Here, in part, is how I threw cold water on giddy celebrations last year after scientists announced their discovery of the elusive Higgs boson (aka the God particle):
Watching scientists behave at Wednesday’s news conference announcing this discovery like little girls at a Justin Bieber concert indicates what a big deal they think it is…
But, frankly, not since the 1988 publication of A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by physicist Stephen Hawking has there been so much media hype about a subject few people know anything about…
Whatever benefits it might lead to at some point in the distant future, I suspect this discovery will have about as much impact on our daily lives as the prehistoric discovery of Halley’s comet.
(“The God Particle? Hardly,” The iPINIONS Journal, July 7, 2012)
Which is why I suppose I should be humbled, if not humiliated, by this news that broke yesterday:
Physicists Francois Englert of Belgium and Peter Higgs of Britain won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their theoretical discoveries on how subatomic particles acquire mass.
Their theories were confirmed last year by the discovery of the so-called Higgs particle, also known as the Higgs boson, at a laboratory in Geneva, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
(The Associated Press, October 8, 2013)
I readily admit that I’m probably to physics what Sarah Palin is to politics. But I am all too mindful that this is the same Nobel Foundation that awarded Barak Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples … especially in the Muslim world.”
Because, if Englert (left) and Higgs do for science what Obama has done for peace, chances are very good that, four years from now, the Nobel Foundation will be suffering another case of … conferrer’s remorse.
After all, Obama effectively watched the germinating, blossoming, and withering of the Arab spring from the sidelines and has precious little to show for all of his efforts to strengthen cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians. Not to mention that his bombing and deposing of Col. Muammar Gaddafi spawned a reign of Islamic anarchists who now seem hell-bent on making peace a pipe dream not just in Libya but throughout the entire African Continent.
In point of fact, here’s the sobering admonition no less a person than Sir Peter Knight, president of Britain’s Institute of Physics, offered amidst all the celebration of this Higgs boson discovery:
[There’s] still much we don’t know about particles – this is only the beginning of a new journey. We have closed one chapter and opened another.
(The Telegraph, July 4, 2012)
Therefore, with all due respect to these great scientists, this Nobel Prize seems based more on the substance of things hoped for than on the evidence of things discovered. But perhaps this God particle will help them reverse engineer the Big Bang that created the Universe; so they can develop one super-atomic bomb that can destroy it…?
Meanwhile, are you aware that the Nobel Foundation did not deem Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent efforts to win independence for Indians worthy of its Peace Prize; yet deemed Yassar Arafat’s violent efforts to secure a homeland for Palestinians eminently worthy…?
Hell, all it needs to fatally undermine its credibility is to award this year’s Peace Prize on Friday to Russia’s neo-Stalinist president, Vladimir Putin, for defying the world by propping up his Middle-Eastern puppet, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
This, notwithstanding that Assad has not only gassed over 1000 of his own people to death, including over 400 children, but also bombed over 100,000.
On the other hand, the Nobel Foundation would go a long way towards reclaiming some credibility if it were to award this prize to a 16-year-old Pakistani, Malala Yousafzai, for fighting for the right of Muslim girls to an education (even after defying a near-fatal assassination attempt by the Taliban).
Not least because her fight is every bit as inspiring and Nobel worthy as Gandhi’s was….
Related commentaries:
god particle…