A blog to provoke, console, encourage, prod and ponder about our shared experience of life. You and I arrived into this world without an instruction manual or explanation about why we are here or what to do next. Meanwhile our lives are filled with responsibilities, challenges and questions. Through faith, a glimpse -- a dim glimpse yes -- is given to us about what the future may hold for us. And how we are to live today, while we wait.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Faster Than Light

One of the physicists who made the recent measurement of particles apparently travelling faster than the speed of light is quoted by the New York Times as saying, "if you find some matter particle such as the neutrino going faster than light, this is something which immediately shocks everybody, including us."  

Indeed.  Einstein’s theory of relativity is considered a foundational pillar of modern physics.  That matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light is an unquestioned truth among scientists.  But it was not always so.  When the unknown Einstein, working in a Swiss patent office in 1905, first developed his theory, it was met with jeers and laughter from the science community.  Famous physicists, such as the prestigious Nobel Prize winner Robert Milliken, travelled the country debunking this silly idea of Einstein’s.  For a long time nobody believed it.

This recalls Danish physicist Neils Bohr’s great line that all physics theories begin as heresy and end as mythology.  Certainly true about relativity. 

I’ve had a number of folks ask me, as a physicist, if I think the findings of the new experiment are true.  I have no idea, but I am skeptical.  As an experimental physicist, I know that experimental results can be fraught with errors that are often hard to identify.  It will take multiple confirmations from other laboratories before one can have confidence in this result. 

But could it be true?  Certainly!  We already know that the theory of relativity fails when applied to certain problems such as the first moments of the big bang.*  The history of science is full of surprises, and this one would be no more startling than Einstein’s original findings were a century ago.

Here’s what I find amazing.  Science continues, as it should, to evolve a better understanding of reality, often replacing what was held to be rock-solid just a generation before.  Yet the foundations of our faith do not change from generation to generation.  The truths I find in Scripture (even if they are told in ancient cultural contexts of sheep, vineyards and Pharisees) are unchanging and challenge, inform and inspire my life every day.  God’s word is indeed a lamp unto my feet, just as it was for the Psalmist thousands of years ago.

While physics theories may begin as heresy and end as mythology, what begins as truth ends as truth.

*Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, p. 3