"Could we be on the verge of a revolution of the type we saw in physics a century ago? The world's largest experiment into the fundamental forces of nature has begun in silent pursuit of the answers to some of the most esoteric questions of science, hitherto addressed by spirituality and philosophy. "
~ DK Matai, Chairman, Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA) & The Philanthropia
The Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) in Europe has a lot of physicists in a tizzy these days.
I found two nice web sites that explain what the LHC is and why physicists would spend billions to crash proton beams into each other. Both sites also discuss the poorly named God particle, otherwise known as the Higgs boson.
This elusive subatomic particle has been theorized but never observed. If it exists, it only exists for a fraction of a second before decaying into other particles.
Basically the idea is to recreate the conditions shortly after the Big Bang and see if some of the missing puzzle pieces of standard physics can be filled in.
The God particle has no religious significance. It is good at grabbing headlines, but I cannot find any philosophical or spiritual meaning to this thing. Oh well.
I predict that one of the outcomes of this experimentation is that we will discover that the constants of nature are even more finely tuned than we imagined.
I am particularly interested in seeing if the LHC sheds any light on string theory. String theory is a contender to help explain in a consistent way the physics we observe on a large scale and the physics we observe in the quantum world. Right now, standard physics produces some anomalies when the physics of the very large (i.e. relativity) is applied to the physics of the very small (quantum mechanics). No one knows why.
If string theory turns out to be true, then one of the predictions of the string theory is that the universe is 10 dimensional versus 4 dimensional. This has spiritual significance, in my opinion. It dovetails nicely with the extra-dimensionality expressed in various places of the Bible (e.g. the expression "before time").
Ostensibly the LHC has the potential to create high-energy environments that would possibly enable particles to jump in and out of the extra six dimensions predicted by string theory.
That would be an exciting find.