Not magical

It's a trend now, using words like "magical", "mystical" or "god" to try and explain or describe things that are neither of these three. Sometimes it's being done for promotional purposes, like Steven Jobs' keynote speech about the iPad, when he described it as "magical". Just to make thing clear, it's really not. The iPad is just a user friendly slate with limited capabilities and a few millions lines of clever code running on it. But to be honest, no damage was done here. No one actually believes that Apple replaced the ARM processor with tiny midgets or the C++ code with fairy dust. At least I hope so.

Sometimes however, using supernatural description can be damaging. The world invested $9 billion in CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which was built in order to discover the Higgs boson. I admit that my knowledge of quantum physics is amazingly limited, but if I understand correctly, the Higgs boson is a theoretical particle which separates matter from energy and if discovered, it will be a huge step in the long journey of realizing Einstein's dream of a unified theory. This information is quite dull, so in order to create some public interest, the American physicists and Nobel prize laureate coined the term "god particle"m to raise public interest.

Ever since this nickname appeared, countless of religious types have pointed their fingers towards scientists and atheists, saying "A-ha! See? Even your precious science turns to god when it seeks answers". There were even a few books and documentaries made about how at the end of our scientific research, we will find out that god exists. In my opinion it happened because most of us know close to nothing about advanced physics, and as soon as someone mentions a concept we are more familiar with like "god", we will immediately feel safer and choose to stay in this comfort zone.

This really has to stop. The iPad is not magic, it's just very nice and fun to use. The Higgs boson is not godly, it's just a very illusive and expensive-to-find particle, which may actually not exist. "Intelligent Design" is not a scientific theory, it's just an idea built to undermine the theory of evolution. Homeopathy is not an alternative to pharmaceutical drugs, it's just pseudoscience which protects itself not by using proper experimental methodology, but by claiming that scientists are closed minded.

When a scientific theory is being suggested, it's either "failed to be rejected" or "rejected", it's never a definite "yes" or "no". This kind of uncertainty is not comfortable, but this is how the real world actually works. But at the very least, science is facing this reality. And if I'm wrong and magic and god do exist, I'm certain that science will eventually fail to reject them too.

But in the mean time, please, stop referring to science as another kind of religion or mysticism.