WHY I KNOW GOD EXISTS ¡ ¡ JoLynn ¡Gower ¡ 493-‑6151 ¡ jgower@guardingthetruth.org ¡ 1 ¡
VERSE FOR THE JOURNEY • Colossians 1:16-17 For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. • Hebrews 1:1-3 God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. 2 ¡
THE GOD PARTICLE (Higgs) • “The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 gigaelectron volts (GeV) This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.” Stephen Hawking • Of course, Hawing says we don’t have a collider powerful enough to do that. Oh good. • The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory first suspected to exist in the 1960s. 3 ¡
THE BIG BANG DEFICIT • As we discussed earlier, one problem with the Big Bang theory is that it only discussed what happened after the “bang” • It doesn’t say what made it go “bang” • Obviously, something came from nothing – but scientists wonder if it did… • Question: where does mass come from? • The “Higgs field” • Scientists supporting this “field” convinced the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to construct a large hadron collider (LHC) • Became operational on 9/10/2008 Prior to the LHC going online, the largest collider in the world was in Chicago at the Fermi labs 4 ¡
WHY THE HIGGS? • Why has the Higgs been the subject of so much hype, funding, and (mis)information? • 1. It was the last hold-out particle remaining hidden during the quest to check the accuracy of the Standard Model of Physics. This meant its discovery would validate more than a generation of scientific publication. • 2. The Higgs is the particle which gives other particles their mass, making it both centrally important and seemingly magical. • We tend to think of mass as an intrinsic property of all things, yet physicists believe that without the Higgs boson, mass fundamentally doesn’t exist. 5 ¡
EXPLANATION • The infamous Higgs particle has a weighty task: It grants all the other elementary particles their mass. Without it, they — we — would zip around frantically at the speed of light, too foot-loose to form atoms. But how does the Higgs do it? • Let’s think of sports and syrup. • First, each of the elementary particles acquires its unique set of attributes by interacting with invisible entities called fields. Like football fields, these are large stages upon which individuals run around and sometimes crash together. • But unlike football fields, the fields of physics are three- dimensional, and extend infinitely in all directions 6 ¡
EXAMPLE • One such field is the electromagnetic (EM) field — like you can feel at magnet poles which exists everywhere around us • Subatomic particles interact with the EM field depending on their electric charges. For example, electrons, whose charge is -1, tend to move through the field and clump together with positively charged protons. • Like a sports field with its corresponding ball, each field of physics has a corresponding particle. The EM field is associated with the photon, or particle of light. This correspondence plays out in two ways: 1. when the EM field is "excited,” – its energy flared up in a certain spot, that flare-up is a photon. 2. they experience the field by absorbing and emitting a constant stream of "virtual photons” that pop in and out of existence just for the purpose of mediating the particle-field interaction. 7 ¡
HIGGS FIELD INTERACTIONS • There is a similar field called a Higgs Field; its more like pancake syrup than a football field • Except for photons and gluons, that are massless, all elementary particles get their mass from the Higgs Field PROTON ¡= ¡ 2 ¡UP ¡ QUARKS ¡ & ¡1 ¡DOWN ¡ QUARK ¡ ¡ NEUTRON ¡= ¡ 2 ¡DOWN ¡ QUARKS ¡ & ¡1 ¡UP ¡ QUARK ¡ ¡ 8 ¡
THE CORPULENT PROBLEM • In the late 1940s, theorists showed that a quantum field theory of photons and electrons could successfully explain electromagnetic interactions at high energy. • The 2013 Nobel Prize went to François Englert and Peter Higgs who independently derived a model explaining why particles are not massless, and this model requires the existence of the Higgs boson. Both papers were published in 1964 in Physical Review Letters . • Some particles have a harder time trudging through the syrupy Higgs field than others, and as a result, they're heavier. • However, it isn't known why certain particles, such as the extremely corpulent top quark, are thousands of times more encumbered by the Higgs field than are lightweight particles, such as electrons and neutrinos. 9 ¡
CERN AND THE LHC • Particles trudge through the Higgs field by exchanging virtual Higgs particles with it. And a real Higgs particle surfaces when the field becomes excited, like a slosh of the syrup. Detecting such a slosh (i.e. the particle) is how physicists can be sure the syrup (i.e. the field) exists. • “You have to get enough energy to excite the field so that it looks like a particle to us. Otherwise we don't know the field is there.” • The purpose of the LHC is to look for the “slosh” • Some have worried about opening black holes, opening parallel universes, etc. • In fact, when CERN rebooted with enhanced power, many were afraid that “portals to hell” were opened 10 ¡
REAL? PHOTOSHOPPED? 11 ¡
LHC DANGEROUS? PROBABLY NOT • Stars throw off tons of material every second. Supernovas blast star stuff across the cosmos. Neutron stars can use intense magnetic fields to accelerate particles from one side of the universe to another. Pairs of orbiting black holes can merge, shaking the very fabric of space itself. • These phenomena, and others, cause subatomic particles, mostly protons to be flung across space and travel the lengths of the universe, stopping only when a bit of matter gets in their way. Occasionally, that bit of matter is the Earth. We call these particles “cosmic rays." Cosmic rays carry a range of energies, from almost negligible, to energies that dwarf those of the LHC. • The LHC collides particles together with a total energy of 13 trillion electron volts (TeV). The highest-energy cosmic ray ever recorded was an unfathomable 300,000,000 TeV of energy. 12 ¡
DO WE EVEN CARE? • Apart from being really interesting, at least to me, we are getting a glimpse into the intricacies of what God created • For a long time, scientists have believed that there are dimensions in our universe that we can’t see – they have even theorized “multiverses” • One theory is that there were other universes that came into being at the Big Bang (think creation) and collapsed in ways that enable us to experience only 4 dimensions in this one. • The Bible talks about dimensions we can’t see • …all things have been created through Him and for Him. • 1 Timothy 1:17 Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. 13 ¡
NO KIDDING, SOLOMON • Ecclesiastes 1:13-18 And I set my mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven. It is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with. I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be straightened and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said to myself, "Behold, I have magnified and increased wisdom more than all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has observed a wealth of wisdom and knowledge.” And I set my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly; I realized that this also is striving after wind. Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain. 14 ¡
IMPORTANT POINTS • Scientists are making things happen: they are observing and describing the way God made things happen • Jesus is eternal; what we know of Earth now is not: John 8:58 Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am." • God existed before any of what we observe or describe: John 17:5 Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was. • It is nearly impossible to describe the efforts being undertaken at the LHC to engineer, construct and use such an amazing piece of equipment • It is impossible to describe the intricacies of design and complexity seen at every turn in the universe that God created 15 ¡
BOOK OF THE WEEK 16 ¡
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