I wonder what the world’s most vociferous atheist, Richard Dawkins, feels as he reads about the discovery of the God particle. Has he spontaneously combusted at some of his fellow scientists using religious terminology that is completely unnecessary?
I am of course talking about the Higgs Boson discovery, hailed as the greatest discovery in science for the last decade. I am not an atheist but I am not particularly religious either and I take issue with the description of the God particle. The Higgs boson is a particle that makes up most of the universe’s mass, what’s God got to do with it?
I am interested in science but I do not compute why this is one of the greatest discoveries in physics unless we can now use this discovery to create crazy cool things on the gadget-to-do-list such as the starship Enterprise. It’s great that science has now proven the particle to exist but it hasn’t changed anything. I think perhaps part of the celebration is that of technological developments that enabled the construction of the Large Hadron Collider and that an international team of scientists collaborated successfully on the project.
In the UK it’s a story of British success but in Indian newspapers it was all thanks to an Indian member of the international team! If you didn’t know already, the Higgs boson is named after Professor Peter Higgs at the University of Edinburgh who said it was ‘very nice to be right’. I wonder what the European press is saying.
Bubbly
