Collider May Provide Proof for String Theory of Physics

Physicist Brian Greene

The following article is from the Deseret Morning News, October 11, 2007. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Joe Bauman, Deseret Morning News Reporter — One of the most significant moments in the history of science may come after a new particle collider starts work this year beneath the Swiss-French border, according to a renowned physicist, Brian Greene.

The Large Hadron Collider just might prove that the controversial "theory of everything," string theory, is true.

Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, New York City, and author of best-selling books on string theory, spoke Tuesday at Brigham Young University's Marriott Center.

His book, The Elegant Universe, was developed into a three-part series broadcast by PBS. "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality," the title of his latest book, also was the name of the lecture.

"Space and time are the most familiar and yet most enigmatic concepts in science today," Greene said, but they are not what our senses would lead us to believe.

"We are learning that reality is not what we think it is. The very basis of existence is not what we think it is," he said.

At the turn of the 20th century, Albert Einstein asked himself how gravity worked. How could the sun reach across 93 million miles and affect the motion of Earth? He struggled with the question for 10 years.

By 1915, Einstein had come up with the General Theory of Relativity as an answer. Einstein pictured space-time as something like a big rubber sheet. When something massive, like the sun, weighs down a portion of the sheet, it causes a distortion in it, and a smaller object will roll around and around the pit.

"Einstein says take that idea and apply it to the cosmos," Greene said. Thus, a planet will circle the sun because the sun causes a deformation, like a pit, in the fabric of space-time.

Rather than static, fixed features, "space and time can actually do something. Space and time push things around," he said. Each person "affects the shape of space; in fact, the shape of time as well."

General Relativity works beautifully on the large scale. But scientists realized that Einstein's ideas were in conflict with another proven theory, that of quantum mechanics, which covers the very small scale.

"Quantum mechanics is a very mysterious, strange, really mind-boggling subject," Greene said.
Quantum effects have been proven in the laboratory. The ideas "are confirmed by experimental observation." A famous feature of quantum mechanics is that one may know one aspect of an electron, such as its speed, without being able to know another, such as its position — and vice versa.

On the large scale, Einstein's laws show the smooth, predictable actions of relatively big phenomena. But on a tiny scale, things are "chaotic," Greene said.
When Einstein's theories were applied to extremely small things, "the laws made wrong predictions."

String theory accommodates both sets of laws. It holds that each subatomic particle actually is an incredibly minute vibrating filament of energy. The frequency of the vibration determines whether the particle is a quark or an electron, for example.

Vibrating strings define space, time and everything in existence, many scientists believe. The theory "winds up fixing" the conflict between the laws of the large and the small.

But if string theory is correct, "it says something really wild," Greene said. It fails when restricted to our three spacial dimensions — up and down, left and right, front and back. "If that's all there is in space," he said, "this thing doesn't work."

Not until 10 spacial dimensions are used in the calculations do the equations work. But we perceive only three. Where are the others? They could be curled up within the normal dimensions, he said.

Greene asked the audience to imagine a piece of paper, essentially a two-dimensional object. When it is curled up and seen from a distance, it looks like a one-dimensional line. But if an ant were on it, the insect might find itself going back and forth in one dimension and around the tube of paper in another.

Peering through binoculars, a watcher might see the ant's circular sauntering and realize the paper has another dimension.

Understanding the nature of the paper "escaped you without the right equipment — the binoculars."

String theory may allow tiny curled-up dimensions to be everywhere, so small that we can't detect them. "We haven't seen them — yet," he said.

But the Large Hadron Collider being built near Geneva — an almost 17-mile circular tube built beneath the French-Swiss border, because it was cheaper to use land underground for such a massive structure — may provide proof of string theory. When it begins smashing rotating streams of protons together, the ideas may be verified.

"There's a chance ... that some of the debris from these collisions will be ejected out of our dimensions," and scientists may be able to discover "these missing energy signatures," he said. "If this is confirmed experimentally in the next few years, to me this would be one of the most significant moments in the history of science."

LHC Set for July Startup

The following article is from PhysicsWorld.com, March 28, 2008. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Jon Cartwright, PhysicsWorld.com Reporter -- Engineers at CERN are making the final touches to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the biggest experiment in particle physics — and expect to have it running in the first half of July. Although the start-up schedule of the European particle accelerator has slipped by over a month since the last official announcement, there appear to be only minor problems left to resolve.

