Contemporary atheists point to
cosmological findings of the Big Bang Theory era, to argue that no Creator is
logically necessary. Earlier
writers, compassing the same end of assailing theism or even deism, likewise
adverted to Big Bang Theory, but put an opposite spin on it. A philosopher, reviewing Filosofskie
Problemy Sovremennoi Fisiki (Moscow, 1957), by Marxist author Ernst Kolman:
He appears to
reject outright the docrine of a cosmological commencement, on the grounds that
such theories inevitable lead to the invocation of non-material causes and hence to religion. Do they? How pleased some of our theologians would be if this were
so.
-- Ernest Gellner, Contemporary
Thought and Politics (1978), p. 138
(Note: Gellner
is not here by any means espousing deism, but merely critiquing one instance of
Physics Porn.)
~
Richard Feynman, a highly engaging guy and no spoilsport, yet disliked the tawdry “three quarks for Mr Mark” sort of foolishness that the public laps up like frumenty. In QED (1985), he wrote (p. 136):
The quarks have an additional type
of polarization that is not related to geometry. The idiot physicists, unable to come up with any wonderful
Greek words anymore, call this type of polarization by the unfortunate name of “color”,
which has nothing to do with color in the normal sense.
And (p. 145)
The “flavor” of this quark is
called c, and I haven’t got the guts
to tell you what c stands for, but
you may have read it in the newspaper.
The names are getting worse and worse!
("Charm".)
And all this was prior to the horrors of .... "The God Particle" ...
And all this was prior to the horrors of .... "The God Particle" ...
~ We here reprint a
post from August 2011. ~
"What is that
streaking 'cross the evening sky?"
"It's a
bird!" "It's Balloon Boy!" "It's the
HI-I-IGGS BOSON !!!"
In an
earlier post, I commented on the debased public presentation of
physics, comparable to the way in which Natural History is reduced to giant
colored plastic dinosaurs (with or without Adam&Eve in the diorama,
according to taste).
Do note:
the epithet "porn" is hurled, not at the content, but at the
presentation. As Edward Wilson
lamented (in Consilience, p. 268),
concerning Americans' attitude towards science:
They don’t understand it, they
prefer science fiction, they take fantasy and pseudoscience like stimulants to
jolt their cerebral pleasure centers.
Even more trenchantly, Richard Dawkins, in his essay
“Drawing Room of Dukes”:
‘Science Weeks’ and ‘Science
Fortnights’ betray an anxiety among scientists to be loved. Funny
hats and larky voices proclaim
that science is fun, fun, fun.
(Having myself tried to scale its cliffs, I can rather
attest, that it is hard, hard, hard -- and gets unbelievably harder as you near
the summits.)
Our remarks here are thus in the spirit of Dawkins, who wrote “I am attacking only the
kind of populist whoring that defiles the wonder of
science.” By no means are
the barbs aimed at science, nor at haute
vulgarisation.
*
* *
~ Commercial break ~
We now return you to your regularly
scheduled essay.
*
* *
~ ~ ~
The other day, a most useful site, aldaily.com, which links
to articles of especial interest from around the globe (though only in
English), saw fit to link to this
one, in the Irish Times:
'God particle' may be discovered soon
No, don’t bother to click -- spare your forefinger. The brief wisp of an article
announces, not any actual development, but a hope or anticipation of a
possible eventual development, namely the ‘discovery’ (something of a misnomer;
see below) of the freaking Higgs boson. (Somehow I can never resist calling it
that. Might as well re-dub it the
FHB.) Such an anticipation has
been in the news for many, many years, and has grown mold.
For those (chiefly children and Pacific Islanders) who have
not yet heard of the marvelous (though possibly non-existent, anyhow completely
unobserved) FHB, the article
explains:
It has been called the “God
particle” or the “stuff that makes stuff stuff” as, without it, there is a
mystery as to how objects get their mass.
Don’t misunderstand -- it will be very nice if they do
‘discover’ the Higgs boson, since particle physics is rather a mess, and needs
all the help it can get. It would
be like filling in a gap in the periodic chart of the elements. But how would it be more than
that? True, there is a mystery as
to how objects get their mass. But
at that level, there is a mystery,
how Time got its start, or Why is there something rather than nothing. At this level, such questions are
fundamentally unanswerable: we
have hit rock bottom, our spade is turned.
