Higgs Boson, or What’s the Meta in Metaphor for?

. Let’s get God out of the way to start. The Higgs Boson particle/field is not the God particle. (I keep telling everyone – the neutral B-meson is the God particle.) In part because of that name, and, certainly, the momentous confirmation at the largest site of physics experimentation in the world of a near […]

Eating Poetry (XXXVII) – The New Physics

THE NEW PHYSICS Al Zolynas for Fritjof Capra And so, the closer he looks at things, the farther away they seem. At dinner, after a hard day at the universe, he finds himself slipping through his food.  His own hands wave at him from beyond a mountain of peas.  Stars and planets dance with molecules […]

Nothing Doing

. Cosmologist Laurence Kruass’s latest book is A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Originally intended to contain a foreword by Christopher Hitchens, the book makes bold to tackle through physics a question to which religion has historically provided the comforting answer and over which contemporary philosophy long ago dismissively threw […]

Once More with Feeling, or the Eternal Return

According to Abhay Ashtekar, Director of the Institute of Gravitational Physics and Geometry at the Pennsylvania State University, the Big Bang theory of cosmology will need to be replaced by the Big Bounce. Loop quantum cosmology (LQC) is a derivative of loop quantum gravity (LQG), which successfully combines Einstein’s General Theory of Relavitity based theory […]