In 1993, Noble prize-winning physicist, Leon Lederman, published a book entitled, The God Particle. The book was about a particle, hypothesized most prominently by Peter Higgs, which is associated with a field that permeates the universe and gives mass to the elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics. On July 4, 2012, physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world’s largest particle accelerator, announced they had discovered signs of a new particle that looks an “awful lot like the long sought after” Higgs particle. So does this mean that the secret to the universe has now been revealed and that with the God particle in its sights, there is nothing left for particle physics to discover? Or does this discovery simply convert the mystery of particle mass into the mystery of the properties of the Higgs field? Learn what the Higgs particle really is and what the recent discovery really means in this episode, where host Philip Mereton talks with John Gunion, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California at Davis, and co-author of the The Higgs Hunter’s Guide.

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Here is a letter to the editor of Newsweek, commenting upon Lawrence Krauss’s article, The Godless Particle, published in the July 16, 2012 issue of Newsweek.

The Higgs finding illustrates a serious problem with modern physics and cosmology: scientists want to bedazzle the public with the latest discovery of “the secret to the universe” and the consequent vanquishing of God, but remain tight-lipped about the assumptions embedded in their theories and the mysteries remaining. While Lawrence Krauss and others triumphantly proclaim that the Higgs particle (assuming it has been found in fleeting collisions of elementary particles) solves the mystery of mass, they remain silent about how the Higgs field itself arose. As the more forthright Nobel prize-winning physicist Martinus J.G. Veltman notes, with the Higgs particle “ignorance about the origin of mass is replaced by the ignorance about the particle-Higgs couplings, and no real knowledge is gained.” In other words, the Higgs field is supposed to bestow mass upon particles but no knows why such a field happens to have the peculiar properties to perform this feat. This leads to the further mystery of why these particles and forces are precisely adjusted to allow for a stable universe and life itself to exist. This fine-tuning problem then leads to the choice currently confronting modern cosmology: either our universe happens to be the only perfectly adjusted one out of a vast landscape of multiple universes, or else cosmology’s theoretical framework is out-of-kilter, and there is an intelligence lurking behind the scenes after all. Scientists like Professor Krauss, who overstate the progress of modern science in understanding our world and fail to disclose their assumptions, do a disservice by leading the public to believe the mystery of the universe has been solved even though, when the full picture is drawn, the mystery only grows deeper.

Our modern mindset conditions us to look at the world as physical beings, collections of matter and dust; advanced robots; machines with a brain.   Into this materialistic framework, we have a hard time fitting spirit, the notion that there is something more than mere inert, lifeless stuff at the core of existence.  Spirit and matter have never gone together well, like a light breeze blowing through the Grand Canyon, spirit does not affect matter, and may be simply an illusion.

But this attitude leads to a big what if?  What if we are in fact spiritual beings having a physical experience. who have fooled themselves into thinking that our essence is matter, rather than spirit?  In his controverisal book, The Phenomenon of Man,  French Philosopher and Jesuit Priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote that indeed, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.  Suppose we take this as our starting point, and then venture out into the world and its ideas.  Where does it lead?  In his new book, Divine Living: The Essential Guide to Finding Your True Destiny, Anthon St. Maarten, takes Chardin’s perspective as true and re-interprets much of our human experience.  And it starts to make more sense.  Anthon in my guest on the latest installment of Conversations Beyond Science and Religion. 

An unavoidable fact of science is that the universe is finely-tuned to allow life to exist. Fundamental forces and constants, from the rest mass of the electron to the sun’s distance from the Earth and the strength of “dark energy,” appear to be adjusted to ensure a stable universe and the possibility of life. Scientists, faced with this fine-tuning, confront the age-old dilemma of whether to bring a supreme being into the picture or to seek a “natural” explanation. But science’s natural explanation for the fine-tuning problem is a humdinger: an increasingly number of physicists are jumping on the multiverse bandwagon, supporting the idea that our universe is just one of a near infinite series of other universes, forming a vast landscape of other worlds. On this show, guest Bernard Carr, Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London, and editor of the book, Universe or Multiverse, joins host Philip Mereton in a conversation on the development of the multiverse and whether this amazing idea is science’s final answer to why the cosmos appears so finely-tuned.

