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Heart and Soul: Faith in science

Factual: Health & Wellbeing

Faith in science

01/07/2022 GMT

BBC World Service - Heart and Soul, Faith in science

Why some scientists researching the origins of the universe still believe in a creator

Elin Rhys visits the Large Hadron Collider and talks to scientists who, despite looking for scientific answers to how the universe began, still believe devoutly in a creator.

CERN, in Geneva, is the most complex scientific experiment in the world. It has just restarted operating after a break, and is celebrating the 10th anniversary of detecting the Higgs Boson, a particle that is the final piece in the jigsaw of the standard model of physics. It explains how particles acquire mass. Without mass, there would be no matter and we wouldn’t be here. 

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was designed to find this Higgs boson, and smashes particles at almost the speed of light in a tunnel deep underground to discover new particles. It attempts to explain how the Big Bang worked. We go underground to visit one of the enormous detectors at the famous Large Hadron Collider and talk to young scientists from different parts of all the world who, despite looking for scientific answers to how the universe began, still believe devoutly in a creator. 

Among the other contributors are the designer of the LHC itself, Lyn Evans; physicists with and without faith who have been at CERN from the early days; a scientist who studies anti-matter and other members of CERN staff, old and new. Faith in Science is presented by Elin Rhys, a scientist raised as a Baptist, who struggles with not knowing the answer to what was there before The Big Bang and tries to discover how scientists with a faith square this with their research into why we exist.

(Image: Elin Rhys and Dr Orlando Villalobos Baillie stand in front of the Alice Experiment at CERN. Credit: Telesgop)

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