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With reference to the previous post about the Higgs, my thanks for all the supportive emails from fellow skeptics. The Hyperbole in the upmaket press about the 'discovery' of 'The God Particle' has wildly exceeded even the over-egging that CERN gave their meagre result. Apparently the title 'God Particle' arose from a publishers decision to reject the title for a book about the hunt for it provisionally titled 'The Goddamn Particle'. So now it enters the popular imagination and the rickety cannon of scientific orthodoxy as a given, along with that other huge leap of questionable asumptions that constitute the standard big bang inflationary expanding and now accelerating expanding universe/multiverse? hypotheses.
We now have a very messy and questionable result which the particle jockeys will undoubtedly use to justify much more funding and which will keep the theorists writing speculative papers.
On a lighter note, since nobody can quite decide whether to attribute the entire idea to Peter Higgs or whether the idea that a boson should exist as a consequence of a mass-giving field represents a group effort, we should perhaps consider calling the 125GeV signal 'The Europarticle'.
The Europarticle, like its monetary equivalent, seems based upon dubious theory, it has cost a fortune and kept vast numbers of people busy collaborating on it, and it shows every indication of falling apart very quickly, plus it has failed to create unity (between quantum and relativistic models).
Based on the energies involved and its apparently bosonic characteristics, I'd like to enter my best guess for posterity, think the elusive once in a trillion 125GeV signal probably represents just a couple of Z bosons stuck together momentarily.
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Higgs or Not?
Today’s announcement from CERN does not send me scuttling off to eat the relevant pages of The Apophenion and The Octavo as I promised to do if the Higgs mechanism proves correct.
The CERN announcement, like many before it, seems to have a whiff of desperation about it, almost as if they need to justify their activities and maintain the excitement before the impending particle physics conference in Melbourne and another lengthy shutdown of the LHC.
The search for the Higgs boson has led to one of the most expensive and messiest series of experiments in history.
They appear to have evidence of some sort of a particle with an energy around 125GeV. However this particle only appears once every few trillion collisions and we can only infer its fleeting existence from its decay products as it only lasts for a vanishingly short time. This particle could well consist of a composite entity like a top-antitop meson rather than a truly new fundamental particle.
I have severe reservations about the Higgs Mechanism for many reasons: -
1) The Higgs Mechanism evolved to explain the surprisingly large masses of the W and Z bosons of the weak interaction compared to the mass of the photon which theoretically has a zero mass even though it carries momentum and energy. Theorists have attempted to extend the Higgs mechanism to explain the masses of all other particles with mass. The Higgs boson does not in itself confer the property of mass upon other particles. According to the theory of the Higgs mechanism, particles acquire mass through interacting with the Higgs field, their mass then simply represents the extent to which they couple with the field. The Higgs boson itself doesn’t normally manifest in nature, supposedly it only appears fleetingly when we supply enough energy to the omnipresent Higgs field for one to pop into existence.
2) We already have a most excellent theory of mass called General Relativity, this describes mass as spacetime curvature. Most importantly it includes both the inertial and gravitational components of mass. In Newtonian theory these two components just appear as co-incidentally identical. In General Relativity their fundamental equivalence forms the cornerstone of the theory itself. The Sat Nav system validates GR on a daily basis; it simply wouldn’t work properly if it didn’t account for the curvature of spacetime around this planet.
3) The Higgs mechanism can only perhaps explain the inertial component of mass, but not only does it fail to explain gravity but it ignores the fundamental equivalence principle of GR. In a Higgs based universe gravity would have to have some other mechanism, presumably the emission and absorption of so called ‘virtual’ gravitons. This would then require that mass carrying particles mysteriously coupled with the Higgs field and the graviton field in EXACTLY the same way, despite that the apparently massless photons remain subject to gravity.
4) Basically the attempt by particle physicists to explain mass and gravity with the same sort of Gauge Force model they use for electromagnetic interactions seems highly questionable, and the Higgs mechanism remains very far from proved.
