There’s a lot of discussion raging right now about the faster-than-light neutrinos that supposedly have been observed at the CERN laboratories. Will this discovery disprove parts of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and radically change the way we view the universe? Or is this just another case of experimental error?

Whatever the outcome, the one thing that is completely clear from the caution of the CERN scientists about their findings is the vast difference between the ways Science and Religion try to make sense of the universe. Here it is in summary:

(You can click on the image to see a larger version, or read a transcript of the text below.)

On god, holy books, and faster-than-light neutrinos

RELIGION
“Here’s this ancient Holy Book that contains the divinely-inspired words of God, the Creator of the Universe himself.

It tells you how you must live and how you must behave, what you can do and what you cannot do. If you think some parts of the book contradict other parts, remember that your human mind is too small to understand God’s mysterious ways.

Should you not obey our interpretation of this Book, you will suffer excruciating pain and torment for all eternity, after you die.
All this is absolutely true. How do we know? It’s written right there in the Book. DUH!”

SCIENCE

“We’ve apparently detected neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light, which means we are going to have to re-think a lot of things we thought we knew about the universe and how it works.

This is extremely exciting, but, even though we have actually observed this phenomenon tens of thousands of times, there is still the possibility that there was something wrong with our experiment.

So, to be as sure as we possibly can, we want other scientists to conduct their own experiments to independently reproduce and verify these results before we can accept them.”

Faith vs. evidence. Who you got?

Still puzzled about what the Large Hadron Collider actually is for?

Here it is all explained as a rap song featuring dancing CERN physicists and the voice of Stephen Hawking. I wish my old physics lectures were this much fun back in the days!

It seems like Douglas Adams was wrong after all about the world ending on a Thursday. Wrong by one day if there is any truth in the words of the scaremongers blabbing about the dangers of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), due to be fired up this coming Wednesday 10^th September.

I Survived the Large Hadron Collider Experiment T-Shirt

The Large Hadron Collider will be used to speed up two proton beams to practically the speed of light, travelling in opposite directions. As these protons are then made to smash into each other, scientists are hoping to recreate conditions very similar to those just the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This has lead to speculation and unfounded scaremongering that a resulting rogue black hole or some other phenomenon will be created that will swallow up the Earth and the surrounding solar system.

But even if this baloney were true, nothing so spectacular will happen this Wednesday because it will take a while for the Large Hadron Collider to get the protons going fast enough for scientists to have the smashing time they have been preparing for for the last 20 years.

So, will you survive the Large Hadron Collider experiment?

Well, that depends… you could be unlucky enough to get hit by a car or choke on a chicken bone before it’s all over. But in the meantime, make sure you get hold of your ‘I Survived the Large Hadron Collider Experiment’ t-shirt from our shop at MadSciStuff.com so that just in case you make it, you’ll be all set and ready to have some fun at the expense of the doomsayers who would like to stop Science progress in its tracks.

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