Broadcaster and physicist Brian Cox recently explained why the discovery of the Higgs particle was so amazing.
“We sort of do know what the fuck is going on at some level with subatomic particles,” he said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “If you look to the LHC — the Large Hadron Collider — which is the place where we generate the highest energy, so it is the biggest microscope in the world in that sense, we have an extremely good understanding of the laws of physics at that level, up to and including the discovery of the Higgs particle.”
Brian Cox excitedly explains the unreasonable effectiveness of math
It’s great to see someone knows Wtf is going on.
Quasars were discovered when I was still in grade school and I decided that I wanted to become an astrophysicist. Then I discovered that I couldn’t do the math so I decided to try may hand at other things. At that time, I read everything about physics I could find in the libraries.
Fifty years later, I find that nothing new has been ‘discovered’ or hypothesized since those school days.
Nice to know that, tens of billions of euros later, we can be reasonably sure that the predicted Higgs boson probably exists. … or maybe five of them or …[pick a number]. At least it’s European taxpayers who are on the hook for CERN complex.
“couldn’t do the math”
BR says the same thing — he dropped the applied mathematics and physics double major as a senior because he had gone as far as he knew he would with the math.
As he says, “Just enough math to get myself in trouble…”
No worries – math in finance and accounting/investing are generally pretty simple.
Quasars were discovered in the 1960s. There has been an awful lot discovered since then, for example, pulsars, the cosmic background anisotropy, black holes, dark matter, accelerating expansion of the universe, exoplanets, neutrino astronomy, the charmed, strange, top and bottom quarks, the tau, and I’m not saying anything about what we’ve learned about the rest of our own solar system. It sounds like someone has lost his sense of wonder.
(If you are worried about the cost, look at how much we spent finding out that Sadam Hussein didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction. Maybe someday we’ll even discover that the USSR collapsed twenty years ago. The LHC is peanuts.)
Sorry buy I read about all these things before 1975. Dark matter, for example, is a makeshift hypothesis like the now discredited ‘ether.’ Neutrino astronomy has been a complete failure so far: each time someone has done the calculations and predicted what to expect, subsequent experiments have failed to find the neutrinos. So the physicists make new calculations to account for the failure and the subsequent bigger and better experiments fails again, and that has been the pattern so far.
If you want to see what is really going on learn enough to be able to read the primary literature published in Science and Nature, the premier scientific publications of today. Maybe the human brain did not evolve enough intelligence to comprehend the universe.
These are the kinds of things that really cheer me up. They improve my attitude towards humanity in general….. contrary to a lot of information out there that would make it sound as if we are moving back into the stone age.
This video made me happy.