Fact and Faith

End of the world in 3 days?

Boffin — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:08:00 GMT

Things are hotting up (well cooling down really, but you get my drift) at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. The world's largest particle reactor is due to be go online on Sept 10, just 3 days from now.

Actually the switch-on started months ago as the eight sectors in the 27km ring have been progressively brought down to the -271 degC required for the superconducting magnets to work. But the big event this week, all being well, will be the first circulation of accelarated particles.

The first beam will be accelerated to an energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV), the preliminary step on the path to attaining particle energies of the record-breaking 5 TeV.

At full throttle, the LHC will accelerate particles to relativistic velocities, accessing energies previously unimaginable. Once the LHC reaches its optimum design specification (expected by 2010), it will generate beams seven-times more energetic and 30-times more intense than any other particle accelerator on the planet.

This is when things start to get interesting, and fears of the accidental creation of black holes big enough to absorb Switzerland have been voiced although the exhaustive safety studies that have been done have dismissed this possibility. And of course Swiss law explicitly forbids black holes from entering Switzerland. (OK, I made that bit up.)

As in an earlier blog in this series, I mentioned that one of the big results expected from this gigantic tool is to re-create the conditions that are thought to have existed just after the 'Big Bang' - or as Christians believe, the moment when God created the universe - to establish whether the so-called 'Higgs bosun' (which is thought to give mass to all particles) really exists.

If it cannot be found then the so-called Standard Model of fundamental particles will have to re-thought, although it will likely be 2010 before this will be known.

Scientists hope the LHC will also help in the understanding of the operation of gravity, the possible existence of extra dimensions and the nature of the 95 per cent of the universe that is invisible to our telescopes.

As those of us who love fundamental paricles learn more about the wonderful universe in which we find ourselves, we find ourselves drawn even more to worship the One who devised it all - our Creator God.

Life on Mars?

Boffin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:35:00 GMT

The big news of the day is that the Mars explorer has dug a small trench and found water, or rather ice, below the surface of the northern plains.

This is exciting because water is (and we must add 'as far as we know') essential for all life, and its discovery opens up the possibility that life could exist, or rather once could have existed on Mars.

One theory is that Mars once had an atmosphere, and therefore experienced a greenhouse effect that kept it warm enough for abundant liquid water to exist on its surface. Some observers say that the surface feature even show evidence of water erosion.

But don't start thinking 'War of the Worlds'. The 'life' scientists are talking about is microbial. Microbes are tough little organisms so there could be still some evidence of their existence in the past fossilized in surface Martian rocks.

The Bible does not have anything to say about microbes on Mars - or on the Earth for that matter - but it certainly does not rule out the existence of other beings. Indeed, it positively asserts that there are such (eg: angelic beings).

Anyway, before you get too excited, check out the evidence for yourself...

Watch this space...

The God Particle revisited

Boffin — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:21:00 GMT

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

Boffin — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:50:00 GMT

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!

Happy birthday, Charles!

Boffin — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:54:00 GMT

With all the media excitement of the U.S Primaries you might have missed the fact that February saw the 199th annivesray of Darwin's birthday, and throughout the United Sates various groups were holding events for 'Evolution Weekend'

Evolution Weekend was started in 2006 as 'an opportunity for serious discussion and reflection on the relationship between religion and science'. One important goal is to elevate the quality of the discussion on this critical topic - to move beyond sound bites. A second critical goal was 'to demonstrate that religious people from many faiths and locations understand that evolution is sound science and poses no problems for their faith'.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the celebrations is the fact that it was a group of clergy that got the ball rolling. See http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/rel_evol_sun.htm

It has been clear for some time to many Christians and Scientists (especially people who fall into bith camps) that lack of knowledge of each others arguments has put unecessary conflict between science and faith. This growing group of more than 800 clergy aims to reduce the friction by promoting understanding of the principles of Evolution and the evidence for it, and a list of scientists who are willing to anwer clergy questions on this subject has been compiled.

We can hope that this will lead to some progress towards reconciling science and Christian faith, but there are some passionate views on both sides.

