The Big Why: Particles, Super Colliders and God.

I will must preface this blog by making clear that I am far from being a physicist. In fact when I was at school I primarily focused on the arts. This was not because of lack of interest but rather the fault of a tyrannical science teacher who put the fear of God into me every time he walked in the room.

On one occasion he caught me in the chemistry lab during break playing with potassium, which introduced to water behaves rather like a speed boat. Rather than recognizing this as a sign of my burgeoning interest in science, he only detected rebellion and after a week standing outside of the headmasters office I decided the sciences were not for me.

However I have retained a life long fascination with scientific attempts to understand the origins of life and the makeup of our universe – and have spent much time reflecting on how this relates to my own deep faith in an intelligent creator, the Alpha and Omega. So on a recent trip to Switzerland I couldn’t resist going to see CERN, the incredible outfit on the edge of Geneva where scientist from 100 countries are trying to unpick the fabric of time and space in order to better understand our origins.

The site itself which contains the infamous Large Hadron Collider is enormous.The Collider itself is 27 km long circular machine which lies beneath the outer edges of Geneva and the surrounding vineyard covered countryside.

The Collider was built to try and recreate the first fraction of a second of the universe; te nano second after the Big Bang when time and space were brought into being, when a tiny point of energy started to expand at an incredible rate and transformed into matter and anti-matter. The Collider attempts to recreate that moment by accelerating beams of proton to more than 99.999% of the speed of light and collides them in four directional points, while four vast detectors take snap shots of each collision.

As I stood in the CERN Universe of Particles centre watching projected macro and micro images of our galaxy swirl around my head, it struck me that despite the awesomeness of is undertaking, as we explore our universe at this micro level, there seem to be more questions than answers. For example, when particles and anti-particles meet they usually destroy each other leaving only radiation, so why did a small amount of the ‘right’ kind of matter survive in order to go on to make up the universe and eventually us (the Collider will be used to test Andrei Sakharov’s theories about this) and where did all the anti-matter go to?

It seems that the kind of questions now being explored by physicists require them to move into the kind of mysterious realms more often occupied by theologians; almost requiring a leap of faith.

Take for example the matter of additional dimensions. Also being explored at CERN. The whole concept is being explored because of string theory which provides a unifying description of all forces including gravity by describing fundamental particles as little vibrating strings of energy. But string theory only works in a world with nine dimensions of space instead of three.

Scientists at CERN are now conducting experiments to potentially measure these additional dimensions by colliding particles so strongly that they can disappear into these hidden dimensions. The plan is to measure the energy of all the particles involved and subtract the energy of the initial collision, on the basis that if some energy is missing it would be a sign that they have disappeared into these alternative dimensions.

As I listened to this I recalled a story I heard in Outback about an ancient belief that the physical world is connected to a subtle or psychic dimension, and that this other dimension, or the Dreamtime, actually exists beyond the speed of light. This Dreamtime is a dimension where thought is a powerful force and where time as we know it stands still. Have these indigenous people known something instinctively for 30,000 years that scientists in CERN are now trying to unlock?

Of course the scientists in CERN stop short of asking theological questions such as what sparked the Big Bang and how do the idea of other dimensions relate to our understanding of heaven – also created by God and to be renewed along with earth in the end. They focus on the ‘how’ but underlying all this exploration is the deep need to know ‘why’. It is as if mankind were hardwired with a question mark deep in our souls and these scientists are no less seekers of truth than the faithful I went on to join a week later at the Burgundian monastery of Taize. We are all simply searching for truth and the deeper we delve, the closer we come to God.

Kate Nicholas’s latest book Sea Changed can be found at Christian bookstores around the UK and online at eden.co.uk and Amazon worldwide,