In 1993, Noble prize-winning physicist, Leon Lederman, published a book entitled, The God Particle. The book was about a particle, hypothesized most prominently by Peter Higgs, which is associated with a field that permeates the universe and gives mass to the elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics. On July 4, 2012, physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world’s largest particle accelerator, announced they had discovered signs of a new particle that looks an “awful lot like the long sought after” Higgs particle. So does this mean that the secret to the universe has now been revealed and that with the God particle in its sights, there is nothing left for particle physics to discover? Or does this discovery simply convert the mystery of particle mass into the mystery of the properties of the Higgs field? Learn what the Higgs particle really is and...
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Here is a letter to the editor of Newsweek, commenting upon Lawrence Krauss’s article, The Godless Particle, published in the July 16, 2012 issue of Newsweek. The Higgs finding illustrates a serious problem with modern physics and cosmology: scientists want to bedazzle the public with the latest discovery of “the secret to the universe” and the consequent vanquishing of God, but remain tight-lipped about the assumptions embedded in their theories and the mysteries remaining. While Lawrence Krauss and others triumphantly proclaim that the Higgs particle (assuming it has been found in fleeting collisions of elementary particles) solves the mystery of mass, they remain silent about how the Higgs field itself arose. As the more forthright Nobel prize-winning physicist Martinus J.G. Veltman notes, with the Higgs particle “ignorance about the origin of mass is replaced by the ignorance about the particle-Higgs couplings, and no real knowledge is gained.” In other...
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Our modern mindset conditions us to look at the world as physical beings, collections of matter and dust; advanced robots; machines with a brain. Into this materialistic framework, we have a hard time fitting spirit, the notion that there is something more than mere inert, lifeless stuff at the core of existence. Spirit and matter have never gone together well, like a light breeze blowing through the Grand Canyon, spirit does not affect matter, and may be simply an illusion. But this attitude leads to a big what if? What if we are in fact spiritual beings having a physical experience. who have fooled themselves into thinking that our essence is matter, rather than spirit? In his controverisal book, The Phenomenon of Man, French Philosopher and Jesuit Priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote that indeed, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience. Suppose we take this as our starting point, and...
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An unavoidable fact of science is that the universe is finely-tuned to allow life to exist. Fundamental forces and constants, from the rest mass of the electron to the sun’s distance from the Earth and the strength of “dark energy,” appear to be adjusted to ensure a stable universe and the possibility of life. Scientists, faced with this fine-tuning, confront the age-old dilemma of whether to bring a supreme being into the picture or to seek a “natural” explanation. But science’s natural explanation for the fine-tuning problem is a humdinger: an increasingly number of physicists are jumping on the multiverse bandwagon, supporting the idea that our universe is just one of a near infinite series of other universes, forming a vast landscape of other worlds. On this show, guest Bernard Carr, Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London, and editor of the book, Universe or Multiverse,...
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The classic Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita, tells the story of the five sons of the deceased King Pandu, who are exiled to the forest through the treachery of a jealous cousin. Thirsting for water, the five brothers come upon a crystal lake; as they prepare to take a drink, a voice comes out of the forest and says, “before you drink, first answer my question.” The first four sons ignore the voice, take a drink and fall dead. The fifth son, Yudhisthira, stops, and listens to the questions. The voice asks, “of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful?” Yudhisthira answers: “That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes he himself will not die.” The voice was of the god Dharma, who proceeded to bring the four brothers back to life. This story either speaks to something eternal in us, or shows that most people cannot face death. ...
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