Particles

Today's announcement of the Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded this year to Higgs and Eglert for their work on determining the source of mass, brings attention to a stunning fact of life on this planet in this universe. We and everything around us are simply vibrating collections of matter and energy. This is a scientific justification for the "everything is one" statements of belief systems down through the ages. This is a basic precept of many interpretations of Buddhist thought, for example. 

Acceptance of this science directly challenges most religious assumptions based on the superiority of human beings as creations of a humanoid god. While human evolution has indeed made human beings the prime predator on this one planet, that status is simply a collection of random natural accidents throughout history. And the same development of a frontal lobe (self-aware brain with applicable memory) may well be the destruction of the species eventually, if human beings fail to control the insatiable greed and unrestrained use of sex for reproduction, driven by the so-called animal brain, with the practical intelligence of the frontal lobe of the human brain.

The irony of the Nobel (Peace) Prize, funded by a weapons fortune, never ceases to amuse me. However, it may also stand as an example of how something so negatively human as weaponry can be transformed into fodder for improving the human condition.