"God Particle" does not change the game. God or Chance, take your pick!

I was reading downstairs when the news began talking about the "God particle" and my wife turned it up for me to hear.  I yelled up, "They just finally observed the Higgs boson, no big deal!"
Sure enough, in a few minutes the announcer had named the particle as expected.  Anyone who follows science to the extent of geek knew about the Higgs boson.   

The Matter of Mass—Making Sense of the “God Particle”

July 5, 2012

Layman

Are you scratching your head about all the recent buzz over the so-called “God particle,” “Higgs boson,” the several-billion-dollar collider under the Alps, and how they all supposedly relate to the origins of the universe? If you have been following the news stories, you would think that the elusive “God particle” is considered the key to understanding how mass was formed right after an alleged big bang. Does it? Also, don’t let God’s name in the nickname confuse you; this is a totally secular effort by scientists to explain the universe without a Creator.

Ultimately, it’s as much a collision of ideas as it is particles. As we prep our analysis of yesterday’s Higgs boson claim (which we will post Saturday on this website in our News to Note column), read our previous article, Beams Collide Today in Expensive Hadron Collider, to help make sense of this confusing topic and also discover what the Bible declares about the universe’s creation.

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Using the Large Hadron Collider, scientists have sought to observe the last particle that had been hypothesized to exist.   The expectation was there because standard Physics had predicted that it did in fact exist.   Now they probably know they have observed it for a tiny fraction of a second.  At the time of the announcement they were not absolutely certain.  I supposed 99 and 44 per cent?  Ivory Soap certain?

Picture credit

It is no big deal, it certainly has no bearing on whether the Big Bang actually happened.   But Spike Psarris of CreationAstronomy.com lays it all out and adds more interesting information so cue Spike!

Creation Astronomy News Volume III, Number 2

In this issue (now in a spiffy new HTML format!): Higgs Boson: The So-Called 'God Particle' Is Found Alien Planets and Dinosaurs Astronomical Discoveries, Our Sun, and the Book of Isaiah

Image credit: Fermilab, US DOE Higgs Boson: The So-Called “God Particle” Is Found

Yesterday, a momentous announcement was made by scientists working at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Europe. The Higgs boson has been discovered. (Or at least, there’s a new particle consistent with the characteristics expected of the Higgs.) Media reports are breathlessly calling it “the God particle.” Other reports claim that this discovery confirms the Big Bang model. Neither statement is true. What is the Higgs boson? It is one of the fundamental particles in physics. These are believed to be the building blocks of everything else. Specifically, the Higgs boson is the particle associated with the Higgs field – the current model explaining how matter has mass. The Higgs boson is an important part of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics. Without it, the whole model falls apart. Now that the Higgs boson is supported by data, particle physicists are breathing deep sighs of relief. Nevertheless, the “God particle” name is inappropriate. The Higgs boson is just one particle among many in the model. (The “God particle” phrase comes from the title of a 1993 physics book.) Most of this particle’s fame comes from the extreme difficulty of confirming (or denying) its existence.  So much for the God particle. What about the claim that this boson confirms the Big Bang?  The current Big Bang model assumes that the Standard Model for particles is true. Thus, the Big Bang model requires the Higgs boson to exist.  Without the Higgs, the Big Bang model would be in deep trouble. But the opposite is not true. Even if the Higgs boson exists, this doesn’t require that a Big Bang happened. The Standard Model of particle physics is the most popular model (at the moment) for how the Universe works at a fundamental level.  However, it doesn’t tell us anything about where the Universe itself came from. Nevertheless, there are many media reports trying to convince you otherwise. Since the evolutionary worldview is based on the Big Bang, evolutionists will interpret the LHC announcement as support for it. But the Higgs only supports the Big Bang model if you already assume that the Big Bang model is true.  Somehow I doubt that news reporters will include that last point in their stories.