Boffin.

Mercury here we come

Boffin — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 17:36:00 GMT

The next 10 days are very exciting ones for cosmologists and physicists, as NASA's Messenger probe - launched in August 2004 - will begin the first of three fly-bys of the enigmatic planet Mercury, a series designed to culminate in an orbit around the planet on 18 March 2011, after a journey of 5 billion miles. This first fly-by, scheduled for January 14, will be the first close up look at Mercury since Mariner 10 completed its third and final rendezvous in 1975.

Technology has moved on apace in the last 30 years and planetologist hope to learn a lot more this time. Astronomers think that the planet holds a secret that will reveal how the solar system was formed. Mercury is an oddball planet and if science can explain how it came together it would go a long way to explaining how the other planets formed.

Mercury is especially dense, suggesting it has a huge iron core amounting to 40% of the planet's total volune. This is a huge proportion compared to Earth's 17%. It is sepculated that one of the enormous asteroids that hurtled around the early solar system crashed into it and blasted a way much of the rocky outer mantle, leaving it about half its original size. There will be clues as to its history in the composition of the surface material, and Messenger will be using spectroscopy to measure the relative amounts of minerals such as iron oxide, silicon dioxide, and magnesium oxide.

Mercury also has a weak magnetic field (just 0.1% of the Earth's field). Such fields are usually generated in the core of a planet by a circulating region of electrically conducting molten material, but Mercury's core should have solidified long ago, putting an end to any magnetic field.

But for me the most interesting measurements will be those concerned with verifing (or not) Einstein's General Theory of Relativity which predicts that that space is 'curved' in the immediate vicinity of massive objects such as the sun. In the case of Mercury, its elleptical orbit means that is should dip into the 'dent' in space as it passes close to the sun. The net result should be that the planet travels an extra 70 thousand kilometres, and this has already been allowed for in Messenger's route. The question being asked is whether relativity is accurate enough or is there another effect that needs to be taken into account. This effect would be due to the (so far theoretical) energy field that is needed to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Cosmologists wait with baited breath for the first verification of this hypothetical energy field that must have operated since the beginning of time, and further evidence that the universe began with a Big Bang, when 'God created the heavens and the earth'.

Mark your calendar - January the 14th 2008.

Modern man gets younger

Boffin — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:22:00 GMT

Conventional wisdom (and textbooks) has it that humans had reached their fully modern form in the mid-Palaeolithic (= old stone age) era hundreds of thousands of years ago, but recent research has suggested that around 40,000 years ago our genes began to evolve much faster.

This fascinating insight into humanity’s development comes from a wide-ranging study of human gene variations variants gathered by the International HapMap project. Investigators at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, studied 3.9 million simple differences in DNA called ‘Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms’ (SNP – pronounced ‘snips’) from 270 individuals in the U.S, including people of Han Chinese, Japanese, Yoruban, and Northern European extraction.

The researchers managed to confirm that 1800 genes – roughly 7% of the total in the human genome – have changed under the influence (apparently) of natural selection within the past 50,000 years. This high level of variations suggest that our rate of evolution as a species must have speeded up considerably, as there has not been time for many SNPs to be weeded out up to now.

The researchers say that this acceleration in our evolution started around 40,000 years until a peak was reached, which occurred in Europeans 5,000 years ago and Yoruban Africans 8,000 years ago.

Those of who take the biblical account seriously can’t help linking this with the account of early man recorded in Genesis chapter 2. Biblical scholars have concluded from the (albeit incomplete) genealogical lists given for kings, and other archaeological clues, that Adam and Eve – the couple from whom we are all descended - must have lived at least 6,000 and at most 60,000 years ago.

(Note: there is no scientific disagreement with the fact that everyone who is alive today is descended from a single pair of humans. The only point of disagreement between science and the Bible would be that the Bible apparently indicates that all humans who have ever lived were descended from the same couple.)

