For those Latin scholars please forgive any syntax or grammar discrepancies as the headline suggests March has been a month for major developments. Apart from market or political based events which drive the economic or social lives of people on planet today. There have been a couple of other events one religious and one scientific I think warrant a mention. I further ask if there should be a conference or council of science and religion to discuss the nature of reality and whether science and theology could ever agree a final understanding or theory of everything which satisfies their long contest in search of the truth of creation.
Firstly, the Roman Catholic Church has elected its first Jesuit Pope and in over a thousand years someone from outside Europe namely Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Secondly, recent data from the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva further backs up the first announcement last summer of experimental evidence of the existence of the Higgs Boson which theoretically provides mass to matter. First predicted in the early 1960s by Professor Peter Higgs from Edinburgh provides another step forward in completing The Standard Model of particle physics as a means of understanding the Universe. The LHC cost about $8 Billion which seems on reflection small beer compared to the 2008 banking bail out when its use is to discover the wonders of the universe and the nature of reality.
Pope Francis 1st has an arduous task ahead with calls for reform of the Roman Curia, corruption and abuse scandals and the arguments over homosexuality within the Church being some of the difficulties he faces. How much time he and his cardinals will have in discussing the nature of reality and the immanence of God and ineffability of His being may be limited more to the pity as theoretical physics has been making steady progress over recent times with new discoveries.
Scientific experiments such as Atlas are now testing and providing evidence for these theorems like the Higgs Boson with huge amounts data recorded and analysed by advanced computers. Care, of course, needs to be taken with analysing complex data as people have a natural propensity to see patterns in random data to confirm evidence as people don’t like ambiguity and doubt. Therefore, the announcements of supporting data for evidence of the Higgs so far have not been absolute in their certainty but cautiously optimistic.
Almost in contrast observing the election of a new Pope with all its spectacle and secrecy how well it serves the modern media by providing a fascinating show with lots of visual practices (a feature long associated with Roman Catholicism) without any more information or discussion of why the Pope retains his religious authority in an increasingly secular world. An issue the Vatican (and protestant churches) are concerned about. The previous Pope Benedict 16th mentioned the secularisation of society in several speeches during his papacy.
There clearly endures a deep human need for both scientific and religious understanding of the universe we live in and the nature of that reality. People still want the certainty and cohesion of organised anthropomorphic beliefs to bring them hope and eternal salvation in a chaotic world. Yet this co-exists with a strong desire to push to the extremes of knowledge and depths of the earliest universe in order to understand the fabric of reality expressed so eloquently by the yet incomplete Standard Model of particle physics.
Debate between these antagonists of truth should always continue let’s hope that Pope Francis can find the time as the scientists are making all the running at the moment. The search for dark matter and dark energy that makes up the vast majority of the fabric of the Universe is already under way not to mention several more dimensions and multiverse theories and ‘branes.
I wonder how much it will cost to build something to test these theories perhaps no more in real terms than the magnificent medieval cathedrals still standing when Roman Catholicism was at it undisputed zenith of knowledge and authority.
LDC