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The classic Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita, tells the story of the five sons of the deceased King Pandu, who are exiled to the forest through the treachery of a jealous cousin.  Thirsting for water, the five brothers come upon a crystal lake; as they prepare to take a drink, a voice comes out of the forest and says, “before you drink, first answer my question.”  The first four sons ignore the voice, take a drink and fall dead.  The fifth son, Yudhisthira, stops, and listens to the questions.   The voice asks, “of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful?”  Yudhisthira answers: “That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes he himself will not die.”  The voice was of the god Dharma, who proceeded to bring the four brothers back to life.

This story either speaks to something eternal in us, or shows that most people cannot face death.  But maybe this is the same thing, for the concept of death must be hard for an eternal creature. To approach this question, we first must define what “we” are, with the two leading choices being a machine or a mind.  If we are fundamentally machines, then we will surely pass away into the grave, left with only a hope that something spiritual in us will live on.  But if we are fundamentally mind, then eternity comes a bit closer.

In his book, Is There Life After Death: The Extraordinary Science of What Happens After We Die,  Anthony Peake offers a new perspective on the mysteries of life and death.  I discuss these timeless questions and others with Anthony Peake in a radio show entitled, “A Life After Death,” on Conversations Beyond Science and Religion, which you can download here.

The universe began with the Big Bang, right? But how did this chaotic, random event lead to an ordered, balanced universe? Recognizing this problem, in the 1980′s, cosmologists developed a new theory called the inflationary Big Bang. This new model called for the early universe to inflate at super-warp speed in the blink of an eye; if this occurred, cosmologists said, it would be possible for the Big Bang to have produced the universe we live in without needing finely-tuned initial conditions. So the inflationary Big Bang made its way into college textbooks, television documentaries, and popular science books. Professor Paul Steinhardt, of Princeton University, is one of the leading theorists who refined the inflationary model into the form it appears today. In a recent Scientific American article, however, Professor Steinhardt raises serious doubts over the inflationary model, showing that it actually requires more fine-tuning than the original Big Bang theory. So where does cosmology go from here? On this show, Professor Steinhardt, along with host Philip Mereton, traces the development of the Big Bang theory and discusses what lies ahead for cosmology.

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The answer most people would likely give to the question of how the universe began is, the “Big Bang.”  But it’s a fair guess that this same group of people do not know what the Big Bang is, or that it has in fact been replaced by another model known as the inflationary Big Bang.

The interesting part of this story is why cosmologists decided to revise the standard Big Bang model in the first place.

It turns out that the original Big Bang possessed a number of features that deeply perplexed scientific theorists.   Two of these features are the smoothness problem and the flatness problem.   Without getting into unnecessary details, the smoothness problem arises as a result of the near uniformity of the so-called cosmic background radiation — the supposed “afterglow” from the Big Bang.   This background radiation happens to be uniform across the celestial sphere to 1 part in 100,000.  How is it possible for a near-infinite, random explosion to have produced such a uniform distribution of energy across the heavens?

The “flatness” problems presents a similar dilemma.  The term “flatness” describes the geometry of the universe, or the ratio of mass to gravitional strength.  Of all the possible geometries, or lay-outs, of the universe, a flat universe is the most unlikely because it requires a precise equilibrium between the total mass and gravitional power in the universe. If either mass or gravity predominated, the universe would have long ago either collapsed upon itself or rocketed off to nothingness.

Both the smoothness and flatness problems require the Big Bang to have begun with unique conditions; specially tuned setttings that launched the Big Bang with precisely the right strength and mass to have evolved into the balanced universe we see overhead.

But modern science does not take well to special conditions because first, they are highly improbable, and second, they are suggestive of a guiding intelligence.

Enter the inflationary Big Bang.