“It has been some time since we’ve been in this kind of position with this kind of research facility,” says James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN. “There’s real confidence that we’ll be collecting new data this year. It’s a very big time for us.”

When all is done and dusted, the LHC will have cost around $6.3bn to build. Some 6000 superconducting magnets will whip proton beams in opposite directions around a 27 km-long ring and smash them together at energies bordering on 14 TeV. The impacts will generate a hoard of new particles, possibly including the highly anticipated Higgs particle and so-called supersymmetric particles. But regardless of what is or is not detected, it is almost certain that the LHC will provide a window onto new physics.

Until recently, the official line from CERN was that the first proton beams would be injected into the ring in May, despite status reports from the LHC website suggesting otherwise. According to Gillies, previous problems have now compelled CERN to set back the start up to the first half of July. An official date will be announced sometime after mid-June, the earliest time that all the magnets can be cooled to their operating temperature of below 2 K.

"There’s real confidence that we’ll be collecting new data this year. It’s a very big time for us." --James Gillies, CERN spokesman

Latent problems

The main problem that has dogged the LHC start-up schedule of late erupted with a bang this time last year, when one of the “quadrupole” magnets used to focus and manipulate the proton beams failed during preliminary tests. Fermilab, the US laboratory who manufactured the magnets, was quick to accept responsibility, but it soon became apparent that all similar magnets would have to be redesigned and replaced. CERN is still reeling from this overhaul, having had to delay the cooling of magnets and skip the low-energy test runs that were due to take place before winter.

There have since been other, less serious problems. Towards the end of last year CERN found that certain “copper fingers” used to ensure electrical continuity between magnets had buckled when the magnets were warmed up. Presently, LHC engineers are having a few difficulties with leaky plumbing of liquid helium, which is used to cool the magnets. “Superfluid helium has no viscosity, so it can find any cracks,” explains Gillies.

Even though proton beams will not enter the LHC before July, by May 21 the beams will be running through two of CERN’s existing particle accelerators, which are serving as preliminary accelerator stages. The Proton Synchrotron, built in the late 1950s, will speed the protons up to 25 GeV and feed into the Super Proton Synchrotron, built in the 1970s, to get them up to 450 GeV.

Wide media coverage

On the day when the LHC is ready to have its proton beams injected, onlookers can expect wide media coverage. According to Gillies, they will inject the first beam in one direction at 9:30am (central-Europe time) to tie in with a live broadcast from BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. Visuals will show the beam’s progress while CERN scientists analyse it. Every 10 minutes, they will be able to send in another beam. “Hopefully we’ll get one circulating all the way round by the end of the day,” says Gillies. Once they have understood the circulation in one direction, the scientists will begin experimenting with counter-circulating beams. “Then we’ll ramp up the energies,” he adds.

In light of the huge public interest in the LHC, CERN is holding an open day for the accelerator on April 6. From April 2–7 the lab is also allowing US high-school students to visit and report back their experiences via blogs and videos.

It appears that the pangs of excitement are beginning to be felt at CERN. Still, few of those involved are counting their chickens just yet. “We have to cool the whole machine down first,” says LHC project leader Lyn Evans. “I hope that that can be achieved by mid-June so we can start taking data in July.”

Lawsuit: Huge Atom Smasher Could Destroy World

AP Black Hole Rendition

The following article is from Fox News, March 31, 2008. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Paul Wagenseil, Fox News Reporter -- Stop the scientists before they destroy us all!

That's what a Hawaii man with a background in nuclear physics is asking a court to do.
Walter F. Wagner and his colleague Luis Sancho have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to stop work on the Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic atom smasher on the Franco-Swiss border that's set to start operations in May.

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.

Physicists hope its incredible energies will form briefly-lived new particles that could shed light on the origins of the universe, among other marvels.

The plaintiffs' concerns? That the LHC could accidentally create strange new particles that would instantly transform any matter they touched, engulfing the Earth, or, even worse, make a rapidly expanding black hole that could consume the entire planet.

"[T]he compression of the two atoms colliding together at nearly light speed will cause an irreversible implosion, forming a miniature version of a giant black hole," reads the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Honolulu.

"[A]ny matter coming into contact with it would fall into it and never be able to escape. Eventually, all of earth would fall into such growing micro-black-hole, converting earth into a medium-sized black hole, around which would continue to orbit the moon, satellites, the ISS, etc."

• Click here to read the text of the lawsuit.

Named as defendants are the U.S. Department of Energy, the venerable DOE-owned Fermilab particle-accelerator facility outside Chicago, the "Center for Nuclear Energy Research (CERN)" and the National Science Foundation.

(CERN's full name is actually the European Organization for Nuclear Research; "CERN" is the French acronym for an earlier name.)

The lawsuit wants the LHC's opening to be delayed for several months so that outside experts can read the facility's internal safety review, which was to have been completed by Jan. 1 of this year but does not appear to have been released.

Wagner has even put up a Web site at http://www.lhcdefense.org/ detailing his concerns.

Not included among the documents is Wagner's own indictment last month on identity-theft charges tied to an ongoing legal battle over a botanical garden on the Big Island of Hawaii, but you can read about that here.

Most physicists say Wagner's worries are unfounded. Micro black holes would evaporate nearly instantly instead of combining to form larger ones, they say, and the "strangelet" particles he frets would freeze the world would in fact fall apart quickly.

Wagner's own background is a bit fuzzy. He claims to have minored in physics at U.C. Berkeley, gone to law school, taught elementary-school science and worked in nuclear medicine at health facilities — but he doesn't appear to have an advanced degree in science.

Sancho's qualifications are even murkier, but the lawsuit identifies him as a Spanish citizen residing in the U.S., even if his presence makes the entire case a bit, um, quixotic.

Fears that atom smashers will destroy the world have been around for decades and seem to come to the fore every time a new well-publicized facility comes online.

But no particle accelerator has ever come close to the power of the Large Hadron Collider.

Dinesh D'Souza to Debate Dan Barker at Harvard

Dinesh D'Souza will engage in a student led debate at Harvard University with Dan Barker on April 22, 2008. Their topic will be "Christianity vs. Atheism."

Dinesh D'Souza is a leading conservative Christian intellectual and author of What’s So Great About Christianity. Mr. D'Souza's bio is available here.

Dan Barker is the president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the largest atheist organization in America devoted to the separation of church and state. Mr. Barker's bio is available here.

R.C. Metcalf to Debate Dan Barker at Tufts in Boston

Dr. R.C. Metcalf is scheduled to debate Dan Barker at Tufts University on the topic of the Resurrection. The debate is being sponsored by the Tufts Freethought Society. Last year's debate was between Dr. Daniel Dennett, author of Breaking the Spell, and Dinesh D'Souza, author of What's So Great About Christianity, on the topic of the existence of God. This debate can be viewed here via YouTube clips organized on Richard Dawkins' website.

Dan Barker is the president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the largest atheist organization in America devoted to separation of church and state issues. Mr. Barker was once an evangelical pastor and is an accomplished songwriter. He is the author of Losing Faith in Faith. Dan's bio is available here.

Dr. R.C. Metcalf's bio is available at ThinkAgain.us.

Seminar: The Science of the Resurrection of Jesus

Dr. R.C. Metcalf will present a 2 hour interactive seminar on the science of the resurrection of Jesus Christ at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, CO. The event is scheduled for May 10, 2008 from 7:00 to 9:00 pm at the World Prayer Center on the New Life campus.

Check here again for further information...

Christians Urged to Meet Atheists in the Public Square

R.C. Metcalf and Dinesh D'Souza at NRB 2008

The following article is from The Christian Post, October 11, 2007. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Christians shouldn't always turn the other cheek and ignore the attacks of secular thought, says one prominent conservative writer. They need to step out and meet the atheist critique.

Thu, Oct. 11, 2007 Posted: 13:55:15 PM EST

Lillian Kwon, Christian Post Reporter -- Christians shouldn't always turn the other cheek and ignore the attacks of secular thought, says one prominent conservative writer. They need to step out and meet the atheist critique.

"We don't want the public square to be dominated by the atheists," said New York Times bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza.

D'Souza believes Christians have left the public square unoccupied, limiting their expression of religiosity to church on Sunday, their families, and the Christian subculture.

As a consequence, atheists have entered the public square – what Christians thought would have been "neutral space," as D'Souza put it. And they want to drive the Christians out, remove Christian symbolism from coins, the pledge and public buildings.

