The Merging of Two Worlds: The Convergence of Scientific and Religious Thought

Through this initiative, students will take away an understanding of and appreciation for the scholarly method. For her project, Kar worked with religion professor Dr. As part of the University Scholars Program the undergraduate must not only undertake a full research project under the guidance of a faculty member but also present their work as part of a poster session. Kar said that the poster session was intimidating as a religion major. To that end, Kar encouraged every undergraduate student to compete in a research project such as the University Scholars Program and she was grateful for the opportunity that her mentors in the Religion Department at UF provided her.

Religion helps us understand so much about the way the world works. As fascinating as this one religion major is, this story is about more than Kar. One might look at these scientific facts and have them lead you to God or one might look at these and decide there is no evidence that God is there. You said, I think rightly — you rejected the idea we know enough to exclude the existence of God. But do we know enough to include the existence of God?

I think we were going to be faced with a choice, and that was part of the intention of our relationship with God. I do think, though, that God gave us some pretty interesting pointers, and I tried to describe some of those. I continually come back to that as a pretty interesting place to find this pointer to God. When we search our own hearts, this is what we learn about ourselves. Now across cultures we will differ a lot in terms of what we call right and what we call wrong.

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Influenced by our culture around us, we may put things in different boxes depending on what our culture tells us. But then what does it say about God? If God is the author of this moral law, then it seems God must stand for what is good and holy. That part of the awareness of God, maybe, is not so much initially love as it is, frankly, fear. It was for me.

So all of that, over the course of two years, not five minutes before the coffee break — laughter — kind of came together in a fashion that made the most incredible sense, even though a few years earlier, that same story would have sounded to me like utter gibberish. And I have doubts. So, OK, my faith is honest then because I have doubt in there as well.

But still, coming back to this synthesis of the pointers to God from nature, the pointers to God from within myself, and then the person of Jesus teaching me something about what God must be like and providing a solution to my imperfection — it all hangs together and it leads me to a perspective of being in awe and worship and love for God the creator.

As I have talked to Andy Newberg about this and visited his lab and other things, Andy has a much tougher time than Francis does and I do with specific religious commitments, not for a metaphysical reason but for an epistemological reason. The brain research indicates that human beings have a tremendous desire for certainty, a kind of artificial certainty that comes from the brain.

The reality is people in various cultures believe that their tradition is absolutely true, and it seems to be related to the brain. How does that affect the nature of belief and our confidence in our beliefs? They have a way to make sense of the world. If I can just tell you what Andy found when he looked at different types of religious people doing their religious practices, whether it was Franciscan nuns or Tibetan Buddhist monks —. Andrew Newberg is a neuroscientist and radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who has basically been running people through brain scans to see what happens when they engage in religious practices.

We had him here. If you go to pewforum. What he has found is that generally much of religious practice looks the same in the brain. Well, actually that is a big exception. The big exception is Pentecostals, which I just love. So there is a sense of merging with Christ or merging with the universe. These things happen with Buddhist monks and nuns and all that — Sikhs — except when you get to the Pentecostals, and actually the reverse is true.

Their frontal lobes shut down — which is not good news for the home team — but their frontal lobes shut down and their parietal lobes activate. But they maintain a relationship in a sense of their own boundaries, and they maintain this relationship, they believe, with Jesus. So at any rate, I found — especially the first part — very, very disturbing from a theological point of view. Spirituality is spirituality is spirituality. So the nuns will see it as a union with Jesus, and a monk will see it as connecting with the ground of being.

So at any rate, I guess the short answer to your question is I find that from a theological point of view difficult. I also find it a source of humility on my part. It has forced me to be humble about my own truth claims or the truth claims that I seem to adhere to. Hold your answer on that. And then Francis, you go, and then Barbara. Mike Gerson, I think, has raised an interesting question about how we can trust our own brains with things that we consider to be certainty when we recognize the mind has its own properties for wanting to arrive at certain conclusions.

