Dimension 0
A
point.
A single point has no length, width, or height. It has no size
whatsoever, no dimension. When we exist in one solitary point, we exist
in Dimension Zero.
Waxahachie,
Texas, was a quiet enough town in 2017, when those four private investors
decided that their way of “making
America great again” was to finish the Superconducting Super Collider
underneath the town – heck, underneath a good chunk of Ellis County, if you
think about it. Dang thing’s over fifteen miles in diameter, fifty-four miles
around, you know? And I think in their good ol’ boy Texas hearts and wallets,
they’d’ve made the dang thing even bigger if more than a quarter of it
hadn’t already been dug, just sitt’n there waiting for them to finish the job.
But
even now, thirteen years later, with the population doubled thanks to the SSC,
Waxahachie’s still a pretty peaceful place. It’s still somewhere that you would
feel good raising a family,
you know?
Too bad I don’t have a family to raise here.
I’ve
only been back here for a year, almost two, since they opened the SSC in late ‘28.
I say “back” here, because one of my three degrees came from here, from the
Southwestern Assemblies of God University, class of 2018. (Go, Lions!) Even played a little football there, like I did back
in Burkbuckett – heck, you can’t be
six-foot-anything in Texas and not play football, you know? Nothing special: NAIA-level lineman, was never
going to start anyway, not even in the Central States League. But I got to play
some, and I learned about teamwork on the field while I learned about God and a
ton of other topics in the classroom.
So,
to fill in the missing years in my resume there, insert a second bachelor’s in
mathematics from SMU – guarantee I
wasn’t going to make the team there, even though I did have a
year of eligibility left! – and my doctorate in particle physics from UT-Austin,
knowing what was coming down the pike back there in Waxahachie.
Because,
see, here’s the thing: I’ve been a Christian
all my life. Raised in the Assembly of God, went to church every Sunday, spoke
my share of tongues, took enough communion to have eaten Christ’s entire arm
off. (Forgive me, Father, for I have
sinned…) But even after being ordained, I knew there was something
missing, something fundamentally wrong in the way I was connecting to
the Lord. I was twenty-two years old, bachelors of divinity in hand, ready to
go find me a nice church population to tend – and yet, I knew I wasn’t quite ready yet, you know? There was something… well, I don’t want to keep
using the word “fundamental”, but that’s what it was: something foundational
that was missing. A brick lacking in my cornerstone that would topple the
entire structure one day through its absence.
And
as I was starting my senior year at SAGU, the news came out about the four oil
men who had decided to take President Trump’s slogan to heart. They’d made a
killing in the resurgent oil market that year, and wanted to do something significant.
(I keep using the fundamental;
they kept using the word significant. Guess we’re all a bit semantically
fixated sometimes.) And
they’d been looking into what the situation was with the Super Collider that
was mothballed back in 1994 (I wasn’t even alive
back then!), found out the tunnels that existed were still in great shape,
that a chem company called Magnablend had bought the site but not done
anything with it yet, and decided
over beer and ribs to buy the thing and “to run them CERN folks into the ground.” (Their words, not mine.
I’m a team player, remember?)
So
they did. Buy it, I mean. The
CERN Large Hadron Collider’s done some amazing work in the fifteen, twenty
years it’s been smashing particles, and its reputation is safe from us.
But it wasn’t “us” back in 2017, of course; it was “them”. As in, “Them
oil men are going to make fools of
themselves, reinvesting in that white elephant! Don’t they know it got shut
down for a reason?”
They
did, in fact, know. Cost
overruns. Mostly the cost of the magnets they needed, not so much
the tunneling, which it turns out isn’t as big of the budget as you’d think
(and even less in 2018, when they’d already had fourteen miles in place before
day one!). And the magnets? Well, twenty-five years is a loo-oong time in technology years, and
those magnets were much more easily produced, more powerful, and a tenth
of the price they were in 1992. So when the original was shut down, the
government had spent two billion dollars already, with an expected ten more to spend, before Mr. Clinton
reluctantly signed off on its shutdown. By the time these four dudes finished
the project in 2028, it had only cost them eight billion, and that’s in today’s pesos! Someth’n to be said for
private management and a lack of government bureaucracy, but a big chunk
of that savings was the improvement in tech since the nineties.
