You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine, and you think they're probably lying to make you feel better?
Yes.
Everything's going to be fine.

Monday, April 28

Cool

On The Subject Of The Higgs Boson And How We Know For Certain That All That New-Agey Spiritual Crap Is, In Fact, Crap

Sorry, jump forward to about 34:00 to get to the delicious creamy filling.  I did have that working, but now it doesn't want to behave.

Though then you'd miss the chocalatey coating, with tidbits like the fact that the amount of energy in the particle beam of the Large Hadron Collider is equivalent to a freight train moving at 100 miles an hour.  (Which is why the thing is so big - freight trains have lousy turning circles.)


In essence, any hypothetical event - say, faith healing - can be reduced to particle interactions under Quantum Field Theory.  People are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, so whatever happens to us has to interact in some way with those particles.

We know the properties of the known subatomic particles, and none of them allow for faith healing.  So if faith healing were real, it would have to be carried by a new, previously unknown particle.  And under Quantum Field Theory the properties of that particle would be constrained by the very fact that it interacts in normal, perceptible ways (curing illness) with normal everyday matter.

The trick shown here is that the same equations that describe this hypothetical interaction also describe how new particles are produced in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider.  And the constraints on the properties of our hypothetical faith healing particle include a constraint on its mass.  And for our hypothetical particle to interact in perceptible ways with everyday matter, that mass would be low enough that existing particle accelerators would generate it in quantity.

And yet, they don't.

In other words, any such particle would already have been found and catalogued, and the mechanism for faith healing discovered.

Which means that Quantum Field Theory can be correct, or faith healing can be real, but not both.  The evidence for Quantum Field Theory is vast; if it were wrong, you would not be reading this, because computers and fibre-optic links simply would not work.

This doesn't mean that there aren't exotic undiscovered particles that show up at very very small scales or at very very high energies.  It doesn't mean that we won't find such particles and harness them in advanced technologies.  It just means that we know for certain that they play no direct role in our everyday lives.

There are known unknowns in physics; we don't know what dark matter is, and dark energy came as a complete surprise.  And there are almost certainly unknown unknowns.  But Quantum Field Theory tells us where these unknowns lie, and it's not in our day-to-day world.

Which means that not just faith healing, but anything that affects people in perceptible ways, that disagrees with known physics, is known to be untrue.

So bigfoot isn't ruled out (though it clearly doesn't exist), but ghosts most certainly are.  Acupuncture isn't ruled out (though meridians don't exist), but crystals are just pretty rocks.  And so on.

We reject all that stuff anyway because it's unsupported by evidence and contradicts well-tested scientific theories, but Quantum Field Theory tells us outright that it cannot be true.  If the internet exists, then psychic powers do not.  If you have an iPhone, you do not have a guardian angel.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:28 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, April 17

Cool

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:35 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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