[LINK] Higgs Boson is no "God particle"

[Stephen Wilson]

Tom,

I think you're taking way too literally the hyperbolic tag "God 
Particle". That was always a nutty name.  Who coined it - a journo, or 
Stephen Hawking maybe? No essential difference there. But anyway, we 
don't need to discover Higgs to disprove god.  It's just a missing piece 
of a particle physics model that accepted years ago.  After all, if LHC 
doesn't find Higgs, theists aren't going to breath a sigh of relief.

I could name a dozen more significant developments and experiments that 
should do more to shake believe in god.

Like Galileo's discovery of sun spots and his realisation that the Sol 
is just another spinning body. That's what really nailed the Coperniccan 
revolution.

Or the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, being the echo of 
the Big Bang itself.

Or the gentic code, where exactly the same amino acid to nucleotide 
coding is used by yeasts, pumpkins, Titan auum lilies, Grey Nurse 
sharks, and humans, as if we're all cousins. Fancy!

Or Lucy.

Cheers,

Steve Wilson.


On 21/10/2011 1:57 PM, Tom Koltai wrote:
> ... for the last 10,000 years, mankind has gone to war in defence of 
> their chosen deity. For the Deity to turn into a member of the 
> Periodic table is unthinkable for well over 5/6's of the worlds 
> population. (I'm estimating 1 billion informed educated people that 
> understand the psychological nature of the need for sentient beings to 
> have an ever after belief system. - But I'm including China in those 
> stats.) Therefore the basis of interest in the CERN experiments is 
> undoubtedly the most fundamental controversy of all time. It is 
> therefore natural for a large amount of neck craning when the validity 
> of various belief systems several millennia old are about to be 
> possibly disproved. TomK