Actually, I think this is a good thing. I think we should be learning increasingly not to trust ourselves to arrive at certainty about issues for which there is insufficient evidence to claim certainty. At the same time, I do think we can adhere to the notion that there is an answer; there is truth. But your brain may prevent you from being able to make the right interpretation. But ultimately, the truth will come out. I think when it comes to this question, though, about how does this fit together with which particular faith you attach yourself to, I guess I would make the case that you can look at pointers from nature and arrive at a comfortable recognition and embrace of a loving, monotheistic God.

Maybe this is like the theological concept that there is general revelation, the recognition of something outside ourselves, and then there is special revelation. Ross, I think you bring up a really, really good point. These people who are going into the brain scans are having something of a spiritual experience, and these tend to be what I think of as spiritual virtuosos. The monks who do it usually have 10, to 60, hours of meditation training under their belt — or under their robes, whatever you want to say. The nuns are Franciscan nuns.

They live in a cloistered situation, and so they tend to pray and meditate a lot. But you are right; they are not Muhammad or St. Paul on the road to Damascus or anything like that. Does special revelation look different from general revelation? The problem is that spiritual experience is such a slippery little devil. They heard the voice of Jesus or the voice of Allah or Yahweh.

Now maybe that was just the context in which they were living. But maybe it really was that in those extraordinary cases, they heard something that was uniquely Christian or Muslim or Jewish. But your point is really good, that these experiments are in their infancy. I wonder really how they can do it.

But your point is a good one, I think. Could I ask a different question for each person? I just wondered if you could give us a sense of the debate about the relationship between science and religion and various different religious traditions, and specifically, what the sticking points are, whether there are any interesting differences in the tensions between science and religion and different religious communities. And for Barbara, I just wanted to ask about the gender differences because there seems to be a significant gender difference between men and women in terms of their spirituality, that predisposition to believe — quite a marked difference.

Basically, if you look at Judaism and Islam, you will find a range of views about origin. Certainly in Judaism, conservative and reform Jews are generally accepting of evolution, and a lot of Orthodox Jews are as well. But there are certainly ultra-Orthodox Jews who oppose evolution and old Earth. A particular debate centers on Rabbi Slifkin, who is called the Zoo Rabbi because of his popularizing the love of animals.

In Islam, the Koran certainly encourages scientific knowledge. But it also describes a six-day creation and that Adam was made from clay. You can look at those and decide whether you think that evidence is compelling. If you have seen the website for Harun Yahya, you will see where a lot of that is coming from.

There is literally nobody left in the world to support evolution. Why This Scientist Believes in God. I guess the bottom line is that the subject of origins is a topic of major interest to all religions, and you find wide interpretations. The extremist views do appear in each of these, showing no signs of dissipation. Francis would be much better at talking about this. For example, the areas that handle compassion seem to be larger in women than men. But it seems to me that would drive women toward religion and church, as opposed to spiritual experience.

I think despite a trend in the past few decades to try to diminish the biological differences between maleness and femaleness, there is clearly a lot of biology there. It is reflected in the brain, in the presence of particular structures in larger or smaller size depending upon gender. Exactly how that translates into real human behaviors is a topic of a good deal of appropriate controversy. Collins, I have two questions for you. The first is you gave that tale about making the presentation at a conference of youth pastors and taking your informal survey and being kind of — maybe not surprised, but struck by the 90 percentile rejecting evolution.

And then secondly, I know you were on the transition team for the Obama administration on bioethics issues. And in each of those instances, the turnout has been amazing. At Stanford, there were 2, students who showed up to hear a talk about science and faith on a school night and wanted to stay and keep asking questions long after the organizers thought the whole thing would be over — same at many other campuses. On the other hand, certainly when it comes to interactions with, perhaps, what I would hope would be the audience that I might have the best chance of reaching out to and making a difference — the evangelical Christian community — it has been quite mixed.

I was invited to speak at The Gathering, which is a wonderful gathering of Christian philanthropists in Florida. On a Saturday night the organizer, Fred Smith, took a good deal of a risk here, I think, by having me as a speaker. At the end of the talk, a very strange thing happened. About half the audience stood up and gave me a standing ovation, and about half sat on their hands and looked very unhappy. So that tells you something about just how mixed this conversation is in that community. This has been presented as such a core of what it means to be a serious Christian that people are understandably distressed about the idea that what they have been told all this time might actually not be true.

