sometimes you just want to quote wittgenstein to bring everything into focus. he brings things down to their element: basic words to mean exactly what they mean--no ambiguity except for the whether or not you want to apply then to your life. this is the realm of aphorisms, axioms, saws, folk wisdom, cliches...and the only reason we don't call them "truths" is that we reserve such finality for religious experience under one pursuit of faith or another. and why faith gets a preference when speaking about "truths" is what i could never fathom: faith doesn't require "truth", only belief.
and now we hear the news from CERN in switzerland about the higgs boson being found. this is the missing piece of the "standard model", the carrier of mass, the "glue"--if you will--that holds all the other particles together. it might even be the "graviton", if such thing exists. it is not like anyone has a picture of it; it shows up as a spike in the data of something like 1.6 gigavolts (as a i recall) before decaying into other components.
this is a scientific phenomena; a fact. the interpretation is open to question because it does not meet the statistical criteria for a "proof". but this is, however theoretical, much closer to reality than any dogma. it literally tips the scale for a system of "belief" that offers
this is the sort of "belief" that i can get behind. this is the sort of "truth" that i can espouse.
and speaking of "espousa", when mi espousa mousa asked me for an explanation as to what this meant, i explained how it was the stuff which keeps us together. to which she replied: "oh, i know what that is! it's love!"
i am writing CERN to ask is they had considered replacing the boltzmann constant with this.
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