Faster Than Light: Well, so what?

I wonder if you have been as intrigued as I about the recent neutrino results that have been flagged up in the media?  A neutrino is one of the fundamental particles of which the universe is formed.  The latest research suggests that they may have travelled faster than light.  Apparently, when they were fired from CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, to the Grand Sasso Laboratory in Central Italy, they arrived before they should have done.  Results are being checked and rechecked by scientists around the world.  So what?

Well, if they have exceeded the speed of light, then the discovery effectively undermines Albert Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity, propounded in 1905, and which asserts that light is a ‘cosmic constant’.  So what?

Well, if the results of the experiment prove correct some of the implications begin to make the science fiction sound like science fact - time travel, for instance.  In 1923, Professor Arthur Buller penned an oft-quoted limerick about such:

There was a young woman named Bright,

Whose speed was far faster than light;

She set out one day

In a relative way,

And returned the previous night.

Hmm!  To explain the neutrino phenomenon, some theoretical physicists are already suggesting that an explanation lies along the lines that we are not part of a uni-verse but multi-verse.  Perhaps the neutrinos went into another dimension (according to some physicists there are 11 dimensions compared to our four (!)), and so arrived in record time.  So what?

Well, if nothing else here is a potential reminder that science does not have all the answers and is always a developing branch of knowledge.  Today’s discovery may overturn centuries of accepted wisdom.  Think of the hassle that Copernicus and others received by daring to suggest that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa.  So what?

Well, firstly, we need to be clearly cautious when someone asserts that ‘science has proved!’ something or other that seems to undermine fundamental Christian truths, such as, dead men do not rise from the dead.  Secondly, there are dimensions of existence that we know nothing about: there are ‘things invisible’ according to the Bible, whole spiritual realities that are not perceptible to the naked eye or science as we know it.  As the Bard put it in Hamlet, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.’  So what?

Well, the God who comes to us in Jesus is Creator, Provider, Redeemer and Consummator of everything, things visible and invisible.  There is nothing in our universe, or whatever multiverse there may be, that is outside of the control of him.  As Abraham Kuyper, a one time Dutch Prime Minister and theologian, put it: ‘There is not one square inch of the cosmos over which Jesus Christ does not say, “That is mine! I made it!”’  You do not need to know or travel at the speed of light, or faster than it, to believe that.  So what?  All is well.

Steve Brady