They are worried about starting down a slippery slope that would lead to a very distressing outcome, namely, the fear that they might lose their faith altogether. I want to try to provide some reassurance that that has not been the case for those of us who have gotten to this synthesis. There are some evangelical leaders who are comfortable going into this space and even willing to be outspoken about it. We have a conference coming up in November. Tim Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, is going to be the local host.

And there are others as well. This is a cul-de-sac, a side issue. It gets in the way, unfortunately, of a lot of other more meaningful conversations about what God is really all about. So, I think we have got a long way to go. Well, that might not be the best way to get us toward the truth. All of these are projects the BioLogos Foundation would like to undertake if we can develop the support for it.

Your second question on stem cells requires a potentially long answer. But he said only lines that were developed before 9 p. Now Obama is saying, what about the lines that have been developed since then, which are actually scientifically more useful? The early lines had problems. These new lines will now be allowed as well. Remember, though, that just means the funds will be allowed for the study of those lines, not for creating new ones.

That is prevented by the Dickey-Wicker amendment, which people expect will probably remain there unless Congress decides to take it away. The use of private funds to develop new lines might be sufficient. There was a pretty strong reaction to the executive order in some quarters. I think when the dust has all settled, what has really been done is a pretty modest but defensible step forward.

That, of course, then got attacked by both sides, which is what happens when you take a modest step forward in a controversial area. As far as what else is coming, those draft NIH guidelines will get finalized in July after taking into account public input. So there will probably be some modifications, and then they will be finalized and issued, and that will then become the policy, at least for this administration.

Whether that actually takes off or not with all of the other things that Congress has to do, who knows? But there are certainly some noises about that. There will be a lot of policy questions. A big one from my perspective is going to be whether we need to impose some additional oversight, even regulation, on genetic testing in the era where lots of people are now finding out about their DNA Perhaps we need to do something to prevent some wild claims that are out there on the Web from being marketed to consumers without scientific evidence. You can go to the Web and order a test to find out if your kid is likely to be susceptible to ADHD based upon a genetic test that has never been validated.

And what do you know? Most of the time, the test is positive, and then the company will sell you nutritional supplements for thousands of dollars that will keep your kid from falling over the edge into bad behaviors. I mean, this is snake oil. On the first question that you just answered, you said you were developing Christian school curriculums. I was wondering if you have looked into public school curriculums. What are kids learning that is leading them to have these beliefs about evolution in the first place?

It depends if they live in Texas or not, right? We recently had this Texas Board of Education event, where there was a debate about whether Texas would have language in its education standards that would imply that evolution was not very well supported. This was actually quite a messy situation. On the first day of the debate, it looked as if that language was being stricken. Then the next day it came back with slightly different wording clearly suggesting that students in Texas will need to understand that evolution is potentially flawed and that intelligent design might be a better solution.

Just the kind of thing, of course, that in Dover, Pa. And this is going to keep happening. But at the moment in most schools that is not the case. It is largely a descriptive science. You memorize various kingdoms and genera and species — all those things I hated and why I went into physical chemistry.

You have to learn the parts of the crayfish, and you never get the sense that there are really principles here. That is a heroic group of very embattled people, who at least in most schools that have a heavy population of evangelical Christians are under attack for trying to teach the principles of evolution. Actually, I have questions for each of you.

Newberg has delineated between those who follow a loving, compassionate God and those who believe in an angry, vengeful God. Of the latter category, he says that that belief system activates the primitive, emotional limbic areas involved in anger, rage, fear and stress. So I was wondering in any of the research, did you delve into the area of religion and violence because that is, of course, what atheists point to as one of the ultimate flaws of religion, that it leads to world conflict?

That research came out after I had done my own research about the primitive — the whole amygdala is activated and it creates fear and anger. The amygdala actually does more when it comes to bad emotions. You think about it a lot with fear and anger. I think of it as a Rottweiler of the brain. So he has made that distinction. Let us not forget to note that in the 20th century, the greatest human slaughter came at the hands of atheist regimes — the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union and the Maoist regime in China.

