This is mad. A friend just sent me the TED talk by the chap who is explaining that the Higgs field is nowhere near strong enough, it turns out, to give particles mass.
So about five years ago, on this blog in fact, very new to OOO and very excited I predicted that either
1. There is no Higgs field. OR
2. There is a Higgs field but it doesn't explain particle mass.
And I got there using OOO. !
4 comments:
Quite impressive. Feminist Theory might have said much the same. Or maybe that the LHC was constructed to build a Higgs Field and construct a Higgs-Bosun particle. Or perhaps the muons love each other. Or perhaps this blog was constructed as a reliquary in order to capture such particles such that they might be worshiped.
If this is the TED talk I think it is, that chap makes statements that border on a Morton-style OOO--like his flirting with dialethism and implicit recognition of Godel's incompleteness theorem as a fundamental attribute of the universe.
His prediction of objects possibly being infinitely withdrawn (or, for science, infinitely unknowable), tickles OOO but ends up just being a tease.
His allergic reaction to OOO statements about withdraw (opining "we can't test it" and "we can't know it") is what differentiates his scientistic philosophy from a worldview actually interested in objects, the things at the medium level--desks and squirrels and yachts and rusty shower doors--as opposed to either the most tiny fundamental things (atoms, particles, fields, holographic projects of strings) or the absolutely massive things (stars, galaxies, the universe, multiverses which end up circling around to the tiny tiny tiny again, since this guy needs huge, infinite multiverses to explain the excruciatingly tiny).
To make a bad analogy, it seems he's interested in the question "why can't I rip my right arm off using only my right arm?" In other words, if we smash enough particles together at high enough energies, we won't be able to see what this universe is made of beyond itself, because it will always be itself. Wouldn't a better question be "why do you want to rip your right arm off in the first place?" (And no, this isn't to advocate the end of smashing particles together, but instead to note that smashing them together might not answer ontological questions pointed in the wrong direction.)
Link?
Yes, link please!
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