It seem that something very special happened 40,000 years ago that has made us what we are as humans, and distinctly different from other primates. And in the biblical account of creation, it is only of Man that the bible says poetically “God breathed into his nostrils the spirit of life”. That surely made him/her uniquely human, sharing something of the life of God himself, and thus ‘made in His image’.

Reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI:10.1073/pnas.0707650104

Beyond Belief

admin — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:37:00 GMT

Last week I sat down to write a post on the continuing rise of 'atheistic fundamentalism' led by Prof ("The God Delusion") Dawkins, but I have put that on one side for a moment to comment on an interesting symposium that took place at about the same time as I was collecting my thoughts.

Some of the best minds in science have just gathered in the seaside resort of La Jolla in California (well even scientists need to have some fun!) for the second 'Beyond Belief' symposium. At last year's symposium there was an outbreak of proselytising atheism (what some are calling 'Atheistic Fundamentalism'). The speakers almost to a man hammered home what they saw as the virtues of the new atheism.

According New Scientist magazine (10 Nov 2007) that gathering made much of the idea that humans can be 'moral' without believing in God, and that science should do away with religion altogether. The mood of this year's conference was altogether different.

While all delegates agreed that rational evidence-based thinking should always be the basis of how we live our lives, it was also conceded that people are sometimes irrational (or should that be non-rational?) beings by nature and that faith, religion culture, and emotion must be recognized as part of what it means to be human.

Edward Slingerland, and expert in human cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, pointed out that 'Religion is not going away', and that even scientists rely on moral values - a set of distinctly unscientific beliefs. Eg: where does our conviction that human rights are universal come from?. 'Human rights to me are as mysterious as the holy trinity' Slingerland confessed to the audience. 'You can't do a CT scan to show where human rights are. It's not an empirical thing, it's just something we strongly believe in.'

Stuart Kaufmnan of the University of Calgary, an expert in complex systems and the origin of life pointed out that no matter how far science advances, there will be aspects of nature that remain unknowable.

Prof Dawkins in his famous book takes an altogether different view: that science has explained or will one day explain everything, and that already God can be explained away by pointing to an area of the brain that is responsible for such a belief. In asserting this he has fallen into the trap of 'the fallacy of nothing-buttery' (eg the brain is 'nothing but' a biological computer ...) that was first highlighted by Donald Mackay when he was professor of Communication at Keele University two decades ago.

The song writer David in the Bible reflects on the fact that our bodies are ingeniously designed - 'fearfully and wonderfully made' as he puts it. (Psalm 139 verse 14) . Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that we can also reflect on this in awe and wonder, as David did, and praise God for it.

More of that anon.

Of molluscs and men

Boffin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:30:00 GMT

Marine biologists are very excited this week over a clam that was dredged alive from the bottom of the seabed off the coast of Iceland, and which had reached its 405th birthday!

This mollusc, nicknamed Ming, briefly took over from Harriet, the giant Galapagos tortoise, who will be 175 next week (The Independent), as the world’s oldest living animal. I say ‘briefly’ because, sadly, the 3.4 inch Ming is no longer alive, having been eaten before anyone realised how old he actually was.
(Times Online)

Much like trees grow ring patterns, the shells of molluscs grow rapidly (rapidly for a mollusc that is) during the summer when the seas are slightly warmer and food more plentiful, while lying dormant during the winter months, resulting in 0.1mm thick layers in their shells that can be counted, like the rings of trees. Ming has 405 of these layers, which dates his emergence as a larva to the time of the Ming dynasty in China (OK you guessed –that’s why the mollusc was named Ming), or about the time when Shakespeare was penning the immortal words ‘to be or not to be…’ .

Leaving aside what he tasted like, this exciting find raises two important questions:

what is it about this particular specimen that enabled him/her to live so long?
how much longer might Ming have lived, if he/she has not been eaten?

Molluscs live a rather boring life. They don’t really compete with each other for food, there are not many predators around, and they don’t do much in the way of reproducing and raising families, and receive no emails. They just quietly filter plankton from sea water for the nutrients they need to survive and reproduce.

