Few today can match 17th century mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal’s deep grasp of the mysterious place of human beings in the immensity of creation. In his Pensées Pascal noted that the strange thing about human beings, is that they exist between two infinities, the infinitely large and the infinitely small, and they want to know both.

The odd thing—stranger than even Pascal could have imagined—is that we should have to look at the infinitely small to understand the infinitely large. That is the point of the Large Hadron Collider: to catch a glimpse of the “pieces” of the proton so that we can better understand the vast, intricate structure of the universe. Given the Big Bang, such a paradox makes sense. The universe unfolded from an infinitely small, infinitely dense point.

That is not the only paradox. The more we try to probe into either infinity—the great or small—the more elaborate, enormous, and expensive the machinery. There is something strikingly comical about the little round ball of a human eye peering through an enormous telescope toward the edges of the universe. But going in the direction of the other infinity, the disproportion is even more absurd. The Large Hadron Colider is an eight billion dollar, seventeen mile circular tunnel built under the border between Switzerland and France so that scientists can smash protons into each other in hopes of catching a glimpse of even smaller constituent shards after the collision just so they can then understand what might have happened the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

And what will they find when it’s fired up to full speed? Here’s the exciting and humbling part. They don’t know what they will find. They don’t know what might happen.
They might create a black hole that destroys the Earth. They might have a peek into some other dimensions. They might set off some unforeseen chain-reaction that destroys a nice chunk of Europe. They might find out what happened to all the anti-matter, and why only matter was left. They could find solid evidence of the Higgs particle, and then we’d know where mass comes from. Or they could simply demolish any notion of the conjectured Higgs particle and several other lovely but merely theoretical constructions of physicists, and hence have to call for a big bonfire of suddenly obsolete textbooks. Perhaps nothing much will happen at all, and years of effort and piles of money will have been wasted.

They don’t know. That reveals as much about us as it does the universe.

About us. Despite the arrogance of some scientists, truthful scientists realize they don’t know everything. In fact, it is precisely at these great experimental junctures that they quietly and humbly reveal how little they know, and how much of the elegant architecture of the universe remains mysterious.

Yet—and this is even more revealing of the essence of human nature—what grand and absurd expense and impractical lengths we are willing to go to find out so something so little! In this respect, the Large Hadron Collider was a smashing success before they even fired it up. As an experiment it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that human beings are not, as Marx, Darwin, and Freud would have it, defined by the simplest and lowest animal urges; rather, we are driven, almost to the point of madness by the desire to know everything, no matter what the danger or cost. We have an infinite and unearthly desire, entirely out of proportion to our size, to have God-like knowledge.

About the universe. It is a deeply, wonderfully, marvelously strange and still largely mysterious place. We know the effects of gravity but not what gravity is. We know that things have mass, but not why. We know from the effects of matter that there must be more of it, some kind of dark matter, but remain in the dark about it.

And what if they find something so surprising, so entirely outside the physicists’ theoretical box, that contemporary physics is shattered in more pieces than the colliding protons? Then once again we’ll know how much we don’t know of the infinite mysteries of the universe, and we’ll pick up the pieces and throw ourselves into this most human and humanizing endeavor.

France rethinks secularism with Pope visit

The Pope’s first visit to France since his election has fuelled debate on church-state relations in a country which prides itself in keeping faith and politics strictly separate.

Last Friday, President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni broke with tradition by greeting the Pope at the airport. Bucking decades of staunchly secularist presidents, lapsed Catholic Mr Sarkozy said that religious “values” should play a greater role in public life.

Mr Sarkozy previously stirred up controversy when he called for a “positive secularism” that would make more space f or religion in the public realm during a visit to the Vatican last year. The separation of church and state has been enshrined in French law since 1905.

Christian Today

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/france.rethinks.secularism.with.pope.visit/21423.htm

The Big Questions: The Large Hadron Collider is asking some Big Questions about the universe we live in

How did our universe come to be the way it is?

The Universe started with a Big Bang – but we don’t fully understand how or why it developed the way it did. The LHC will let us see how matter behaved a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers have some ideas of what to expect – but also expect the unexpected!

What kind of Universe do we live in?

Many physicists think the Universe has more dimensions than the four (space and time) we are aware of. Will the LHC bring us evidence of new dimensions?

Gravity does not fit comfortably into the current descriptions of forces used by physicists. It is also very much weaker than the other forces. One explanation for this may be that our Universe is part of a larger multi dimensional reality and that gravity can leak into other dimensions, making it appear weaker. The LHC may allow us to see evidence of these extra dimensions - for example, the production of mini-black holes which blink into and out of existence in a tiny fraction of a second.

What happened in the Big Bang?

What was the Universe made of before the matter we see around us formed? The LHC will recreate, on a microscale, conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang.

At the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of a searingly hot soup of fundamental particles - quarks, leptons and the force carriers. As the Universe cooled to 1000 billion degrees, the quarks and gluons (carriers of the strong force) combined into composite particles like protons and neutrons. The LHC will collide lead nuclei so that they release their constituent quarks in a fleeting ‘Little Bang’. This will take us back to the time before these particles formed, re-creating the conditions early in the evolution of the universe, when quarks and gluons were free to mix without combining. The debris detected will provide important information about this very early state of matter.

Where is the antimatter? The Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we only see matter now. What happened to the antimatter?

Every fundamental matter particle has an antimatter partner with equal but opposite properties such as electric charge (for example, the negative electron has a positive antimatter partner called the positron). Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang, but antimatter then disappeared. So what happened to it? Experiments have already shown that some matter particles decay at different rates from their anti-particles, which could explain this. One of the LHC experiments will study these subtle differences between matter and antimatter particles.

lhc.ac.uk

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