Blog@GraceJunction

(Re-post from March 26th, 2008)

The papers today reveal a quest of science that started several decades ago. Physicists from all over the world are getting together in Europe and are racing to prove the existence of a particle that’s surmised to be at the heart of the matter!

Dubbed the “God particle“, the Higgs Boson, which “it” is otherwise called, is a controversial particle believed to bestow mass on all other particles. Scientists are hoping to discover traces of its presence in Fermilab’s Tevatron, a 17-mile-long circumference particle accelerator (also called the Hadron’s Collider) that smashes opposing beams of protons and antiprotons around a circular track, sifting through the debris with two immense detectors. This experiment is supposedly expected to bring back Europe as the leaders in Physics and not the USA!

Had not science found all the answers?

The 1800s declared ‘atoms’ as the foundation of matter and affirmed that Newtonian principles neatly governed the universe. Atoms were indivisible by definition- atom means ‘uncuttable’. But then strange things started popping up in laboratories: x-rays, gamma rays, a mysterious phenomenon called radioactivity. Physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron. Atoms were not indivisible after all, but had constituents. In 1911 physicist Ernest Rutherford announced that atoms are mostly empty space, their mass concentrated in a tiny nucleus orbited by electrons. Physics underwent one revolution after another. Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) begat the general theory of relativity (1915), and suddenly even such reliable concepts as absolute space and absolute time had been discarded in favor of a mind-boggling space-time fabric in which two events can never be said to be simultaneous. Matter bends space; space directs how matter moves. Light is both a particle and a wave. Energy and mass are inter- changeable. Reality is probabilistic and not deterministic.

By the early 1930s Ernest Lawrence had invented the first circular particle accelerator, or “cyclotron.” It fit in his hand. Definitions and understanding of science was destined to change forever.

We know things today that Einstein, Rutherford, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and the rest of the great physicists of a century ago couldn’t have imagined. But we’re “no where” near a final theory of physical reality.

Molecules are made of atoms; atoms are made of particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons; protons and neutrons (which are the “hadrons”) are made of odd things called quarks and gluons—but already we’re into a fuzzy zone. Are quarks fundamental particles, or made of something smaller yet? Electrons are believed to be fundamental, but you wouldn’t want to bet your life on it.

Theoretical physicists crave simplicity. They’d like to have a model of reality that snaps together neatly. Their standard model, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, is widely viewed as unwieldy, like a contraption with too many loose ends and knobs and dangling bits. It includes 57 fundamental particles, with no rhyme or reason to many of the numbers describing how the particles interact.

Did you really read the earlier paragraph!!

The standard model can’t explain several towering mysteries about the universe that have their roots in the minuscule world of particles and forces. If there’s one truly extraordinary concept to emerge from the past century of inquiry, it’s that the cosmos we see was once smaller than an atom!!

They are now saying that the universe is a tough nut to crack!!

Because the result of this test plays a key role in the standard model of physics (the theory on which physicists base their whole understanding of matter), proving the existence or absence of the Higgs Boson could rock the entire foundation of physics, indicating the existence of particles and forces not yet imagined and paving the way for an entirely new set of laws!!!

To much of physics for the day?? Those who want to know more can click the link and get more details.

Decades and decades of the biggest brains working alone and then coming together and then again working alone and again working together, first in laboratories and now hundred of meters underground in huge tunnels that look like the set of a James Bond movie, they have only time and again concluded that their earlier conclusions have been wrong!

With such kind of mystery and order (energy and mass) in the deepest caverns of particles and sub particles, it is strange that many a men still insist that all this is an accident!

And all this is still a discovery! Nothing is certain neither about the outcome of the experiment nor about the reality of the universe!

Theoretical physicists are right when they crave simplicity but they are looking at the wrong place. They’d like to have a model of reality that snaps together neatly. And that model can be found in ‘Genesis’ Chapter 1 and henceforth in the Grandest Book of all, the Bible. They want a theory which anyone can understand, and here it is.

The amazing universe is not an accident. The design and order in it proves a designer and a task master. Someone who has fashioned each element of the universe for a definite outcome. Some are under fixed laws and the outcome is predictable. Others, like humans, have volition (will power) and therefore their course is not that predictable, but their outcome surely will be. There can only be two outcomes. One wherein you agree with the creator and other wherein you don’t.

The choice is yours. You either wait for science to unravel a mystery thats only getting more and more complicated as they delve deeper or you bend your knees before God.

It’s that simple. Good Day.

Tags: accelerator, amazing, anti protons, atom, Bible, bohr, CERN, design, discovery, einstein, electrons, experiment, faith, fundamental principles, genesis, gluons, God, god particle, Hadron Collider, heisenberg, higgs boson, higgs particle, high speed collision, Internet, james bond, laboratory, lawrence, Modern Science, mystery, national geography, newton, newtonian physics, observations, origins of the universe, particle physics, planck, protons, quarks, relativity, rutherford, Science and Religion, test, the grid, thompson, universe

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Announcements, Articles, Geo, Modern Science, Science & Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.