Idolatry in Israel, polytheist particles, rapidly and recently, and more!
Scientists have discovered the oldest known three-dimensional remnant of mammal hair.
For the third time in as many weeks, we’re reporting on purported evidence of water on ancient Mars.
Archaeologists in Israel have excavated artifacts thought to be from an ancient pagan temple.
If the Higgs boson is some physicists’ “God,” then it turns out some physicists are polytheists.
The Higgs boson is a hypothetical subatomic particle: hypothetical because, despite its prediction from the “Standard Model” of physics, no one has been able to detect it in years of trying. Its nickname, the “God particle,” comes because physicists believe it will explain why all other particles have mass. We reported on the hunt for the Higgs boson in In Search of God, shortly before Europe’s Large Hadron Collider began operating to search for it. (To learn more about the LHC, see A Miniature Big Bang or More Hot Air? and Beams Collide Today in Expensive Hadron Collider.)
Now, a U.S. team suggests there may be more than one version of the Higgs boson. Researchers have reported on anomalous results from Fermilab’s Tevatron particle accelerator that resulted in a physics event known as “CP violation,” in which matter and anti-matter behave in unexpected, asymmetric fashion. According to the team, the event can be explained if there are multiple Higgs bosons—five, to be specific.
While the argument—and interpretation—is of course highly technical, the search for and the debate over the Higgs boson can still be understood in light of the biblical worldview. Physicists are trying to search for the most fundamental particles that make up everything we observe in the universe. That, in and of itself, is compatible with the scientific quest to understand God’s created cosmos. The appellation of the “God particle” to the Higgs boson is partially representative of the particle’s theoretical importance in the Standard Model. But for some physicists (see again In Search of God), the search is not about understanding God, but about replacing Him.
Two stories this week report on astronomical objects—moons and a planet—that may have formed relatively “recently,” at least in terms of billions-of-years belief.
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