no need to drag gods into this wonderful story. They are worse than useless. They're just not involved, no more than they are involved in any other real world experience.
That's because they are fictional, not real. Just like unicorns and leprechauns.
— phhht - Don't worry - God will get his chance to reciprocate sooner or later.— nellar
- A reciprocal post from the gods! I can't wait! — phhht
- A columnist hired to write a column and blog about evolution is made fun of for being an "evolution freak"? Of course she is, or else she wouldn't be any good at writing evolution articles. Keep up the good work, Faye.— Gorian
- I haven't seen Weinberg's full Op-Ed piece, but any time you judge if the results of doing something are worth the cost,you run the risk of someone saying the $$$ could've been better spent. Getting more compelling evidence for the Highs boson may be a tough sell if you compare it with, say, feeding Africa or curing cancer or AIDS.— nerdyseahorse
- Higgs, not Highs -- phone helpfully corrected it for me :/— nerdyseahorse
- The theists are complaining that God was not mentioned. Apparently you think God deserves the credit. I suggest we poll all theists and ask them which deity should get credit and why. Allah? Vishnu? Yahweh? Jehovah? Other? Why bother doing science when we can just let the theists tell us what happened?— mattfoley772
In pursuit of her stories, writer Faye Flam has weathered storms in Greenland, gotten frost nip at the South Pole, and floated weightless aboard NASA’s zero-g plane. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and started her writing career with the Economist. She later took on the particle physics and cosmology beat at Science Magazine before coming to the Inquirer in 1995. Her previous science column, “Carnal Knowledge,” ran from 2005 to 2008. Her new column and blog, Planet of the Apes, explores the topic of evolution and runs here and in the Inquirer’s health section each Monday. Email Faye at fflam@phillynews.com.
Reach Planet of the at fflam@phillynews.com.
