rhamphotheca:

Higgs Boson Positively Identified! (Probably)

by Adrian Cho

Eight months ago, physicists working with the world’s biggest atom smasher—Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—created a sensation when they reported that they had discovered a particle that appeared to be the long-sought Higgs boson, the last missing piece in their standard model of particles and forces. Today, those researchers reported that the particle does indeed have the basic predicted properties of the standard model Higgs boson, clinching the identification.

“It sure does look like the standard model Higgs boson, you bet,” says Sally Dawson, a theorist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, who was not involved with the measurements.

It’s a big step, at least semantically. Ever since the new particle was reported last July, officials at the home of the LHC—the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland—have taken great care to describe the new thing as a “Higgs-like particle.” Now, a CERN press release calls the particle “a Higgs boson.” “That’s a big deal for the community,” Dawson says.

To make the positive identification, researchers relied not on dental records, but on observations of how the Higgs boson decays into combinations of other, more familiar particles. Key characteristics of the Higgs include its spin and its parity, a symmetry property. They can be determined by looking at correlations in the particle directions when, for example, a Higgs boson decays into two particles called Z bosons, each of which then decays into two particles called muons…

(read more: Science NOW)             (images: CERN/ATLAS Project)

Who Killed America’s Biggest Gadget?
The hunt for the Higgs boson, god particle or goddamn particle, the one that gives things mass, came closer to an end on July 4. Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world’s largest particle accelerator, found evidence of the particle and its energy field. But the LHC didn’t do it alone. The search has been a massive, costly and unprecedented international effort that began thousands of miles away, at another atom smasher beneath the Illinois prairie.

mothernaturenetwork:

5 elusive particles beyond Higgs

From gravitons to winos, here are five bizarre things that may exist beyond the Higgs.

astrodidact:

Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is the Higgs

A newfound particle discovered at the world’s largest atom smasher last year is, indeed, the Higgs boson, the particle thought to give other matter its mass, scientists reported today (March 14) at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the “God particle,” to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.

But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn’t collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is the Higgs. [In Photos: Searching for the Higgs Boson]

“The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela in a statement.

Dave Charlton, ATLAS spokesperson agreed, the new results “point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model,” referring to a quantum property of elementary particles.

To confirm the particle as the Higgs boson, physicists needed to collect tons of data that would reveal its quantum properties as well as how it interacted with other particles. For instance, a Higgs particle should have no spin and its parity, or the measure of how its mirror image behaves, should be positive, both of which were supported by data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

Even so, the scientists are not sure whether this Higgs boson is the one predicted by the Standard Model or perhaps the lightest of several bosons predicted to exist by other theories.

Seeing how this particle decays into other particles could let physicists know whether this Higgs is the “plain vanilla” Standard Model Higgs. Detecting a Higgs boson is rare, with just one observed for every 1 trillion proton-proton collisions. As such, the LHC physicists say they need much more data to understand all of the ways in which the Higgs decays.

From what is known about the particle now, physicists have said the Higgs boson may spell the universe’s doom in the very far future. That’s because the mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time. Its mass of 126 times the mass of the proton is just about what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now.

“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe,” Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out,” added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

http://www.space.com/20226-newfound-particle-is-higgs.html

astrodidact:

6 Implications of Finding a Higgs Boson Particle

Physicists announced today (March 14) that a particle discovered at the world’s largest atom smasher last year is a Higgs boson, a long-sought particle thought to explain how other particles get their mass.

Discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where protons zip at near light-speed around a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France, the Higgs boson particle is the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

Confirming a Higgs boson, physicists say, will have wide-reaching implications. Here are six of the biggest consequences:

1. The origin of mass

The Higgs boson has long been thought the key to resolving the mystery of the origin of mass. The Higgs boson is associated with a field, called the Higgs field, theorized to pervade the universe. As other particles travel though this field, they acquire mass much as swimmers moving through a pool get wet, the thinking goes.