The atheists conveniently seem to overlook that and point to other examples. Let us say the lesson is here that humans are capable of great cruelty, and they will use whatever worldview they wish to blame for their behavior or to excuse themselves. Collins, you started to answer this at the end of E.

But I do know, as a Christian, that I can say categorically that God knows what suffering is about, that God in the form of Jesus Christ suffered in ways that none of us could possibly imagine. I think my leaning toward Christianity came on grounds other than on science.

Actually, can I jump in? For example, I think about two particular scientists. One is Mario Beauregard up in the University of Montreal, who studied people who meditate. Another guy is Michael Persinger, who is up in Canada as well, who has a completely atheistic view.

I did this, put it on. But he feels that if you can do these things from a mechanical point of view, then you can circumvent God or the belief in God. The point is that both the atheist and the theist believe that these practices create better people, people who are more self-sacrificing, peaceful, calm, loving, all of that. I think spiritual practice generally leads toward good results, rather than negative results.

Collins, I wanted to come back to Genesis. We all essentially evolved over the course of 12 million years or so.

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Then at some point, God grants humanity a soul. At what point does Genesis or does the Bible become something approaching a historical record? At what point does it go from being something we have either greatly misinterpreted or just wrong to something that is historically accurate? It requires you to be a scholar of the Old Testament — which I am not, although I have read those who are — in terms of applying an appropriate hermeneutic to understanding the context of particular Scriptures. What was the original wording, and what did those words mean?

What were the contexts in which they were written, both in terms of who wrote them and the audience they were written for? And in that context, what was the difference between reality and myth? Is the language that of a historical eyewitness description or of something that seems more like a morality play? When you apply all of that to various parts of the Bible, different people will come out slightly differently. Certainly when it comes to the Garden of Eden, a question often asked is, were Adam and Eve literal, historical figures? One thing I think we can rule out as a possibility is that Adam and Eve were created as special acts, separate from the rest of the animal kingdom.

On the other hand, I think you could make a plausible argument that Adam and Eve were historical figures, a pair of Neolithic farmers, at a time where the brain had reached the point of sufficient complexity for the arrival of the sense of free will — which then got misused — of the moral law and of the soul. Or, you could also make the case that Adam and Eve are standing in for that whole group of about 10, ancestors from which we are all descended. Or, some would argue that Adam and Eve were never intended to be historical.

I think all are consistent with reasonable readings of the Old Testament from people from Augustine to C. A really wonderful book by Denis Alexander called Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? Genesis does not read like a scientific textbook. Where in the Old Testament do you get to the point where you need to say, this starts to sound more like a historical description?

Certainly there are parts of the Old Testament that very much read that way. There are other parts, like the Book of Job, that I think reasonable people might argue are more allegorical than historical. It goes to people with greater theological expertise than I to say in any particular situation how close to that boundary you are.

When it comes to the New Testament, that certainly does not fit in the same realm at all of something that sounds allegorical. It sounds very much like historical records of eyewitnesses. Is there a counterpart? Do you have any counterparts in other traditions? Who is the Hindu Francis Collins? And why or why not? You addressed it a bit in the PowerPoint. Certainly the Dalai Lama from that perspective has been a wonderful voice for reason in terms of a synthesis of science and the spiritual.

Collins, I wanted to ask you as a Christian and a scientist how you regard the miracles? You just mentioned a couple of moments ago about the eyewitnesses.

In some cases the Bible mentions pretty persuasive eyewitnesses — I think for the resurrection — but not for others, and for things in the Old Testament as well. So how should we regard them as Christians? But if you do believe in it, then you should believe in all of them — except I have trouble with a lot of them. So what about the miracles? I think basically the real question is, do you believe in a God who is outside of nature and who is the author of the laws of nature?

Lewis calls them, where something really important is being conveyed, a miraculous event is a pretty powerful way to do so. And why would we be surprised that an all-powerful God would choose to do that from time to time? So in that regard, I have no rational objection at all to miracles. I do believe in the resurrection as a literal rising from the dead of Jesus Christ in a fashion that N. But, of course, it is the cornerstone of my Christian faith. Yeah, it is a bit of a long read — not one of those things to try to do on a short plane flight. But it is a wonderful book.

