Faith Science - The Science of Christian Faith

On November 11, 2009, the headline on CNN.com said, “Huge

$10 billion collider resumes hunt for God particle.” That

article, written by CNN reporter Elizabeth Landau, pushed atomic

and molecular physics to the forefront of popular culture for at least

one day. The story highlights read as follows: “The Large Hadron

Collider (LHC) will circulate a beam around the tunnel within two

weeks. CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) scientists

say an electrical failure caused a major shut-down of the collider

in September 2008. The full scientific program for the LHC

will probably last more than 20 years. The LHC will look for the

Higgs boson, quarks, gluons and other small particles.”

Antoine Lavoisier is commonly referred to as the father of modern

chemistry. In 1789, he formulated the law of conservation of

mass, which in simple terms states that matter is neither created nor

destroyed. This is an approximate physical law that loses its credibility

in terms of mass conservation when physical matter changes

to a form without measurable mass.

Albert Einstein, the most famous theoretical physicist in history,

disproved the conclusions drawn by Lavoisier and took the concept a

step further. His discovery of special relativity and the related equation

of mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2, showed a relationship between

mass and energy. This allows for mass to practically disappear during

a chemical reaction and be changed into mass-less energy.

Withal, this still proved that if energy is considered a type of matter,

the simple interpretation of Lavoisier’s conclusions still applies.

Hence, even though mass in its traditional sense is not always conserved,

matter, whether or not it has physically measurable mass,

always is. Therefore, while things that exist can change form, science

has proven that everything in existence has always been in existence

and will always be in existence.

One part of the Standard Model mentioned in the earlier chapter

“Matter versus Antimatter” which cannot be fully understood by

scientists is how fundamental particles have mass. The most popular

proposal is the Higgs Mechanism, which suggests the role of a particle

called the Higgs Boson. In an article called “Ask the Experts,”

published by Scientific American on October 21, 1999, the following

questions were posed: “What exactly is the Higgs Boson? Have

physicists proved that it really exists?”

Chris Quigg, a researcher in the theoretical physics department

at FERMILAB, said, “Over the next fifteen years, we should begin

to find a real understanding of the origin of mass. The interest lies

not just in the arcana of accelerator experiments but suffuses everything

in the world around us: mass is what determines the range of

forces and sets the scale of all the structures we see in nature.”

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research

(CERN) in Geneva along the Franco-Swiss border with the Large

Hadron Collider and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

(FERMILAB) near Chicago, Illinois, with the Tevatron Collider

have been actively involved in some important research. In an effort

to identify the source of mass, they are currently seeking ways to

definitively isolate the Higgs Boson, or God Particle. According to

the Merriam Webster Dictionary, the Higgs Boson is “a hypothetical

elementary particle that has zero spin and large mass that is required

by some gauge theories to account for the masses of other elementary

particles.”

Therefore, they are attempting to prove what has been accepted

theoretically for a long time. Apparently, elementary particles essentially

have no measurable mass without the Higgs Boson. Thus, the absence or presence of measurable mass does not define the existence

of a particle. Based on this theory, all particles actually exist

apart from mass that can be quantified. If you can understand this

simple fact, it will revolutionize the way you think about everything

in life. We have always known that visibility does not define existence

because many essential elements in life are invisible, like the

air we breathe.

Yet, it was understood that even invisible elements have some

level of infinitesimal mass. Now scientific researchers are out to

prove that particles in existence can be both invisible and massless.

When God created the earth, could it be that he combined

the Higgs Boson with invisible, mass-less particles that were already

in existence? Why not? If that’s what gives a particle its mass, isn’t

every particle in existence essentially mass-less apart from the Higgs

Boson? So when we consider items with mass to be more real than

items without mass, we make as much scientific sense as a person

who concludes that something doesn’t exist because it can’t be seen.

I spent the summer of 2000 working on a cosmology project at

the Berkeley National Laboratory in California with several other

students. The lab was run by University of California Berkeley professor

Dr. George Smoot. We invested our time and other people’s

money in removing rotational noise from the Cosmic Microwave

Background Rotating Polarimeter Experiment (CMB ROPE).

Over several years, with the support of National Aeronautics and

Space Administration (NASA), millions of dollars were spent on

the cosmology projects run by Dr. Smoot.

His amazing discoveries enhanced our understanding of the Cosmic

Microwave Background and provided strong evidence for the big

bang theory. His main research project was called the Cosmic Background

Explorer (COBE), and some estimate its total cost to be $160

million US dollars. It was a smashing success, earning him the 2006

Nobel Prize in physics. Even though it answered many questions

about the origins of the universe, it also left many unanswered. Several

follow-up projects were launched, and I guarantee that this type

of research will continue until scientists run out of money, patience, or time. They will never be able to answer all the possible questions that

arise. Fortunately, that’s why we have the Bible.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence

of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by

the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made

of things which do appear.

Hebrews 11:1–3 kjv