Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Breaking: particle blows up universe

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Of course not. Not that you would know from the headline: From Jon Cartwright at New Scientist:

Believe it or not, this burst of cosmological inflation, followed by a slower, tamer expansion, is the most sensible way to explain how the universe looks today. But there’s something missing: what did the inflating?

The answer could be everywhere, and right under our noses. When a long-sought particle finally appeared a few years back, it seemed to close a chapter in physics without giving any clue about what happens next. Read between the lines, though, as some theorists recently have, and you see that the famous Higgs boson – the particle that gives mass, or inertia, to all other particles – might have an explosive secret. “If the Higgs gives inertia to particles,” says Juan García-Bellido at the Autonomous University of Madrid, “can it give inertia to the entire universe?”More.

The Higgs boson did not blow up the universe. It was just a rare instance of scientists fronting something real instead of, for example, evolutionary psychology Maybe an instance that is becoming rarer all the time, these days.

It gets tricky, fronting reality, in a world that demands safe narratives.

See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down

Comments

Leave a Reply