Vatican Delegation Visits CERN
Declaring that true faith has no quarrel with science, a senior Vatican delegation visited the CERN nuclear physics lab on the Swiss-French border this week.
Vatican City’s governor, Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, represented the Roman Catholic Church, and toured the facility and its 17-mile proton accelerator, the world’s largest nuclear physics laboratory.
The delegation embraced any breakthroughs scientists could provide on understanding the basis of the universe, saying such discoveries would also advance religion.
"The Church never fears the truth of science, because we are convinced that all truth comes from God," said Lajolo on Thursday in Geneva.
"Science will help our faith to purify itself. And faith at the same time will be able to broaden the horizons of man, who cannot just enclose himself in the horizons of science,” the AP quoted him as saying.
Lajolo’s comments come one day after visiting the lab, where he received a crash course in particle physics from Edward Witten, a professor at the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey. The institute is leading the charge to unify Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics, and CERN’s atom smasher is seen as critical in this mission.
Physicists seek to use the $10 billion machine to crash protons from hydrogen atoms into each other at high energy, then record what particles are produced in order to better understand the makeup of the universe.
CERN’s initial startup last year set the project back one year, but it is expected to resume work again this fall.
Researchers hope the collisions will reveal on a very small scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, which many scientists believe was the massive explosion that formed the universe. According to the theory, the universe was quickly cooling at that stage and matter was changing rapidly.
The CERN experiment could "correct some of our opinions" about scripture and faith, said Lajolo, adding that nothing in science could contradict the Holy Scriptures since both were rooted in God.
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