Your Opinion: Response on science and faith

Dear Editor:

In his July 11 cartoon Jim Dyke would have us believe the "God particle" is "something no eye has seen, nor ear heard, or mind conceived." As such, "Mr. Science" exhorts a Bible-toting skeptic to "Ummm ... Have Faith?" I suspect this is Dyke's attempt at irony.

What follows are the words of Paul Tipton professor of physics at Yale University taken from an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times recently.

"The Higgs (boson) was first proposed in the 1960s and is thought to be the remnant of ubiquitous interaction common to all objects with mass. As lofty and ethereal as these ideas are the Higgs discovery, as well as with all scientific discoveries is solidly grounded in concrete, observable phenomena. It took a colossal new scientific instrument, the large Hadron collider, of LHC at Cern the European Origination for Nuclear Research in Switzerland to produce the few hundred examples of the new object thought to be that Higgs ...

"This much-anticipated discovery is in one sense the culmination of a huge intellectual effort and in another sense the beginning of a new field of research ...

"The Higgs could well be the first science discovery brought about by all of us in the broadest sense, the planet-wide human community. It seems fitting that nature's secrets are unwrapped by all of us, that we won and enjoy the discovery corporately. Let us hope that is the first of many such endeavors."

Mr. Dyke, I do believe there are things we should accept on faith; however, as long as we continue to develop scientific abilities to expand our knowledge beyond faith we should do so - and do so jointly in a spirit of mutual respect and understanding.

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