Monday, July 30, 2012

Self-Evident Truth: "The God Particle"

From the 18th Century (1776) Declaration of Independence:

Because (w)e hold these truths to be self-evident (i.e., “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitles” us):  Ithe unalterable security of "The God Particle" one of the "self-evident" truths for which “Governments are instituted among Men”?  If so;

What does it mean to us?

From National Geographic Magazine - The God Particle: At the Heart of All Matter:
  .  .  .  The universe is a tough nut to crack.
Go back a little more than a century to the late 1800s, and look at the field of physics: a mature science, and rather complacent. There were those who believed there wasn’t much more to do than smooth out some rough edges in nature’s plan. There was a sensible order to things, a clockwork universe governed by Newtonian forces, with atoms as the foundation of matter.  Atoms were indivisible by definition—the word comes from the Greek for “uncuttable.”  .  .  . 
Physics underwent one revolution after another. Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) begat the general theory of relativity (1915), and suddenly even such reliable concepts as absolute space and absolute time had been discarded in favor of a mind-boggling space-time fabric in which two events can never be said to be simultaneous. Matter bends space; space directs how matter moves. Light is both a particle and a wave. Energy and mass are inter- changeable. Reality is probabilistic and not deterministic: Einstein didn’t believe that God plays dice with the universe, but that became the scientific orthodoxy.