It was reported today that a Higgs boson subatomic particle may have finally been discovered by physicists at CERN. Although the physicists haven't been able to confirm if they have definitive proof yet and are not calling it a discovery...at least not yet. What they have found has been described as being like a "footprint" or "shadow" of what may be the subatomic particle, but they haven't actually glimpsed it.
They've spent $10 billion over the years searching for this subatomic particle. Finally finding evidence of it is exciting to them. But I'm not all that excited about it. It's kind of like a dog chasing a car...what is he going to do with it if he catches up to it? What are these physicists going to do with the Higgs boson if they do find it? Hopefully they can do something besides build a weapon. And hopefully it will be something worth all the money they spent on it.
So if the Higgs boson does exist...then alright, it exists. Now what? What they plan on doing with that knowledge would be more interesting news to me. Hopefully they can do something wonderful with it if they do find it. Now that would be some exciting news.
I'm with you on that. I adore science and discoveries and physics is a passionate interest, but how this applies to our practical world, not really sure. It does, perhaps help us understand the nature of our world, but then with no way to apply that, it's kind of like philosophy-a great deal of intriguing conjecture, but no real world application.
ReplyDeleteYep...but I don't know if philosophy has ever been so expensive!
DeleteLets not be so 16th century.There are plenty of discoveries that have been without a clear and immediate use that later proved to be invaluable to future technologies. The higgs will be no different, if not directly then because of where it leads. The discovery may simply be so far ahead of its time that its uses may be completely unclear to us now but once its existence has been accepted new ideas and theories will undoubtedly develop. As many so called philosophical discoveries proved in the past.
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