This model, which is now the textbook account of the early universe, holds that at its inception, the Big Bang expanded in size at an unimaginably rapid rate in a flashing moment.  After this instantaneous period of inflation, the growth spurt ended, and the universe began tracking the original Big Bang model.  How fast was this inflation?  Roughly 50 orders of magnitude in less than one-trillionth of a second. 

The inflationary Big Bang solved the smoothness problem because, theoretically, the thermal equilibrium of the cosmos was locked into a small area that later grew into the universe.  The inflationary model solves the flatness problem by supposing that the universe we experience appears flat because it is actually a small part of a gigantic ballooning mega-universe.

But now the inflationary Big Bang is under fire.  And the critic is one of the original theorists who developed and refined the inflationary Big Bang, Professor Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University.  In an April 2011 article in Scientific American, entitled, “The Inflation Debate: Is the Theory at the Heart of Modern Cosmology Deeply Flawed?” Professor Steinhardt concludes that if inflation occurred it is much more likely to have been “bad inflation;”  in other words, a period of accelerated growth that would have produced a universe other than what we observe.   When all is said and done, Professor Steinhardt says, the original Big Bang without inflation is more likely to have produced our universe than one with inflation.  So where does this leave modern cosmology?

I address these questions and others with Professor Steinhardt in a radio show entitled, Beyond the Inflationary Big Bang,  on Conversations Beyond Science and Religion available for downloading at www.webtalkradio.net.

            Even in the mindless, God-less, designer-less worldview of materialism, a mind is still present.  Where is this mind?  In the head of a scientific theorist who imagines that the intelligence and organizational ability of matter is much more creative than it could ever be on its own.   

            Let me provide a bit more detail.  

            At bottom, material scientists believe they can explain the entire universe using only matter and the laws of nature.  The laws of nature are necessary to give order and regularity to the dust that would otherwise scatter in the wind.   For example, the laws of gravity, chemistry, quantum theory, and nuclear fission are considered among those responsible for sculpting the large-scale structure of the cosmos, such as galaxies, stars, and planetary systems. 

.           The laws of nature possess at least two noteworthy features: (1) they are

engrained “rules to the game” of the universe and considered integral to the physical world; and (2) if these rules were changed even slightly, life would not be possible.  This last point is the source of the anthropic principle, the notion that life constrains, or perhaps even dictates, the physical laws that make life possible.  

            All scientific theorists assume the laws of nature as given, as if this dead and dumb matter came off the assembly line nicely programmed with operating instructions, like marching robots.  Material scientists appear more comfortable assuming the laws of nature than invoking some mysterious spirit or intelligence as because it sounds more scientific, which is to say less supernatural.

            But if we remove the “laws of nature” from the equation we have only mindless stuff, and under any story of creation this mindless stuff will never form into an ordered universe, or stay in place once it got there.

            So we have this formula:

            Matter – Laws of Nature = Chaos

            So scientists, unable to place mind out in the world due to their materialistic prejudices, resort to the only resource available to them: their own minds.  Faced with a chaotic world of mindless matter, scientists use the creativity of the scientific imagination to create matter, organize it, and give it life.

            Here are three examples of how the scientific mind resorts to the creative imagination when trying to explain how dead and dumb matter formed the world standing in front us.

            Example 1:  Creation from nothing theories.

            The quantum creation story goes something like this: Under quantum theory, we are unable to attribute an exact energy state to a vacuum.  Therefore, there is a chance the vacuum may contain a probability cloud or virtual particles.  Theorists then say that this quivering, uncertain energy state somehow morphed into a real world, with a 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars.  (See Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing). 

            Notice something here that is indisputable:  this quantum creation theory originated in the mind.  Consciousness, it turns out, is an integral part of quantum theory and most physicists acknowledge that what we call the “real” world is in some way bundled up with the mind.  Therefore, for these quantum-creation theorists to imagine creation without consciousness contradicts the basis of quantum theory.  See, e.g., B. Rosenblum & F. Kuttner, Quantum Enigma.

            Without the creativity of the scientific theorist there would be only a nothing trying to become something.   So the modern theorist implants his theory upon the dark void and imagines that nothing became something, without an observer or consciousness.  

