Re: God: a failed hypothesis?

dkomo wrote:
glennmorton@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Inappropriate analogy. All of the things you write about here like
higgs bosons, sterile neutrinos, multiverses, etc. are scientific
hypotheses which will sooner or later either be verified or discarded.
A true IPU is an ad hoc, fabricated religious myth which has no hope of
ever being verified.

As is the multiverse, an ad hoc explanation to explain the anthropic
coincidences.

And, when I have quotations from leading figures in the field
questioning whether or not the concepts are actually testable, and you
come back with the extremely weak stretch contradicting what those guys
are saying, I think you just lost. How do we verify that there are
other universes each with their own set of fundamental constants?
Please, pray tell HOW IN THE WORLD you expect to design an experiment
to verify it?

Please, pray tell, tell my how realistic it is to build a detector the
size of jupiter to detect the graviton

"He's talking about something very large indeed. In fact,
according to Rothman and Boughn's calculations it would have to be
the biggest detector conceivable, something similar in mass to
Jupiter. "Much bigger and I the detector would shrink under its
own gravity and become a brown dwarf," says Rothman. Drifting
through interplanetary space, the detector's vast surface would be
a web of glistening electronics. Building such a behemoth would be
a colossal technical challenge and enormously expensive - clearly
way beyond anything conceivable today.
But let's suppose it will one day be possible to build one.
Would such a detector be capable of bagging a graviton? Rothman
and Boughn calculate that during the lifetime of the universe, a
detector placed as far. from the sun as Earth is now would detect
about 1000 gravitons. Placing the detector the same distance from a
super-dense white dwarf or neutron star would collect up to a
billion gravitons. That's one every decade or so."
"Even supposing that the detector works perfectly, and each
graviton hit produces an electrical pulse, the problems go on.
Millions of other particles would rain down on such a vast
detector every second, and many of them would produce the same
electrical signals as gravitons. The most troublesome particles
are expected to be neutrinos, but the good news is that although
they rarely interact with matter they are positively sociable
compared with gravitons and so, in principle, could be shielded.
Yet there is a problem: that you would need an impossible amount
of shielding material. "Neutrinos can penetrate light years of
lead," says Rothman. "That much shielding would collapse into a
black hole." Marcus Chown, "The Longest Stake-out," New Scientist,
March 18, 2006, p. 35

So, you think this is likely. Is it science? yeah, is it an invisible
pink unicorn, sure is, 1000 gravitons in the lifetime of the universe?
1 every 10^14 seconds or once every 14 million years or so. What a
valuable experiment. What a way to spend about 140,000 human lifetimes,
so see one, and then needing to wait another 14 million years to verify
that the first wasn't a fluke! Pray tell, how are you going to run an
experiment for 28 million years? Come on. This is as invisible as any
unicorn God makes up.

I admire your faith in us detecting gravitons. But it is just a faith.

And as to ad hoc, the current status of the Higgs field and particle is
somewhat ad hoc.

"Leon Lederman, the
director of Fermilab, wrote in his 1994 book The God Particle that
this wraith-like field should probably have been called the "goddamn
particle" because it would completely stifle any further progress in
understanding the true nature of mass, when it is found. Finally, and
in a more colorful turn of phrase, Sheldon Glashow often refers to the
Higgs field as "a
toilet down which we flush away the inconsistencies of our present
theories'" Sten F. Odenwald, Patterns in the Void, (New York:
Westview Press, 2002), p.76

I love that toilet part.


You're still talking about sterile neutrinos here. The Large Hadron
Collider being built at CERN and due to come online next year has as one
of its central missions to try to find higgs bosons. My understanding
is that there isn't just one type of higgs boson, but a number of
different types.

They may or may not find it. I also know that that is the mission. If
it is found, it is no longer an invisible pink unicorn and I will
proudly say so. But until it is seen, your statement is no different
than a statement made by a cryptozoologist searching for big foot. The
next mission to the NW has as its mission to capture a big foot.



If the higgs isn't found, there are a bevy of alternate theories waiting
in the wings to explain the masses of the various elementary particles.
If the Superconducting Super Collider hadn't been stupidily canceled
back in the 1990's, we would already have had a resolution of the higgs
boson hypothesis, as well as other predictions of theories which are
extensions of the Standard Model. Possibly we would have discovered
compactified hidden dimensions, mini-black holes, supersymmetric
partners, and undreamed of new phenomena by now.

Actually we might not have had a resolution even if the Higgs boson
hadn't been found. One can always claim it is more massive than our
collider can detect.