“The Higgs mechanism is the thing that allows us to understand how the particles acquire mass,” said Joao Guimaraes da Costa, a physicist at Harvard University who is the Standard Model Convener at the LHC’s ATLAS experiment, last year when the discovery was announced. “If there was no such mechanism, then everything would be massless.”

Confirming the particle is a Higgs would also confirm that the Higgs mechanism for particles to acquire mass is correct. “This discovery bears on the knowledge of how mass comes about at the quantum level, and is the reason we built the LHC. It is an unparalleled achievement,” Caltech professor of physics Maria Spiropulu, co-leader of the CMS experiment, said in a statement last year.

And, it may offer clues to the next mystery down the line, which is why individual particles have the masses that they do. “That could be part of a much larger theory,” said Harvard University particle physicist Lisa Randall. “Knowing what the Higgs boson is, is the first step of knowing a little more about what that theory could be. It’s connected.”

2. The Standard Model

The Standard Model is the reigning theory of particle physics that describes the universe’s very small constituents. Every particle predicted by the Standard Model has been discovered — except one: the Higgs boson.

“It’s the missing piece in the Standard Model,” Jonas Strandberg, a researcher at CERN working on the ATLAS experiment, said last year of the particle announcement. “So it would definitely be a confirmation that the theories we have now are right.”

So far, the Higgs boson seems to match up with predictions made by the Standard Model. Even so, the Standard Model itself isn’t thought to be complete. It doesn’t encompass gravity, for example, and leaves out the dark matter thought to make up 98 percent of all matter in the universe.

“Clear evidence that the new particle is the Standard Model Higgs boson still would not complete our understanding of the universe,” Patty McBride, head of the CMS Center at Fermilab, said today (March 14) in a statement. “We still wouldn’t understand why gravity is so weak and we would have the mysteries of dark matter to confront. But it is satisfying to come a step closer to validating a 48-year-old theory.”

3. The electroweak force

The confirmation of the Higgs also helps to explain how two of the fundamental forces of the universe — the electromagnetic force that governs interactions between charged particles, and the weak force that’s responsible for radioactive decay — can be unified. [9 Unsolved Physics Mysteries]

Every force in nature is associated with a particle. The particle tied to electromagnetism is the photon, a tiny, massless particle. The weak force is associated with particles called the W and Z bosons, which are very massive.

The Higgs mechanism is thought to be responsible for this.

“If you introduce the Higgs field, the W and Z bosons mix with the field, and through this mixing they acquire mass,” Strandberg said. “This explains why the W and Z bosons have mass, and also unifies the electromagnetic and weak forces into the electroweak force.”

Though other evidence has helped buffer the union of these two forces, the Higgs discovery may seal the deal.

4. Supersymmetry

The theory supersymmetry is also affected by the Higgs discovery. This idea posits that every known particle has a “superpartner” particle with slightly different characteristics.

Supersymmetry is attractive because it could help unify some of the other forces of nature, and even offers a candidate for the particle that makes up dark matter. So far, though, scientists have found indications of only a Standard Model Higgs boson, without any strong hints of supersymmetric particles.

5. Validation of LHC

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator. It was built for around $10 billion by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to probe higher energies than had ever been reached on Earth. Finding the Higgs boson was touted as one of the machine’s biggest goals.

The newly announced finding offers major validation for the LHC and for the scientists who’ve worked on the search for many years.

“This discovery bears on the knowledge of how mass comes about at the quantum level, and is the reason we built the LHC. It is an unparalleled achievement,” Spiropulu said in a statement last year. “More than a generation of scientists has been waiting for this very moment and particle physicists, engineers, and technicians in universities and laboratories around the globe have been working for many decades to arrive at this crucial fork. This is the pivotal moment for us to pause and reflect on the gravity of the discovery, as well as a moment of tremendous intensity to continue the data collection and analyses.”

The discovery of the Higgs also has major implications for scientist Peter Higgs and his colleagues who first proposed the Higgs mechanism in 1964. The finding also shines a symbolic light on the boson’s namesake, the late Indian physicist and mathematician Satyendranath Bose, who along with Albert Einstein, helped to define bosons. A class of elementary particles, bosons (which include gluons and gravitons) mediate interactions between fermions (including quarks, electrons and neutrinos), the other group of fundamental building blocks of the universe.

