Paging Mr. Liberal, Mr. Liberal you’re wanted on the empirical/essential/existential courtesy phone.
and just incase you wanted to know, the wikipedia article on Peter Higgs states
Argent, dig up.
It’s very different. It actually has a chance to work. Magic, alchemy and religion are made up bullshit.
The beauty of this is you can wave your pitchfork and howl incoherently all you like. They’re gonna keep on working and hopefully make your life better regardless of your misgivings.
Leon Lederman jokes that it’s called the “God particle” because the “God-damned particle” was too long. If that’s true, would you be upset that the experiments are being run by a bunch of crass boors? What would that say about their motives?
Sooner or later something will happen to destroy the world. Maybe its a giant meteor 20 years from now. Maybe it’s the sun entering its red giant phase billions of years from now.
As a species, we’re living on borrowed time. The only was we can keep ourselves alive in the long run is to learn as much as we can as fast as we can. So when that meteor comes to smash everything to bits we have the technology to stop it.
The saber tooth tigers are howling outside the cave. The scientists are CERN are sharpening the spears.
Really? How many cancer survivors have magic or alchemy to thank?
So you’re angry at the CERn scientists because you’re too God-thickheaded to understand that it’s totally safe?
10^-googolplex is a non-zero number. If that was a proven figure, you’d not want it turned on? There’s probably a greater chance of the thermal energy in your body propelling you straight up into the air, but you don’t walk around tethered to the ground.
Argent Towers:LHC::lekatt:NDE
Been lurking in this thread before now, and I’m quite unsurprised to still be here alive today.
So you want scientists to both lie and not lie to you about the safety of the experiments? For that matter, why should we put our blind trust in the nay sayers and their so called “scientific basis” for making that claim? Surely if they’re both using “science” then they both have equal and incredibly high probabilities of being wrong, right?
“What is the meaning of life?” is an existential question. “Why do some particles have mass?” is not.
The trust is not blind. Quantum physics has never been wrong. The various symmetries on which physics are based have never been wrong. Do you still not trust your friends and family even if you have known them for many years and they have never done you wrong?
I am comparing energies from a natural source (hurricanes) to energies from a man-made source (nuclear bombs). So, are you saying the cosmic rays in nature are interacting under the same exact conditions as within the collider?
Of course not. I was pointing out how poor you analogy was. Conditions in a collider are controlled and restrictive. Those in nature are not.
So, what if it is precisely those unnatural conditions that lead to a runaway reaction that unmakes the world?
ETA: “controlled and restrictive” can describe uranium in a bomb as opposed to uranium sitting in a mountain.
I would say they are both existential questions, insomuch as that “particles” and “mass” are for all intents and purposes place-holder terms. What are “gluons” and “muons” and “bosons?”
“Why does matter have mass” seems to be a pretty existential question to me.
And I’ve heard a hell of a lot of talk about “figuring out the secrets of the universe” from this device.
I’m not arguing that science and religion or magic are the same things. I do however think that at the fringes, science is attempting to answer the same questions that religion does - it’s just doing it in a much more focused way.
Holy shit, this is only the EXACT SAME QUESTION that I already asked. “If the conditions for nuclear explosions can exist in nature, why don’t we have Hiroshimas and Nagasakis erupting all over the place on a regular basis? It obviously takes the controlled effort of man to harness that power and cause a huge explosion.”
I don’t recall getting a very good answer for it when I asked it.
What might satisfy you as an answer to any question of this type? I mean, supposing I said “Gluons are Xes”, what sort of thing would X have to be for you to not then ask “Well, what are Xes”?
I would not consider it terribly significant that one can, if one likes, look upon “particles” and “mass” as place-holder terms, anymore than the fact that one can, if one likes, look upon “chairs” and “tigers” as place-holder terms.
Chair and tiger are place holder terms. Obviously if I asked you what a tiger is, you’d say, it’s a large feline animal with a tail, sharp teeth, stripes, etc. This opens up more questions - what is a tail, what are teeth, what are stripes, why does the tiger have them, etc. Okay. There’s a certain level of detail in which this can be described, and it will make sense to an average person.
Can the same be said of these theoretical particles? If so, can they be described in detail without resorting to ifs and maybes?
That article says:
It takes OUR intervention to use nuclear power to create explosions.
Just popping in to say: I was kind of freaking out a bit earlier today, and a lot of posts here have really reassured me. So thank you, all, from the bottom of my heart.
And yes, maybe this is a little cool. Go science. 
The linked article is an example of a naturally occurring nuclear fission. Kaboom concentrations of Uranium 235 no longer exist in nature. But there is nothing to say they did not in the past. U-235 has a half-life of only 700 million years.
Sure. Gluons are particles that behave like […]. Muons are particles that behave like […]. Etc. I can’t personally fill in those blanks with concrete details, but I am confident particle physicists can, given that they would have no other reason to have technical terms like “gluons” and “muons” around in the first place.
Can you give an example of a term that is not a “place holder term”?
By “theoretical particle” do you mean the ones we have found, or the ones we haven’t? If the former, yes, we can describe quite a lot of things that we know. If the latter, no. Can you describe the events of September 2009 without resorting to ifs and maybes?
Would our description make sense to the average person? I think the average person could understand “Light is made up of lots of tiny particles called photons. Photons always move at a certain, very fast speed–in fact, light is the fastest thing in the universe.”