On my way to church, it suddenly became clear - the end of God is near.
Two hundred thousand years ago, there was none of us modern human on earth. But what happened last week will be remembered some 200,000 years from now.
On my way to church, it suddenly became clear - the end of God is near.
Two hundred thousand years ago, there was none of us modern human on earth. But what happened last week will be remembered some 200,000 years from now.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });
Scientists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, discovered Higgs boson, aka God particle. If it did not make front page in a newspaper where you live, it is because your society is yet to get to the point where empirical proof is more important than superstition.
In 1964, Peter Higgs proposed that there is an elementary particle that explains why particles have mass. The field of this particle gives mass by allowing other particles with multiple identities to exist in the same place and in the same quantum state. It does this by interacting with other subatomic particles in a way that it helps them to gain mass. Mass is what gives particles inertia. Without inertia objects cannot resist forces. Without forces, there won't be motion. “Without motion, nothing exists.”
So 50 years ago, scientists set out to prove Higgs’ theory that the God particle exists. They built the $10 billion dollar Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In it protons moving in a 17-mile long circular tunnel at near the speed of light smashed against each other at 11,000 times per second. It created mini-Big Bangs each second. Last week, after months of analyzing data, scientists announced the discovery of the God Particle.
If scientists had not found the God particle, everything we know about the universe would have been false. Now that they did, everything we knew about the universe had been false. It is a brand new world. The Dark Ages ended on Wednesday.
It will take another 2,000 years to know half of what this discovery means. And that is why you should care. Everything you think you know about life in this universe is on its way out. Not one. Not two - but all. It is so unsettling in scope that it is good that so many people are not even paying attention. It is more important that the transformation will not be overnight but rather in drops, bit by bit. Otherwise the current order will be so disturbed without a ready replacement. The creation of a vacuum with the potential to swallow everything will be so frightening.
I have always felt that people who clutch their Bible, Koran and other religious books in their armpits need to also pause, every now and then, to read scientific journals. If they do not read, at least pause and watch science programs like “Wonders of the Universe.” The world of modern science gives context to everything. The conclusion science will help keen observers arrive at is that these religious books understate God or that God underrepresented himself in them.
It is baffling that Africans who do not know how the fax machine works or how the television signals get into their televisions, are confident about the number of rooms in heaven and the best gate to get in.
These Africans believe that an old woman who lives down the road from them, who is probably suffering from amnesia or Alzheimer disease, is the one who tied the womb of their daughter. But their curiosity does not allow them to find out the science that this old woman uses to remotely get into the womb of their daughter and tie it. Maybe it is similar to the science of the fax machine.
Meanwhile in New Jersey, Prof. Jacques Cohen of the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of Saint Barnabas has created 30 healthy babies whose genes were genetically modified. Two of these children have the DNA of three parents. This is the first known alteration of the human gene line. The era of designer children and super humans are already with us. Prof. Cohen said that he could clone children too but wouldn't. But we know that somewhere in Israel and some other Island countries, where ethics laws are lax; cloning is being experimented with right now.
While Africans are still pointing accusing fingers at some old men and women, doctors in other parts of the world are helping any woman who wants a baby to have the exact kind of baby she wants.
The discovery of the God particle is not currently important to the everyday life of regular man and woman. But it is one million times more important than Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity in 1687. And obviously more important than the discovery of the electron in 1897, without which you won’t be able to read this article off your computer screen. As advanced physical physics, the significance of the God particle is hard to explain. But it is a lot harder to explain it to those who do not understand how the fax machine works.
As big as this discovery is, it is not the greatest outcome of this research. What is mindboggling is man’s achievement of that elusive goal of designing a machine that will travel faster than light. We celebrated the breaking of the sound barrier. But it is the breaking of the speed of light that is full of opportunities. For one, we can now visit yesterday. It is no longer stuff of science fiction.
The earth that we live in is 4.6 billion years old. The last dinosaur died out some 65 million years ago. Two hundred thousand years ago, there was no modern human on this earth. No white, no black. No Igbo, no Hausa, no Yoruba. All these shenanigans going on now started some 200,000 years ago. This is just the first chapter of human life on earth. Not even a nuclear war, which is coming down the road, will destroy the world. Not even an asteroid, which will hit the world again, at the earliest 2040, will destroy it. The world will end when our 4.5 billion-year-old sun burns out. The earliest that will happen is 4-5 billion years from now when the sun will enter the red giant phase.
It doesn’t matter how many pilgrimages we Africans go to, the world is not headed to Jerusalem or Mecca. The world is headed to the bosom that modern science has prepared for it.
The discovery of the God particle, the very basic building block of the universe, firmly connects us to the Big Bang theory. The universe is no longer the question. And God is no longer the answer. Scientists are set to unmask God. It is the end of God as we know it.
Please correct me if I’m right.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });