Discovery of a Higgslike Particle

Too soon to tell but this was the news yesterday


The researchers at CERN discovered Higgslike Particle (or the God Particle)

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.

Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.


Ten things you may want to know about Higgs Boson

7. Standard particle theory will be incomplete even if the Higgs particle is discovered.

The Higgs boson is the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model, a beautiful mathematical framework physicists use to describe the smallest bits of matter and how they interact. Experimental results have time and again validated the model's other predictions. But finding the Higgs boson would not close the book on particle physics. While the Standard Model accounts for fundamental forces such as electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force, it cannot make sense of gravity, which is disproportionately weak compared to the other forces. One possible explanation is that we experience only a fraction of the force of gravity because most of it acts in hidden extra dimensions.

Interesting Documentary about Qatar

Qatar: A tiny country asserts powerful influence

Bob Simon: I think Americans are going to be shocked about a few things here: That there are no taxes. That electricity is free. Health care is free. Education is free. Sounds like a paradise.

The work is being done by a million man army of immigrants: 94 percent of Qatar's labor force is foreign; Filipinos, Indians, Nepalese mainly - creating a home for a mere 250,000 Qataris. Paying for it? No problem. Qatar sits on top of the third largest natural gas reserves on the planet.

Sheik Hamid bin Jasim: Everything is free. That become, like, a part of our culture.
Sheik Hamid bin Jasim is Qatar's prime minister.
Bin Jasim: Even when the-- people died, they were-- we take care of them.
Simon: Free funerals.
Bin Jasim: Yes.
Simon: From cradle to grave--
Bin Jasim: Yes, yes.
Simon:--everything's taken care of.

Those "problems" - the chaos, violence and killings throughout the Middle East are not cooling down at all - and many Arab leaders say, to a large extent, it is the emir's fault.

That's because of the television network he created 15 years ago. It's called Al Jazeera and it does something unprecedented in the Arab world. It covers the news. It's on the air 24 hours a day, broadcasts in Arabic and English and is widely considered to be the engine of the Arab Spring.

Simon: This was the first and the only network in the Arab world that was independent. Everyone else was just doing what their government told them to do.

Bin Khalifa: Of course, it caused us a lot of problem with the top people in the Arab countries.

Simon: You say that Al Jazeera created problems for some leaders in the Middle East. It created big problems. It got them overthrown.

Faisal al Qasim: We Arabs have been fond over the years of hiding our dirt under the carpet.

Faisal al Qasim is the host of one of Al Jazeera's most popular talk shows.

Al Qasim: We are here to reveal everything, to cover everything. That's why they don't like us. We are talking here about Arab governments, Arab regimes. I'm not talking about the Arab people. The Arab people love Al Jazeera.

Egyptians sure loved it last year. Thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square watched themselves and their own revolution "live" on Al Jazeera.

Al Qasim: And nobody can negate the fact that Al Jazeera played a big role in what happened in Egypt at the time.

Simon: Here at Al Jazeera, are you covering the news or do you have an agenda?

Al Qasim: What is wrong with transforming the Arab world from tyranny and despotism into a democracy? What's wrong with that? If there is an agenda, it's a very good agenda.

I Don't Like the First Cause Argument

Wikipedia states the Kalām cosmological argument as

Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence;
The universe has a beginning of its existence;
Therefore:

The universe has a cause of its existence.

I know that a lot of Christians and Muslims believe in the cosmological argument but I don't really believe in it. I think it is just created by religious people to justify the existence of God.

Vahid Behbahani

There's an interesting PhD dissertation available online about the emergence of an Islamic Reform Movement in Early Modern Iraq and Iran

http://content.lib.utah.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/us-etd3&CISOPTR=223&filename=364.pdf

I am specifically interested to read about Vahid Behbahani (Muhammad Baqir ibn Muhammad Akmal al-Wahid Bihbahani).

This work goes deeply into his biography, his thoughts and his scholarly career.

Al Quran Chapter 14 Verses 24-26

I am studying the following verses from The Book.

These are the translation of the verses (please see them in the original Arabic language).

Verse 24
Have you not regarded how Allah has drawn a parable?
A good word is like a good tree:
its roots are steady and its branches are in the sky.

Verse 25
It gives its fruit every season by the leave of its Lord.
Allah draws these parables for mankind so that they may take admonition.

Verse 26
And the parable of a bad word is that of a bad tree: uprooted from the ground, it has no stability.

The above translations is by Ali Quli Qara'i.

Items of note

- In verse 24, the word mathalan is used. A literal translation of this word seems to be Example.

- Ali Quli, rightly so, added another degree of preciseness to his translation and used the word parable (def: a statement or comment that conveys a meaning indirectly by the use of comparison, analogy, or the like).

- The word similitude (def: a likening or comparison in the form of a simile, parable, or allegory) is also a good replacement.

- The second important word in verse 24 it Kalimatan Tayyibatan (short form: Kalima tayyiba). A literal translation would be 'a good word'.

- There's been some dispute on the meaning of the good word.

- Some believe that the good word here is referring to the shahādat (lā illāha illā llāh) witnessing Allah and his messenger.

- Some of the Sunnis have speculated that the verse good tree is probably a date palm tree. And the whole verses might be referring so someone's good deeds that may reach up high to the heaven. Yes, this does sound extremely speculative.

- Al-Zamakhshari, the Mutazila scholar, said the good word is tawhid with all the attributes of God.

- Al-Razi rejected the tree (mentioned here) as the palm tree.

- In the Shia commentary by al-Kashi, he narrated a hadith by the sixth Imam, where the good tree is Ahle Muhammad, Imam Ali and his descendents. The Holy Prophet is the root, Imam Ali is the trunk and his descendents are the branches of knowledge or its fruits.

- Furthermore, the bad tree in the verse 26 is referring to the Umayad.