An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design.

Bradley Monton.
An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design.
Talks to RSS.

Friday 29th March (Good Friday), 5:30pm

Biology Building BLT100

 

About the book: 

The doctrine of intelligent design is often the subject of acrimonious debate. Seeking God in Science cuts through the rhetoric that distorts the debates between religious and secular camps. Bradley Monton, a philosopher of science and an atheist, carefully considers the arguments for intelligent design and argues that intelligent design deserves serious consideration as a 

scientific theory. Monton also gives a lucid account of the debate surrounding the inclusion of intelligent design in public schools and presents reason why students’ science education could benefit from a careful consideration of the arguments for and against it.

 

 

 

UPDATE: Here is the audio and handouts from the seminar Dr Monton gave: 

 

The Universe from Nothing

Tuesday 21st May, 5:30pm, Arts 1 room 315

We watch a Lawrence Krauss talk/documentary

Physicist Lawrence Krauss considers that the information recoverable by any civilization over the entire history of our universe is finite in an ever-expanding universe.

Jeff Talon on Science versus Christianity

Sunday 5th May

10:15 am 

Shadows Tavern (on campus)

Hosted by Auckland Evangelical Church http://aucklandev.co.nz 

Doesn’t science disprove Christianity?

Either way, are you sure? Sure enough to bet your life on it?
At least give one of NZ’s top Physicists a chance to explain how he sees the two as inseparable.

Professor Jeff Tallon is one of New Zealand’s most distinguished physicists, internationally known for research which revolutionised the field of high temperature superconductors.
Current research interests extend to nanotechnology, high pressure physics, and materials science.
Jeff has received numerous awards for his work, including the inaugural Prime Minister’s science prize, the Rutherford medal and the Dan Walls medal for physics. He currently a visiting professor at the Cavendish laboratory, Cambridge University.

He has been a prominent advocate of science education and research in New Zealand and for the compatibility of science and Christian faith.

Here’s a video to watch:

Here’s some reading: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10616394

Review of “David Krofcheck on the Higgs Boson”

New Zealand at CERN and the Discovery of a new Particle: The Review

In July the physics world was rocked by the discovery of a new particle that looks suspiciously like the long hypothesized Higgs boson. The announcement was met with huge excitement and extensive media coverage. We all knew that something significant had been discovered, but what exactly? To the non-physicist it all sounded pretty perplexing. What exactly is a Higgs boson, Higgs field and why is it important? With these questions in mind we invited Dr. David Krofcheck from the department of physics to discuss the recent discovery. David and his NZ team are part of CMS collaboration at CERN, so he was able to give us a fascinating first-hand account of what goes on at the CERN laboratory.

David began by explaining how, much to the embarrassment of physicists everywhere, there are lots of really basic unanswered questions in modern physics. For instance our best theories for understanding matter and its interactions only describe 4% of the known “stuff” in the universe. There is good reason to believe the rest of the universe is composed of (as yet) unidentified dark matter, and even more nebulous dark energy. We don’t know why there is matter in the universe at all, and more fundamentally we don’t even know what mass is! The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built to try and answer some of these questions.

From these motivating questions David went on to summarize what (we think) we know: the standard model of particle physics. The standard model divides the world into two types of particles, fermions and bosons. Fermions are the building blocks for protons, neutrons and all of the other “normal matter” in the universe. Bosons are the particles that mediate the known forces e.g. photons are bosons which carry the electromagnetic force. In a sense the standard model is a bit like the periodic table in chemistry. It is a carefully structured table of the fundamental “ingredients” of matter which you can combine in different ways to build more complicated particles/substances.

Although the standard model has worked exceptionally well in making successful experimental predictions, for decades there has been one major missing piece in the puzzle: the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is conjectured to explain “what gives particles mass”, but what exactly does this mean? David presented us with an analogy to help us understand the theory. Consider a room full of uniformly-distributed journalists, and suppose that an especially famous person (e.g. Margaret Thatcher) enters the room. As she tries to cross the room, she will of course be swamped by journalists that impede her progress and slow her down. The more famous the person, the more they are slowed down inside the room as more journalists “clump” to them. In this analogy the journalists represent the Higgs field, and famous people crossing the room are particles with mass: the more famous the person, the greater the mass of the particle (and the more they are slowed down by Higgs field/clumping of journalists). The Higgs field permeates all of space such that particles everywhere are slowed down and thus appear to have mass. If there were no Higgs field every particle would move at the speed of light since nothing would impede their progress. The Higgs boson can also be understood via this analogy. Sometimes it doesn’t even take the presence of a famous person for journalists to clump together; they may excitedly clump together at the mere mention of a famous person. This represents the idea that given enough energy, the Higgs field may be excited to a state whereby massive particle spontaneously form from the field itself (no particle is required – the field spontaneously ‘clumps’ into its own particle). Although it is the Higgs field that is of interest from a theoretical perspective, we cannot measure the Higgs field directly. Instead we try to observe the Higgs boson, and in doing so test the existence of the associated Higgs field.

David then went on to explain how exactly the LHC is being used to test for the existence of the Higgs boson. The LHC accelerates protons to extremely high speeds and smashes them together inside huge particle detectors. The NZ team plays a fairly crucial role in this process. They are responsible for the construction and operation of the Beam Radiation Monitor, a device that detects if the beam of protons start to drift off target. If the beam were allowed to drift this could be disastrous as super-high energy particles would collide with fragile multi-million dollar electronic equipment. The Beam Radiation Monitor acts as a warning system: if the particles begin to drift off target the beam is safely dumped into a solid wall.

How exactly then is the LHC being used to test for the existence of the Higgs boson? During a collision of two protons, the massive kinetic energy of the protons is converted into new particles which stream outwards in all directions and are detected by large particle detectors. If the energy of the incoming protons is sufficiently large, a Higgs boson may be among the new particles created by the collision. Theory describes how often we should see certain particles created at different energy levels. If we perform many collisions we can compare the experimental frequency distribution (of particles created in the collisions) to the theoretical frequency distribution. In particular if the Higgs boson exists, we expect a slight blip in the frequency distribution at a particular energy level, and indeed such a blip has just been observed. Interestingly some of the characteristics of the distributions suggest that the observed Higgs may not quite have the same properties as the simplest Higgs model predict, which opens the door to a potential family of Higgs particles and exciting new physics beyond the standard model. We await further results from the LHC with great anticipation.

By Josh

David Krofcheck on the Higgs Boson

New Zealand at CERN and the Discovery of a new Particle: The shock of the “New”

Dr David Krofcheck from the department of physics will be joining us to talk about the discovery of the Higgs boson, what it means for particle physics, and life at CERN. David is a member of the CMS collaboration (one of the two major experiments being conducted at the LHC), so he knows first hand what goes on at CERN.

The Physics world was rocked by the July announcement of the discovery of a new particle that possesses characteristics of the long hypothesized Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the physical manifestation of the Higgs field which is predicted to generate masses of all fundamental particles. The shock of initial observations is that the discovered particle may have properties that point towards “new physics”. We will follow the 50 year path of discovery and look at up-to-date arguments about the nature of the new particle. New Zealand is one of 39 nations forming the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaoration at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.
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EDIT: This talk can be viewed here:

Peter Wills – The Origin of Life

Associate Professor Peter Wills from the University of Auckland’s Physics Department gives a brief introductory talk about the origin of life (abiogenesis). This meeting took place on Monday 13 September 2010.