Higgs boson and foreign policy

When everybody looks in the same direction, humanity needs a pair of eyes looking in the opposite direction so as to complete the universe.

For me, the finding of the Higgs boson at the CERN particle physics laboratory was more a major marketing success than a great scientific leap forward. First of all, this was not a discovery; it was rather a confirmation of a belief held by a majority of physicists all through the second half of the 20th century. Peter Higgs suggested its existence back in 1964 and, whereas the confirmation of this suggestion is good news for particle physicists, the real paradigm shift would happen if it was not found. The established theory about the nature of things had Higgs boson as a foundational axiom and without it the whole body of what physicists thought they knew about the universe would be proven wrong. The cheering physicists at CERN were indeed happy: They won't need to rewrite the whole of quantum theory from scratch.

Indeed, there were those who didn't believe in the existence of Higgs boson. A majority of them will not be convinced from the confirmation of CERN. We are still teaching and learning Newton physics despite the fact that it has been undone by Einstein's general theory of relativity, which was has also been confirmed by observations.

Science is quite similar to religion. New scientific paradigms do not sweep out old paradigms altogether. Astrologists still insist on using the Platonic celestial maps proven wrong by the Copernican Revolution. Even though Higgs boson has been proven to exist by CERN, there will be those who try to construct a theory of the universe without the Higgs.

I will survive without the Higgs boson.

Peter Higgs deserves the Nobel Prize, that is sure, but that doesn't mean I have to bow to a particle.

The fundamental issue here is that the Higgs boson existed from the moment of creation onwards and up until Peter Higgs claimed its existence it was a part of the ontological universe. After 1964, it became part of epistemological existence. Now, what was epistemologically made is proven to have been ontologically created as well. Good work, but this doesn't mean that all “no Higgs” models collapse or that the Higgs model explains everything.

Just because several pages in Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu's Strategic Depth proved right doesn't mean that the world in the book is in fact the very world in which we live.

CERN will find -- literally -- many other yet-unnamed indivisible particles -- just as Professor Davutoğlu found extraordinary facts about the world politics while in office that cannot be comprehended while in academia -- and a whole generation of physicists will work on elucidating their existence.