Showing posts with label Newton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Newton. Show all posts
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Newton and Particle Accelerators
This is an interesting article from National Geographic on one of the world's largest particle accelerators which is located in France. At the end of the article a physicist says, "Every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand." Newton and Galileo laid the foundations for a scientific understand of a universe that behaves systematically, but new discoveries about the fundamentals of matter have made some scientists question whether the universe is fundamentally ordered, or "aesthetically pleasing." Should discoveries about the fundamental particles of matter affect our decision-making? Or are these discoveries and their implications on the order of the universe irrelevant for most of us? How would Newton respond to these questions?
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