Black Holes

I have discovered a black hole!

On Monday I had a mole removed from my face. The doctor who did it put a small plaster over the wound so I did not get to see it until yesterday. I have a black hole in my face. I am intrigued by it and by how people may react to seeing it. Sympathy is in short order in our household.Thomas was repulsed. Hannah was less interested in it than an injury she picked up at school and Sally finds it amusing. Last night at church only one person made any comment: either everyone had read yesterday’s blog, they were all being very polite, or it is less obvious than I think. What do you think?

Black holes are very topical at the moment. Yesterday the Large Hadron Collider collided two protons for the first time to see what will happen. The aim is to try to discover the building blocks of the universe – the particles that make up particles that make up atoms. The one they  are particularly looking for is a theoretical particle called a ‘Higgs Boson’. To me that sounds like a person working on a pirate ship for Captain Higgs, or what you find in the bathroom of an unsophisticated provincial person*. Some people are worried that they will create a black hole in Switzerland where the LHC is based that may swallow the Alps or even destroy the planet. I am fairly happy to trust that this will not happen, but we can’t be sure.

The LHC project has cost over £4 Billion. Yup, that’s £4,000,000,000. A lot of zeros are involved. Don’t get me wrong, I am fascinated by what they are doing and what may be revealed. But what could £4 Billion do to alleviate world poverty, cancel the debts of poorer countries, provide education for those who have no access, and so on? Is discovering the small building blocks of the universe worth more than human life?

Talking of black holes, I have been watching ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ on BBC2 by Prof Brian Cox. It has been brilliant – describing the intricate and delicate balance of the Universe, explaining how things have been created in language I can understand and showing some astonishingly beautiful pictures that have been taken of space. With my tongue very firmly in my cheek (the left one in case it comes through the black hole in the right one) I would suggest that it almost looks like someone designed it all. Wouldn’t it be great if one day a programme like that not only looked at the ‘how’ but also rearranged the letters and looked at the ‘who’ – science and faith hand in hand?

Anyway, following the success of the LHC scientists have agreed that they can now recreate the way in which the Universe was formed. So they sent their best people to tell God that humans no longer need him because they can create too.

God suggested that to test this theory the scientists and he should have a little competition to see if he was now redundant – each would create Creation. Since God said he had already done it once the scientists should go first. The LHC scientists wound up the elastic bands powering the LHC further than ever before, getting ready to launch two protons against each other at almost the speed of light in order to recreate Creation. Just as they were about to push the button to start it all off God stopped them.

“If you are going to do it how I did it you will have to get your own protons instead of using mine!”

* A Hick’s Basin! [Stop groaning, you should know me better than to assume it was not corny…]