"Ultimately, they want to discredit Christianity as something that is incompatible with modern life and modern thought," said the noted author in an interview with The Christian Post.

D'Souza is calling Christians back to the public square.

"There is a time to turn the other cheek but there is also a time to drive the money changers out of the temple," he said. "By that I mean there is nothing in Scripture that says Christians should ignore or embrace attacks on their face. But with the right tone, using not only Scripture but reason and science and experience, I think Christians should step out into the world and meet the atheist critique."

D'Souza is due to release What's So Great About Christianity next week. It's his first book, among many, dealing with Christianity in America. He originally set out to approach the topic in a modest and more secular way, he said, but found himself in the midst of a number of atheist books hitting stores and greatly widening the attack on religion and, more specifically, Christianity.

The atheistic arguments – that Christianity goes against reason and science and is based on blind faith – are resonating with people, D'Souza noticed, and hitting bestseller lists.

"I do think that we are seeing a more self-confident and perhaps even militant atheism," he noted. "Atheists are kind of on the war path, out to attack religion, demean it, drive it out of the public square, and remove all religious symbolism from American society. So something odd is going on here."

One such atheist is Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, who is urging atheists to come out of the closet and declare themselves publicly with his Out Campaign. Like other "new atheists," Dawkins publicly rejects the existence of God and wants to drive out religion.

Part of the reason society is seeing an emboldened atheism is that a lot of these outspoken atheists were hoping religion would disappear as society became more modern and developed, according to D'Souza.

"Religion was seen as more of an ancient form of belief that would go away as science progressed and as we all became more successful, educated and affluent," said D'Souza.

"But this has not happened,” he continued. “And, in fact, religion is booming in countries around the world," including the most modernized ones such as India and China.

"So the atheist in a way is getting a little more desperate," D'Souza believes.

Living in a culture that is to a considerable degree secular, D'Souza would like to see in churches across the country apologetics come to center stage not to displace what the churches have been doing but to supplement it in a very important way, he said.

"[Christians] are going to meet arguments that cannot be settled simply by 'the Bible says this, the Bible says that' because the other person will promptly reply that they don't accept the authority of the Bible," D'Souza noted.

He suggests Christians become "bilingual" in which they are educated in both the biblical language and a secular language the world can recognize – a language anchored in history and reason and experience.

In his upcoming book release, due out Oct. 16, D'Souza dispels common myths about faith, many of which are argued by atheists.

Myth #1: Atheism is growing and more people are choosing it over church

Pews might be empty in some urban parts of America, but the world is witnessing a huge explosion of Christianity, says D'Souza who notes Christianity as the fastest-growing religion in the world and that the number of unbelievers is actually shrinking. In America, about half of the population goes to church and an overwhelming majority believes in God. But there are also "powerful currents of secularism" in this country that counter that, the author acknowledged.

Myth #2: Religion has caused history's wars, murders, and violence

The number of people killed in religious wars such as the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition is infinitesimal compared to those killed during modern atheist regimes, the author notes. "We have to keep a sense of proportion," he says.

Dawkins had argued in an earlier debate that atheists never commit atrocities in the name of atheism while religious people do so in the name of their faith.

D'Souza disagrees. "Somebody should send Dawkins a copy of 'The Communist Manifesto' [because] the truth of the matter is that these secular ideologies of the 20th century were explicitly opposed to religion."

"Communism was explicitly atheistic. It committed attacks against the church, imprisoned priests, shut down prayer meetings ... in the name of creating atheist utopia freed from the shackles of traditional religion and traditional morality," said the conservative author.

Myth #3: There is no such thing as a human soul

Atheists use science to argue that there is no soul, as there is no physical evidence of one. "If the atheist universe were true, there would be no free will in it," says D'Souza. The world of science, of atoms and molecules, is one in which there is no free choice because the actions of the atoms and molecules determine the outcome, he argues. Atheists believe the only things that exist are the material things that can be seen under the microscope and smelled and touched to which there is empirical evidence, he adds.

"There are dimensions of reality that cannot be captured in purely material terms. When has science ever located a thought or a feeling or a choice?"

Myth #4: Where is God when bad things happen?

