Higgs boson: Find it in one year or bust, top physicists say
The Higgs “God particle” boson has been in the news a lot lately, principally because it doesn’t seem to exist … not so far, anyway. Some panicked, and as a no-show at the opening of a glitzy new cosmology centre named after Stephen Hawking, it cast a pall over the festivities.
Now, from “Higgs boson real? We may know in a year” (MSNBC, October 6, 2011),we learn:
The long-sought Higgs boson, believed to have given shape to the universe after the Big Bang, will be found in the next 12 months or shown to be a chimera, heads of the three top physics research centers said on Thursday.
“I think by this time next year I will be able to bring you either the Higgs boson or the message that it doesn’t exist,” declared Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN whose Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is at the focus of the search.
He was echoed by KEK’s Atsuto Suzuki and Pier Oddone of Fermilab, which last weekend shut off after 26 years its Tevatron accelerator, which has also been seeking the Higgs in the debris of billions of particle collisions.
Good for them. Making it definite like that encourages confidence that physics is a discipline. In essence, that means physics could tell us something wee didn’t want to hear and we would accept it.
So it will be really interesting to see is whether, in a year or so, some sources are rewriting history to show that they never really thought there was a Higgs boson, in just the way that Darwinists insist they never thought junk DNA was just junk and conclusive evidence for their position, when in fact there is very considerable documentary evidence that that is exactly what they did think.
Incidentally, they doubt the faster-than-light neutrinos.
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It is so funny that you guys think junk DNA has been overturned, when you’ve never explained, and rarely even acknowledge, the crashingly important fact that genome size varies hugely among very similar species, and that many things like ferns and salamanders have genomes that are dozens of times bigger than the human genome, with the difference being mostly due to parasitic repetitive elements.
The fact that species A can have a genome size of, say, 30 billion base pairs, and species B can have a genome size of, say, 3 billion base pairs, and both species are onions which only an expert could even tell apart, is *strong* evidence that most of that extra genome isn’t doing anything all that amazing. Finding a functional pseudogene here or there doesn’t change this basic fact a bit.
You routinely ignore this kind of important information, and then start tossing insults at biologists, and you expect scientists to take you seriously? Good luck with that.
Nick you just mad because physicists get all the cool toys.
heh.
Well Nick considering the unmatched level of poly-functional complexity we are dealing with in the genome, that computer programmers can only dream of, I should think that, by far, the best approach to this slowly unraveling C-value enigma would be to presuppose design constraints for such variance, especially given the sheer poverty of neo-Darwinism to account for the generation of a single gene or protein (Casey Luskin);
notes:
There seems to be no logical ‘evolutionary progression’ to be found for the size of genomes in less complex animals to the size of genomes found in more complex animals. In fact the genome sizes are known to vary widely between Kinds/Species, despite the clear differences in their complexity, and this mystery is known as the c-value enigma:
And yet, even though this C-value enigma is somewhat paradoxical to the materialistic, neo-Darwinian, point of view, since information is presupposed to simply ’emerge’ from a material basis and there clearly is no linear correlation to amount of material present and amount of information expressed, from a design point of view we should rightly expect genome sizes to vary somewhat with design constraints. constraints that are imposed in trying to achieve a ‘optimal design’ in any particular life-form that was designed; For instance:
Jonathan has also written an excellent rebuttal of Nick’s ‘onion argument’, though I have lent my book out right now and can’t quote it at the moment;
Further notes:
Thus, though we are just barely beginning to understand these varying constraints on genome sizes that ensure ‘optimal design’, the point is that the evidence is indeed beginning to point strongly in the Intelligent Design direction, just as it should have rightly been presupposed years ago to do, if science were to have been unshackled from the dogma of neo-darwinism!
As well Nick Matzke, at the 7:00 minute mark of this following video, we find that ‘genome length vs. mass’ gives a enigmatic 1/4 power scaling on the plotted graph for a wide range of different creatures. Thus, once again, giving strong indication of a design constraint that was imposed, top down, on genome length, and which is inexplicable from the neo-Darwinian framework:
Of related note; this ‘enigmatic 1/4 power scaling is found throughout life, not just for genome length;
Though Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini rightly find it inexplicable for ‘random’ Natural Selection to be the rational explanation for the scaling of the physiology, and anatomy, of living things to four-dimensional parameters, they do not seem to fully realize the implications this ‘four dimensional scaling’ of living things presents. This 4-D scaling is something we should rightly expect from a Intelligent Design perspective. This is because Intelligent Design holds that ‘higher dimensional transcendent information’ is more foundational to life, and even to the universe itself, than either matter or energy are. This higher dimensional ‘expectation’ for life, from a Intelligent Design perspective, is directly opposed to the expectation of the Darwinian framework, which holds that information, and indeed even the essence of life itself, is merely an ’emergent’ property of the 3-D material realm. Professor McIntosh reflects that expectation, from the Intelligent Design perspective, here:
And indeed that expectation that ‘transcendent’ information would be found to be constraining mass and ‘free-energy’, has now been met with the finding of ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum information/entanglement in molecular biology:
ba77,
I found this video to be equally as inspiring:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRMBxnxWiNQ
Nah; I have the book, and all Wells does is gloss past T. Ryan Gregory’s onion argument; Wells gives the more important point, the huge variability in genome size as a widespread pattern, much attention at all. Considering Wells’s book is the definitive ID treatment of the junk DNA issue, and us ID critics have been bashing ID for its complete failure on the genome-size variability issue for years, this was a huge omission on Wells’s part.
Nick, I think your post got a bit mangled – could you rephrase it?
What argument did Wells “gloss past” and what did he say (or not say) about variable genome size?
Luckily your link doesn’t work 🙂
Nick Matzke, (as to my Casey Luskin reference) I call attention to the fact that it is YOU PERSONALLY who Casey Luskin recently refuted as to YOUR claim that neo-Darwinian processes have been observed generating a novel gene:
Thus Nick Matzke, why does it not trouble you greatly that what you referred to as the most ‘Detailed Explanation’ for the evolution of a gene is found to be nothing of the sort??? Should you not humbly admit that this is a stunning lack of empirical support,,, indeed a very serious short-coming of neo-Darwinism??? Why do you go to so much personal effort to artificially prop up a ‘scientific theory’ that cannot even support its own weight with empirical evidence? ,,, Especially when such intellectual dishonesty on this particular matter could very well be, in the end, personally, and tremendously, tragic for you???
music and verse:
Twas written too quickly, left out a “not”. Rephrase: should have been:
“Nah; I have the book, and all Wells does is gloss past T. Ryan Gregory’s onion argument. Wells gives the more important point, the huge variability in genome size as a widespread pattern, not much attention at all. Considering Wells’s book is the definitive ID treatment of the junk DNA issue, and us ID critics have been bashing ID for its complete failure on the genome-size variability issue for years, this was a huge omission on Wells’s part.”
—
I agree it’s still poorly phrased. Shorter version: Wells doesn’t give the genome size variation point much attention at all.