I have a very light interview schedule for the month of August. Not only did I need a little break from the rigors of booking and appearing on these shows, but August is the time when some shows go on break and broadcast previously recorded interviews. It is also a slow time for book sales and radio listenership. I plan to pick it up again in September.

Join me as I make a return appearance to Dead Air Radio with host George Lopez Tuesday, July 31 at 9:00 PM Eastern. Catch it live at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/dead-air.

My next installment with GeorgeAnn Hughes of the Byte Show will be posted late Friday night, August 3. This is a reschedule from the cancelled show of July 20. Find the podcast at http://www.thebyteshow.com/ThomasPFusco.html.

Join me as I talk about supergeometrics and paranormal mechanics with Stephanie and Chris on Second Sight NYC Radio Thursday, July 26 at 8:00 PM Eastern. Go to the UFO Paranormal Radio Network at http://ufoparanormalradio.homestead.com/Main_Page_version_2.html and click on one of the players near the top of the page.

Sunday, July 29 at 7:00 PM Eastern will find me with David Nathan on The Brightside Show (rescheduled from July 1). Catch it on Blog Talk Radio at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/brightside1.

Bit of my interviews for this week—Paranormal SIBS and The Byte Show—were cancelled by the hosts for various reasons. We hope to have these rescheduled sometime in the near future. Thank you for your understanding.

With all the sensational headlines we see on the science frontier, followed by articles that do not support the misleading headline, I’m thinking of making “The Rest of the Story” a regular feature on the Cosmic Blog.

One of the recent fads in scientific circles is the idea of multiple universes, or what’s commonly referred to as the multiverse. One of the several problems with this hypothesis is in finding a way to experimentally test such a hypothesis (predictions that are experimentally testable are what distinguishes a scientific theory from speculation, hypothesis and POT or plain-old-theory). There are several models of what a multiverse might look like. One is the soap bubble model, which I liken to envisioning a jar of marbles, each marble representing a different universe so that they nestle together surrounded by their neighbors. This particular model predicts that evidence might be found at the outermost edge of our universe of collisions with other adjacent soap bubble universes. A team of researchers led by physicist Stephen Feeney claim to have found such evidence in late 2010 in the form of large concentric circular structures in the cosmic background radiation (CMB), which according to them is evidence of collisions with neighboring universes. A mathematical algorithm was applied to various observable structures to find those that would be consistent with the proposed model. Of course, the sensationalist press at the time trumpeted this report as evidence proving the existence of multiple universes.

Now here comes The Rest of the Story. The scientists themselves called it a preliminary finding needing further study, and that it was relatively easy to find many kinds of statistically significant in a dataset as huge as the CMB. Subsequent researchers have opined that the statistical significance of these findings are too small by which to draw any conclusions other than the CNB contains many different kinds of structures within it, none which would be necessarily attributable to a collision between adjacent universes as a likely or preferable answer.

Then there are other logical problems that are often simply ignored. Since our universe is still expanding, one would presume that the adjacent ones are as well. They should then all be pushing up against each other so that rather than a couple of possible collision bruises, we’d have huge indentations around the entire perimeter of our space, crushing it in with increasing pressure. And speaking of space, what kind of ‘space’ do these universes occupy, and what kind separates them? As far as I know, even multiverse proponents have no sensible clue of this. Additionally, it still tells us nothing about how our own universe came into being, but instead adds a collage of other universes requiring their own explanations as to their origins. In truth, it is difficult to foresee any kind of testing experiment that might elevate the concept of a multiverse beyond the philosophical speculation it has always remained. 

I will be returning to Robby Bradbury’s Gut & Bones Show on the Para-X Network Monday, July 16 at 5:30 PM Eastern. Listen in at www.para-x.com.

Join me as I speak with host Steve Hultay on the Paranormal SIBS Radio Show Tuesday, July 17 at 9:00 PM Eastern. Catch it at http://stevehultay.com/talkradiogolive.html.

My next installment with GeorgeAnn Hughes of the Byte Show will be posted late Friday night, July 20. Find the podcast at http://www.thebyteshow.com/ThomasPFusco.html.

I will be the guest of Dave Schrader on Darkness Radio Thursday, June 12 at 11:00PM Central (Midnight Eastern). Tune in at http://www.darknessradio.com/.

Join me as I speak about the theory of supergeometrics on Ecto Radio Tuesday, July 10 at 8:30 PM Eastern. Catch it at http://www.ectoradio.com/.

I will be appearing Friday July 12 at 8:00 PM Eastern on Everyday Connection with Rick and Jean. Tune in at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/everydayconnection.

My interview with Tom and Ramon on Hundredth Monkey Radio is now posted. Go to http://thehundredthmonkeyradio.com/thomas-fusco.html.

The wires are a-buzz with the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson….or something. Scientists at CERN, working with the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle smasher in Switzerland, announced today that they have confirmed the discovery of a particle within the Giga-electron Volt range (GeV) predicted by theoretical models of the Higgs particle, but are not in a position to yet say that what they found is actually the Higgs. I thought this would be a good opportunity to give my readers a brief overview of what’s going on and why it’s important.