6. Is the universe doomed?

The Higgs boson discovery opens the door to new calculations that weren’t previously possible, scientists say, including one that suggests the universe is in for a cataclysm billions of years from now.

The mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time. At around 126 times the mass of the proton, the Higgs is just about what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now.

“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe,” Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out,” added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

http://www.livescience.com/27893-higgs-boson-implications.html

divide-by-zero asked: RE: That anon ask about the Higgs - there are different flavours of Higgs theories, some which predict multiple different Higgs particles. They differ in mass and charge but they're all spin 0. For instance, one form of one of the most popular models, Supersymmetry, predicts five distinct Higgs particles. (Though recent evidence from the LHC is making Supersymmetry look pretty unlikely.)

Thank you. I’m going to publish this specifically because we all need to be sharing good science :) I’ve read so many variations of descriptions about the Higgs and trying to simplify it down into a brief synopsis - for the Higgs, at least - is not as easy to do with so many layers of quantum mechanics and basically, why this means that, is not as easy as talking about how it pertains to the early universe.

I appreciate it friend, I’ll eventually be diving into some more quantum physics literature, but for now it’s nice to know how we’re coming along in our understanding of it to be able to share it with others.

p.s., Supersymmetry is pretty rad though. I think it’s much more fascinating to have some of the more fantastic theories discarded by process of elimination :)

Supercharging the search for secrets of the universe

image 1: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN faces a two-year shutdown so engineers can ramp up its maximum energy.
image 2: Proton-proton collisions during the search for the Higgs boson. Photo: AFP
image 3: A collision event between two lead ions in the Large Hadron Collider as observed by the ALICE detector. Photo: Supplied
image 4: A simulated black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider. Photo: Supplied

When it comes to shutting down the most powerful atom smasher ever built, it’s not simply a question of pressing the off switch.

In the French-Swiss countryside on the far side of Geneva, staff at the Cern particle physics laboratory are taking steps to wind down the Large Hadron Collider. After the latest run of experiments ends next month, the huge superconducting magnets that line the LHC’s 27km-long tunnel must be warmed up, slowly and gently, from -271 Celsius to room temperature. Only then can engineers descend into the tunnel to begin their work.

The machine that last year helped scientists snare the elusive Higgs boson - or a convincing subatomic impostor - faces a two-year shutdown while engineers perform repairs that are needed for the collider to ramp up to its maximum energy in 2015 and beyond. The work will beef up electrical connections in the machine that were identified as weak spots after an incident four years ago that knocked the collider out for more than a year.

The accident happened days after the LHC was first switched on in September 2008, when a short circuit blew a hole in the machine and sprayed six tonnes of helium into the tunnel that houses the collider. Soot was scattered over 700 metres. Since then, the machine has been forced to run at near half its design energy to avoid another disaster.

The particle accelerator, which reveals new physics at work by crashing together the innards of atoms at close to the speed of light, fills a circular, subterranean tunnel a staggering eight kilometres in diameter. Physicists will not sit around idle while the collider is down. There is far more to know about the new Higgs-like particle, and clues to its identity are probably hidden in the piles of raw data the scientists have already gathered, but have had too little time to analyse.

But the LHC was always more than a Higgs hunting machine. There are other mysteries of the universe that it may shed light on. What is the dark matter that clumps invisibly around galaxies? Why are we made of matter, and not antimatter? And why is gravity such a weak force in nature? “We’re only a tiny way into the LHC programme,” says Pippa Wells, a physicist who works on the LHC’s 7000-tonne Atlas detector. “There’s a long way to go yet.”

The hunt for the Higgs boson, which helps explain the masses of other particles, dominated the publicity around the LHC for the simple reason that it was almost certainly there to be found. The lab fast-tracked the search for the particle, but cannot say for sure whether it has found it, or some more exotic entity.

