Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

What is the Higgs Boson, and why is it so important?



What is the Higgs Boson, and why is it so important?
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/208652-what-is-the-higgs-boson

by Graham Templeton
June 24, 2015

The Higgs boson is, if nothing else, the most expensive particle of all time. It’s a bit of an unfair comparison; discovering the electron, for instance, required little more than a vacuum tube and some genuine genius, while finding the Higgs boson required the creation of experimental energies rarely seen before on planet Earth. The Large Hadron Collider hardly needs any introduction, being one of the most famous and successful scientific experiments of all time, but the identity of its primary target particle is still shrouded in mystery for much of the public. It’s been called the God Particle, but thanks to the efforts of literally thousands of scientists, we no longer have to take its existence on faith.

Why has the Higgs been the subject of so much hype, funding, and (mis)information? For two reasons. One, it was the last hold-out particle remaining hidden during the quest to check the accuracy of the Standard Model of Physics. This meant its discovery would validate more than a generation of scientific publication. Two, the Higgs is the particle which gives other particles their mass, making it both centrally important and seemingly magical. We tend to think of mass as an intrinsic property of all things, yet physicists believe that without the Higgs boson, mass fundamentally doesn’t exist.

The reason comes back to something called the Higgs field. This field was actually theorized before the Higgs boson itself, as physicists calculated that in order for their theories and observations to jive, it was necessary to imagine a new field that existed everywhere in the universe. Shoring up existing theories by inventing new theoretical components to the universe is dangerous, and in the past led physicists to hypothesize a universal aether — but the more math they did, the more they realized that the Higgs field simply had to be real. The only problem? By the very way they’d defined it, the Higgs field would be virtually impossible to observe.

The Higgs field was thought to be responsible for the fact that some particles that should not have mass, do. It is, in a sense, the universal medium which separates massless particles into different masses. This is called symmetry breaking, and it’s often explained by way of analogy with light — all wavelengths of light travel at the same speed in the medium of a vacuum, but in the medium of a prism, each wavelength can be can separated from homogenous white light into bands of different wavelengths. This is of course a flawed analogy, since the wavelengths of light all exist in white light whether or not we’re capable of seeing that fact, but the example shows how the Higgs field is thought to create mass through symmetry-breaking. A prism breaks the velocity-symmetry of different wavelengths of light, thus separating them, and the Higgs field is thought to break the mass-symmetry of some particles which are otherwise symmetrically massless.

The (a) mouth of the Large Hadron Collider.

It was not until later that physicists realized that if the Higgs field does exist, its action would require the existence of a corresponding carrier particle, and the properties of this hypothetical particle were such that we might actually be able to observe it. This particle was believed to be in a class called the bosons; keeping things simple, they called the boson that went with the Higgs field the Higgs boson. It is a so-called “force carrier” for the Higgs field, just as photons are a force carrier for the universe’s electromagnetic field; photons are, in a sense, local excitations of the EM field, and in that same sense the Higgs boson is a local excitation of the Higgs field. Proving the existence of the particle, with the properties physicists expected based on their understanding of the field, was effectively the same as proving the existence of the field directly.

Enter, after many years of planning, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an experiment massive enough to potentially falsify the theory of the Higgs boson. The 17-mile loop of super-powered electromagnets can accelerate charged particles to significant fractions of the speed of light, causing collisions violent enough to break these particles into fundamental constituents, and deform space around the impact point. With a high enough collision energy, it was calculated that scientists could basically super-charge the Higgs boson, pushing it up into an energy state where it would decay in ways that we canobserve. These energies were so great that some even panicked and said the LHC would destroy the world, while others went so far as to describe an observation of the Higgs as a peek into an alternate dimension.

As you can see from this chart of the composition of the universe, understanding
dark matter and dark energy will be fundamental to understanding our universe.

Initial observations seemed to actually falsify predictions, and no sign of the Higgs could be found — leading some researchers who had campaigned for the spending of billions of dollars to go on television and meekly make the true-but-unsatisfying argument that falsifying a scientific theory is just as important as confirming it. With a bit more time, however, the measurements began to add up, and on March 14, 2013 CERN officially announced the confirmation of the Higgs boson. There is even some evidence to suggest the existence of multiple Higgs bosons, but that idea needs significant further study.

So what’s next for the God particle? Well, the LHC just recently reopened with significant upgrades, and has an eye to look into everything from antimatter to dark energy. Dark matter is thought to interact with regular matter solely through the medium of gravity — and by creating mass, the Higgs boson could be crucial to understanding exactly how. The main failing of the Standard Model is that it cannot account for gravity — one that could do so would be called a Grand Unified Theory — and some theorize that the Higgs particle/field could be the bridge physicists so desperately desire.

In any case, the Higgs is really only confirmed to exist; it is not yet remotely understood. Will future experiments confirm super-symmetry, and the idea that the Higgs boson could decay into dark matter itself? Or will they confirm every tiny prediction of the Standard Model about the Higgs boson’s properties and, paradoxically, end that entire field of study once and for all?