Monthly Archives: October 2009

Who is pushing what here… you tell me.

October 28, 2009   caraleisa   No comments

My friend Staks Rosch writes a daily blog called Dangerous Talk. He’s a sincere, ethical, GOOD young guy, with a lovely wife and an adorable new son, Orion (love that name!). And, he’s an atheist. I enjoy his blog and occasionally repost one that holds particular appeal to me. This is one of them, it really goes very well with my earlier post “Sick and Tired of God Stuff” which is here at http://www.caraleisa.com/blog1/?p=46.

MOST atheists I know, (and I know a lot of atheists having been active in assorted free-thought communities since 1992), do NOT bring up their lack of faith in general social conversations. We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, though, when it’s brought up to us, which happens regularly. We can answer honestly that THAT is not what we believe and be considered rude, or we can keep our mouths shut and imply that we do agree, and give ourselves a knot in our stomach.

What if, instead of a sweet old lady saying “Oh, your baby is such a wonderful gift from God!”, someone said to a religious couple “How wonderful that your son was born free of superstitious nonsense like religion!” Well, folks, you and I know that they would NOT like it one bit. They’d be offended and likely get nasty. Why do you think it’s any different when the statement is about a ‘gift from god’? It’s not.

Here are Stak’s thoughts on the matter.

The Double Standard of Religious Conversation
http://www.dangeroustalk.net/?p=658
Posted: 27 Oct 2009 09:02 AM PDT

Why is it that religious people feel the need to insert their religious views into seemingly every conversation? If an atheist inserting his or her lack of belief into seemingly every conversation we are criticized by the religious for “pushing our atheism.”

Yesterday, I was out with my 8 mouth old son and a woman came up to me and started a conversation. She told me about how she works in a hospital and deals with babies all the time. She of course thought that my son was cute (because he is cute!) and that was fine. No problems so far. But then she started going off on how he is a miracle from God and stuff. She actually laid the God-talk on pretty thick and it got pretty awkward. I did my best not to say anything and to just be polite since we were in a store full of people. But she made it really difficult.

The thing is that I shouldn’t have had to bite my tongue, she didn’t bite her tongue. In fact, she had no problem whatsoever pushing her religious beliefs on me and making the conversation very uncomfortable. Plus, had I told her that I didn’t believe in God, no doubt I would be considered the rude one.

Contrast this with an incident from over the weekend in which a facebook friend (relative really) had a status update in which she started to express doubt in God. I posted a comment joking about how I don’t believe in God and haven’t gotten hit with a lightning bolt yet. This of course led to a small debate with one of her Christian friends. I was very polite and even told her friend that if she wanted to continue the conversation, we should do so privately. But instead, her friend just kept insulting me. In the end, I was considered the rude one for, “pushing my atheism” and “inserting my atheism into every conversation” despite the fact that the conversation started with someone else’s doubt of deities.

This is why I think it is so important for atheists to come out of the closet. In fact, I am probably going to start wearing my American Atheist necklace more often now. If more people realize that atheists are out there in the general public in larger numbers, they will stop assuming that everyone they meet believes in God. This might cause them to think a little bit before they start babbling about gods and miracles at seemingly every turn.

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What’s so important about the Higgs Boson?

October 27, 2009   caraleisa   No comments

With particles now in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Cern, Switzerland, it seems a good time to talk about what the goals are, this article specifically on finding the Higgs.

One of the biggest goals in physical science today is to identify and prove the existence of the Higgs Boson, which is predicted by quantum theory, but has never been seen. If they find it, it should be the missing piece that makes Quantum Mechanics (QM) whole… currently there is an empty space in the theory.

Simplistically put, We don’t understand why a particle has a certain mass – almost everything we see has mass except pure light. But in QM computations, many particles must be massless… we know that’s wrong! The calculations predict that there is a Higgs Field which these massless particles must pass through – it is essentially everywhere, and interaction with the Higgs boson – the particle component of the Higgs Field, is what gives mass to those assorted massless particles.

So, it’s a pretty important thing to find. Fermilab (another collider) in the US has been trying to find it, but so far no luck. The new and bigger LHC is definitely capable of identifying it, IF IT EXISTS. It could/will likely take some time, perhaps years, certainly, because in theory, the Higgs will be very difficult to produce (1 in millions) and recognize.

How does it work? Well, the LHC is huge – 27km in circumference – a massively constructed circular tunnel running deeply under three countries. The ‘tunnel tubes’ are surrounded by unbelieveably powerful magnets which basically bend the paths of the particles (specifically, hadrons) which are fired in two opposite directions so that they speed around the circle, instead of straight ahead. There are ‘stations’ along the path where scientists can direct these particles which are moving just under the speed of light, to collide with each other. Hence the name: Large – hadron – collider.

When they collide, they produce – for an incomprehensibly short time only – some of the conditions of the universe in the very first moments after the big bang. The particles produced disappear far too fast to be seen and/or utilized, BUT astoundingly, we have the capability to record the trails these particles make as they come into and go out of existence.

Every type of particle has its own special trail/behavior style. Scientists already know what the path from a Higgs will look like! So it’s a matter of producing many, many, many collisions and then examining the vast amounts of data to locate the Higgs. IF it exists.

What if it is not found? Scientists believe that if they do NOT find the Higgs with the LHC, then it doesn’t exist. In some ways that would be the more fascinating result, since then they must backtrack and re-examine all of quantum mechanics, particle physics and possibly even rework General Relativity! Either result is exciting…

For more information for the non-scientist, here are a few fabulous links:

My personal favorite: The Particle Adventure. http://particleadventure.org/index.html – In my mind, one of the very best explanations I’ve ever seen, done in a cartoon style but don’t think for a second that makes it fluffy. You can spend days on this site, learning. It’s divided into sections depending on your knowledge.

For shorter bits:

The CERN website: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Science/Higgs-en.html also CERN-TV on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jup2R9Jtnc

SciAM: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-exactly-is-the-higgs (oldie but goodie)

Wikipedia page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fg16j5hbvY&NR=1&feature=fvwp and there is a long list of other videos on it. Don’t know how good they all are, but you can check them out. Watch ones by scientists, of course!

NOTE PLEASE - I am not a scientist, I just love this stuff. If you are knowledgeable and see that I have made any errors in the above, PLEASE correct me and I will correct what I’ve said.

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