Political science BAs are like old school nuclear physicists , we think we can talk about everything like an expert
Why not ?
If Marc Morano is qualified to be an expert on climate change, than so am I on the Higgs particle.
Like Marc, I have a BA in political science, hold strong opinions and am at times very partisan.
On the other side, it too is a similar story : teams made up of thousands of scientists at universities and institutions all over the world have laboured for decades before coming up with a a cautious scientific consensus.
(A) Humans are causing the atmosphere to heat up (B) we have located evidence that the predicted Higgs particle exists, to Sigma 5 level of probability.
So on one side, high level tenure & repeated high level peer-review has qualified about one earthling in a million to truly be regarded as experts on a technical scientific matter.
These 7,000 experts have divided themselves into two big world-wide groups to look for the Higgs by two totally different methods and each big group has now separately decided, by general consensus, that the Higgs does exist.
One the other side, amateurs in the academic world's second oldest profession : not pros but game - on the game in fact.
Now all we need is a pimp and a john.
Strident advocacy think tanks die without constant infusions of hot cash --- they'll know who has some readies available.
Maybe Big Asbestos - they under the gun lately - seems at least 100,000 people die annually thanks to this killer mineral.
But how would proof of the existence of the Higgs particle damage the libertarian-capitalist world view enough to waste money refuting it ?
SOLID science is threatened, like never before, by Higgs
Well, I guess I would begin - strictly as a Devil's Advocate - to argue that what all of the various denier efforts have really been fighting is the notion that erroneous common sense (solid) science has been losing a century long battle with nonsensical but accurate quantum science.
The Higgs particle is the missing keystone to the Standard Model of how ultimate fundamental reality actually works.
How it works is in a manner totally in conflict with the 19th century commonsense positivist science that all deniers and corporate CEOs expouse.
Basically what we take to be a solid reality, based on a solid science, turns out to be neither.
Solidity is a vivid illusion - but illusion nevertheless.
But who can blame the deniers & CEOs - it is what they were taught and what 21st high school teachers still teach kids, (in part, because it is easy to teach and easy to write exams for) .
Solid - Newtonian - science is a BLACK BOX - it gets more less accurate results at a certain limited but common scale of events, but it is not a true explanation of the world.
But it is this old fashioned newtonian and daltonian and darwinian science that we spoon-fed high school and yes university kids with.
Rather than teach their trusting charges science that is difficult and unsettling but also happens to be true : quantum physics, quantum chemistry and yes, quantum biology.
By no coincidence, High School teachers teach this crap because because politicians in school boards and departments of education force them to.
Politicians and their corporate handlers sense that if quantum science was taught to all of the population, in a lay manner, it would unsettle the current human belief that we are the only smart and rational beings in a stupid but stable and simple world.
This belief is what lies behind libertarian skygod-ism and the denial of human climate pollution.
Attack Higgs, you attack the quantum theory and thus you attack the quantum (earthling) way of looking at the world.
So gentlemen, when do I get my money ......
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