And the ultimate pink unicorn is that one will never build an
accelerator of a large enough size to test theories of the big bang:

"At earlier times and higher energies, the temperature increases
continuously back to the Planck instant, where it attains the
incredible value of 10^32 kelvins. For physicists who ordinarily work
with giant particle accelerators, such conditions are unattainable.
The corresponding energy is 10^19 gigaelectron volts (giga- billion):
the largest planned terrestrial accelerators may smash particles
together at energies of thousands of gigaelectronvolts. The early
universe offers a marvelous particle accelerator: we would need to
build an array of superconducting magnets 1 light-year across to
duplicate it." Joseph Silk, The Big Bang, 3rd ed. (New York: W. H.
Freeman 2001), p. 110

I can just see the funding request for that one!


When I read this originally, I wanted to ask if we have found the
physics god.


Ha, ha, in fact Leon Lederman, who was then the director of Fermilab,
wrote a book about the proposed search for the higgs boson called _The
God Particle_ back in the 1990's.

I have read Lederman's poorly written book. No wonder we didn't get
funding for the supercollider (I really wish we had gotten it) Maybe we
could remove the Higg from a pink unicorn list.


God particle or not, the higgs will
eventually be either detected or ruled out, unlike a real IPU, the God
of religion. Had we had a Superconducting Super Collider for the past 8
years or so, it would have absolutely no effect on *that* IPU.

I thought you said you ruled God out? You can't have it both ways
buddy. If ruling out a particle makes it science, your ruling out god
using physics makes God everybit as much science as ruling out a
particle.

I really think what you should mean is that we can detect the particle
but can't detect God (I hate having to fix up the logic in an atheists
argument).


*Free* quarks. But in fact there is clear experimental evidence for the
existence of quarks.

No, there is evidence that particles behave in a fashion predicted if
quarks exist. That really isn't the same as saying that there are
quarks. One could have a more complex particle than quarks which under
certain circumstances behaves as we expect of quarks. In such a case,
our concept of quarks would be false even if giving correct
observations. This would be analogous with the correct predictions of
the ptolemaic system or the newtonian system (within the measurments of
the day)

Look, this is still science and not religious fantasy.

I guess you can't read.

". "I think Gross sees this as science taking on some of the traits of
religion;' says Carr. "In a sense he's correct, because things like
faith and beauty are becoming
a component of the discussion:'" Geoff Brumfiel, "Outrageous Fortune,"

Nature, 439(2006), p. 10-11

This is from NATURE for pete's sake, not from a religious tract. And
why isn't it religious when the main philosophical reason for the
multiverse is to avoid the obvious conclusions of the anthropic
principle. Seems to me that motivation to disprove god is a religious
motivation. And that, my friend, is what you had when you started this
thread to tweak the Christian noses. It is your religion that there is
no God. That can not be a conclusion of science as you falsely tried to
make it. Science can neither prove nor disprove God yet you tried to
make out like science could rule God out---it can't. It also can't rule
Him in either.


We have no
possible idea what the science and technology of a hundred years from
now will be capable of, any more than scientists of Darwin's era could
have dreamt of mass spectrometers, scanning electron microscopes,
particle accelerators, telescopes in space, and so on, let alone the
theories of life and the universe that we have today.

YOu sound like a young-earth creationist who is claiming that we
shouldn't draw conclusions about the age of the earth because we don't
have all knowledge and the future might show us something which will
change our mind.
(I am always amazed at how various religions (yea you have religion)
almost always end up with the same argument at some time--the future
will prove me right)

I think that 100
years from now every one of the things you wrote about will have been
verified or discarded, and the theories then will be much more advanced
over today's. One thing will still stay static unfortunately -- the IPU
of religious fantasy.

And in 1000 years people will still believe in God because science can
not disprove him. You need to actually take some philosophy of science
and learn a bit of epistemology. While you can say a certain type of
God is unlikely to exist, to say that no God exists is to show a huge
naievete about philosophy. If a devious God decided to make an illusory
world (say a holographic universe) in which people would think they are
3 dimensional beings when they are infact merely holograms (their
'thinking' is also encoded in the hologram) there is no test you can
perform to rule this possiblity out. You also can't rule out a God who
makes a grand illusion of age in a universe created last Tuesday. If
you can rule it out on any basis other than your personal incredulity
(a charge often thrown at YECs) my hat will be off to you. Therefore
you can't rule god out in spite of your sophomoric opening post.

.

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