D'Souza turns this question around and asks where is atheism when bad things happen? At the tragic event of the Virginia Tech shooting in April, there were nonstop memorial services and everyone began to speak a very religious language of healing and spirituality, he noted. "Atheism has absolutely nothing to offer us at moments of life that matter the most – birth, marriage, death, suffering."

What's So Great About Christianity is a defense of Christianity, D'Souza explained, "but it's a defense that meets the critics of Christianity by taking them seriously."

Apologists Ask Churches to Step Up Response to Militant Atheism

The following article is from The Christian Post, March 8, 2008 as reprinted from a February 13, 2008 article. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Katherine T. Phan, Christian Post Reporter -- As more atheist-centered books and movies make their way to mainstream culture, two best-selling Christian apologists are encouraging churches to better equip their congregation to respond to what they call a more outspoken and "confident" atheism.

"The arguments are not really new but the ferociousness" with which atheists are lobbing their attacks "are coming much stronger," Mark Mittelberg, primary author of Becoming a Contagious Christian, said in a teleconference on February 12.

The teleconference, hosted by Outreach Training, was for pastors who were interested in updating their churches' apologetics approaches amid an onslaught of pro-atheist books and movies in recent years. Books like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great have made best-selling lists. Meanwhile, movies like The Da Vinci Code, The Jesus Family Tomb and The Golden Compass have claimed widespread media attention.

These books and movies are not just posing challenges to the basic tenets of the Christian faith, according to Mittelberg, but they are also empowering attacks against Christianity.

Lee Strobel, author of the best-selling The Case for Christ, agreed with Mittelberg that many Christians are raised to believe in doctrine but are not adequately taught on why their faith is true or how to support their faith with evidence.

"Churches need to help them reach out to their friends, colleagues and family members with the good news of Christ" using data that supports the good news as true, said Strobel, a former atheist.

The two apologists recommended that pastors become familiar with both books by atheist authors and those by Christian apologists.

Mittelberg said pastors can identify "key sharp lay leaders" within the local church to help them do further apologetics research or become the starting point for an apologetics ministry.

"There are people who love this," said Mittelberg. "If you can identify these people, you can build a ministry around them."

Another suggestion was for churches to organize a panel discussion on hot button topics in Christianity such the resurrection and divinity of Jesus. Churches would invite professors and experts from opposing sides to debate selected topics in Christianity or field questions from the audience.

"A lot of Christians assume they are hanging on to a shred of faith – that they are clinging by their fingernails. They don't know that the truth is on our side," noted Mittelberg.

For churches with more limited resources, Strobel recommended subscribing to a satellite feed that would stream live broadcasts of his seminars straight to the church. His next scheduled one-day live training seminar, "Investigating Faith," will be held on March 8 at Word Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Northville, Mich. Churches will be able to view the presentation in real time through Church Communication Network.

Strobel also asked pastors to consider setting up seeker small groups. While Strobel's small group curriculum won't be available until this Fall, he recommended Garry Poole's Seeker Small Groups as a resource.

"There are great answers to these challenges," said Mittelberg. "We just got to do our homework.”

Metcalf-Mahone Debate Questions & Responses

In spite of a postponement due to illness, the debate between R.C. Metcalf and Steven Mahone was quite a success. The audience was small (less than 150 attending) and approximately evenly split between Christians and Freethinkers. Quite a few attendees expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to discuss issues openly and cordially. One Christian mentioned that, until that night, he had never actually met an atheist in a setting that allowed free discussion of worldviews. This tendency for religious groups (or in the case of Freethinkers, non-religious groups) to associate primarily among themselves is an unfortunate hindrance to open discussion and communication.

The evening's topic was "Is There Hope Beyond the Grave?" Many individuals expressed their desire for further discussion of these areas that are so important to humanity as a whole. Think Again will continue to encourage such events and opportunities for discussion, so please check our calendar often. Better yet, sign up for our quarterly email newsletter and we will send an announcement one to two weeks prior to each event. We never share email information with others.

The following questions were addressed during the debate. Each link will lead you to a discussion of the various topics addressed. Feel free to post respectful comments to the blog. Inflammatory or ad hominem posts may be deleted.

Dr. Metcalf's PowerPoint Presentation

Question 1: What exactly is the soul?

Question 2: Does the soul come into existence at the moment of conception?

Question 3: Are near death experiences good evidence for the afterlife?

Question 4: Aren't all religions selling false hope?