Leading physicist backs Gliberty

Well, not explicitly…

A while back Carlin Romano used The Chronicle of Higher Education to give Stephen Hawking a kicking. This was in retaliation to Hawking’s provocation that philosophy was dead as it hadn’t kept pace with science, which alone can explain the universe, and that it isn’t necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Gliberty couldn’t see the point of that debate, other than as spectator sport as the confrontation became increasingly spiteful. It caused us to ask – Science Vs Religion. Why bother?

Now Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, who oversees the CERN laboratories in Switzerland, wherein lies the Large Hadron Collider, has neatly sketched the distinction between the two to The European and, blow us down, if he doesn’t concur with Gliberty.

Here are some extracts.

The European: The Higgs Boson has been described as the “God particle”. Many scientists dislike the name. Why?
Heuer: It is too flamboyant and misleading. Why should it be a “God particle”? It is one of the building blocks of the Standard Model, the cornerstone without which the model would not be valid. But there is nothing divine to it. I think the name primarily serves as a publicity tool to attract the attention of publishers.

The European: Let us talk about the idea of the divine. For much of human history, religion and science were deeply intertwined. Galileo was expelled from the church for questioning those links. How would you separate the two realms?
Heuer: We separate knowledge from belief. Particle physics is asking the question of how did things develop? Religion or philosophy ask about why things develop. But the boundary between the two is very interesting. I call it the interface of knowledge. People start asking questions like “if there was a Big Bang, why was it there?” For us physicists, time begins with the Big Bang. But the question remains whether anything existed before that moment. And was there something even before the thing that was before the Big Bang? Those are questions where knowledge becomes exhausted and belief starts to become important.

The European: What is the difference between justified opinion and belief?
Heuer: Justified opinion or knowledge is something that you can at least partially prove. Belief or philosophical thought cannot be examined through experiments.

The European: For Aristotle, physics was the primary science that could tell us almost anything about the cosmos. But he also thought that all things had an innate capacity – the telos – to develop to their full potential.
And so it fell to philosophy to investigate the nature of things.
Heuer: At the edge of physics, it becomes linked to philosophy. But in the case of particle physics, it is really not a question of “believing” but of deducing something from a larger theoretical framework or from experimental data. Once you can prove something, it is no longer a question of philosophy.