Urantia Book Commentary and Articles: 2008-09-28

Miranda Devine
September 27, 2008

This is the first of a two-page article. As you may know, John Templeton, for whom this lecture is named, was a champion and supporter of the effort to harmonize science and religion. Again, this is an article which shows how the revolutionary new discoveries in space science and physics are slowly but surely helping scientists look even further for the Truth of creation. The truth of The Urantia Book's revelations are slowly becoming known...

Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

In a lecture theatre on the second floor of the Physics Building at Sydney University on Wednesday, an American professor in jeans and sandshoes bounced around the seven blackboards, scribbling formulas, talking of quarks, gluons and multiverses, drawing chalk pictures of expanding galaxies and workshopping a few little mysteries of the universe.

What caused the Big Bang? What is dark energy? Does God exist?

Known as the "rock star of physics" for his lucid language and peppy style, Lawrence Krauss, 54, a theoretical physicist and best-selling author from Arizona State University, was briefly in town to present the Templeton Lecture at Sydney University and a small workshop for students the next day.

In the past decade a series of discoveries about the universe has prompted a revolution in scientific thinking, of which the average person is probably blissfully unaware.

Krauss is one of those scientists at the forefront of this new cosmological understanding - and of a corresponding renewed battle between science and religion. "The last 10 years have changed everything," he said in an interview after Wednesday's workshop. "Our ideas of what the universe is made of have changed â€¦ That's why physicists have gone so crazy."

For instance, we now know that the universe is flat (although we don't know if it has an edge). And we have discovered that 70 per cent of the energy of the universe is in empty space. But we don't know how that can be.

"The dominant part of the universe is dark energy - the energy associated with empty space. That implies something," he says. "Why is the universe driven by the energy of nothing?"

What's more, dark energy is "gravitationally repulsive", so it acts to push the universe apart. "The expansion of the universe is speeding up, but dark energy is constant â€¦ That is the biggest mystery in the universe."

Why is the energy density of all matter in the universe almost exactly equal to the density of dark energy today?

It is the great cosmic coincidence: we humans exist at the precise point in the life of the universe when those two numbers coincide. Physicists call it the "coincidence problem".

"The fact we happen to be close to the time when the two values are the same is absurd," says Krauss. "It's absurd. It drives me crazy."

The accepted explanation for how the universe began is the Big Bang theory, first proposed in 1927 by the Belgian mathematician and priest Georges Lemaitre, which holds that the universe expanded 13.7 billion years ago from a single dense point and has been expanding ever since. More recently came the discovery that the rate at which the universe is expanding is speeding up.

Labels: Big Bang, dark matter, God, gravity, Lawrence Krauss, Miranda Devine, physics, religion, science, space, Templeton Lecture

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Why The Large Hadron Collider Is Already On The Fritz

By Eben Harrell
Monday, Sep. 22, 2008

Anyone who has struggled to change a fuse in their home should pity the scientists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. Last Friday, just nine days after celebrating the successful test run of the largest particle accelerator ever constructed, a tiny electrical connection between two magnets overheated and caused a minor meltdown.

Although a final evaluation is yet to be completed, scientists believe the fault caused the machine to lose the near absolute-zero temperature it must maintain to operate. For now, however, repair work can't begin because the machine is still too cold; it will take about a month to warm up the area to a temperature at which replacement parts can be inserted. It will take another month to cool it back down, and given that CERN has pledged not to run its giant machine â€” which requires as much power as the entire city of Geneva â€” during winter months when Europe's energy needs are highest, Friday's breakdown could delay the actual smashing of atoms until early next year.

CERN spokesman James Gillies called the fault a "teething problem" and said that previous accelerators that used superconductivity â€” i.e., low temperatures that allow metals to conduct electricity without resistance â€” also faced early problems before "running pretty smoothly after they were sorted out." Even so, "it's certainly a disappointment," he added.

When it is fully operational, the $6 billion LHC will send beams of protons careening around a 17-mile underground ring, crash them into one another to re-create the immediate aftereffects of the Big Bang, and then monitor the debris in the hopes of learning more about the origins and workings of the universe.

Scientists are relying on the experiment to unlock several of the universe's mysteries (for example, how matter in the universe acquires mass) by providing hard data on subatomic matter from which cosmologists and theoretical physicists can extrapolate. But they have less exalted reasons to hope for the LHC's success: After a glut of funding for particle physics in the '80s promised the building of several particle accelerators of equivalent power to the LHC, recent funding cuts mean the CERN experiment is now the only game in town. If it fails to provide results, physicists worry they will have to struggle to justify new, even more powerful machines, not to mention the salaries of thousands of scientists needed to build and operate them. Already, the LHC has been delayed several years and is significantly over budget.

Gillies says last week's functional hiccup was not surprising. A massive machine designed to study miniscule particles will inevitably face problems. The LHC's intricacy is indeed breathtaking: One of the particle detectors on the 17-mile ring (there are four) is connected to enough cable and wiring to wrap around the earth nearly seven times. Scientists had to take into account the gravitational pull of the tides when constructing it.

The sheer size of the LHC â€” watching scientists work on its gargantuan components brings to mind a colony of frantic Lilliputians â€” and the complexity of the science behind it have resulted in bouts of eschatological fear of its destructive potential, with websites and even two lawsuits claiming the LHC will create black holes that will swallow up the earth. (The cover images of this week's issues of the Economist and TIME would suggest that black-hole anxiety has in fact bubbled up into the public consciousness.) But while such scenarios have been ruled out, the machine does pose a small threat to the scientists overseeing it: There's a constant risk of a helium leak, high concentrations of which quickly depletes the tunnels of oxygen.

Gillies says that Friday's breakdown released a "large amount" of helium into the tunnel but that CERN's safety protocols ensured there was no risk to staff. Scientists are not allowed into the tunnel when the machine is running, he says, and first responders after the fault all wore respiratory equipment. All scientists working in the underground ring also carry portable respirators, which they are instructed to use within seconds of a helium leak.

CERN's clerisy of PhDs and Nobel Prizeâ€“winners tire pretty quickly of the public's near-erotic obsession with the destructive power of a machine they consider a harmless tool. But, there's no underestimating the thrill of the risk. Earlier this year, when I visited CERN, my tour group included a father and his slouching, intensely apathetic teenage son. It wasn't until the tour guide mentioned that a helium leak could fell a man on the spot that the youngster's eyes lit up, practically dancing with visions of white-coated scientists crumpling to the floor like unstrung marionettes. "So, this thing could just kill us all," he said. "So, it's a death ray!" The father murmured, "Well, I'm not sure that's correctâ€”" Too late. The son said, "Cool!"

Labels: Eben Harrell, Large Hadron Collider, matter, science, the universe

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