Comments on: Limbaugh, you magnificent bastard! You’ve done it again!

By: RWA

RWA — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:50:05 +0000

Thoro: I feel much the same way when I read PZ Myers or Phil Plait talk about politics instead of science. Facts, evidence, logic and reason all suddenly go out the window for them when they stride outside of their specialties, and it’s all about emotion, passion, and knee-jerk impulsivness.

By: Thoro

Thoro — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:42:50 +0000

Limbaugh’s been going on some pretty embarassing rants about science lately. I like hearing him talk politics, but when he starts talking about science, I cringe. I’m no expert by any means, but I do know what science is and what it isn’t. The contradiction is that he always tells us to use logic not emotion when dealing with any political topic, but when it comes to anything evolution-related, it’s clear he’s all emotion, no logic.

He had been off the science topic for quite a while too.

By: Physicist

Physicist — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:06:49 +0000

Just a quibble. The discovery–or otherwise–of the Higgs boson won’t strengthen or weaken any particular cosmological model. What it will address is a particular unification scheme for the electromagnetic and weak forces, referred to as the “Electroweak model”.

The reason press reports emphasize the Big Bang is because–according to the models–for a brief period following the initial instant, there was enough energy density to realize such particles in quantity. That’s not really relevant to the current research, but “the Big Bang” is a buzzword most readers know.

Since that fleeting epoch, Higgs bosons have only existed as ghosts, far over the edge of reality, barely able to touch the matter of the physical world. And yet, that ghostly touch is enough to give mass to every massive particle in the universe. Maybe “the God particle” isn’t such a bad name, after all.

By: Richard Saunders

Richard Saunders — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:48:58 +0000

True, but he’s *their* embarrassment, not ours.

By: RWA

RWA — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:30:23 +0000

Too bad that Franken himself is also a dumbf*#k and an obnoxious jerk to boot.

By: Richard Saunders

Richard Saunders — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:44:50 +0000

Al Franken was right.

By: RWA

RWA — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:51:47 +0000

I remember a great Larry Gonick cartoon on the Higgs Boson and its importance to the electroweak theory. That would have been enough to help anyone understand it.

By: Ichneumon

Ichneumon — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:43:04 +0000

As usual, the people attempting to critique science are the least equipped to do so. Limbaugh reveals his near total ignorance of science when he claims that “there’s no way that anybody could possibly know this” — to him, if you’re not there watching something happen, it’s impossible to know anything whatsoever about it. Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

First, if everything in the Universe was obvious and viewable, we wouldn’t need science. You’d think that even the anti-science dolts would have snapped to this, and realized that the whole *point* of science is to employ methods that allow us to reliably learn about things that are beyond the immediately viewable. Yes, Virginia, it *is* possible to know about things that happened near the start of the Universe.

Second, as you point out, even a quick Google would have answered this point for Limbaugh, if he had bothered. In times past, it might have been excusable to be ignorant on such things, but not today, with so much knowledge available for free on the internet, so easily. Limbaugh has no excuse for his boneheaded comments, other than his arrogance and presumptions.

Finally, for those who are interested in how the Big Bang scenarios are explored and validated, see for example: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang.html