Alien Planets Have “Advanced” Dinosaurs. Yes, Really. An important announcement from a top scientist

Dr. Ronald Breslow is a noted scientist at Columbia University. Among other accomplishments, he’s a member of multiple scientific academies around the world, has won the U.S. National Medal of Science, and is the past President of the American Chemical Society. He even has an award named after him (the Ronald Breslow Award in Biomimetic Chemistry). In other words, he’s one of America’s most respected scientists. That’s why it was big news recently when he announced that dinosaurs probably rule other planets. But not just any dinosaurs. “Advanced” dinosaurs. You might think such a crackpot claim would be dismissed by his fellow scientists. You’d be wrong.  Breslow published a paper1 about this in the highly-respected Journal of the American Chemical Society. Before discussing his ‘reasoning’, let’s get some background. Life here on Earth has defied evolutionary efforts to explain its origins. Among many other challenges, life is composed of proteins that are made exclusively of amino acids that have a certain geometry (often called “left-handed”).  Conversely, sugars are all made of right-handed amino acids. Why is this important? Because when you make amino acids in the laboratory, you always get an equal mixture of both kinds. You never get only one kind. In fact, even if you separate out the two kinds from each other, you won’t have pure samples for long. Some of the amino acids in each batch will change back to the other kind. (This process is called racemization.) Evolutionists who believe that life formed by itself without a Creator have a real problem here. They need random mixtures of chemicals to somehow sort themselves out into pure solutions of non-racemic amino acids, and stay that way. But this is chemically impossible. Anyway, back to the alien dinosaurs… Professor Breslow knows about the ‘handedness’ problem (known more formally as the ‘chirality’ problem) for the origin of life. And he’s been trying to figure it out. Here’s a summary of his proposed solution. Millions of years ago, meteorites were flying through space and hit the Earth. These meteorites were carrying a slight excess of left-handed amino acids compared to right-handed ones. Then, through a series of complicated chemical processes, the left-handed ones got concentrated together. Eventually, thanks to a long process of “evolutionary success,” life formed. The holes in this story are wide enough to drive a truck through. Breslow himself acknowledges that it’s incomplete, and that it merely “fills in some of the cracks” in the chirality problem. If it ended there, his scientific paper would have been a yawner to everybody except other biochemists interested in the origins of life. But he couldn’t resist adding one final paragraph to the end. He concluded the paper by noting that since meteorites had seeded life on Earth, they probably would have done so elsewhere too. Therefore: “An implication of this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could exist life forms based on D amino acids and L sugars… Such life forms could even be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth.” As he explained later to an interviewer, the mammals on Earth that evolved and “became us” were only able to do so because an asteroid collision had wiped out the dinosaurs.  Therefore, “on a planet similar to ours without the asteroid collision it is unlikely that human types would be there, more probably advanced lizards [dinosaurs]”. Not only that, he concluded his paper with an ominous warning. These alien dinosaurs would be so advanced that: “We would be better off not meeting them.” (Apparently their alien dino-technology is better than ours. There’s nothing worse than meeting an aggressive alien dinosaur who has better weapons than you do.) So there you go.  One of the country’s top scientists has applied the ‘science’ of evolution and shown that there are “advanced” dinosaurs ruling alien planets. So advanced, in fact, that “we would be better off not meeting them.” Meanwhile, creationists are ridiculed in the media as “not knowing how science works.”  The irony here is rich.

A red dwarf star. Image credit: Casey Reed/NASA Astronomical Discoveries, Our Sun, and the Book of Isaiah

Evolutionists like to claim that our Sun is merely an average star, just one among billions. There’s no reason to believe our Sun is unusual–or so they say. After all, if our Sun were special, that might support the idea that a benevolent Creator made it for us. Nevertheless, our Sun is special indeed. If you’ve seen my second astronomy DVD, you know that Chapter 6 shows how our Sun is unique. Recent discoveries continue to support this.  As I pointed out in my DVD, stars come in a variety of sizes, colors, and temperatures. As a single ‘Class G’ star, our Sun is very well suited to support life on Earth.  Most other stars are not. For example, the most common stars (about 75 percent of all stars) are red dwarfs, as shown above. These stars commonly emit flares: eruptions of superheated material, radiation, and charged particles blasted out into space. They do this so frequently that they’re often called “flare stars.” Large-enough flares can sterilize any planets orbiting these stars. Although our Sun occasionally releases small flares, they’re gentle compared to what we see elsewhere. We’ve seen other stars produce “superflares” up to 10 million times more energetic than those from our Sun. Is our Sun so quiet merely because of its size, temperature, and other characteristics? No. Even among Sun-like stars, our Sun is unique.  A recent study2 of solar-type stars found that many had erupted in superflares. Of 83,000 stars that were observed, 148 erupted in just 120 days of observing. Extend this rate out, and each solar-type star would have more than a 50% chance of erupting every 100 years. This result is consistent with previous studies that showed that solar-type stars erupt about once per century. Over thousands of years, a typical Sun-like star should have multiple massive eruptions. Yet there is no evidence that our Sun has ever emitted a superflare. As the study’s summary in Nature noted, “The flares on our Sun are thousands of times punier than those on similar stars.” But why? Secular astronomers are scratching their heads over this.  They attribute the Sun’s gentleness to a lack of large sunspots. But that doesn’t really explain anything. Why should the Sun have smaller sunspots than other solar-type stars? They don’t know. But creationary astronomers aren’t surprised by this. As Isaiah 45:18 says, the Lord created the heavens and Earth “not in vain… He formed it to be inhabited.” Since our Sun was designed by a masterful Creator to support life, we shouldn’t be surprised that it supports life very well. Meanwhile, secular scientists are still grasping for some excuse to deny a Creator. They still wish to find other worlds like ours, so that ours won’t seem so unique.

Illustration Credit & Copyright: Inga Nielsen (Hamburg Obs., Gate to Nowhere) http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120429.html But even the most “habitable” places they can find are hellish planets like Gliese 876. Click on the picture to the left to see an artist’s conception of what the surface of this planet might be like. Our Earth, Sun, and Solar System are fearfully and wonderfully made to be our home – and to proclaim the glory of their Creator. May His name be praised!

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Footnotes Breslow, R., Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2012, 134 (16), pp 6887-6892, DOI: 10.1021/ja3012897. Interestingly, the paper was retracted a few weeks after publication. Apparently Breslow had “self-plagiarized” – he repeated work that he had already published elsewhere. http://www.nature.com/news/superflares-erupt-on-some-sun-like-stars-1.10653

Psalm 19:1-4 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. [There is] no speech nor language, [where] their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Spike Psarris www.CreationAstronomy.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Spike's DVDs speak for themselves.  He has compiled pictures and evidence from various space missions that have explored the Solar System and beyond.   Click on the "Preview" tab at http://creationastronomy.com/ and watch the beginning of DVD number one.  Just go see for yourselves? These space missions have helped confirmed Creation Science predictions about the planets and their magnetic fields made by Dr. Russell Humphreys long before the space probes were launched.   Whether Humphreys is correct about the way God created, his predictions made on the assumption that God did create and use water as a basis for creating all things has panned out as secular science has begun to discover.  Other observations, such as the Pioneer anomaly, are explained by Creation Science.  Excerpt: "Creationist cosmologies explain the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer spacecraft by D. Russell Humphreys [Note: This page only shows the abstract plus parts of the introduction and conclusion of the paper. The full paper may be downloaded as a PDF.] A broad class of creationist cosmologies offer an explanation for the ‘Pioneer effect’, an apparent small Sunward anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. If a large volume of empty space surrounds the matter of the cosmos, so that the cosmos can have a centre of mass, then the matter is in a deep gravitational potential ‘well’. If space is expanding and spreading the matter outward, then the depth of the well is decreasing. According to general relativity, especially a new solution of Einstein’s equations derived in the Appendix (which also deals with Birkhoff’s theorem), the decreasing depth continuously shortens ‘radar’ distances within the well, causing the observed apparent acceleration. The magnitude of the anomalous acceleration implies the bottom of the potential well has not yet risen very far above the critical depth for gravitational time dilation. Thus the Pioneer effect supports the essentials of several creationist cosmologies: a centre of mass, expansion of space and recent time dilation. Big bang theorists, whose cosmology does not have a centre of mass, cannot use this explanation. As yet, they have no alternative theory upon which they agree..."   Here is the URL for the online article. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ That a "God particle" exists is no surprise.  But God created the very concept of "exist" and that knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.  Now if all these Naturalists who do science would discover God, we'd all be better off!