And it flicked a switch in me. I’d
gotten hooked on science from our chem and physics teacher back in high school,
over my mother’s objections. At the time, the big thing in particle science the
search for the “God Particle”, the super heavy boson that Peter Higgs and
Francois Englert theorized, and CERN found before I graduated from Burkbuckett
High School, up on the OK border. When I heard about the Superconducting Super
Collider project starting up again in 2017, it renewed that love in my gut for
the physics I’d set aside in my devotion to God.
And
it was then that I realized what the missing brick was in my foundational belief system:
How can I believe the literal translation
of my Lord’s Word, as He has given it to us through the prophets in the
sixty-six books of the Bible, when the scientific world was making discovery
after discovery that seemed to put that Scripture in question?
Which
was right? The Bible, or the Universe?
Mind
you, it’s not like they’re really as contradictory as some people make it
sound like they are. Most people don’t realize, for example, that the Bible always assumed the earth was a sphere,
unlike most of the societies alive fifteen hundred years before Christ. I was
just reading Isaiah 40, which happens to be where I am in my yearly
reading straight through of the Bible (and like any lifelong college student, I
take such copious notes that I have to work to remember to listen to what God is telling me with his Word each
day, not just read and digest it untested). In verse 22, he casually throws in
this verse:
It is He who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers…
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers…
The “circle of the earth”? The actual Hebrew
word means “sphere” – so they called it a globe
for hundreds of years before the
Greeks and Romans watched sailors disappear below the horizon and famously
realized the earth is round. (Yes, there
were backwards stragglers who thought Columbus and Magellan would fall of the
edge, but they were just stupid, not the norm.)
We could go on and on… Do you know why
God told man to circumcise male Hebrew babies on the eighth day of life
in particular? Scientists have recently ascertained that the combination of
wound coagulation (which increases over
time as babies live their first month) and comfort of the surgery (while babies do feel pain, despite
calls to the contrary by fools, it is less at birth than down the road)
makes the eighth day the ideal date for circumcision for the health and
well-being of the baby! And God knew
that already and ordered it for His People from the very beginning!
Many of the food
restrictions of the Old Testament were obviously designed to keep the nomadic
Israelites healthy and alive, and that’s partially why some of them were
rescinded in Christ’s time – they
were no longer medically necessary. The most obvious of these is the restriction on eating pork, a meat
that turns deadly when it
starts to go unrefrigerated. God chose simply to forbid his nomadic people
the deadliest meats (there are long lists
of animals that are ‘unclean’, although some of those are designed to keep up
away from animals that the idolatrous pagans around them worshipped).
There
are literally dozens of these “coincidences”, and all of these things
add up. I was certain that there was more method than madness to the
Bible’s many rules, statutes, commandments, and so forth. But I couldn’t put my
finger on it.
So I decided,
two months before graduation, that I needed to find an answer to that all-important
question if I was to become a true servant of God, and certainly before I could
shepherd anyone else. So I applied to and got accepted at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas (Go, Mustangs!), majoring
in mathematics with an engineering specialization, with the sole intent on
going on to graduate work in particle physics. Three years later, I was working
with amazing physicists like Willy Fischler and Duane Dicus and Jacques Distler
at the University of Texas at Austin (Go,
Longhorns!), learning everything I prayed I would need to get on at the SSC
when it opened in a few years.
Four
years there left me just enough time to get some practical experience at
one of the National Accelerator Labs (the
one out in the South Bay, near where the 49ers played. Even got to see a couple
of NFL games there, including seeing my beloved Cowboys play!), plus a trip
to Switzerland as a “visiting scientist” (sounds
like I was some high-fallutin’ hotshot!) for three months to study what the
folks at CERN were doing now, before I landed the cherished gig back
here in Waxahachie, studying and working on whatever our calling would
be.
I
had no idea what projects I’d be working on, but I knew it would have
importance. And I knew it would bring me closer to my goal – the
understanding of the relationship between God and the Universe he’s created.
So,
there’s my life and career in a nutshell up until now. And all of it was
aimed at answering one question, reconciling one conflict in my world’s
paradigm. For example, in all my years, I’ve never had a serious girlfriend. Why?
Well, before I left high school, it
was mostly because I was a math geek, and afterwards,
my studies always took precedence. And today, thirty-one years after birth, I’m
still lost in those studies, in the question that supersedes all other
questions:
How do
I reconcile what the Bible says with what modern science says?
Amazingly,
I got the chance to find out.
And now, I get to share that knowledge with
you.
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