Physics and Easter
06/04/15 04:47
It is probably just the product of exhaustion, but it might also be a bit of a window on how my quirky brain works, but I somehow found it sort of creepy that they chose Easter as the day to restart the Large Hadron Collider. If you haven’t been following the field of experimental physics, let me fill you in a little bit. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Is a gigantic physics experiment buried under the French/Swiss border. It is a huge circle around which particles can be accelerated to nearly the speed of light, traveling around the gigantic circle something like 11,000 times per second. When the particles collide physicists can observe the results of the collisions and infer new information about the nature, and origins of the universe. It was the LHC that provided evidence of the existence of the once-theoretical particle known as the Higgs Boson, sometimes referred to as the “god” particle because of its potential to explain certain theories about the origins of the universe.
The LHC has been shut down for a year and a half, being retro-fitted and rebuilt so that it has even more energy - about double of what was available for earlier experiments. The system is now able to garner about ten times the amount of data per unit of time than was possible with the old LHC. The search is on for dark matter and dark energy.
Physicists, some of whom like to criticize religion because they see it as a product of human imagination, are able to observe less than 10% of the universe. The rest is pure speculation. They theorize that there may be other dimensions, and dark matter and dark energy are simply placeholders for elements of the universe that they infer might exist but which no one has been able to directly observe.
I’ve no problem with physics experiments. I think they are a worthy pursuit for human beings. I might have had different priorities for the limited resources of the world - something like, let’s work on solving word hunger and eliminating substandard housing first, then we can tackle expensive theoretical physics experiments. But they didn’t consult me and they did find the money to build the LHC. So I’m OK with them using it to try to learn as much as possible. Jesus himself once referred to an expensive extravagance by reminding his disciples that they were unlikely to solve hunger and poverty in their lifetimes: “The poor you will always have with you.”
I just would have chosen a different day to start up the experiments that garner such passion and intense emotion from physicists that they are tempted to use religious language to speak of them. Let the religious at least have the day of Easter and fire the sucker up a few days later. But that’s just me and I’m pretty sure that my mind doesn’t work quite the same as that of a physicist, who was probably just eager to get it up and running as soon as possible and didn’t want any kind of a delay.
So far, contrary to dire predictions of some religious fanatics, the LHC hasn’t caused the end of the world or the second coming of Christ. It has just produced experiments with results that, while amazing, were not out of the range of the imaginations of those who designed the experiments and the machines to conduct them.
Anyway, they’ve got the thing going and the particles are being accelerated around the giant ring. The data is being harvested and it is possible that we will see multiple major additional discoveries in our lifetimes.
From my perspective, there is nothing even moderately like a resurrection going on in the restart of the LHC. Resurrection is a very complex and difficult thing for humans to understand and I’m confident it isn’t something that we can make happen with our own skills and abilities, regardless of how much funding we secure.
But, again from my perspective, I see the aims of the scientists involved in the LHC as distinctly religious. The pursuit of truth for the sake of truth is what we who have invested our lives in religion believe we have been doing all along. And, like the physicists, we understand that there are limits to our understanding. There are even limits to our capacity to understand.
Of course, we in the field of religion pursue the truth in a slightly different manner than physicists. We don’t spend as much time speculating about what we might discover, and a bit more time being amazed and awed at what is revealed to us. Still I see us as colleagues in the pursuit of a better understanding of the universe.
I fully expect there to be many more announcements of new discoveries from the scientists at the LHC in the span of my life. I fully expect that our understanding of the true nature of the universe will still be a tiny, tiny slice, even centuries from now. The universe is so great and possible the word “universe” is inaccurate to describe what is being explored. “Multiverse” might be a bit better. But even that doesn't describe it fully.
Whatever else has occurred, we have found ourselves to be relatively small and obscure in the vastness of the universe. There is a lot more to creation than we can begin to observe.
So it is an amazing discovery that the Creator of all that is is so concerned with us that we are pursued with a passionate love and desire to be in relationship with us. It shouldn’t surprise us that we don’t understand death, when we have already freely admitted that we don’t know more than a tiny fraction of the whole of reality.
