Posted on 06/18/2005 7:04:07 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Recent cosmogony is basically and effort to avoid the theological implications of the big bang theory. Is string theory any more valid than Ptolomy's epicycles. except that the latter fit the data better?
That is quite a revelation. Might epicycles affect interplanetary trajectories?
Sounds like an undergrad explanation of evolution.
Where are the space aliens? ID'ers claim the Designer is not God.
And no photons?
That's right. Photons as such exist only below the electroweak breaking scale; they are really a low-energy mixture of two fundamental electroweak bosons. From Introduction to High Energy Physics by Donald H. Perkins, 3rd Edition, p. 322:
The fundamental vector bosons are a massless isovector triplet Wmu = Wmu(1), Wmu(2), Wmu(3) (for SU(2)) and a massless isosinglet Bmu (for U(1)). As a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, three bosons (denoted Wmu+, Wmu-, and Zmu0) acquire mass, and one (Amu, the photon) remains massless. These four bosons are combinations of Wmu and Bmu...
(The "mu" is supposed to be a lowercase Greek letter mu.)
Above the electroweak breaking scale, you have W1, W2, W3 and B, which are the fundamental bosons; below that scale, you have W+, W-, Z0, and the photon, which are mixtures.
Ahh, then there are no fundamental particles, everything is a mixture of massless things and the Higgs boson which is also rather elusive?
Perhaps. We don't know, yet.
everything is a mixture of massless things
Masslessness is more elegant, more mathematically pure, so I would expect truly fundamental particles to be massless, yes. But that's OK; after all, photons are massless.
and the Higgs boson which is also rather elusive?
The Higgs boson is also a by-product of electroweak symmetry breaking.
Well, then that just puts the icing on the cake. Something that no longer exists came from nothing that did not exist giving us something we haven't found.
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