God and Science are Harmonious
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."- Einstein
This started as a response letter to an old friend, who had said he was reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. When I realized this was turning into more than the appropriate "Um, why are you reading that?", I decided to share my writing with a larger audience. I start with one of the most commonly referenced analogies for a greater consciousness, move on to a critique of that analogy, and for the remainder of the paper delve into modern physics while constantly searching for a God-Science link.
Nucleons were once seen as the final destination for particle “building blocks.” Only through avid research and commitment to digging deeper did science advance into the realm of quarks and gluon. (Goofy words, but cool stuff nonetheless). It may be that former views of God in Science were forgotten too early as well. (Galileo Galilei? Issac Newton? William Thomson Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell? Albert Einstein?)
Okay, now I’m about to dive off into the deep waters of subatomic particles. There’s a lot here, and it gets confusing, so I won’t blame you for skimming. Here it goes (keep in mind that a proton is found in the nucleus of an atom):
“When two protons collide, they break apart into even smaller particles. That includes subatomic particles called quarks and a mitigating force called gluon. Quarks are very unstable and will decay in a fraction of a second.” -Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN)
“For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC [Large Hadron Collider]can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.”-CERN, 2008
The LHC was completed in 2009. I’m willing to bet that they find something like this:
“Color-charged particles cannot be found individually. For this reason, the color-charged quarks are confined in groups (hadrons) with other quarks. These composites are color neutral. The development of the Standard Model’s theory of the strong interactions reflected evidence that quarks combine only into baryons (three quark objects), and mesons (quark-antiquark objects), but not, for example, four-quark objects. Now we understand that only baryons (three different colors) and mesons (color and anticolor) are color-neutral. Particles such as ud or uddd that cannot be combined into color-neutral states are never observed.”-Particle Adventure: The Fundamentals of Matter and Force (PA:FMF)
(to clear it up: “color” and “flavor” are used to describe different quarks, not necessarily how they look or taste)
Hmm, getting closer to understanding the laws of nature… and bringing us to the concept of Color Force:
“The quarks in a given hadron madly exchange gluons. For this reason, physicists talk about the color-force field which consists of the gluons holding the bunch of quarks together. If one of the quarks in a given hadron is pulled away from its neighbors, the color-force field “stretches” between that quark and its neighbors. In so doing, more and more energy is added to the color-force field as the quarks are pulled apart. At some point, it is energetically cheaper for the color-force field to “snap” into a new quark-antiquark pair. In so doing, energy is conserved because the energy of the color-force field is converted into the mass of the new quarks, and the color-force field can “relax” back to an unstretched state.”- (PA:FMF)
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