CotN Community

Church on the Net community - the place to explore Christianity
Welcome to CotN Community Sign in | Join | Help
in Search

Fact and Faith

Comments on the world of science from a Christian perspective. Your feedback welcome!

May 2008 - Posts

  • The God Particle revisited

    Physicists the world over are getting very emotional as The Day approaches, but all is not well in the particle physics world.

    The world's most powerful particle smasher is due to begin hurling protons at each other at its base outside Geneva this summer, in the search for the Higgs Boson* and other exotica.

    Physicists hope that the device, which has taken 14 years and £4 billion to build, will provide clues to the universe's origins by mimicking its condition a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. However, a spanner has been flung in the works (only metaphorically thus far).

    Walter Wagner, who runs a botanical garden on Hawaii's Big Island, and Luis Sancho, a Spaniard, have asked for an injunction to prevent the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) starting up the Large Hadron Collider.

    Although CERN scientists have already ruled out the possibility in a safety review, Mr Wagner and Mr Sancho say there is at least a small chance of total annihilation of the planet and maybe the universe.

    They claim Cern has under-played the chances that the collider could produce a tiny black hole or a particle called a "killer strangelet" that would suck CERN and most of Switzerland or even whole Earth into it.

    A spokesman for Cern said the lawsuit's claims were "complete nonsense". "Much higher energy collisions than those at the LHC occur in nature, because cosmic ray particles zip around our galaxy at close to the speed of light," he said.

    "The moon has undergone such collisions for five billion years without being devoured by a ravenous black hole or killer strangelet."

    Of course the scientists at CERN are not likely to be worrying over much about their professional reputations, since there will be no-one around to criticize if they are wrong, so they would say that wouldn't they?

    Anyway, I'll come back to this subject in the autumn (probably)...


    * in case you have forgotten, the Higgs Boson is postulated to be the particle that gives all other particles their mass. It has been dubbed, tongue in cheek, 'The God Particle' because it is fundamental to everything yet has never been observed.

  • It's official: drunkenness causes fights

    It has often been observed that binge drinking can result in aggressive behaviour, but no-one knew why - until now that is...

    A research team at the U.S National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (in Bethesda, Maryland) used an MRI scanner to to look at the brain activity of 12 healthy 'social drinkers', both when sober and after they had been given alcohol intravenously (obviously they couldn't allow any actual drinking to take place!) until their blood alcohol level had reached 0.8g of alcohol per 100 ml of blood - the legal limit for driving in the U.S and the UK. In both conditions they were shown pictures of either frightened or neutral faces.

    The researchers found that the alcohol completely changed the way the brain reacted to the images.

    Without alcohol the amygdala - which is the region of the brain involved in processing emotional reactions - lit up (in the MRI images) in response to the frightened faces, but with the high level of alcohol it was less active, responding equally to both neutral and fearful faces.

    This may help explain, say the reserachers, why drunkenness makes people more aggressive. It impairs the amygdala's ability to detect threats or fearfulness in others. (It may also explain why alcohol-fuelled jokes seem so funny to the drunken raconteur while so feeble to sober listeners).

    Of course this is not just a 21st century phenomenon. The Bible, without the benefit of MRI scanners, has this wise observation:

    It isn't smart to get drunk!
    Drinking makes a fool of you
    and leads to fights
    .
    (Proverbs chapter 20:1 CEV)

    Don't say you haven't been warned!