Who buried my fossils?

In another amusing instance of showcasing its collective ignorance and dogmatic thinking, creationism seems to be making a comeback along the American Bible belt with the opening of a multi-million dollar creation museum in Kentucky recently. This, along with the gaining popularity of a book claiming that the Grand Canyon was carved by the retreating waters of the biblical Noah's flood rather than by natural erosion, are once again extending the heated debate between creationists and evolutionists.

Theres no telling how much more time it will take for mainstream consciousness to understand that whatever it is, the Theory of Intelligent Design (ID) can not be a science because its not falsifiable. Falsifiability, is a critical feature of scientific hypothesis and can be simplistically thought of as an inherent disclaimer stating that a given hypothesis or theory is only true, until proven false. An embodiment of rationality, it says: attack me with facts and I am ready to change in whatever way to accommodate those facts. Just being called a 'theory', doesn't give it instant membership to the science club. The Falsifiability card has been played against ID hugging creationists for some time now, but they seem to be coming up with more mightier yet sillier propositions as their grip gradually loosens.

Ironically, prominent voices of science from the past century have been guilty at times of decorating the frontiers of scientific advancement with some divine creationist references (i.e. Quantum Mechanics - God does not play dice, Cosmology - understanding the mind of God, etc), often viewed as aspirational and conformist by the creationists. The tables have now turned, and it seems like we've completely entered the age where the creationists boldly reference terms and methods of science in their interpretation of scripture.

I wonder, if and when science survives this, what is the real price that we'll have to pay as we watch this lengthy battle unfold, apart from the occasional insane attempts to bury back the fossils?

Search for the God particle

During a 2005 Q&A session with Nobel Laureate, Leon Lederman, Fermilab scientist Peter Skands points out that "if the Higgs boson exists, and if it is the way the Standard Model predicts it to be, then it must have a mass greater than 114 GeV". More recently there have been experimental indicators that the mass of the Higgs Boson could lie in the region 155-180 GeV (Giga electron Volt). But then this increased speculative mass is often rather unfairly seen as an attempt to garner funding for larger (higher energy) particle accelerators, capable of detecting higher mass particles.

Repeated attempts have so far failed to find this much sought after and elusive particle. There is a general consensus among physicists that anyone associated with the possible finding of this particle is assured a Nobel Prize.

Dubbed 'The God particle' and 'The Holy Grail of particle physics', the Higgs boson is a hypothesised particle which, if it exists, would give the mechanism by which particles acquire mass, thereby affirming the best theory that physicist's have today to explain the origin of mass. It is safe to say, that if it does not exist, it would shake the foundations of theoretical physics to an extent that new interactions, fields and laws that bind them may need to be conjured up. So in a way, its absence may be as valuable for us as its presence.

There is a rumour going around right now, that the Higgs Boson may have been found by Tevatron physicists working on the D0 (pronounced D-Zero) experiment at Fermilab, Batavia near Chicago, USA.

There have been optimistic articles about observed 'bumps' in the data before, so we'll have to wait and watch to see if the current evidence from the Tevatron D0 data holds up, amidst the clutter of data from competing labs.