Urantia Book Commentary and Articles

Martin Rees
08/09/2008

This experiment may be of interest to Urantia Book students, as it will attempt to actually re-create the dawn of creation. Just as with the Human Genome Project and the Hubble Telescope, there may emerge new understanding and new insights into God's creation, and there may even be more corroboration with the revelation of The Urantia Book. It will certainly be interesting to follow the results and conclusions drawn from such an ambitious project.

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On Wednesday, physicists turn on the multibillion-pound machine that will recreate the birth of the universe. Martin Rees applauds the greatest experiment in history

Einstein famously said that "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible". The universe isn't anarchic: it's full of patterns and structures.

The same physical laws apply in distant galaxies as in the lab. Our brains evolved to cope with life on the African savannah, but they can make sense of things far beyond our ancestors' experience - from subatomic particles, far too small to be imaged by any microscope, to galaxies billions of light years away.

As the centuries have passed, we have progressed remarkably in our understanding of the world around us. We know that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by the atoms of which they are made, and by how those atoms are linked together.

We know that in every cell of every living creature, atoms are configured into proteins and tangled strings of DNA. We know, even, that these atoms were all synthesised from pristine hydrogen by processes deep inside stars that died before our solar system came into being. We are literally the ashes of ancient stars - the "nuclear waste" from the fuel that made them shine.

We know, also, what forces acted on those stars, and act on our bodies. Isaac Newton showed that the force that makes apples fall is the same thing that holds the planets in their orbits and that controls the trajectory of spacecraft and satellites.

Michael Faraday achieved a further unification by showing that electric and magnetic forces were linked - an insight that led to electric motors and dynamos, and radio waves.

Nearly 100 years ago, Ernest Rutherford, then working in Manchester, inferred that an atom contained a nucleus, surrounded by a "cloud" of electrons. These developments have led to lasers, nuclear energy and much else.

But there are still gaps in our knowledge. In particular, we still can't link the forces uncovered by Faraday and Newton to the so-called "nuclear" force that actually holds the nuclei of atoms together - and without this force there would be no carbon, no oxygen and no life.

Nor can we make our theories about the universe work without adopting some very strange assumptions indeed: there seems, for instance, to be a mysterious force, latent in space itself, that is pushing everything apart and speeding up its expansion.

These profound questions can't be solved just by armchair theorists. In terms of innate brainpower, we're no wiser than Aristotle was; without successive generations of experiments, we would still believe, like him, in the four elements of earth, air, fire and water.

Science demands experimentation - and some scientific challenges are so great that they demand a massive enterprise, in which thousands of researchers combine their efforts to achieve a common goal.

This happened in astronomy with the Hubble Telescope, and in biology with the human genome project. And now it is happening in physics. The Large Hadron Collider, which will begin operations on Wednesday, will be the largest experiment in human history.

Constructed at a cost of Â£4.4 billion, shared among all participating nations, it is the latest in a series of successively more powerful particle accelerators that have been built at the CERN laboratory in Geneva.

CERN was set up in 1955 by European scientists who had won the ear of government through their nuclear work during the Second World War, and who recognised that progress in their subject would require equipment too expensive for any single European country to fund. But what started as a European project is now in effect a machine that belongs to the world.

An even more ambitious American project was cancelled owing to cost overruns, so the LHC is likely to be the world's premier accelerator for at least the next 15 years, home to scientists from America, Russia, Japan and everywhere else. Protons, after all, are the same from China to Peru - and indeed throughout the cosmos.

Continued

Labels: atom, Large Hadron Collider, Martin Rees, pattern, protons, the universe