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You may well wonder why I bother with all this physics stuff, well as I explain in my books, my current Magical Theory also makes certain predictions about the structure of spacetime and particle physics in terms of a 3D time metric, and if these become falsified I'll have to build another magical theoretical framework.
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Following a number of heated debates with my eldest who has gone native after marrying a fine Scot, I've taken a lot more notice of the arguments about Scottish Independence.
I'm all for the gloriously bogus Tartan Romanticism myself, castles, kilts, mountains, broadswords, haggis, Burns, the skrill of the bagpipes, love all that stuff.
However economically it doesn't make a lot of obvious sense. Politically, Scotland has become tainted by a subsidy induced sense of socialism which it probably cannot afford to maintain unless it gets ownership of all the North Sea oil and gas revenues.
Macro-politically, Scotland already has it both ways with a voice in Westminster and its own Parliament. That Westminster Parliament may soon allow us all a referendum on leaving the ghastly EU and we shall probably say yes to that.
And where does that leave Scotland? Hankering after an EU membership? Well they can have ours if they want one.
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Arcanorium College announces its program for Semsters 6 and 7. www.arcanoriumcollege.com
Semester 6. Jun 15th - Jul 28th
Pete, Elder Gods
Hyperritual, Measuring Magic
Semester 7. ~Aug 6th - ~Sept 14th
Tadhq, Knights of Chaos 3.
Andriehvitimus, Chaos Vodoun
In Semester 6 I invite Staff and Members to asist in the creation of a Necronomicom worthy of the name, so far nothing in the field strikes me as entirely good enough. As this planet's premier magical institution we have the capability and the responsibility to do so, whatever the casualties.
Whilst the rest of the world is preocupied with watching the London Olympics on television the Knights of Chaos will mount a third annual campaign to save the biosphere and human civilisation by deploying sorcery against those forces striving to destroy them. Every little helps. Willing Wands Welcome, apply to Arcanorium College online, as above.
Personally I find the Olympics tiresome, when you start taking sport too seriously it first becomes absurd and then grotesque, and berift of any sense of fun or sportsmanship. I may however give the ladies beach volleyball a few moments of attention, that looks like fun, and basically who cares who wins? The best time to see London incidentally, is in the 1970s, a slightly down at heel bohemian place full of Hippys and old bookshops. Since then the place has become poisoned by too much money. I used to crash in sleeping bags in properties that now fetch more than a million quid each.
I just re-noticed Dave Lee's review of The Octavo. http://chaotopia-dave.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/octavo-by-peter-j-carroll-review.html
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Plenty of good cheer this week, married off my eldest daughter to a fine scotsman, dog bit my sporran mistaking it for a badger, it probably once was a badger, otherwise a splendid day. The anti-rain spell worked despite an averse forecast, we had a brief flurry of snow to accompany the sunshine, white wedding in May! I returned to find that my mandrakes have sprouted from seed as had the canarian dragon tree, this may take 300 years to mature but the project to repopulate southwest england with mandrakes may only take a decade or two.
I notice that my seminal earlier blog on Designer Religion has now achieved 1,000 reads. Perhaps this calls for a franchise operation.
http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=38&Itemid=137
The Dark Matter absence seems to be causing some serious head scratching amongst our cosmologists, and the chances of the Higgs existing seems to receede with every passing spin of the LHC. The standard models of cosmology and particle physics look set for drastic revision, hooray.
There remains some danger that the Euro and the EU may survive though. We must have the courage to accept the short term consequences of their collapse and welcome destruction, for otherwise europe will condemn itself to a Synarchist Totalitarianism run by an unelected oligarchy of faceless bureaucrats that we have no power to deselect, and who will expand their regulatory powers beyond all apparent sense and reason until they have achieved their actual goal of Arbitary Power. SCREW THE EU.
Saturday 26th May marks Apophenia's Birthday, prepare rituals, lay in plenty of chocolate.