Now what if an atheist snuck onto the payroll. He or she would never, ever find the Higgs or the Higgs antiparticle. It would all be a waste of money. Can only Christian physicists be capable of seeing it?

Is there anything in the Bible which foretold the Higgs? The anti-Higgs? Bosons?

It boggles the mind.

Seriously though, the Higgs Field makes as much sense to me as Dark Matter – that being that it’s a silly blanket idea meant to fill as many holes as possible. When results don’t match reality, that either means that our theories are off, or our observations are skewed. Many times it seems a new sensible theory pops up in physics only to be set aside simply because people are too afraid to rewrite all their equations.

I DO think the Higgs boson exists, or something like it. However, there’s always the possibility that it doesn’t; or that it does, but there’s something that makes up it, or that there’s more than one kid (actually….)

Proton collision

The model and the accelerator

There’s more where those came from.

And things like protons, electrons, atoms, molecules are swimming though this Boson sea or fields.

A HIggs Boson weighs about 125 times what a proton does. It doesn’t make sense to me at this time that an entire ether of these things can be so massive or the wave form of these bosons can’t be found.

Now I’m not saying the researchers are stupid for not finding it. I’m saying I can’t wrap my mind around the concept.

All scientific theories start off as ad hoc hypotheses that are then
subjected to experimental verification. Even Ptolemy’s epicycycles were modifications to a successful theory that kept on showing problems as it was subjected to greater demands and scrutiny. Eventually, it had to be abandoned altogether, but in the meantime, it was good enough for engineering work, you could navigate ships and predict eclipses with it, and we still use its calendar.

A consistent theory (even if it is dead wrong) is useful if it suggests strategies for further research, even if it needs a major ovrhaul down the line. Even Newtonian physics served its purpose, and even today, is good enough for engineering work.

Out of all this dark matter and energy, strings, branes, quarks and other nonsense will eventually come a new synthesis, one that can be backed up in the lab or at the telescope. Even if it looks like nothing we have today, our ‘epicycles’ will have suggested the experiment that will show the way to the next level.

Newton, and Einstein did not emerge like magic from some experimentum crucis, the mathematics had all been done by others, worked out in other blind alleys long before, for other reasons, ready to be picked up as useful tools as soon the conceptual breakthrough made them necessary.

Science is proven by observation and experiment. But the ideas, the concepts, come straight out of the human brain, as if by magic. Faraday understood electricity and magnetism instinctively and intuitively before Maxwell actually wrote down his Equations. The scientific process is much more like art than it is like engineering.

Metaphors are risky. I thought the CERN fish video made (a primitive sort of) sense, but it’s not going to work for everybody. And it only seemed to make sense to me because it fit a pre-existing notion:

Seems to me that physicists tossed out a useful working concept a century ago when they declared the “aether” to be imaginary. Literally, sure, there’s no “fluid” filling up the universe like an ocean…but look at all the fields that we’re told “permeate” the universe, and we’re basically talking aether. Or The Force…

I watched the CERN explanation interpreting the Higgs field as a kind of “aether”, and from that perspective, a field acting like a fluid, I could then imagine the different resistance of different fish cross-sections trying to move through it, and thinking that the force required to push against the “Higgs aether” is what translates into mass.

I’m not really sure I understand the Higgs field and boson, but that’s my interpretion of the same video you saw.

How do you “add a huge mass, still unseen, to the Universe without going nuts”? Well, how about you call it “dark matter” and prepare a grant proposal to study it?