What if I tell you that a 17-mile particle collider near Geneva has the possibility of creating a black hole that would swallow the earth or develop "strangelets" that would vaporize the earth in a chain reaction sometime in July (or August) by the time you read this post? By "swallow" and "vaporize" I means completely gone, sucked into and trapped inside the black hole, crushed by gravitational force so massive that all matters are compacted into something of massive density.
Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is finishing up the construction of an underground ring that is 17 miles (27 kilometers) in circumference, 300 feet (25 meters) below the surface of the earth somewhere near Geneva. There are sensors at four specific locations around the ring (the largest one is seven stories tall and the heaviest is heavier than the Eiffel Tower). The diameter of the tunnel is about nine adults stacked head to toe on top of one another.
Two beams of atomic particles will be accelerated up to almost the speed of light, guided by all the massive supercooled magnets, and then made to collide at four locations where the sensors are located. The collision will produce enough energy to throw the particles into different directions. It kind of reminded me of how I used to take toys/equipments apart to see what they are made of when I was younger (I still do).
That supercool machinery is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). And it is built to find the evidence of the Higgs bosons. And because of the extremely short span of life of the bosons, only their effects can be observed.
When I was in high school not too long ago (alright, a 20-year long ago), I was told that an atom is made up of electrons orbiting a nucleus of protons and neutrons. Nowadays, there are weird names like quarks, leptons, hadrons, baryons, mesons, muons, neutrinos, and positrons. So far, it has been identified that everything in the universe is made up of 12 basic building blocks (fundamental particles) governed by four fundamental forces (see more here). Scientists called this the Standard Model. A good and friendly place to attempt to learn all about this is here. (Have fun!)
There is only a "small" problem with the model, an essential ingredient of it, a particle called the Higgs boson (popularized by the name the "God particle") has yet to be found in an experiment.
Other unsolved mysteries are:
(1) All the visible objects in the observable universe (so far it is about 10 billion light years in radius like a 3-dimensional ball, who knows what is the real size of the universe) only accounts for 4% of its total mass. How do they know that? By observing the gravitational effects in the universe because mass directly affects gravitational force. Where are the other 96% of its mass?
(2) Current science best guess of the origin of the universe is something called the Big Bang Theory, in the beginning there was this single particle of unimaginable density. Something or someone (of course no respectable scientist would dare to use the "someone" or are there?) caused this particle to explode into the universe, theoretically producing equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would cancel each other out. Instead the universe is clearly, full of stuff. Why was the matter favored and won out over the antimatter?
(3) The discoveries of the Higgs boson might also account for the missing mass in an atom, because the fundamental particles are theoretically almost massless. Even with all the known fundamental particles, we are still missing 99.999999999999% of the mass of the atom.
More unsolved mysteries here. That page is just the beginning, make sure you clicked on the right arrow to see the complete list of unsolved mysteries.
See the conceptual picture of the collision here. And the whole set of resources at the National Geographic here. You got to see the photos of the particle accelerator. It is cool.
Why do I bring all this up? (1) I am fascinated with all these enormously tiny particles and the enormously big universe. Assuming we are at the center of the observable universe, it would take ten billion years if we travel at the speed of light (which is theoretically impossible because as soon as you reach the speed of light you are disintegrated into particles) to get out this big ball space of this observable universe as we know it, (2) how about the universe within our bodies, we have barely scratched the surface of the biochemical processes going on inside our bodies, (3) this coincide with the study of the book of Genesis chapter 1.
With every major breakthrough in scientific discovery, we become more perplexed and realized how much we don't know.
When Genesis chapter 1 is mentioned, we usually are drawn to "evolution" versus "creation." What is the origin of the universe? Instead I would like to focus on the first verse.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
How can all this wonderful universe without and within happens by chance? What makes the leptons tied to the hadrons and not just take off, disintegrating the atoms and the matter?
The beginning of Genesis 1 introduces God as the one without beginning, without opposition, and without limitations of power. His existence does not need any explanation. "In the beginning God ...." He is the one creating and organizing the universe without and within us.
The key to understanding the relationship between the Genesis creation account and science can only be best understood by first determining the literary genre of Gen 1:1 -2:3.
We will continue this discussion in the next posting.
