The first is that there is a good chance that the predicted Higgs boson does not exist.
In just five months running the Large Hadron Collider, two teams have eliminated – at a 95 percent confidence level – most of the range of possible masses the Higgs could have, Vivek Sharma, a physics professor at UC San Diego, reported at the biannual Lepton-Photon conference held recently in Mumbai, India. “The Higgs, if it exists, is now trapped between 114 and 145 GeV (Giga-electron volts, a measure of mass),” he said.If it turns out that the Higgs boson does not exist, it's back to the drawing boards, as the 'Standard Model' of how fundamental forces interact, which has been our best explanation for the last 40 years, depends on the existence of the Higgs boson.
Secondly, and this is more tentative, scientists may have discovered that neutrinos travel slightly faster than light, which as you know violates relativity.
These are exciting times, for there are no more exciting times than when science discovers that it is wrong in fundamental ways. It's our chance to be even more creative in explaining the universe. As Richard Feynman warned, "I think that nature's imagination is so much greater than man's, she's never going to let us relax."
Edit: As suspected, the discovery that neutrinos have been found to travel faster than the speed of light was announced today.
13 comments:
Very coincidentally i was assigned a paper in my philosophy class regarding the fine tuning argument that is due this friday. Maybe i'll try to work this article in somehow, seeing as the theory of relatively is being violated which would lead to different views of the how the universe works
Absolutely! Take what I say with discretion since, 1) you know more about the fine tuning argument than I and 2) you know more about what type of analysis your teacher wants than I.
As the fine tuning argument argues, it does seem like we have arrived here "by the skin of our teeth"—all these remarkable coincidences. Gravity, the strong nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, the mass of the proton in relationship with the neutron and electron—if any one of these were off slightly, life as we know it wouldn't exist.
But, of course, that's the rub, "life as we know it." Here is where I like your insight, Martin. How well do we know it? How well do we understand the science behind the universe? Gravity? The strong nuclear force, etc.? Just in the past week, our basic understanding of the fundamental principles of the universe have been challenged by two events.
1. The likelihood that the Higgs boson does not exist, which dramatically changes everything we know about the four fundamental forces.
2. The likelihood that neutrinos travel faster than light which changes everything we know about relativity and gravity.
Tomorrow our understanding of these forces may be very different. In a hundred years (as long as scientists' quest for knowledge is tempered with the philosophers' quest for meaning and understanding), we may not view nature as coincidental at all. We may have a very different understanding of the fundamental forces of nature.
I think it foolish and unscientific to base the veracity of the fine tuning argument on what we understand about nature at present. What we know is that we know very, very little.
If you wish to find mystery, it is not in the seemingly coincidences of science of which we are but barely scratching the surface, but in the coincidence that anything exists at all.
I've looked a bit more into the fine tuning argument. What kind of paper was assigned? Long/short? Does your prof want you to give him back the different arguments, pros and con, for fine tuning? Is he/she asking you whether you think it is a good argument or bad one? Does he just want to make sure you understand it or does he want some original thinking? Does he want you to bring in the religious side of the argument?
One thing I've learned is that any paper or discussion in philosophy should contain some humor. It is fundamental to all philosophy, but rarely displayed by philosophers, who should know better.
One bit of humor I found in the fine tuning argument is related to the religious implications. As we know from religious texts, such as God telling Abraham to slay Isaac, or even from our daily perplexing dealings with moral ambiguities and the slippery nature of truth, God comes off as a very peculiar fellow. Strangely this same peculiar fellow emerges from the fine tuning argument. God creates a universe that can exist and sustain life by only the merest and narrowest chance. Any normal fellow would have made the universe and life much more obvious, to say nothing of welcoming.
Basically my paper is in response to a few essays we've had to read. I am just choosing one essay about fine-tuning to respond to. We must give the author's points and be charitable towards his views and try to explain them the best we can. Then we can give our own analysis on his argument and the points he makes. The paper is supposed to be around 1800 words so not too long where philosophy is concerned.
I like your professor's approach. Have you chosen your essay, and is it on the web?
Yes I've written a first draft but it is not on the web anywhere. Is there any way i can attach it somewhere on the blog?
I meant, is the essay you've chosen to write about (one of those you had to read) on the web?
If you want to share the essay that you have written, and I would love to read it, you could try Google Docs. Basically, instructions are here. There is a link on that page which will take you to Google Docs. I've never used it, but apparently you can set sharing options so it need not be publicly available but only to those you specify. Alternatively, you can just send an attachment with an email. My Google email is jrrharvey@gmail.com
http://home.messiah.edu/~rcollins/Fine-tuning/Revised%20Version%20of%20Fine-tuning%20for%20anthology.doc
you could try that for his essay or just google god, design and fine-tuning. I'll send you my paper through email.
If you have a gmail account send me an email at peterharv@gmail.com and I can make you an author of the blog allowing you to post and add comments without my approval...back to anatomy
I got the paper by Robin Collins. Thanks. I'm starting to read it. It is interesting and well written. Of course, I'll have comments.
I didn't have a lot of time but I skimmed the article and read your article (quickly).
I really have little to add. Collins paper is fairly understandable and generally well-reasoned. You do a great job in summarizing it. By the way, Collins does go off on a tangent of sorts in Objection 5, the Probability Objection. Basically, all he is saying is that he does not mean "probability" as a statistical chance among many outcomes, like rolling a die or many dice, but as "degree of credence—the rationality we should have in the proposition."
A few comments (and it is probably too late and unnecessary to change anything):
1. Collins talks of the four forces as if they are parts of the universe. It follows, therefore, that if any of these force laws did not exist, complex, intelligent life would be much less likely, if not impossible. I'm not sure if your class has dealt with the terms, noumena (the thing itself) and phenomena (what we observe), but Collins makes no distinction when talking about these forces. You raise the objection that science is not sure about how the universe works, introducing these terms would just enhance your argument. The universe (noumena) is not going to change (as far as we can tell), while our understanding and how we perceive it (phenomena) most certainly will change. But it may be more trouble than its worth to introduce these terms since Collins brings in Rudolph Carnap, who made a living writing about these distinctions. Clearly, however, Collins should not be talking of the four forces as if they are entities of the universe.
2. Collins also tries to avoid your objection by saying What matters for the likelihood of an hypothesis’s truth (or empirical adequacy), however, is the current evidence in its favor, not whether it is possible to find evidence against it in the future. Point taken, but using his own likelihood principle, what is more likely, that our understanding of the universe and forces will remain as they are or that they will change—dramatically?
3. Personally, I like that you don't spend a lot of time on the multi-world business. My feeling on this is: Either science has some observable data from other universes or it is not science but just an imaginative fiction (like the book Flatland) that simply serves to show off our imagination and mathematical prowess.
Again, you definitely captured the article and have stated you points clearly and logically. (I didn't read for grammar.) I would be surprised if you don't get an 'A'.
In reading over my comment I could have used noumena and phenomena better. It can get somewhat complicated. As I said, I wouldn't bother with explaining it. The point was that Collins treats our best explanation of how the universe works, an explanation that currently relies on four forces, as the universe itself. Clearly, especially with the Higgs boson problem, our explanation is not correct and will change.
Sorry for all the posts (although James says no apology is necessary), but I just thought of an analogy of what I meant. Actually, it's an analogy for Martin's argument.
A few hundred years ago, science looked up at the heavens and saw the sun and all the stars revolving around the earth. Our best explanation was that we were in the center of the universe, a sure sign of God. Now science's best explanation involves incredible coincidences of forces and constants in order that life is possible. We have been down that road before. We should travel there only with caution.
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