God in the Details

Technology has become so evolved that most of us operate on faith. We don’t have the slightest idea what makes that crazy computer box do things or work the way it does. Yes, it is useful and you only need to press buttons to make it transform something into something else, but that’s beside the point.

Doesn’t our absolute faith in Science today resemble the blind faith humanity has cherished for thousands of years for religion and God?

The obsession with divine powers seems to have left an eternal mark on humans, and today technology and science have allowed us to successfully transfer the notion of divinity to ourselves, or more precisely, to scientists.

Technology’s most recent ‘act of God’ will be ready later this year at the Large Hadron Collider, located near Geneva, Switzerland.

A 27 km circular tunnel, a million tons of concrete and metal, around 3 billion Swiss francs, science fiction equipment, thousands of superconducting magnets designed to fire protons or heavy ions at speeds close to that of light in an isolated environment cooled to temperatures colder than space. Some 8,000 physicists are waiting eagerly to test the new tools, and perhaps to solve one of the greatest mysteries ever: to understand the universe, or maybe even create one. Simple as that.

The colliding particles would simulate what scientists believe to be the inception of the universe, the very first moments after the Big Bang occurred, the beginning of everything. Detectors of gargantuan proportions will be in place to record the results and properties of the collisions, to discover new matter or new dimensions, examine the nature of dark matter, matter, and antimatter, and many other similarly fascinating phenomena.

How this will benefit humanity is unclear, other that expanding the science fiction sections in libraries and titillating a few doomsday predictors. But we seem to be ok with it. After all, we’re only human. And we’re taking it on faith.