Christopher Hitchens once said, send me that book. I mean, for instance, was Jonah really in the belly of the whale? I have trouble with that particular one, both in terms of the scientific improbabilities and what I have learned from theologians who are not convinced that that story is intended to be a historical story as opposed to a morality play. I have trouble with the literal standing still of the sun in terms of what that would mean for all kinds of laws of physics. At the same time, if God decided the sun needed to stand still, I presume God could figure out how to deal with those laws of physics for a little while too.

And if some of them are beyond human understanding. So how do you, as an individual, make the distinction between what you choose to accept as something that actually happened and something that did not? I think God gave us these two books: If we are empowered and given the opportunity to read both of them with the confidence that there should be consistency, then when we encounter something that seems to be an inconsistency, we have the tools at hand to try to sort it out.

So when science tells me in a way that seems incontrovertible from many directions that the universe is But that has not been presented. I suspect it will not be. So in that situation it comes down to the question, can I, as a scientist, accept the idea that at those very rare moments where science is not likely to provide you any data that God could suspend the natural laws? And I see no reason why that could not be the case. It seems that a number of our cards are dealt before free will or even consciousness arises. So what does that tell us about human behavior, free will and how we are ultimately judged by God?

We do know from the study of identical twins, long before we even had specific DNA analyses to back it up, that an awful lot of human behavior is in some way strongly influenced by heredity. Anybody who knows identical twins will recognize that yeah, there are some similarities there in those personalities.

People are already given a certain pathway by their genes that might make it more or less difficult for them to find God. At the same time, looking at whether the glass is half full or half empty comes in here. Free will is not going out the window on the basis of the study of the genome. And that is a free will decision, which every person has to make in terms of moral decisions, in terms of life choices, and yes, in terms of whether to be interested in pursuing the question of God or to let that one go. Predestination is too strong. A lot of Dr. Given that we have a lot of pluralism in our society, is it possible that we are looking at this the wrong way?

Ultimately, I think the truth is going to come out. If you have your religious traditions based on premises that are going to be seen as flawed in a fundamental way, how can they then survive? I guess what I would say is it seems to me that the nation is going the other way — not going the Quiverfull Movement way. In the "meantime", through that special, one-way, 4th dimension created expressly to accommodate massive, causal, local, temporal matter, the Universe can live, evolve, explore, and experience itself.

Charge conservation is the "credit card" of the material Cosmos. Gravity pays the entropy-"interest" on the symmetry debt of matter through the creation of matter's time dimension - the only dimension in which charge conservation has durable, historic, or causal "karmic" significance. Because gravity slows the spatial expansion of the Cosmos via the annihilation of space , we see that matter's time dimension or historical entropy drive T is actually funded by the intrinsic motion or spatial entropy drive of light S , with gravity acting as the conversion force - as represented below by a quasi-mathematical "concept equation": Light has perfect symmetry, bearing no charges of any kind.

When the symmetry of light and light's particle-antiparticle pairs is broken in the "Big Bang" by asymmetric weak force decays , and the symmetric light cosmos is transformed to an asymmetric "matter-only" cosmos, the raw energy of light is conserved as the mass and momentum of particles; the entropy drive or intrinsic motion of light as gauged by "velocity c" is conserved via gravitational transformation as the entropy drive or intrinsic motion of matter's time dimension as gauged by "velocity T" - the spatial metric as modified by gravity ; but the various symmetries of light are conserved as the charges and spin of matter.

These charges produce forces which act to return the asymmetric system of bound energy to its original symmetric state of free energy - fulfilling Noether's Theorem. The particles and their charges constitute the "fermions" - the leptons and hadrons which make up the atomic matter of the periodic table of the elements. A General Systems Perspective ". If we are simply considering the most general case of converting free to bound energy, such as the absorption of a photon by the electron shell of an atom, we need only take into account the conservation of raw energy and its entropy - which is to say mass and momentum, gravitation and time.