            We already know one way the mind can create an external world without bothering with the quantum theory: the power of the dream.  This is something we can test everyday, for at night our mind naturally conjures up a real-seeming world from nothing but itself.  And, unlike the quantum creation approach, with the dream perspective we do not separate ourselves from creation, but find it linked to the soul.

            Example 2: The origin of life 

            Despite the numerous books written about how life rose from the dead, scientists have no credible, testable theory to explain the origin of life.  But they have a lot of theories, and one thing again is for sure:  all the theories are a product of the ingenuity of the theorizing mind.

            Look at the dirt on the ground.  Does it look alive?  Does it look like it can someday become alive?  I thought so.  To imagine how dirt and slime became alive requires a leap of the imagination, something minds are very good at.  But not dirt.

            So what’s the alternative explanation?  Well, if the dreaming power projects a world, one might think it someday would want to experience its creation.  So life becomes the mind’s best idea of how to lose itself in the dream – and to forget it is nothing after all.

            Example 3: The blind watch-making capabilities of Natural Selection

            Then there is natural selection, the all-purpose life-sculpting power responsible for turning bacteria into Marilyn Monroe and Rock Hudson.   Here again we find a big disconnect between the actual working parts of natural selection and the artwork attributed to it.  Natural selection is the term used to describe the theory that creatures better adapted to the environment are more likely to survive and pass on their genes to offspring.  Random mutations at the level of DNA provide the raw material for changes in organisms.  As these copying errors mutate an organism, once in a while a mutation will prove beneficial and allow an organism to outlast its competitors; the mutant organism will then pass on the favorable traits to its offspring and so on.  Through this process, biologists believe a primitive organism mutated its way to the human form. 

            But looking strictly at the working parts to this theory – random mutations and the survival instinct – it is not easy to understand what caused exactly the necessary mutations to march out of DNA randomly– but wind up at the human figure. 

            Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that the human figure is also the best form our minds can imagine?  Isn’t Marilyn Monroe a dream image of a woman?  (Woman can imagine their own male dream image; I have a feeling it’s not the Alien, Tyrannosaurus Rex, or a hippopotamus.)   

            So scientists take the mind out of the physical world and then use their own minds to imagine a way for the cosmos to have evolved into a place of apparent order.

            They drain mind from the physical world and absorb the creativity as part of their own theorizing.  

            And we can make this point into a principle:

            To the degree scientists take mind out of the physical world they must use greater theorizing power to imagine how this mindless stuff assembled itself into world of perfect order.

            But a mind is always present, either out in the world organizing the dream, or in the mind of the theorist imagining how mindless stuff evolved into a world.  With the dream perspective, we do not have to take wild speculative leaps imagining how an infinitely condensed seed of matter sprang from the void; how life rose from the dead; or how bacteria evolved into a perfect human form.  We finally admit, in other words, that a scientist is both theorist and creator in our world.   And if you think about it, that’s not so bad.

Science deals with the real world; mysticism, with the spiritual world. Science is based upon testable facts and logical deductions; mysticism, upon wispy thoughts, dreams, and hopes. But is there a deeper connection that we are missing? Notably, science too is filled with mysteries – the origin of matter, the laws of nature, the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, the origin of life, to name a few. Is mysticism an integral part of the world? This week’s guest, Jude Currivan, of the UK, is a cosmologist, author (HOPE: Healing our People and Earth), and mystic. She joins host Philip Mereton in a wide-open conversation about reconciling the worlds of science and mysticism.

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On this show we go to the land down under to talk with Brian Creigh, publisher of the Austrialian magazine, Veritas. Calling itself the “world’s most complete consciousness magazine,” Veritas features regular interviews with leaders in the “new consciousness” movement, such as Neale Donald Walsch, Amit Goswami, and Gregg Braden. It offers a unique mix of mind-expanding and health-focused content, while at the same time fulflling one of Brian’s objectives, which is to remain grounded in the real world. Brian joins host Philip Mereton to talk about why Veritas seems to have struck a cord in our rising consciousness.

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