“The headline discovery was just the start,” says Wells. “We need to make more precise measurements, to refine the particle’s mass and understand better how it is produced, and the ways it decays into other particles.” Scientists at Cern expect to have a more complete identikit of the new particle by March, when repair work on the LHC begins in earnest.

By its very nature, dark matter will be tough to find, even when the LHC switches back on at higher energy. The label “dark” refers to the fact that the substance neither emits nor reflects light. The only way dark matter has revealed itself so far is through the pull it exerts on galaxies.

Studies of spinning galaxies show they rotate with such speed that they would tear themselves apart were there not some invisible form of matter holding them together through gravity. There is so much dark matter, it outweighs by five times the normal matter in the observable universe.

The search for dark matter on Earth has failed to reveal what it is made of, but the LHC may be able to make the substance. If the particles that constitute it are light enough, they could be thrown out from the collisions inside the LHC. While they would zip through the collider’s detectors unseen, they would carry energy and momentum with them. Scientists could then infer their creation by totting up the energy and momentum of all the particles produced in a collision, and looking for signs of the missing energy and momentum.

One theory, called supersymmetry, proposes that the universe is made from twice as many varieties of particles as we now understand. The lightest of these particles is a candidate for dark matter.

Wells says that ramping up the energy of the LHC should improve scientists’ chances of creating dark matter: “That would be a huge improvement on where we are today. We would go from knowing what 4 per cent of the universe is, to around 25 per cent.”

Teasing out the constituents of dark matter would be a major prize for particle physicists, and of huge practical value for astronomers and cosmologists who study galaxies.

“Although the big PR focus has been on the Higgs, in fact looking for new particles to provide clues to the big open questions is the main reason for having the LHC,” says Gerry Gilmore, professor of experimental philosophy at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.

“Reality on the large scale is dark matter, with visible matter just froth on the substance. So we focus huge efforts on trying to find out if dark matter is a set of many elementary particles, and hope that some of those particles’ properties will also help to explain some other big questions. So far, astronomy has provided all the information on dark matter, and many of us are working hard to deduce more of its properties. Finding something at the LHC would be wonderful in helping us in understanding that. Of course one needs both the LHC and astronomy. The LHC may find the ingredients nature uses, but astronomy delivers the recipe nature made reality from.”

Another big mystery the Large Hadron Collider may help crack is why we are made of matter instead of antimatter. The big bang should have flung equal amounts of matter and antimatter into the early universe, but today almost all we see is made of matter. What happened at the dawn of time to give matter the upper hand?

The question is central to the work of scientists on the LHCb detector. Collisions inside LHCb produce vast numbers of particles called beauty quarks, and their antimatter counterparts, both of which were common in the aftermath of the big bang. Through studying their behaviour, scientists hope to understand why nature seems to prefer matter over antimatter.

Turning up the energy of the LHC may just give scientists an answer to the question of why gravity is so weak. The force that keeps our feet on the ground may not seem puny, but it certainly is. With just a little effort, we can jump in the air, and so overcome the gravitational pull of the whole six thousand billion billon tonnes of the planet. The other forces of nature are far stronger.

One explanation for gravity’s weakness is that we experience only a fraction of the force, with the rest acting through microscopic, curled up extra dimensions of space. “The gravitational field we see is only the bit in our three dimensions, but actually there are lots of gravitational fields in the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension, and however many more you fancy,” says Andy Parker, professor of high energy physics at Cambridge University. “It’s an elegant idea. The only price you have to pay is that you have to invent these extra dimensions to explain where the gravity has gone.”

The rules of quantum mechanics say that particles behave like waves, and as the LHC ramps up to higher energies the wavelengths of the particles it collides become ever shorter. When the wavelengths of the particles are small enough to match the size of the extra dimensions, they would suddenly feel gravity much more strongly.

“What you’d expect is that as you reach the right energy, you suddenly see inside the extra dimensions, and gravity becomes big and strong instead of feeble and weak,” says Parker. The sudden extra pull of gravity would cause particles to scatter far more inside the machine, giving scientists a clear signal that extra dimensions were real.