One of the greatest mysteries still confronting physics is how such an incredibly ordered universe emerged from the chaos of the Big Bang. Imagine a sealed box filled with air. The highly active nature of atoms in a gaseous state causes them to move around vigorously and continuously collide with each other, breaking up any kind of structure as it begins to form. This is what’s known as a highly disordered state, and is actually the most probable state of matter. Now imagine that for no apparent reason, all the oxygen atoms in the box withdraw from the other gases and collect in one corner. We now have order and structure in the box defined by the border between the pocket of oxygen and all the other gases. But this is a highly improbable state of matter, especially with the lack of any mechanism within the box to effect such a ordered separation. Yet this is exactly what happened in the early universe. Against all probability, the chaotic cosmic soup of energetic particles began to form distinct patterns of order and structure that led to the highly organized universe we now see. So, just as in our box of air, there had to be some causal mechanism that would drive this formation of structure. Otherwise, you’d have to consider that something external to the universe imposed its order onto reality and shaped these early structures like the hand of Newton’s Creator or Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

The early universe posed an additional challenge to the emergence of this improbable order. The particles in the primitive soup of the Big Bang were zipping around space at the speed of light. At this velocity, particles cannot form the kinds of stable bonds needed to establish persistent ordered structures. Something had to impart mass to these whizzing lightspeed particles so that enduring subluminal (below the speed of light) orderly structures could be assembled from them.

Enter the Higgs boson, named after theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who popularized the idea in the 1960s. To understand the Higgs, it’s easier to focus more on what it does than what it is. According to the Standard Model (SM) of the universe, which is the model physicists use to describe all particles, forces and their interactions, there must be a component that imparts mass to other particles. According to the theory proposed by Peter Higgs and others, this mass-imparting component takes the form of a field through which other particles pass and in doing so acquire mass. Such a mechanism fills a critical gap in the SM, and would be an important step toward explaining a material cause behind universal order as opposed to a divine one, hence the nickname ‘God’ particle first coined by physicist Leon Lederman (a term most physicists dislike and rarely use but one that is trumpeted constantly by the press for its sensational, attention-getting quality). The particle or ‘quantum’ represented by this field (just as an electron is a particulate form of the electromagnetic force) is the Higgs boson.

Bosons are fundamental or elementary particles from which larger, compound particles are built like protons or hadrons. While bosons cannot be directly observed, their decay trails can be detected by smashing compound particles at high velocities. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is capable of smashing apart hadrons, hence the collider’s name. The more powerful the collider, the more violent collisions can be made that disintegrate a particle more thoroughly, and so the more fragments of that compound particle can be observed and more clearly. Physicists can deduce from these decay trails a number of characteristics of the particles that produces them including their mass, which is expressed in electron volts.

Back to the Higgs. According to the mathematical models of the mass-endowing Higgs field, the Higgs boson should have a mass somewhere between 115 to 150 Giga-electron volts (GeV), although one physicist placed it as high as 130 to 230. The particle reported discovered by the LHC has a mass of 125 GeV, which is in the predicted range. So, why are the CERN scientists holding back from conclusively declaring that the discovered particle is actually THE Higgs boson?

I applaud them for this honesty, because there is a tremendous amount of pressure on these scientists to confirm one of the primary goals to justify the $10 billion poured into the LHC project. Here’s the problem—the ones that you won’t find in any of these mainstream media articles because they rain on the sensationalism parade. Back in the summer and early fall of 2011, CERN was reporting a very pessimistic outlook on finding the Higgs. Why? It’s about the mass. At a particle mass of around 135 GeV or higher, the Higgs field should perform as predicted. CERN had already exhausted their search at that ideal range, and found nothing. Then Higgs news out of CERN fell silent until December 2011, when suddenly they did an about-face and reported finding strong evidence of the Higgs, but this time at 125 GeV. There are two serious problems at this mass. For one, there’s real doubt among physicists that a standalone Higgs field at this low mass would the necessary stability to perform its mass-producing act without the agency of another as yet unknown stabilizing companion particle.    

The second problem is more vexing, and the one you never hear about. Unlike other elementary particles, calculations based on the SM yield the paradoxical result that the mass of the Higgs boson should be infinity! While this value can be encountered during calculations in physics, there is always a mitigating factor in the equation that brings it back into the realm of physical reality (since nothing in the physical realm can have a value of infinity).

So what is it that was expected to modify the mass of the Higgs into a physically realistic value? Supersymmetry. This theory, proposed in the 1960s to repair certain problems with the SM, states that all elementary particles have a heavier twin or symmetrical particle. Because of the power of the LHC, evidence for these supersymmetry particles was already to have been easily discovered at that facility. But no trace of these heavier twins has been uncovered by CERN. Moreover, these particles were also to unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Articles are already appearing in science journals discussing the likely demise of the supersymmetry model. Without supersymmetry, we have no available components that will mitigate the mathematics to cause the Higgs field to behave as advertised or for the Higgs boson to not have an impossible infinite mass at 125 GeV.

There are other flies in the ointment. A SM completed with the Higgs boson would still not have an expression for gravity. Furthermore, a SM completed with the Higgs and nothing else in the form of a new discovery would leave physics without a good path to work out many of the other enigmas that the SM does not solve. It would be like being taken to the dance, having a wonderful time, and then be left stranded there without a ride home.

So this is why the CERN physicists have a new particle discovery in hand with a mass in the correct range, but cannot say for certain if it will ultimately prove to have the characteristics of the now-notorious Higgs boson, or even if they can conclusively demonstrate that it is indeed the Higgs without making further discoveries of even more elusive and possibly non-existent exotic particles. 

And so, as the late Paul Harvey famously said at the close of each episode of his radio news program, “Now you know the rest of the story.”

   

I will be returning to the Barry Chamish Show on Tuesday, July 3 at 6:00-8:00 PM Eastern. Tune in at http://firstamendmentradio.net/.

On Saturday, July 6th at 11:00 PM I’ll be speaking with David Berck on Paradigm Shift Radio. Catch it on Ztalk Radio at http://ztalkradio.com/.