One of the things most Christians have been taught since childhood is that “God works in mysterious ways,” so there’s no point in questioning the seeming lack of “logic” in whatever happens, like innocent babies born with AIDS or fetal alcohol syndrome or drug addiction. Or why little children get bombed and maimed.
Bad things DO happen to good (& innocent) people. One may blame the “Devil” or God or whatever, but the all-powerful creator-deity of choice seems just too busy to deal with it all.
Or, HE may have a “higher purpose” in mind.
OR, he’s just a demented prick who likes seeing HIS people suffer! Whatever.
The main point is that the creator-deity’s “mysterious ways” make no sense to our logical thinking. And, neither does “quantum mechanics,” the way in which sub-atomic particles (like protons, electrons, gluons, etc.) behave utterly contrary to our “common sense.” Where maybe even TIME runs backward when messing around with “positrons,” which are positively charged antimatter “electrons” whirling around a negatively charged atomic nucleus! Supposedly, that has all been calculated mathematically, illustrated by the so-called “Feynman Diagrams” showing the interaction of electrons (tiny particles of matter) colliding with photons (electromagnetic energy particles), as developed by the late Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, who was a professor of physics at Cal-Tech in Pasadena.
WHEW! WAY over my pay grade! Feynman, a non-drinker, liked to ride around Pasadena at night in his Dodge van, decorated with his Diagrams, and hang out in bars, playing his bongo drums with the local bands. Can I get a witness?
One just has to ASSUME that theoretical physicists (like Feynman) know what they are talking about, so just have “faith” that the sub-atomic world exists in that way. That seems almost like a “religious” experience to me. One must just have “faith” that things work those ways in the sub-atomic world. On top of all that, in the quantum world, the behavior of sub-atomic particles is said to be determinable by “probability,” in that the determination of particle motion and particle position are mutually exclusive (the “Uncertainty Principle” developed by German physicist Werner Heisenberg), by “guesswork,” such that the more one determines or measures the particle position, the less certain the particle motion, and vice-versa. Strange ways, indeed!
“Science” has been defined as anything that can be DIS-proven. Religious matters defy “proof” of any sort, but “science” is ALWAYS subject to further revelation or revision, as more is learned. Even the “theory” of gravity is open to question, but not likely in the way alleged “creationists” might be inclined to so do. Sub-atomic particles do, indeed, behave in strange ways, and one must be open to accepting those weird ways and not try to shoehorn them through the venturi of “common sense.” That is, of course, my pathetic oversimplification of the phenomenon but as the gal said, when asked about the “future” on “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus” by the Firesign Theatre comedy group, “I say, ‘Live it, or live with it!’”
For years physicists have been trying to mathematically unify the four fundamental forces in the Universe: (1) Electromagnetism, (2) the Strong Nuclear Force (keeping the atomic nucleus bound together), (3) the Weak Nuclear Force (controlling atomic decay—atom-splitting), and (4) Gravity. Sub-atomic particles seem to define the first three, but I understand that only gravity remains a mystery. Albert Einstein’s “General Theory of Relativity” addresses some of that, and he spent his lifetime wrestling (mostly unsuccessfully) with understanding the mechanics of gravity. It defies definition and “connection” to this day. All matter (mass) seems to exhibit gravity, but nobody really knows how it works. It WILL bend light waves (pure energy), which have no mass at all! Einstein called gravity a “warp in space-time,” much like a bowling ball being held in a big blanket, sucking everything else in the space-time “blanket” down to it. I have no clue how that really works.
Einstein mostly rejected those “probabilities” of quantum mechanics, given his famous quote about how “God does not play dice with the Universe.” For years physicists have tried to integrate gravity with quantum mechanics, but now some physicists are suggesting that gravity operates as “classical physics” and may not belong to the quantum “club” at all. It continues to defy definition.
The sub-atomic world is illustrated by the phenomenon known as the “Standard Model,” which seeks to show sort of a balance among all the various particles. I found the following chart on Wikipedia:
I don’t know if the “balance” has been truly satisfied, since it appears from the chart that three more particles need to be included in the “Scalar Bosons” column along with the “Higgs Boson,” sometimes referred to as the “God Particle.” It is named after Peter Higgs, the Nobel Laureate who discovered it at the CERN particle accelerator in 2012, and the late Leon Lederman was the Nobel Laureate who had given it the nickname in the 1990’s. He wrote a delightful, funny book by the same name. And there may be even more particles yet to be discovered, so the chart may never get truly completed, as some physicists believe.
[As an aside, in his novel Mason and Dixon, about the 18th-century British surveyors who ran the eponymous southern boundary of Pennsylvania and the western boundary of Delaware, as they adjoin Maryland, the author Thomas Pynchon opens with Mason sailing on a ship to the South Pacific to observe a total eclipse of the sun. I love the fact that the “boatswain” (pronounced “bosun”) crew member on board is named “Higgs”! Coincidence?]
It was hoped that the Higgs boson would illustrate some sort of mathematical “connection” of gravity to the other three fundamental forces, but I don’t think that’s been shown (yet). We must all just wait and see.
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