The Lowe-Down

The world is a complicated place! I was listening to an interview on the radio some time ago with a scientific expert on black holes. As I listened, I was intrigued at just how vague some of his answers were. It seems that while we understand a lot more than we used to, there is still much about black holes that remain a mystery. The National Geographic has this to say about black holes, “No one has ever seen a black hole, and no one ever will. There isn’t anything to see. It’s just a blank spot in space—a whole lot of nothing, as physicists like to say. The presence of a hole is deduced by the effect it has on its surroundings. It’s like looking out a window and seeing every treetop bending in one direction. You’d almost certainly be right in assuming that a strong yet invisible wind was blowing. When you ask the experts how certain we are that black holes are real, the steady answer is 99.9 percent; if there aren’t black holes in the centre of most galaxies, there must be something even crazier.” (http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/space/star-eater.aspx)

Black holes are big and complicated but life is no less confusing at the small end of the scale. Quarks are fun. They are subatomic particles that haven’t been observed but exist in theory, oh and they don’t exist except in pairs, threes or maybe fives! Or did you know that electrons (Electrons are the subatomic particles that orbit the nucleus of an atom) have a crazy property? Two physicists, Drs. S. Haroche and D. Wineland, won the Nobel Prize in physics for proving the correctness of the bizarre properties of quantum mechanics, i.e. that electrons can be two places at the same time!

The Trinity – the Christian concept of God as both three (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and one – is one of those notoriously difficult concepts to explain. Over the centuries people have come up with all sorts of metaphors, analogies and illustrations to try and explain it – The Trinity is like water; like an egg; an apple; a shamrock (you can blame St Patrick for that one); and in one elusive reference by author Adrian Plass, the Trinity is like a vacuum cleaner! The one thing everyone agrees on is that the Trinity is an incredibly hard concept to understand and even harder to explain.

It is interesting to note that in our predominantly secular society, we readily accept many of the mysteries encountered in the scientific realm, confident that eventually we will figure it out, and yet there is a tendency to dismiss out of hand the mysteries of God. “We can’t see God so how do we know he exists?”; “How can something be both three and one?”; “How can something be in more than one place at the same time?” Sound familiar?

Just like the world science explores, God is mysterious, not boring. God is big and exciting and confusing. God does things that make little sense to us. God has properties that we struggle to come to grips with. We should expect God to be more amazing than the universe He created – and this is a universe that contains black holes we can’t see, quarks that only exist in relationship with each other, and electrons that can be in two places at the same time! I don’t want a God who is less complicated than my alarm clock!

What are the mysteries that most baffle you in the world?