Biologist speculate that this low-stress low-metabolic rate living might be part of the answer, but are trying to find out from the shell (which is all we have of Ming now) , with the aid of £40,000 grant from ‘Help the Aged’, if there are any other secrets that would contribute to human longevity.

All of which reminded me of another longevity record – the biblical Methuselah, who was the son of Enoch and grandfather of Noah, and clocked out at 969 years old according to the account in Genesis Chapter 5. (An age just over twice that of Ming the mollusc)

Of course there has been a lot of scoffing about the great ages of the biblical Patriarchs (‘ancient myths’ etc) because in modern times only one person in a billion lives past their 116th birthday.

Interestingly, stories from the ancient Akkadian and Sumerian cultures also tell of extraordinary long life spans, and they claim that their most ancient kings lived a thousand years. Fourth century Babylonian historian Berosus drew from archives in Marduk’s temple to name 10 kings who lived before ‘a great deluge’, who live thousands of years each. The Weld-Blundell prism, which dates back to the third millennium BC, and the Nippur tablets, also list ten pre-flood kings who lived thousands of years (not implying that kings lived longer than everyone else, but no one else was considered important enough to have their lives recorded in expensive stone tablets.)

The bible records in Genesis Chapter 6 that, after the Flood, God exponentially shortened the life span of humans to 120 years, but it doesn’t say how he effected this change. Can science offer any explanation?

I am going to summarise a complex argument here, but one of the major factors limiting human longevity today is the fact that the number of times cells can reproduce is limited because the ends of the chromosomes get ‘frayed’, and shorter and shorter so that eventually important genes fail to get replicated. Once such damage occurs, damaged cells cannot be reproduced.

A higher level of the enzyme telomerase would help prevent this, but would also make the cells more susceptible to cancerous growth in the event of mutations, most of which are a result of the cosmic radiation that the earth is now ‘enjoying’.

It turns out that around the time of the great deluge (eg Noah’s Flood), 20 to 30 thousand years ago, there was a supernova explosion ‘near’ the earth (known to astronomers as the Vela supernova). It would have been seen in the sky at about the size we see the moon from earth, but faded over time until the cosmic radiation source is now the only evidence of its existence.

Whether or not this is the only factor, this, together with Ming the mollusc, helps to give some unexpected scientific credence to the long lives of the pre-flood ancient peoples of Mesopotamia, and an explanation of why no-one today lives longer than 120 years.

So Happy Birthday, ex-Ming.

Read ‘The Genesis Question’ by Hugh Ross

See article 'Long Life Spans' on the website 'Reasons to believe'

There might be giants

Boffin — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 14:01:00 GMT

I was standing at the departure gate in Dallas Fort Worth airport, waiting for a flight back to London when I saw I sight that has been etched in my memory ever since - the Dallas Mavericks basketball team checking in at the adjacent gate.

What was so remarkable about that? Well, these guys were all at least 7 feet (2.1m) tall! At 5ft 8ins, I felt like a midget next to them. I had never stood next to anyone that tall, before or since .

It all came back to me when I read about the 56-year-old Mongolian herdsman who stands 7ft 9ins (2.36m) tall. He recently kindly provided a photo opportunity for the world's media by marrying his sweetheart from the same Mongolian village, and who only comes up to his elbow.

However, even he does not come up to the stature of the worlds tallest man in documented history - Robert Wadlow, who lived in the small town of Alton, Illinois, in the U.S.A. At
the age of 5 he was already taller than his grandmother, and and eventually reached 2.71m (almost 9 ft). (Archive B&W footage)

These ultra-tall individuals are often a result of 'pituitary gigantism'. Growth hormone excess is the single condition which accounts for nearly all cases of pathologic extreme height. The excess growth hormone usually results from oversecretion by a group of somatotrope cells of the anterior pituitary gland (termed a "somatotrope adenoma"). These cells do not respond to normal controls of growth or function. Other health problems are associated with this problem, not to mention the problems of getting clothes, furniture, and a bed to lie on.

