Having had a little fun in my last post at psychology’s expense and wandering into fun-making of science as a whole, I hurriedly want to draw attention to this article.
Here is the gist:
US scientists have conducted potentially revolutionary research that could force a rewrite of the Standard Model, the theory for how particles interact, which has been accepted by physicists since the 1970s. A team at the University of Maryland studied the behavior of leptons, tiny subatomic particles that form the building blocks of our universe, during the initial run of CERN’s $9 billion research facility in 2011 and 2012. Leptons are highly unstable, and decay at a fast, but previously predictable rate. Yet scientists noticed that there was a mysterious force that was affecting this process, when they studied the readouts from the Swiss facility. The impact was small, and the team is still unsure about the explanation for it, but the effect was consistent, and unaccounted for in the Standard Model, which explains almost all particle phenomena, and even helped predict the existence of the Higgs Boson, which has since been proven to be real.
“The Standard Model says the world interacts with all leptons in the same way. There is a democracy there. But there is no guarantee that this will hold true if we discover new particles or new forces,” said Maryland professor Hassan Jawahery, ahead of the publication of his study in Physical Review Letters. “Lepton universality is truly enshrined in the Standard Model. If this universality is broken, we can say that we’ve found evidence for non-standard physics.”
Lepton universality.
Now there’s a phrase you can drop into casual chat with your buddies at the pub waiting for the start of the football game or futbol match.
Or how about, lepton democracy?
Part of the motivation for my last post was revenge, or at least a desire to balance the books.
Theology, after all, has been lambasted and lampooned, by many scientists or those with a scientific bent of mind, since the Renaissance and especially since the Enlightenment.
The once Queen of the Sciences has been almost banished from the court of intellectual respectability (academia, that is) entirely. Annoying really, especially in the halls of institutional learning where the claim to “pursue truth” resounds. It’s like the political claim to be tolerant of all opinions, which on examination in real debate turns out to be equivalent to being tolerant of all views which are in agreement with your own.
So, theologically let me draw your attention to how the article on lepton universality closes:
Any knowledge from here on helps us learn more about how the universe evolved to this point. For example, we know that dark matter and dark energy exist, but we don’t yet know what they are or how to explain them, Jawahery said.
clamjamfrey 
Oh dear, I nearly misread thinking you meant leprechaun ‘s and their function was to find this missing gold! (Bad sense of humour; I am sorry!)
I know that God is as an entity is actually such a challenging way to describe it. I feel as though, in our dreams we have bursts of electrodes pulsating through our bodies and we do see things from a leprechaun perspective – “pot of gold on the other side.” What we need to believe in is the purpose and motivation behind it all rather than discovering the entity. I feel this approach is far more structural than “Lepton Theory’s” suggest…. Ergo – if most anatomical, psychological, spiritual, social, and, physiciological functions of humans need to believe in something – it would mean they would push and strive to find out the answer. Irrespective of what I believe.
I believe there are so many religions out there it proves we really need some Form or notion to think of – our spiritual wellbeing is based on how we see ourselves and our response to knowing the truth or seeking the truth. I do not know if you could say hard science is actually literally needing answers – but their pursuit will be on going – at the moment we need to figure out other ways to find out purpose. Does that make sense?
Actually, we don’t know for sure that dark matter exists. It’s only part of a formula on the chalkboard of a theoretical physicist. What science has is proof without certainty.