We don’t understand resurrection even half as well as we understand death.
It shouldn’t surprise us - or the physicists either - that we still have a lot to learn about the nature of God’s love and God’s actions in this universe.
Like the physicists, I’m content to invest my lifetime in exploring truth that is far bigger than me and discoveries that take more than a lifetime to be revealed.
The LHC has been shut down for a year and a half, being retro-fitted and rebuilt so that it has even more energy - about double of what was available for earlier experiments. The system is now able to garner about ten times the amount of data per unit of time than was possible with the old LHC. The search is on for dark matter and dark energy.
Physicists, some of whom like to criticize religion because they see it as a product of human imagination, are able to observe less than 10% of the universe. The rest is pure speculation. They theorize that there may be other dimensions, and dark matter and dark energy are simply placeholders for elements of the universe that they infer might exist but which no one has been able to directly observe.
I’ve no problem with physics experiments. I think they are a worthy pursuit for human beings. I might have had different priorities for the limited resources of the world - something like, let’s work on solving word hunger and eliminating substandard housing first, then we can tackle expensive theoretical physics experiments. But they didn’t consult me and they did find the money to build the LHC. So I’m OK with them using it to try to learn as much as possible. Jesus himself once referred to an expensive extravagance by reminding his disciples that they were unlikely to solve hunger and poverty in their lifetimes: “The poor you will always have with you.”
I just would have chosen a different day to start up the experiments that garner such passion and intense emotion from physicists that they are tempted to use religious language to speak of them. Let the religious at least have the day of Easter and fire the sucker up a few days later. But that’s just me and I’m pretty sure that my mind doesn’t work quite the same as that of a physicist, who was probably just eager to get it up and running as soon as possible and didn’t want any kind of a delay.
So far, contrary to dire predictions of some religious fanatics, the LHC hasn’t caused the end of the world or the second coming of Christ. It has just produced experiments with results that, while amazing, were not out of the range of the imaginations of those who designed the experiments and the machines to conduct them.
Anyway, they’ve got the thing going and the particles are being accelerated around the giant ring. The data is being harvested and it is possible that we will see multiple major additional discoveries in our lifetimes.
From my perspective, there is nothing even moderately like a resurrection going on in the restart of the LHC. Resurrection is a very complex and difficult thing for humans to understand and I’m confident it isn’t something that we can make happen with our own skills and abilities, regardless of how much funding we secure.
But, again from my perspective, I see the aims of the scientists involved in the LHC as distinctly religious. The pursuit of truth for the sake of truth is what we who have invested our lives in religion believe we have been doing all along. And, like the physicists, we understand that there are limits to our understanding. There are even limits to our capacity to understand.
Of course, we in the field of religion pursue the truth in a slightly different manner than physicists. We don’t spend as much time speculating about what we might discover, and a bit more time being amazed and awed at what is revealed to us. Still I see us as colleagues in the pursuit of a better understanding of the universe.
I fully expect there to be many more announcements of new discoveries from the scientists at the LHC in the span of my life. I fully expect that our understanding of the true nature of the universe will still be a tiny, tiny slice, even centuries from now. The universe is so great and possible the word “universe” is inaccurate to describe what is being explored. “Multiverse” might be a bit better. But even that doesn't describe it fully.
Whatever else has occurred, we have found ourselves to be relatively small and obscure in the vastness of the universe. There is a lot more to creation than we can begin to observe.
So it is an amazing discovery that the Creator of all that is is so concerned with us that we are pursued with a passionate love and desire to be in relationship with us. It shouldn’t surprise us that we don’t understand death, when we have already freely admitted that we don’t know more than a tiny fraction of the whole of reality.
We don’t understand resurrection even half as well as we understand death.
It shouldn’t surprise us - or the physicists either - that we still have a lot to learn about the nature of God’s love and God’s actions in this universe.
Like the physicists, I’m content to invest my lifetime in exploring truth that is far bigger than me and discoveries that take more than a lifetime to be revealed.