By contrast, there are some very tall but immensely fit basketball players, who have reached their enormous size through a combination of genes and a healthy diet, the tallest currently being Sun Ming Ming (unless you know differently? If so please sign in and leave a comment.) who, at 7ft 9 inches (2.36m) doesn't have to jump to reach the basket. He recently signed for Fuerza Regia in Monterrey, Mexico.

The ancient Phillistines found a good use for their giant, Goliath, who was shooter for the Gath Warriors basketball team. (OK, I admit I made that last bit up). In a stalemate in the ongoing war between the Israelites and the Phillistines they put forward their champion Goliath and challenged the Israelites to find a champion on their side to come out and fight him, the result of that fight to determine who would be the slaves of whom. You'll find the full story in the OT of the Bible, the first book of Samuel ch 17

The Bible says Goliath was '6 and a half cubits', translated as 'over nine feet', or a little taller than the aforementioned Robert Wadlow. The Israelite army under King Saul just didn't have anyone who stood a chance against him in a man-to-man fight to the death .

In this dramatic account, young David, a teenage shepherd, came forward. Rejecting the heavy armour that was offered him, he wisely decided to keep his distance. Instead he put a stone through Goliath's forehead with an accurate sling shot, before getting close enough to grab the giant's sword and finish the job.

Now you may be wondering where we're going with all this...

In the recent past such 'tall stories' have been the occasion of much scepticism amongst critics of the Bible. These accounts were used as 'evidence' that the Bible was 'myth' rather than factual, and therefore could not be trusted on historical facts (and by implication, any other matters).

Thanks to our Mongolian friend, the sport of basketball, and medical science - we now know that men can indeed be 9 ft tall. It seems that. once again, the Bible is credible and reliable after all.

Watch a video clip about David and Goliath

Read about David and Goliath in the Bible

Surprise - the Old Testament is historically accurate!

Boffin — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:42:00 GMT

Archimedes was so excited with his discovery of how bodies lost weight when immersed in water that he immediately hopped out of the bath, and allegedly rushed naked into the street yelling triumphantly, 'Eureka! 'Eureka!'.

It was that kind of Eureka moment in the great Arched Room of the British Museum some days ago when Michael Jursa, a visiting prof from Vienna, made what has been called the most important find in Biblical Archaeology in 100 years. 'A discovery that supports the view that the historical books of the Old Testament are based on fact', said the Daily Telegraph. (Those of you who had already reached that conclusion - stay tuned for confirmation evidence).

The aforementioned Arched Room houses a collection of 130,000 Assyrian cuneiform tablets dating back 5,000 years, and Prof Jursa had been rooting through the tablets, looking for Babylonian financial accounts (obviously Assyrian tax collectors never give up...).

Anyway, during this foray among the tablets he came across a name that rang a bell, one Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, described there by a hand 2,500 years old as 'the chief eunuch' of King Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon. (Some readers may not realise that court officials in those days had to be eunuchs for security reasons, so this is not so surprising as you might think. It just means he was head of the civil service).

So the able prof checked the Old Testament and there, in the book of Jeremiah, chapter 39 he read about Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, capturing Jerusalem and 'all the officials came and took seats in the Middle Gate' including a certain 'Nebo Sarsekim, a chief officer'.

Fortunately the good prof knew his ancient languages and recognised that Nabu-sharrussu-ukin in Assyrian sounded the same as Nebo Sarsekim in ancient Hebrew. (You probably already knew that, but it was news to me).

The tablet referred to the payment of some gold to a temple in Babylon (maybe it was tax-deductible even then). It is dated to the 10th year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 595 years BC, and 12 years before the siege of Jerusalem.

Why is this so important? Well, evidence from non-biblical sources of people named in the Bible is not unknown, but Nabu-sharrussu-ukin would have been a relatively insignificant figure. I'll let the prof have the last word:

"If Nebo-Sarsekim existed, which other lesser figures in the Old Testament existed? A throwaway detail in the Old testament turns out to be accurate and true, I think that it means that the whole of the narrative takes on a new kind of power".