Extra dimensions may separate us from realms of space we are completely oblivious to. “There could be a whole universe full of galaxies and stars and civilisations and newspapers that we didn’t know about,” says Parker. “That would be a big deal.”

“The Face of Creation” - Higgs Remix
via melodysheep

electricspacekoolaid:

CERN’s Research Confirms Existence of Higgs Boson - New Physics ?

The latest research findings from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN show that the CMS andATLAS experiments are now reporting that the significance of their observation of the Higgs-like particle is standing close to the 7 sigma level, well beyond the 5 required for a discovery, and that the new particle’s properties appear to be consistent with those of a Standard Model Higgs boson.

The news comes in a week when the Physics World award for their ‘2012 Breakthrough of the Year’ gone to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN, for their joint discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the LHC. The CMS and ATLAS results were delivered when representatives of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and five of its experiments presented a round-up report on the first three years of activity to the CERN Council.

The CMS and ATLAS representatives went on to report that further analysis of the data, and a probable combination of both experiments’ data next year, will be required before some key properties of the new particle, such as its spin, can be determined conclusively. The focus of the analysis has now moved from discovery to measurement of the new particle in its individual decay channels.

The measurements reported by both experiments show that the new Higgs-like particle is in good health with a mass of around 125 GeV, but much further analysis is needed to reveal the full details of its identity.

Read Article 

theuniverseishuge:

Misconception 1: The Higgs particle gives other particles mass.
Correction: The masses of fundamental particles come from interactions with the Higgs field.

“You see this statement all the time, but how would another particle even ‘give’ another particle mass?” Kruse asks, explaining truly it’s…

(Source: scientificcomputing.com)

brookhavenlab:

Particle hunters at work in 1960.

In today’s great physics experiments, global computing grids do a lot of the heavy lifting as scientists seek fundamental breakthroughs like the fabled Higgs boson. But five decades ago, similar discoveries required that researchers spend hours manually sifting through actual photographs of subatomic wreckage. These ladies are doing just that: looking through the bubble tracks of yesteryear’s cutting-edge experiments and identifying fundamental photographic gold.

The work was probably tedious, but at least the discovery images from bubble chambers were kind of stunning.

Science and Religion

It’s time that scientists learned to talk amicably to faith groups about research on the origins of the universe

When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill set up a post-war forum for reconciliation in 1946 – the Wilton Park meetings – I doubt he imagined it would be playing host to peace talks between science and religion.

Sixty-six years on from that first meeting, and after subsequent Wilton Park sessions predicted the fall of the Soviet bloc and helped pave the way for South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, the search for a common language for dialogue between cosmology and religion has taken centre stage.

Last week, Wilton Park and the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, co-organised an attempt at resolving this very modern clash. It was the brainchild of Rolf Heuer, CERN’s director general.

CERN’s remit includes closing the gap between scientists and the general population. Heuer is troubled by a sense that scientists are perceived as operating outside of human culture. Hence efforts such as the Arts@CERN collaborations, where the laboratory hosts artists whose work is informed and inspired by science.

Getting closer to faith
Religion is clearly another big part of culture. Heuer’s idea is that science might engage better with culture through a closer relationship with faith communities. It’s an interesting strategy, but it has big hurdles to overcome: most scientists aren’t all that interested in religion.

In 1998, for instance, a survey of members of the US National Academy of Sciences revealed that only 7 per cent believed in a personal god. It’s not that they’re against religion; it’s just that religion does not inform what they do on a day-to-day basis. For the most part, religion simply does not get scientists’ juices flowing.

And these scientists are in increasingly crowded company. In August, a WIN-Gallup survey showed that atheism is on the rise worldwide. Many of the religious representatives at the meeting last week seemed to feel science might be to blame. Some expressed a sense of outrage that scientists have encroached on their turf. Stephen Hawking’s declaration that philosophy is redundant, for instance, or that God is a superfluous notion, rankle because of the media attention they receive. The religious – religious scientists in particular – feel they should not take this lying down.

