Disturbing discoveries (A mad world)

by dhw, Sunday, August 07, 2016, 20:45 (3028 days ago)

An article in yesterday's Times, under the headline “Scientists at Cern uncover evidence of the damp squib”, is at one and the same time hilarious, disturbing, and admirable. In brief, the scientists got wildly excited by some “very unusual signals coming from the tunnels deep below the Swiss border”. They thought it might be a new particle. One physicist suggested it would “rewrite the textbooks,” and another said it was “ten on the Richter scale of physics.” The article goes on to ask: “Was it a cousin of the Higgs?A gravitation? Or maybe it explained dark matter, the elusive substance that makes up the majority of the universe. Whatever it was, if proven, its existence would be one of the most significant in at least 50 years.” - Apparently no less than 500 papers have been written about the implications. And here comes the grand climax: - “Yesterday, after the release of a trove of new data by Cern, it was revealed that it was a statistical blip after all. The search for a new particle continues.” - Thinking of the time, the effort, the money spent on studying a particle that doesn't exist makes the mind boggle. But so does the thought that perhaps some currently favoured theories may also be based on blips of one kind or another: the big bang, dark matter, dating techniques (no, not the romantic type), the history of everything, God…Imagine a few thousand years from now: will scientists and thinkers be telling us that their 21st-century colleagues got it all right? - Maybe 5 billion papers have already been written about blips (hilarious), maybe vast numbers of our assumptions are based on blips (disturbing), but blips or no blips, we humans will never give up our search for the truth (admirable).