Saturday, September 20, 2008

A Bigger Bet on the Large Hadron Collider

Cribbing from the style of InstaPundit.com, I'm writing a short item here (rather than my usual long-winded ones) highlighting an interesting piece in First Things.

In it, physicist Stephen Barr suggests that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has to do more than discover the Higgs boson particle to be interesting. That's pretty much a given. Rather, it should also shed light on why the Higgs boson, in the Higgs wave, in the Higgs field, doesn't make life impossible. For Barr at least, to discover, via the LHC, some countervailing force to the Higgs stuff, if I may, provides support for an "anthropic" or human-life centered view of our little region of the multiverse. Hmm, can God be far behind?

P.S. To my students who might be visiting my blog. Please forgive yet another story about the LHC. I assure you I'm not a physics geek masquerading as a philosophy teacher.