There is a widely-held notion that the more we learn about the universe (or better, the more science teaches us about the universe), the less use we'll have for religious and supernatural concepts. An apocryphal story illustrates this train of thought: Napoleon supposedly asked Pierre Laplace, a famed late 18th and early 19th century French scientist, why the word “God” hadn’t appeared in his Celestial Mechanics. “Sir,” Laplace is supposed to have responded, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
With the purported discovery of the Higgs boson particle, you'd think the explanatory urge to turn to supernatural concepts has been further mitigated, but coverage of the event seems to suggest otherwise. Here is some of CERN physicist Daniel Whiteson’s explanation of a particle accelerator:
Read Full Article »