From Peter Rowland
A joker once called the Higgs boson “the God particle”, and the processes highlighted by Rick Benish in his letter are akin to the old unanswerable question: If God made the universe, who made God? (3 July, p 31)
If a process explains a phenomenon, what process explains that process? Processes have no higher philosophical status than particles: in fact, they have less, since the latter can at least be detected and measured, and the only way we can know anything about processes is by observing particles.
And isn’t the attraction or repulsion between two particles, say, itself a process? Supposedly fundamental explanations that invoke processes attempt to get knowledge to pull itself up by its bootstraps – they are logically invalid.
Neither science nor any philosophy can do other than relate the observed phenomena of the universe to each other in the most elegant, economical manner.
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The editor writes:
• See “Mass hysteria”, for more on the Higgs
London, UK
