Posted on 02/04/2015 2:55:51 AM PST by samtheman
IN MARCH, after a two-year shut down for an upgrade, the world’s biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will reopen for business. The rest of the year will see physicists biting their nails—for one way or another 2015 will go down as a famous date in their field. Either theoreticians will be proved spectacularly right, and experimenters can move confidently on into the verdant pastures of so-called new physics, engaging in a positive safari of hunting for novel particles, or they will find out, to exaggerate only slightly, that they do not understand how the universe really works.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
My first thought on seeing the headline was that this was a call to closeted gays.
That was a good nutshell summary and a good read.
The thing I particularly like about this piece is its mention of a possible need for a return to “natural philosphy”.
:)
Thanks for posting this.
“Another approach, which has the virtue of requiring such a shift of perspective, is to accept that the Standard Model’s arbitrary assumptions are actually arbitrary realities. Physicists are reluctant to do this because even small changes in the numbers would cause the whole thing to break down. The result would be either a radically different universe or no universe at all. It beggars belief, the argument goes, that things could be so finely tuned as to produce this particular universe, the one humans live in, by accident.
The way out of this, for those unwilling to invoke an intelligent creator, is to allow that the observable universe is just one of an indefinite number of universes, each with its own laws of physics.”
Hubris, defined.
You are welcome
Given the problems of fine tuning (dark energy, for example, is precise to a magnitude of .x1, where x is 120 zeros... slightly stronger and no stars form ... slightly weaker Big Crunch immediately after the Big Bang), I think the following proposition is true:
Either there is a God planning everything, or there is a multiverse.
We will never know the second.
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