The God**** Particle

[Zadig]

Here's the article I was trying to find when I came across that video. This explains it fairly well in layman's terms:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/13/world/euro...index.html

[Trapped Pentecostal]

Thanks, Zadig. I'm still feeling like I have only the tiniest glimmer of understanding of it. And that may be all I ever have, since now that I think about it, I don't really understand things like electrons or quarks, either.

[dramaturge]

Here's an interesting little video discussion about the large hadron collider and the Higgs boson: http://vimeo.com/41038445

I like the visualization of mass as how a particle interacts with the Higgs field, and the graph that shows why it takes so many collisions to extrapolate the evidence of a small amount of data.

[squiz]

(07-07-2012 09:07 PM)dramaturge Wrote:  Here's an interesting little video discussion about the large hadron collider and the Higgs boson: http://vimeo.com/41038445

I like the visualization of mass as how a particle interacts with the Higgs field, and the graph that shows why it takes so many collisions to extrapolate the evidence of a small amount of data.

I also liked that video. I especially liked their analogy to the development of the periodic table, and the constant "we don't know".

I just stumbled upon this video of Richard Feynman explaining wave-particle duality.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...ty/259718/
It's from before the Higgs boson was even theorised, but it explains the fundamental experiments behind quantum physics quite well. It's the sort of stuff that I remember covering back in high school physics class 30 years back, but it is always great to hear this master-teacher explaining things.

I liked this line (at 52:00), in which he ephasises the primacy of experiment and observation over theory.
Feynman: 'A philosopher once said (pompously) "it is necessary for the very existence of science, that the same conditions always produce the same results" - well they don't'.
(And at 53:41) 'What is necessary for the very existence of science is the ability to experiment, the honesty in reporting results (the results must be reported without someone saying what they would like the results to have had been) and finally an important thing is the intelligence to interpret the results - and finally an important thing about this intelligence is that it should not be sure ahead of time about what must be...' This sums up to me the massive gulf between the fundamentalist religious mindset and that of science.