July 7, 2012
S.E. Cupp
MSNBC
I saw you on the Chris Mathews show today and when I learned, after looking at your profile, that you are an atheist, I felt compelled to write you.
I read the wiki on your life and also noticed you were also a Southern California native educated in the Ivy League, and quite successful in your professional life. As an atheist, it must have been even more difficult getting a significant position within your employer, who traditionally, i believe, developed their talent within their own cosmological belief systems of Jewish, Christian, and perhaps Mormon.
As an atheist you must feel that your life and awareness of consciousness of life are limited by our cellular life span, here on this planet. It's over 100 years now.
I am happy to tell you that this idea is short sighted and naive.
My perspective, of course, is that of a 62 year old man, born and raised in Southern California. , I started my professional life as a flight instructor, then a student, brought me into the computer business where I made a career, finally starting a residential fire protection business before my present semi-retirement.
Please consider the following:
There has never been a period of time, when our comprehension of life or the universe has decreased.
Often the change is forward, and dramatic. iPhones and information at your fingertips prove this point.
This week the confirming proof of a theoretical construct called Higgs Boson, which confirms an idea by a theoretical physicist first advanced while I was a freshman at Hawthorne High School, changes, again, our conception of the universe, or at least this "standard model" described in physics, which is Chinese to me.
World religions depend upon the written or spoken word, which of course is a symbol for something we encounter in our consciousness of life. B O A T or boat employs 4 discrete symbols to describe a vessel that floats upon the water. Love, faith, truth, integrity, honesty, are of course open to a broader, and secular interpretation. Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, and Buddist are systems developed in pursuit of those basic life questions: Why are we here, where did we come from, what is life, how should we feel about it, how does it end, are all basic questions of existence that we all ponder.
Please take this in the spirit intended as an idea to consider, that there is more than what we can yet comprehend to our brief dance of energy, on this planet, here and now.
Best wishes,
Gary Ozenne
firesprinklers@gmail.com
www.garyo.info
Corona, CA
Showing posts with label cosmology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cosmology. Show all posts
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Thursday, July 5, 2012
What the heck is a Higgs boson? Physicists break it down
Physicists welcomed July Fourth with intellectual fireworks, announcing "preliminary" results pointing to the discovery of the long-sought "God particle." Formally known as the Higgs boson, it was detected in experiments at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) lab near Geneva.
CERN, via AP
This undated image made available by CERN shows a typical candidate event including two high-energy photons whose energy (depicted by red towers) is measured in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision. The pale blue volume shows the CMS crystal calorimeter barrel.
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For the non-scientists who wonder what a Higgs boson is, USA TODAY distilled explanations from a number of physicists, including Paul Padley of Rice University, part of one of the discovery teams:
Q: So what is a Higgs boson?
A: A tiny subatomic particle that apparently weighs about 130 times as much as an atom of hydrogen, the lightest gas.
Q: What does it do?
A: Simply put, the Higgs particle interacts with other subatomic particles that are building blocks of atoms in a way that slows them down. It's the reason that matter in the universe has mass. Mass gives the particles inertia, or resistance to being moved faster.
Q: What is a simple analogy that describes this effect?
A: Compare Higgs bosons to groupies mobbing a celebrity. The other particles are the celebrities, desperately trying to move but slowed by autograph-seekers. Higgs bosons don't have pens, but the attention they give to the other particles slows them, creating inertia.
Q: Why did physicists think this likely had to exist?
A: Physicists look to particles to explain forces in the universe. In the physicists' theories, electromagnetic and nuclear forces don't need particles with mass to work. But they have it, so we need an explanation for why. In 1964, Peter Higgs of Scotland's University of Edinburgh and other physicists, theorized the Higgs boson was the culprit.
Q: How did they make this discovery?
Essentially, two teams collected data in separate experiments that smashed together millions of subatomic particles called protons to see what pieces emerged from the smash-ups. The particle reported on July Fourth fell to pieces in ways predicted by Higgs and other physicists.
Q: How sure are they that this is the Higgs boson?
A: CERN chief Rolf Heuer calls it "a particle consistent with the Higgs boson." CERN assigned about a 0.000057% statistical chance of the particle detection being wrong.
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