Friday, December 15, 2023

Cause and Effect

AbsurdTimes

Dec 16

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God-damn

Absurd Times

I had to put the illustration above because different platforms have been mucking about with various format changes and the illustration should be visible.

It seems increasingly the case that religion or fables are the primary issues to discuss these days as any talk of a Republic, Democracy, or Idiocracy is simply overwhelmed with spam. This includes both pro-any specific religion and against any, Frankly, most Americans will agree that they will not believe in anyone who does not have the decency to at least claim to believe in a personal, benevolent God, a creator, intelligent design- or some facsimile.

The problem developed in the late 1950s as Physicists noticed that reactions often enough occurred by the actions that motivated them.

Above is a pictorial representation of the equation devised by Goins to finally arrive at a mathematical solution to the Higgs Boson -- what he called "The God-Damn" particle. I found it, of all places, after searching just about anywhere else, on Wikipedia. It has doubtless been revised and attacked, but that's your problem. It is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional view of a four-dimensional equation. It is also where the popular journalistic notion that this is some sort of "God Particle" originates. It is too abstruse to say it is the sort of perversion Fox News would come up with, but it is certainly beyond the interest of our Idiocracy. (Most of the "hard" information is in the footnotes to the entry, but one can get lost if not comfortable with "higher Math".

Recently, someone quoted Stephen Hawkings as saying there was no God to create the universe. Well, it is true, but it takes a while to get there, and, believe me, I've simplified this as much as possible. The math is out and the ideas, are still debated and pared down to the point that we are discussing an Alpha-Romeo by seeing one of its tires. Still, I hope I've been able to understand how far the God Squad has to go to establish a viable alternative to the origin of the universe(s). It is mind-stretching.

We have to start with the Higgs Boson, sometimes called the "God" particle. Well, let us get rid of that idea first. It come from some physicist/mathemetician (the boundaries have not existed for decades now) who was assigned to work on it and he got so frustrated with the mathematics of it that he called it 'THE GODDAMN PARTICLE". So, sorry, there is no real metaphysical significance to that term, (one would suppose).

Its value is that it is the particle that gives mass to all the other subatomic particles, starting with hydrogen which had been missing since the 50s at least. Finally, they found it a CERN (still the one superconducting supercollider of distinction). Georgie Bush wanted to build an even bigger one but would listen to nobody with any knowledge and tried to build it in TEXAS (of course). Well, ants kept eating it, so it never really got built. (But I digress).

So, where does the string theory come into this? Well, before anything else, at the Big Bang, these strings, not particles, came out and each represented a dimension. The Higgs particle/space generates 30 dimensions in itself. However, there are other particles and theories, each with its plethora of dimensions. The easiest to wrap your mind around (you still there? Ok.) is the idea of a two-dimensional model that combines all the dimensions but requires a mirror to be understood. (Don't ask me, I was lost about 2/3rds of the way through this.) This gives rise to the plausible idea of multi-verses. I'll just stick with our own and focus on Earth. That's enough for me.

All of our ideas, theories, beliefs, etc., depend upon some sort of cause and effect, and that requires the dimension of time. I started out as a Physics Major in college and had read a great deal about relativity, thought experiments, nuclear reactions, and so forth, but such topics were never even considered in the official classes we took. All of them, without exception, seemed to be designed for the education of civil engineers. The focus was on Newtonian mechanics with a bit of newer ideas thrown in, but nothing beyond electricity (which they were still debating as to whether it traveled in waves or particles) and related topics. Gauss and then Maxwell seemed to be the most abstract thinkers they could follow – and I mean the "Professors". There were no more LAWS in physics, only theories and hypotheses. Einstein was accurate enough to designate Relativity as a "footnote to Newton".

I remember very vividly once, having heard of the activity of the hyperon where the reaction took place a micro nanosecond before the action, and was eager for direction on where to search for more information. I raised the question in class and was answered with "When we want to be talking about that stuff, we should all be wearing long beards!" He chuckled, hoping for a class agreement, and was greeted with yawns. I found that irritating, but I was young and did not realize that he did not know the first thing about such concepts. Such was the intellectual climate. I also had trouble in a mathematics class because I used a novel solution (I thought) to a Calculus problem and nearly flunked for the sin of reading ahead to the next semester. Naturally, I hadn't and it was the first time I had ever been attacked for actually reading anything in these textbooks before I had to and the only thing that kept me awake was looking for spelling errors or omissions of proper exponents. It was also the last. (I think I had suddenly, with no reasoning at all, applied what was known as "L'Hospital's Rule, a clever rearrangement of sine and cosine.) Never mind. At least this is more intriguing than thinking about Donald Trump.

Anyway, now we have the background. The concept of a God or "Creator" relies on our experience in the four, two, or three dimensions we confine ourselves to, all of them not in existence until AFTER the Big Bang. Using the dimensions that we can detect and in which we live, we have developed a prejudice in favor of cause and effect, and this idea depends on these dimensions. Essentially, it states that one thing causes another and that means one thing happened before another, and all of this relies on the dimension of time. Space is another dimension, although we usually divide it into three, length, height, and width. In any case, none of this happened before the dimensions emerged, and the idea of cause and effect only makes use of two or three of them. Thus a "creator" is a ludicrous concept.

So, the Senate Republicans want to confirm someone to make sure that healthcare is more expensive, skip the idea of helping those who are out of work as a result of our mishandling of Covid, and make sure that the current occupant remains in the White House, eh? Let's have a good laugh at that one! Then realize that a majority of our population is stupid enough to vote for him. Talk about String Theory being a puzzle. Now, the Booboisie will try to preserve or create an idiocracy as soon as they can. At least the can understand t.

Here are a few simplified statements regarding our discussion:

The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field,[8][9] one of the fields in particle physics theory.[9] It is named after physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964, along with five other scientists, proposed the Higgs mechanism to explain why particles have mass. This mechanism implies the existence of the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was initially discovered as a new particle in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations based on collisions in the LHC at CERN, and the new particle was subsequently confirmed to match the expected properties of a Higgs boson over the following years.

String Theory

String theory began as bosonic string theory, whose 26 dimensions act as many fewer. Yet this modeled only bosons, which are energy particles

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while omitting fermions, which are matter particles. So bosonic string theory could not explain matter. Yet by adding supersymmetry to bosonic string theory, fermions were achieved, and string theory became superstring theory, explaining matter, too.

(In versions of quantum field theory that include supersymmetry (SUSY), each boson has a corresponding fermion, and vice versa. That is, each energy particle has a corresponding matter particle, and each matter particle has a corresponding energy particle, yet the unobservable partner is more massive and thus super. These superpartners might seem an extravagant prediction, yet many theorists and experimentalists favor supersymmetric versions of the Standard Model, whose equations must otherwise be tweaked extravagantly and sometimes arbitrarily to maintain predictive success or mathematical consistency, but with the superpartners align.

It seems as if some of the devotees of the Abrahamic Religions felt left out, So I conclude with a quote from one of their favorite books, in fact the Bible of the Judeo-Christian ones:

"I saw a pale horse and a pale rider upon it.

And the name of the horse was Pestilence,

And the name of the rider was death."

So now everyone is happy?

[I may add more as new issues concerning this arise, but I have not heard from any pantheists or Buddhists yet.