Discovering the Origins of the Universe

A few years ago the Church exonerated Galileo Galilei. In March, it announced that it's going so far as to erect a statue of Galileo inside the Vatican walls.

In 1995, the Cardinal in charge of reviewing the Galileo trial gave this explanation and statement about the relation of faith and science:

Science and Faith

A second and immensely important area is the relationship between science and faith. I had the honour to be President of the interdisciplinary Commission that, at the request of the Pope, investigated the Galileo Case. That sad and symbolic episode, we discovered, was born mainly from the limitations of the culture of the time: it lacked the intellectual tools to distinguish between methodologies and fields of knowledge. Thus the theologians who judged Galileo were unable to see that the Bible does not make claims about the physical world as such. As a result they were mistaken in transposing "into the realm of the doctrine of the faith a question that in fact pertained to scientific investigation" (John Paul II, L'Osservatore Romano, English edition, 3 November 1992, pp. 1-2).

In the last century there were other tensions between theology and science in the field of creation itself: one thinks of the initial panic about Darwin's theories. But today what is striking is a new and mutual openness between science and religion. Undoubtedly this was helped by the clear recognition of the "rightful independence of science" by Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes § 36) and also by the healing of wounds through the initiatives of the Holy Father concerning Galileo. Besides, both science and theology have learned new forms of humility. Possibly the most significant shift within the field of science is the abandonment of a mechanistic model of reality and the move towards a new sense of mystery especially in cosmology and astrophysics.
How can we really grasp the staggering fact that the universe is about fifteen billion years old? For the theologian today, in fact "cosmic evolution can be considered as something entirely logical if one supposes that God did not wish to create a fully realized universe and that he chose to rely on the cooperation of natural causes" (Mariano Artigas, "Science et foi: nouvelles perspectives", in Après Galilée: science et foi - nouveau dialogue, ed. Paul Poupard, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1994, p. 210). Here I am doing no more than evoking horizons of friendship between science and religion that were unimaginable in the culture of even a few decades ago.

This "new sense of mystery . . . in cosmology and astrophysics" is exemplified by the exciting new scientific experiments being planned to test the origins of the universe. The most recent is the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

MSNBC described the Hadron Collider as follows:

The machine is the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, or LHC — the most powerful, most expensive particle-blaster ever invented. On Wednesday, Europe's CERN particle-physics lab is due to start shooting beams of protons through the LHC's 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) ring of tunnels beneath the French-Swiss border, near Geneva.
It will take months for the machine to reach full power. But eventually, those protons will be whipped up to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, slamming together with the energy of two bullet trains colliding head-on. Underground detectors as big as cathedrals will track the subatomic wreckage on a time scale of billionths of a second. Billions of bits of data will be sent out every second for analysis.

The theories the collider is expected to test are fascinating.

Some of the key mysteries that stem from these clashing theories include why gravity is so weak, relative to the other fundamental physical forces such as electromagnetism and why the universe is so large. These issues come up because on an inconceivably small scale, the particles that make up our world seem to behave completely differently than one might imagine.

For example, if you are driving a car, your GPS tells you where you are, and your speedometer tells you how fast you are moving. But on the scale of particles like electrons, it is impossible to know both position and speed at once; the very act of trying to find out requires incredible amounts of energy.

If it takes so much energy just to try to pin down a particle, then, in theory, all particles should have temporary energy changes around them called "quantum fluctuations." This energy translates into mass, since Einstein famously said that mass and energy are interchangeable through the equation E=mc2.

"It makes it extremely mysterious that the electron, or indeed, everything else that we know and love and are made of, isn't incredibly more massive than it is," Arkani-Hamed said. A theory that has emerged in recent decades that claims to bring some relief to physics mysteries like these is called superstring theory, or string theory for short. Previously, scientists believed that the smallest, most indivisible building blocks of our world were particles, but string theory says the world is made of
extremely small vibrating loops called strings. In order for these strings to properly constitute our universe, they must vibrate in 11 dimensions, scientists say. Everyone observes three spatial dimensions and one for time, but theoretical models suggest at least seven others that we do not see.

Arkani-Hamed proposed, along with physicists Savas Dimopoulos and Gia Dvali, that some of these dimensions are larger than previously thought -- specifically, as large as a millimeter. Physicists call this the ADD model, after the first initials of the authors' last names. We haven't seen these extra dimensions because gravity is the only force that can wander around them, Arkani-Hamed said.

String theory has come under attack because some say it can never be tested; the strings are supposed to be smaller than any particle ever detected, after all. But Arkani-Hamed says the Large Hadron Collider could lead to the direct observation of strings, or at least indirect evidence of their existence.

In 2006, a physics professor from Notre Dame, Professor Anthony Hyder, gave the keynote address at our club's Universal Notre Dame Night. While most of his talk was on the state of the University, the professor answered questions afterwards. One of the questions asked, "What is the current 'big question' that physicists are trying to answer?" Professor Hyder answered something to the effect of "Where is all of the matter in the universe? Our calculations tell us there should be 70% more matter than what we know about, so where is the rest?" Among its many experiments, the Hadron Collider is expected to provide information related to the questions,

Why is most of that mass hidden?
Where did all the antimatter go?

Notre Dame professors are participating in the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC.

Notre Dame physicists Mitchell Wayne, Randal Ruchti, Michael Hildreth, Colin Jessop and Kevin Lannon are responsible for the development of the optical readout for the hadron calorimeter in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector, one of two large, all-purpose detectors that will be utilized in the LHC experiments. A research faculty member, a postdoctoral fellow and three graduate students from the University were at the LHC today as test operations began.

Here at Dayton Domer Digest, we're guessing they discover something unexpected and mysterious.