What is God’s relation to space and time? Is there a way of reconciling theology and physics?

John Polkinghorne

Time is much more mysterious than space. We can move around or stand still at will, but no one can travel in time or arrest its inexorable flow. Or so it seems to us. Yet there are people who believe that the passage of time is no more than a trick of human psychological perspective and the real nature of temporality is what is called ‘the block universe’, the spacetime continuum as a whole, considered ‘all at once’. They appeal to the fact that relativity theory tells us that different observers make different judgments of the simultaneity of distance events. If that is so, does it not mean that the apparent difference between past, present, and future is in reality illusory?

Well, actually, no.

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The European Organization for Nuclear Research [CERN] has their Large Hadron Collider [LHC] up and running. The first test-fire was successful. A lot of fearful people fearing the creation of a super-massive black hole are calmer now. Should they be?

In his next post, Majid weighs in on the science vs. religion debate the best way he knows how: not as an evolutionary biologist, but as a physicist. Read it here >>

[UPDATE]: Great to see so many questions in the comments section, which I, of course, am not qualified to address. I’ve contacted Dr. Majid to see if he wishes to answer to any of them. Keep ‘em coming!

[UPDATE #2] Please see Dr. Majid’s comment below in response to some of your questions.

Shahn Majid put together Cambridge’s On Space and Time and is Professor of Mathematics at Queen Mary, London. He’ll be filling us in on why these taken-for-granted dimensions of reality hold so much fascination for physicists, mathematicians, theologians, and philosophers.

[UPDATE From Dr. Majid - 4:30 EST]

Without spoiling the fun of the piece, I should probably add that I do firmly count myself among those that say ‘no’, LHC definitely won’t produce a giant black hole that swallows up the Earth. For one thing, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming — much more energetic collisions occur all the time out there in the Universe at large and astronomers don’t see them producing black holes. However, the theoretical issues about the possible production of black-holes and what exactly happens to them if they are produced is a fascinating story that takes us to the edge of our understanding of the structure of space and time …

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There’s nothing like the prospect of imminent death to get you interested, especially considering the usual public interest in hard-core particle physics. This week it was the switch on of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Geneva. The BBC, at least, was quick to denounce reports that this might result in the creation of black holes that might coalesce and grow, eventually swallowing up the entire Earth and in the process destroying life and civilisation as we know it.

View the nasty footage here.

So that’s what all the fuss is about.

Actually, there will be two particle beams, going in different directions, and only once both of these are working will CERN scientists actually collide them and possibly create black holes. So we don’t know yet. Should we be worried?

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