What if cat was really spelled d o g?

One of my astrophysics friends told me that if they find the Higgs particle then the whole field of particle physics is dead - no need for more funding.

May not be a bad thing, but the majority of funding would probably go into the maths behind rearranging the theories we already have... and everyone knows that mathematics is a cheap and dirty whore...

But can we weaponize it?

I misread the title as Higgs Boston.

A Higgs Boson is a quantum particle which accompanies a Higgs Field (and presumably a matching Higgs Belt and Higgs Bracelet) which supposedly permeates every place in the universe. Such a discovery would change particle physics considerably, although I'm not sure what philosophical effects it would have. One thing scientists do agree on, you wouldn't be able to play Forza 2 anymore and would have to mail the game to me.

While I don't know about the Higgs Boson, this thread reminded me of Session 4 of the Beyond Belief conference (skip to minute 17:30 for the fireworks), only in that case there's almost a universal disdain for his use of quantum theory to suggest a Universal Consciousness.

That random aside is all I have to add, unfortunately. Let me know if this Boson turns out to be true and if so when I can become a Jedi Knight.

I read a book on quantum holography several years that raised an interesting theory about particle physics- namely that subatomic particles are highly influenced, to the point of being created by, human interaction (I guess this ties in with your post, montalban). The book pointed out that almost all subatomic particles are theoretically predicted before they are physically observed, and that once they are discovered they often have conflicting properties until scientific consensus agrees on what properties that they should have, at which point the particles politely conform to expectations. One example was a particle (I think it was the gluon, though it's been several years since I read the book) which was first observed by american scientists during the cold war and was found to have zero mass, in accordance with the scientist's theoretical models. Russian physicists, however, had theorized that the particle had a small amount of mass, and when they observed it shortly thereafter the particle was found to have some small amount of mass. After the iron curtain fell and the physicists were allowed to mingle, however, the observed mass of the particle slowly dropped to zero to conform with the american physicists' findings.
Another example is the anomalon. Physicists can't even agree whether it exists or not, some physicists have observed it and varified that it does, others have varified that it doesn't.

In Soviet Russia, theoretical particles research you.

We can rule this out from the fact that we only know what we measure and we can tailor experiments, consciously or unconsiously (read: stupidity) to return the results we expect. Basically, if your theory predicts something then you try to measure that thing, if your experiment is set up incorrectly or with a certain assumption in place then it can change the result to be a false positive. Many scientists have unwittingly fallen into this trap and it is only through continued experimentation that we can get an aggregate of results to let us know which is most probably correct.

In short: Humans suck... all hail our infallible robot overloads!

Maybe it is because my fiancee has been out of town for a while, but I read the thread starter as "Bigg Bosoms".

This development and the Stuff going on with RNA makes the science in me all giddy.

Then I would call you Fred "The Ogre" Palowatski.

Bah.... so Greg Bear was right...

Eh, wot?

You forget that for much of the cold war Russia was more advanced, technologically, than america. However, whereas capitalism thrives during a wartime economy, communism flounders, because money that would otherwise go towards the citizens and non-military science starts getting funnelled into the military in increasing amounts. Keep in mind that Russia beat us into space and almost beat us to the moon. It's just that as the cold war dragged on the military was consuming so much money that they could no longer afford "unimportant" things like the upkeep of it's power plants, scientific funding, or even keeping it's citizens fed. That's a big part of why the iron curtain fell, the military bankrupted it's own government (which sounds eerily ominous considering the current financial situation of the united states).

Mal,

I take it you aren't in rocket science. I don't say that as an insult, but as an assessment of fact. I, btw, live in Greenbelt, MD and my neighbors ARE rocket scientists over at NASA Goddard.

I have yet to meet a single rocket scientist who would characterize the Russian space program as "technically simple" or "didn't work very well". They may have approached engineering challenges differently than we did, but in many (some would even argue most) of those same challenges, they arrived at more elegant engineering solutions than we did. The Fisher Space Pen is a prime example of how a capitalistic society arrives at an overpriced solution for a simple engineering problem.