TruthBook Religious News Blog

By ROSS FREAKE

"The most important thing is to clear your mind so you don't expect anything in particular. You really have to be ready to see absolutely anything."

Who would say something like that: A psychologist, a preacher, or a physicist?

And does it make a difference because the rift separating the three is becoming increasingly narrow and each could be the high priest in the other's "religion".

They use different methods and a different language, but they all delve into the Big Reality beneath the apparent to find a larger Truth.

In this case, the speaker is Hulya Guler, a postdoctoral fellow at the universities of Montreal and McGill who is working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

He's part of a Canadian team working on a project to find the Higgs boson, called the God Particle, which is believed to give everything mass, allowing the universe to exist.

Scientists hope the largest machine in the world will let them peer into nature, to see a reality that existed during the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, to see the platform on which reality is constructed.

The Higgs boson, named after British physicist Peter Higgs who concocted the theory 40 years ago, is hypothetical, but scientists believe it exists because it helps explain the universe we see, which is five per cent of the universe that is.

Like scientists seeking the truth, we can delve into the depths of self. While most of us don't have a spare $9 billion to build a collider, we can perform our own experiment and observe the collisions happenings within us, and why we act the way we do. We can learn to act consciously and choose to walk the mystic path "to the One, with the One, in the One."

Anyone who peers into nature or the nature of self, asking why, is just as much a mystic as Plotinus, St. Francis or Rumi.

We only "see" part of who we are because most of us are below the line of our consciousness. But just as the stuff we can't see, the dark energy and dark matter that make up 95 per cent of the universe, influences what we can see, so the stuff below the line of awareness affects what's above.

Science looks for facts, while religion attempts to clothe them in wisdom, wonder and awe. Religion is the glue of life for billions of people, while science investigates the gluons - the force that holds the quarks in the atomic nucleus together and allows us to have life.

We need to emulate the scientists and the sages mesmerized by the wonder and awe as they search for the really Real, and not be dazzled by the apparently real, the trinkets and beads of a society more concerned with the outward than the inward.

We need to marry the sensual and the spiritual.

Labels: God, God particle, Higgs particle, Large Hadron Collider, Ross Freake

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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Largest particle collider, operational, could rewrite science

September 9, 2008

Large Hadron Collider is a 17-mile ring constructed deep underground beneath the border between Switzerland and France.Large Hadron Collider is a 17-mile ring constructed deep underground beneath the border between Switzerland and France.
The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons around a 17-mile underground ring Sept. 10 in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the Large Hadron Collider.

The collider is constructed deep underground beneath the border between Switzerland and France.

Considered to be the world’s largest machine, it was built at a cost of $9 billion dollars to make truly groundbreaking discoveries in science.
The collider took ten years to build.

Inside the collider, powerful magnets chilled to a few degrees above absolute zero (-271C) zip beams of energetic protons in a loop at speeds close to the speed of light then collide them head on.

The energy released is so huge that the impacts will eventually recreate conditions in the universe as they existed just a tiny fraction of a second after the “Big Bang,” the so-called instant of the universe’s creation.

The first high-energy collisions are planned to take place beginning in October.

If the collider performs as expected, it will most likely reveal a previously unseen particle known as the Higgs boson. Other phenomena may also be created and observed for the first time, including microscopic black holes.

Some have theorized that this side of the project could go wrong with Earth-threatening results, a fear that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the group that oversees the collider’s experiments, has comprehensively denied.

It is expected to be the most powerful tool yet for physicists who seek to uncover the secrets behind the laws of the universe, both on the sub-microscopic scale of quantum physics and in the huge domain of galaxies and black holes.

Critics who say the world’s largest atom-smasher could destroy the world have brought their claims to courtrooms in Europe and the United States, and although the claims are getting further consideration, neither court would hold up the official startup.

Legal action is pending at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. The court agreed to review doomsday claims from a group of professors and students, primarily from Germany and Austria. However, the court rejected a call for the immediate halt of collider operations.

Hopes are highest for the discovery of the Higgs boson, nicknamed “the God particle.”

It’s so called because it’s a key part of the standard model of particle physics, which explains how matter interacts with three of the four fundamental forces of nature — electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force that binds the parts of an atom’s nucleus together, and the weak nuclear force that allows for the radioactive decay of particles.

This model posits two kinds of elementary particles: bosons, which mediate these forces, and fermions, which combine to make up matter.

The Higgs boson, which is supposed to impart mass to other particles, so far has eluded researchers but because the standard model has stood up to repeated experimentation, it is assumed the Higgs is likely to be found at the energy levels the collider will be working.

Since this is exploratory science, the collider may uncover surprises that contradict prevailing theories, said Joseph Lykken, theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

“When Columbus sailed west, he thought he was going to find something. He didn’t find what he thought he would, but he did discover something interesting,” said Lykken, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of six experiments inside the collider complex.

Potential breakthroughs include identification of the mysterious dark matter that makes up 90 percent of the mass in the universe. More exotic possibilities include evidence for completely new forces of nature or hidden extra dimensions of space and time.

“The collider is a discovery machine. We don’t know what we’ll find,” said Abraham Seiden, professor of physics and director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dominican Sr. Katarina Pajchel, a physicist, works with CERN on collider projects.Dominican Sr. Katarina Pajchel, a physicist from the University of Oslo in Norway, who works with CERN on collider projects, told NCR: “Today’s picture of fundamental particles and processes has become part of our common understanding of nature. The theories have so far been remarkably successful; however there are some key questions that remain open.”

The collider is designed to cover the energy range where we would expect new discoveries that answer these questions, she said. “We hope perhaps also to answer other questions: Are there, for example, more than three space dimensions? Can we understand better the small asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, which is the very reason that we and everything around us exists?

“It might sound like a science fiction scenario but it is not.”
The laws of nature speak of an amazing order, creativity and beauty, she said. “Our current understanding bears witness to the power of human thought, imagination and curiosity. Through it we are given insight into God’s creative plan.”

However deep these discoveries go, Pajchel said, they do not threaten religion, “but rather firmly hold up the real mysteries of faith, more clearly and in a challenging way.

“Contact with sober science can make us less vulnerable and more balanced as well in meeting modern religious movements, like New Age, which are often quasi-scientific,” she said. “One can end up in the paradoxical situation of defending both rational scientific research and the real mysteries of faith.”

Rich Heffern is an NCR staff writer. His e-mail address is rheffern@ncronline.org.

Labels: God particle, Higgs particle, Katarina Pajchel, Large Hadron Collider, religion