Still, there is much that can usefully be done. Thus, Newton did not discover the
fact of gravitational attraction, let alone explain how it came to be -- as he
well knew. What he did was
posit a precise formula -- the inverse-square law -- which, when you do the
math (and he had to invent much of the math) turns out to fit precisely the
observed orbits of the planets, as well as the behavior of falling apples. This was a formal tour de force,
and was of immediate philosophical significance as well, as uniting the
supralunary and sublunary spheres, traditionally thought to obey quite
different laws. Nay further, as
Arthur Koestler puts it epigrammatically
in The Act of Creation (1964):
This equally applies to the
discoveries of the artist who makes us see familiar objects … in a strange new
revealing light … Newton’s apple and Cézanne’s apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
Now, there are two basic ways in which some new constuct,
like the FHB, might be desirable.
One, like Newton’s Universal Gravitation, it might be
illuminating, in that it would formally unite gravity with something else,
which is the goal of the Theory of Everything. But in that case, it would seem, the intellectual work has already been
done: someone has calculated that,
given a particle of such&such particulars, it would be a key that would fit
both locks. And that might
constitute a conceptual tour de force, only -- the actual ‘discovery’ of the
particle is philosophically an anticlimax: it would not be really a discovery,
the way penicillin or X-rays or the Cosmic Microwave Background -- previously
unsuspected -- were discovered.
It would simply mean that the already-posited and largely-understood
particle was finally physically spotted -- the way the positron was
spotted, after Dirac had predicted its characteristics with math.
[Update 23 April 2012] Thus indeed now Steven
Weinberg:
"The discovery of the Higgs boson would be a gratifying
verification of present theory, but it will not point the way to a more
comprehensive future theory. We can hope, as was the case with the Bevatron,
that the most exciting thing to be discovered at the LHC will be something
quite unexpected. Whatever it is, it’s hard to see how it could take us all the
way to a final theory, including gravitation."
Unfortunately, this happy scenario may not be the case. Rather, we may be faced with Case
Two: the particle is needed, not
because, like the calculus and the working out of the consequences of the
inverse square laws, it is a key that opens many doors; but only because, for purely formal
reasons, without it, you’re screwed.
Such is the picture as presented in Wikipedia:
The existence of the particle is
postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in current theoretical
physics …
In other words, the Standard Theory is sweating beneath the
auditor’s eyeshaded gaze, “We seem
to have uncovered certain inconsistencies in your physicofinancial
statements…”, and the hope is that adding yet one more creature to the Particle
Zoo will stave off the day of
reckoning for a time.
Okay, so: a
non-story, at many levels.
Why, then, did a well-informed site like aldaily choose to link to it,
rather than to any of a number of substantive
scientific articles for a lay audience?
(For examples, see any issue of the excellent American Scientist.) The answer is obvious: the tawdry misinvocation of the Deity
in that misbegotten amelus of a nickname, “the God particle”, which manages to
degrade comprehension of both science and religion at one go.
[update 19 IV 11:]
aldaily has now promoted that piece of tripe to its coveted "nota
bene" section.
[update 21 IV 11:]
Ah, just what we needed:
toss in the much-battered metaphor of the Holy Grail (now decapitalized
and pluralized):
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/physics-and-the-search-for-the-holy-grails/779476/0
[update 26 IV 11:] As we anticipated.... "Nevvah
mi-ind..."
And so the media once again climbs down from its puffed-up
non-event. But meanwhile they have
sold some more newspapers, and John Q. Citizen can feel that he has kept
"up-to-date" with Science.
[update 28 IV 11]
As an antidote to all this, see the current New Yorker for some
excellent physics reportage. The
subject -- quantum computation and Many Worlds -- is difficult to approach
without falling into mystification or gee-whiz, but reporter Rivka
Galchen manages nicely.
[update 14 VIII 11]
More digs at Higgs
The FHB is beginning seriously to get on my tits. Now this:
To More, the usual concept of empty space was meaningless
because space is always filled with divine spirit. To us, the usual concept of empty space may be similarly elusive, since the
empty space we’re privy to may
always be filled with an ocean of Higgs field.
-- Brian
Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), p. 270
Ergo, a new Paternoster, for the Physics-Porn crowd:
Our Particle, who art in Aether,
Shallow be thy name …
[update 24 VIII 11]
The alarming possibility just occurred to me, that this post
might be misconstrued as dissing physics popularization as a genre, as a whole. Not at all ! There are several quite excellent books. Heading the list would be the brief and
very readable title by Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
(1965).
~
~ Posthumous Endorsement ~
"If I were alive today, and in the mood
for a mystery,
this is what I'd be reading: "
(My name is Dick Feynman, and I approved
this message.)
~
~
~
[update 18 IX 11]
Cf. now also this.
[update 24 IX 11]
And this.
No comments:
Post a Comment