Recent Advances Excite Imaginations of Scientists and Non-Scientists Alike, Author Says...Americans are increasingly fascinated by recent advances in science that physicists promise will answer our biggest questions about the universe – or multiverse: How was it (or they) created? From what? Why?
With the Large Hadron Collider closing in on the “God particle,” physics has become water cooler talk in distinctly non-scientific workplaces. One doesn’t have to be a physicist to be excited by the possibilities. When scientists can determine the mass of Higgs boson, the hypothetical tiny particle on which the Standard Model of particle physics is built, we’ll be that much closer to developing a Theory of Everything. That could happen in the next 20 years – well, about 18 percent of physicists thought so when polled by PhysicsWorld.com.
“These advances get people thinking seriously about our universe and suddenly, anything’s possible,” says Eli Just (http://tinyurl.com/85xu4lo), author of The Eddy, a “supernatural physics” novel that explores those very possibilities.
“That’s why TV shows like ‘Lost’ and ‘Fringe’ developed such big followings. We no longer take for granted the world as we see it; alternate or parallel universes may well exist – and science may discover them in our lifetimes.”
Just says coming closer to answering those questions inspires even more questions, particularly about science and its relationship to religion. If scientists can tell us how the universe was created, does that mean there’s no God and that physics created the world, as physicist Stephen Hawking said in 2010?
Or does it prove there is a God – the master scientist?
Just notes that a Pew Research Foundation survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that 51 percent of scientists believe in God or a higher power. That’s compared to 95 percent of the general public.
With so many fewer believers among scientists, they’re also much less likely than the general public to be affiliated with a particular religion. Almost half the scientists said they were atheist, agnostic or had no particular religion. Only 17 percent of all Americans describe themselves the same way.
In 2007, Just says, a group of physicists met in the United Kingdom for a discussion called “God and physics.” They debated whether science helps prove or disprove the existence of a single grand creator.
In a Physics World magazine article about the meeting, former physicist and Church of England priest John Polkinghorne argued in favor of a God.
"Polkinghorne pointed out that mathematics has an enduring ability to accurately describe the physical world and that our brains have a capacity to comprehend abstract concepts – such as quantum superposition – that he maintains could not have arisen in response to evolutionary pressures,” according to the article by Edwin Cartlidge.
“This profound intelligibility, he argued, is itself comprehensible if a rational God has created the world and made humans in his own image.”
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, Just says, and the more science discovers about our universe the more we may learn about its creator.
About Eli Just
Eli Just is the author of several books including The Eddy and the popular Manny Jones series of supernatural thrillers. He has a master’s in history from Southeastern Louisiana University and is a self-taught student of physics, which he taught at the high school level. As a Christian, Just enjoys exploring themes involving physics and its relationship to religion. He lives in the mountains of northern Georgia.
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