Wisdom and maturity are two of the most important words in the 21st century to navigate through the flood of informations, ideas, propagandas, attitudes, emotions, and newly developing situations.
The need for clear and precise assessment of an issue and coming up with the best way to handle it require knowing and understanding of the issue and having a perspective with the broad horizon and critical thinking.
The story of the boson is an example tof the opportunity presented to us to understand ourselves and the universe we are living in and to get the perspective as to where we stand in that universe. Through this story, hopefully, we'll gain a little more wisdom and maturity in outlook.
One of the ways to achieve perspective in life is looking at us as a biological being in this unimaginably vast universe. Historically, humanity has had three approaches to raise and answer questions in life; philosophy, religious dogma, and science.
Here, I'd like to quote Bertrand Russell. "All definite knowledge-so I should contend- belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses the definite knowledge belongs to theology.
But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy . Almost all questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science can not answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries."
The biological being with speculative mind, let's assume it is the human being, has to ask how, why, when it all started and with what. We have been coming up with many theories and getting better at answering the questions. A few thousand years ago, people from the different parts of the world believed that the basic building blocks of the world were water, fire, earth, and air.
Now, we've come a long way from the four elements of a few thousand years ago to boson, Higgs boson, announced on Wednesday, 7/4/12 by the CERN director general Rolf Heuer. At the press conference, Dr. Heuer said that "---We have a success. Today, we have a discovery.---We have discovered new particle, boson.--- Does it have the properties which we expect from the Standard Model?--- It is the beginning of the long journey to investigate all the properties of this interesting particle."
The story of boson, the Standard Model, the Universe, and us, the biological being start with the Big Bang theory. The theory tries to answer how and when the Universe has started, and , of course, with what. The theory calculates the age of the Universe at around 13,75 billion years ago. In other words, the Universe has started at that time with a literal big bang.
www.en.wikipedia.org
Physicists came up with the theory and number after the observation of the Universe that is expanding, and assuming it's been expanding ever since the Big Bang. The theory postulates that, at the time of the Big Bang, there were only elemental particles, the smallest possible particles with no substructures. These elemental particles combined with others and formed elemental atoms, and so on and on to the biological being that is us, and everything else in the Universe.
The big part of the modern physics is the story of trying to find these elemental particles, for example, fermions, and bosons through repeatable and provable experiments after all this is the science. In physics, two important words are matter and force. The definition of the two words, we won't get into that here, suffice it to say that fermions are considered as the matter particles and bosons, force-carry particles.
Our world is saturated with force fields. That is why we can listen to radios and use our cell phones. The Standard Model theory postulates boson field which gives matter its weight. Boson field saturates the Universe, and we are swimming in the boson field, just we don't know it. Isn't it interesting that the Universe, and our world are full of matters we can not see or feel. When Higgs boson was created and observed, at least, they positively think they did, it was one more evidence that boson field does exist.
We have been observing and measuring our surroundings, and trying to come up with ways to explain them. When observations and measurements don't match, physicists come with concept like dark matter. It must be out there to give them a certain measurement but not able to observe it. Science is doing a wonderful job answering many important questions.
But there are questions like "What was there before the Big Bang?" It may take scientists long long time before coming up with answers. Religious dogmas always have the definitive answers. People in the No Man's Land will continually say 'hmm.'
* Boson - Looking for a perspective in the fascinating science news about the origin of the Universe.
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