These are the two internal lines of the Tetrahedron Model running from the peripheral Conservation and Entropy poles to the central Causality pole. However, if we wish to consider the conversion of free energy into an isolated particle a "singlet", not a particle-antiparticle pair , born new into the Universe, then we must add "charge" to our accounting, the third internal line of the Tetrahedron Model, running from the Symmetry to the Causality pole. The charges, in the case of the creation of the elementary leptons for example , are the strictly conserved electric and weak force charges, the latter known as "number", or as I prefer, "identity" charge.

In the case of the creation of the composite hadrons particles containing quarks , the internal quark charges "color" strictly conserved and "flavor" only partially conserved must also be added. Below I will discuss only the leptons and the "identity" charge, including the "Intermediate Vector Bosons" "IVBs" , the field vectors or force carriers of the leptonic "identity" charge.

The other charges, including gravity, are discussed in " Symmetry Principles of the Unified Field Theory ". For the gravitational charge and force: Like electric charge, identity charge is strictly conserved and must always sum to zero; that is, a "positive" identity charge must always be balanced by a "negative" anti-identity charge, but unlike electric charge, in the case of "identity" the balancing can be accomplished by either the implicit or the explicit form of the charge. The elementary massive leptons, the electron, muon, and tau, carry identity charge implicitly, in "hidden", latent, or potential form, whereas their respective neutrinos carry identity charge in explicit or "bare" form.

A neutrino is nothing else but the pure, explicit, or "bare" form of an identify charge. The electron, for example, in addition to spin carries two charges, an electric charge, and an implicit "hidden" identity charge. The electron neutrino is the explicit form of the electron's hidden identity charge.

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When an isolated elementary particle a "singlet" - not a particle-antiparticle pair is created or destroyed, an identity charge must record the event explicitly - an antineutrino or neutrino must be emitted - notifying spacetime of a change or asymmetry in its population of elementary particles.

The protocol of identity charge is very similar to our religious notion of a human soul implicit in the body from birth, which becomes explicit at death, conserving the essential element of personal identity. While we can think of the neutrinos and anti-neutrinos in terms of positive and negative arithmetic signs which sum to zero, nature distinguishes matter from antimatter by spin: Only the massive leptons - the electron, muon, and tau, are known to have associated neutrinos, and each neutrino is specific to its massive lepton partner and namesake.

Neutrinos are the hallmark of an elementary particle, and therefore only the three massive leptons are elementary particles. Quarks, for example, have no associated neutrinos, but quarks are sub-elementary particles, as we know because they carry fractional elementary leptonic electric charges.

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The partial identity charges of the quarks if they have any may be collectively summed up, carried, and conserved by the hypothetical "leptoquark" neutrino. The neutrinos themselves are also usually accounted as elementary particles. However, there remains a lot we do not know about neutrinos, and if they have mass, they may also be composite particles.

Current observations suggest neutrinos have a tiny mass and oscillate more or less freely between the three types, somewhat as the three massive leptons can transform into one another albeit less freely, requiring in the latter case the services of the "W" IVB to mediate their identity transformations. Neutrinos comprise an accounting system by which spacetime keeps track of all elementary particles existing within its conservation domain - much as the government records the number and identity of its citizens.

Neutrinos are weak force "identity" charges, and so they must record, carry, and be the consequence of a broken symmetry of light. In the case of identity charge, the broken symmetry is light's "anonymity". All photons are exactly alike, and the photon is also its own antiparticle. Elementary particles, however, are not all alike and they are not their own antiparticles , and can be separated into three types plus antiparticles: These particles are distinguished by large and exact rest mass differences; anti-neutrinos are distinguished by right-handed spins, whereas neutrinos have left-handed spins "parity".

The photon's "anonymity" constitutes a symmetry of identity, which Noether's Theorem says must be conserved, requiring the identity charge, whose explicit form is the neutrino. In practical terms, the identity charge serves to facilitate annihilation reactions and hence helps to conserve light's symmetry by identifying in a timely fashion - within the time limit for Heisenberg's virtual reality - the appropriate leptonic annihilation partner and one which also has the appropriate spin.