It’s easy to laugh off such attitudes, but Heuer was right to bring these issues to the fore: they should give scientists pause. Few scientists receive much, if any, instruction in philosophy or the history of science during their training, and as a consequence few think much about what they do, how they do it, what it achieves and what it does not. When scientists engage with academics from other disciplines, there is a dangerous tendency to overstate and oversimplify.

Big bang, big talk
The focus of Heuer’s meeting, held in Nyon, Switzerland, was big bang cosmology and the language scientists use to describe it. For example, the claim “we now know the history of the universe” seems appropriate, given the recent successes of cosmology. But it is a claim that can and should be picked apart. The word “know” is difficult to define in scientific terms.

It is astonishing how reluctant certain scientists can be to compromise over religion. After all, compromise has been shown to be the most fruitful path in some fields. Realising that the goals of nanotechnology might seem threatening, researchers in this area set up forums in which people could express their concerns, learn about the technology and draw their own conclusions about its promise and the potential dangers. The UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is holding public consultations about the use of mitochondrial replacement in in-vitro fertilisation and allowing people to express concern over the creation of animals that contain human material.

None of the researchers involved in such exercises dismiss public concerns or deride those who are offended by the research proposals. Nor do they stop their work; what they do is explain their goals and motivations, their limits and their willingness to engage in dialogue about what impact – positive and negative – their work might have.

Triumphalism and derision
Contrast that with the approach to research that intrudes on what has traditionally been the domain of philosophers and theologians. There is frequent open triumphalism – open derision – as concerns expressed by representatives of entire communities are batted away. When claims about the implications and reach of the science are contested, the complainants are often dismissed as scientifically underqualified, or accused of having a vested interest in dismissing advances in our knowledge.

All this matters because we live in a globalised world. Huxley versus Wilberforce at the University of Oxford on the topic of evolution was another era, and the repercussions of scientists overstepping reasonable boundaries may, before long, be cause for regret. The last thing science needs is a reputation for elitism and for riding roughshod over the concerns of religious communities. No government has ever got away with that for long – and there is no reason to think that science will either.

At Heuer’s discussion, the issue bubbling away under the surface – but rarely mentioned – was to do with containing extremism. Just as publishing cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammed might be permissible in countries with a tradition of free speech, but is not always the most helpful of moves, scientists employing inflammatory language, however naively, will eventually create significant problems. It may be only a matter of time before a Muslim cleric declares war on, say, particle physics, outraged by something a devout student says he was told about the discipline at his university.

Less attitude
The time has come to address scientists’ disinterest in religion, drop the superior, confrontational attitude and make constructive engagement with religious groups a priority.

Though it remains extremely hard to imagine cosmologists agreeing to talk about their discoveries in ways that would avoid challenging religious belief, Winston Churchill’s assertion that dialogue can help resolve and avoid conflict is laudable, and its success has been proven. This new search, for commonality that encircles science, philosophy and religion, is clearly important and overdue. It may take as long as the search for the Higgs boson, but it will be worth the effort.

wildcat2030:

Some of Europe’s most prominent scientists have opened a debate with philosophers and theologians over the origins of everything. The event, in Geneva, Switzerland, is described as a search for “common ground” between religion and science over how the Universe began. It will focus on the Big Bang theory. The conference was called by Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in the wake of its Higgs boson discovery. Cern is the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, situated beneath the French-Swiss border region near Geneva. Professor Jim Al-Khalili explains what the Higgs boson is and why its discovery is so important The first speaker at the conference was Andrew Pinsent, research director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford University. He said that science risked “trying to turn society into a machine” if it did (via BBC News - Big Bang and religion mixed in Cern debate)

explore-blog:

Higgs boson data from CERN turned into a melody? Yes, please! Best thing since the Solar System set to music and this three-movement choral suite inspired by Sagan.

(↬ Open Culture)

(Source: )

(Source: cumdesgarconss, via culturerevo)