'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'
Posted by Keith Tidman
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| The Large Hadron Collider, siad to be the most complex machine ever built by humanity. Image courtesy of CERN |
A tale of scale. The CERN Large Hadron Collider, a Brobdingnagian* machine searching through the Lilliputian world of subatomic particles. This, we are told, to better understand the universe at the smallest scale. The human mind is challenged to take in the machine’s ‘cathedral’ dimensions. I think that the aim of this cathedral, however, is more than just inspiring awe, or reverence, or faith.
There’s the hard-core science to all this, to be sure, with international collaboration at its best. But just like more-conventional, faith-based cathedrals, doesn’t this image also inspire humanity to speculate about the cosmology and meaning of this universe that we occupy, our own purpose, and the values we ought to revere? Doesn’t it serve and reward humanity’s instinctual sense of curiosity, imagination, and inspiration — the fertile seedbed of human discovery?
Rather, for me this towering monument — testament to human tool-making — has a very different purpose: to pull back the shroud so that humanity can peek into the remarkable inner world of our cosmos, and what it tells us about aspects of reality. Case in point: the confirmation of the Higgs boson a few years ago, whose field gives other particles their mass — ‘convenient’ for a universe like ours, including us.
There’s the hard-core science to all this, to be sure, with international collaboration at its best. But just like more-conventional, faith-based cathedrals, doesn’t this image also inspire humanity to speculate about the cosmology and meaning of this universe that we occupy, our own purpose, and the values we ought to revere? Doesn’t it serve and reward humanity’s instinctual sense of curiosity, imagination, and inspiration — the fertile seedbed of human discovery?
* After the fictional land in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical novel Gulliver's Travels occupied by giants