Nature is telling us through the charges of matter exactly what symmetries of light she considers worth conserving. It's up to us to figure out what symmetries the charges represent and why they should require conservation. The "Intermediate Vector Bosons" or "IVBs" are the highly specialized field vectors or force carriers of the weak force.

As noted above, the massive leptons the electron, muon, and tau and perhaps the hypothetical leptoquark, carry identity charge in hidden or implicit form, while the massless or nearly massless neutrinos are the "bare" or explicit form of identity charge. Each massive lepton is paired with a corresponding massless neutrino or explicit identity charge.

As the field vector of identity charge, it is the role of the IVBs to mediate transformations of identity charge among the elementary leptonic particles, including, when necessary, transformations of "flavor" among the quarks. Unlike the bosons or field vectors of the other charges photons, gluons, gravitons , which are massless particles with intrinsic motion c, the weak force IVBs are extremely massive particles: The IVBs are apparently "metric" particles, whose great mass is entirely due to the binding energy required to compress and perhaps fold? The IVBs' mode of action is apparently to form a "complex" with, or "engulf" within its compressed metric, a "real" particle ripe for transformation, combined with an appropriate virtual particle-antiparticle pair drawn from the Heisenberg - Dirac "virtual particle sea", the vacuum repository of all possible virtual particle-antiparticle pairs.

The compressed metric of the heavy IVB brings the real particle and the selected virtual particle pair into very close contact with each other, perhaps even "touching" , such that they can safely exchange charges and energy in a manner they could not when separated by normal distances because of the danger of violating charge, energy, and causality conservation laws, interference from unwelcome virtual particles, etc. The IVBs of the weak force can also be conceived as recreating the original energy-densities of the "Big Bang" force-unity eras the "W" IVB reproduces the environment of the electroweak era, for example during which the reactions they now mediate first took place.

This is the fail-safe method of the weak force IVBs for ensuring the invariance of all single elementary particles it produces. The global gauge character invariant everywhere always of the spacetime particle metric or Dirac-Heisenberg "vacuum" ensures the invariance of particle-antiparticle pairs when they are created by the electromagnetic, strong, or gravitational forces.

But when single elementary particles must be created, the IVBs of the weak force play this particle gauge role on a local stage - an important example of a "local gauge symmetry current" operating in the weak force also suggesting an analogy between the weak force Higgs boson, IVBs, and the spacetime metric. A connection between the weak and electromagnetic forces is also hinted - since both seem able to create the same elementary particles. This connection was of course formalized as the Electroweak Unification by Salam, Glashow, and Weinberg, for which they received the Nobel Prize in physics.

For more details of the weak force transformation mechanism, see: The IVBs therefore are a form of "metric catalyst", mediating reactions between real and virtual particles; the IVBs form a bridge between ordinary 4-dimensional reality and 2-dimensional virtual reality, a bridge which makes available to "real" particles the infinite charge resources of the virtual particle "sea", bringing virtual particles into the "real" world and sinking "real" particles into the virtual world.

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No identity change occurs in the real world which is not also reflected in changes in the virtual world. This bridge of the IVBs is all that remains of the primordial unity and connection of the electroweak force-unity era which existed during the early micro-moments of the "Big Bang". The bridge, in the form of the primordial condensed metric of the IVBs, remains in the world today as a massive connecting link with the symmetric, virtual, and primordial electroweak era like an actual "time machine" , providing a secure pathway for elementary particles and identity charges to move between 2-D virtual reality and 4-D "real time".

While of course the product of a weak force transformation is important say, an electron , the uniformity of that product is just as important - all electrons must be exactly the same in mass and charge, whenever and wherever produced - for obvious reasons of energy, charge, and symmetry conservation. Uniformity is the reason why the whole weak force transformation process is quantized into particle form, and why it is divided into two interactive parts, the Higgs boson and the weak force IVBs. Particle creation and transformation did not end with the Big Bang creation of matter, but continues with the creation and transformation of leptons, neutrinos, quarks, and mesons including the creation, transformation, and destruction of the elements and elementary particles in stars and via "radioactive" processes.