Read the Bible passage - Jeremiah 39

Read a newspaper article about the find. Daily Telegraph

Further study: The Old Testament Documents: are they reliable and relevant?

The God Particle

Boffin — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 19:41:00 GMT

I must confess to having a great deal of affection for fundamental particles - electrons, protons, neutrons and their newer cousins -quarks.

Studying ‘A’-Level Physics, I was stunned by the amazing beauty and subtle complexity of the microscopic world of the atom. Surely here was evidence of a creative mind, a divine Intelligence, at work... And so began my personal journey to faith, and a life-changing encounter with the Creator himself.

Since I studied physics, scientists in their search for the Theory of Everything, and the basic building blocks of matter, have been discovering more and more 'fundamental' particles. In fact, over a hundred of them to date.

It is generally agreed that the good old simple protons and neutrons of my school days are made up of even more elementary particles known as 'quarks' (which have lovely descriptions such as 'charm', 'strange', 'bottom', 'top'). All these elementary particles that have been discovered are known collectively as 'hadrons'.

Now, can I introduce you to the Large-Hadron Super-Collider that will soon be completed at CERN in Switzerland? 'Am I bothered?' you might ask. You should be, because it is costing you and me and other taxpayers about 8 billion Euros.

But first some geek stuff...

Under the Standard Model of fundamental particles and interactions, physicists have classified 16 particles that make up all matter. But the sums don’t quite add up for the Standard Model to be true if these particles are considered alone. If only 16 particles existed, they would have no mass (don't ask...) - contradicting what we know to be true in nature.

Another particle has to give them this mass. Enter the ‘Higgs boson’, first proposed by University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs and colleagues in the late 1960s. Their theory was that all particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field, called the Higgs field, which is carried by the Higgs 'boson'. The Higgs' is so fundamentally important to the Standard Model that it has led some to dub it the "God particle"

Back to CERN then, where a 12-thousand-tonne particle detector is being buried a hundred metres underground, connected to a custom-built 27-kilometre-long circular tube, surrounded by 1600 massive magnets to keep the beams of particles going round in a circle getting faster and faster, eventually smashing into each other with huge energy (huge for a particle, that is), and hopefully splitting them into pieces.

One of the pieces will hopefully turn out to be the elusive Higgs' bosun. The monster is due to be switched on in 2008, and physicists (and taxpayers) are holding their breath, hoping the God particle will show itself at last.

Meanwhile, some scientists have been wondering if there was a chance of creating a mini- black hole, that would suck half of Switzerland into itself, but these concerns have been apparently allayed (mostly).

As for me, whether they find the God particle or not, I will never cease to be amazed at the wonderful works of the master designer, the Creator of the cosmos, and of the tiniest fundamental particle.

Oh Lord my God When I, in awesome wonder,
Consider all the works your hands have made..
Then sings my soul, my saviour God, to thee
How great thou art, how great thou art.

Read more about fundamental particles

Visit the website of CERN

Read an article at BBC online about the God particle

Read more about the large hadron-collider “Is this the answer to God, the universe and all that? Physicists plan £3bn experiment in a 20-mile long tunnel”

Look up Higgs Boson in Wikipedia

Read the book Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship by John Polkinghorne

The Dawkins Delusion

Boffin — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:23:00 GMT

The Dawkins Delusion - why I don't believe in his existence

1 ) I have never seen him or heard from him
He has never once contacted me to prove he exists. Do you know
anyone reliable who claims to have met him? I don't.

2 ) There is a book that purports to be by him but other than what the book says
about itself I have seen no credible evidence that he did write it - if he exists, which is
I deny.

4 ) The book itself is well known to be full of inaccuracies and contradictions

5 ) Dawkins apostles ram it down your throat

6 ) Many scientists strongly disagree with him on scientific grounds

7 ) Belief in Dawkins is an invention of the mind (a meme if you will) produced by a
widespread fear that God really does exist, and we might have
to face Him one day.

That's it for now, tongue-in-cheek. A more factual comment coming soon

Clive