A Prayer for Thursday, July 16, 2015

Pluto and Pentaquarks

O God,

They taught me at Gordon Grammar School that Pluto was the ninth and last planet in our solar system. Then the experts demoted it to a “dwarf planet.”

Now we know that, no matter what we call it, it’s another amazing part of your amazing creation.

Thank you for the New Horizons spacecraft. Thank you for the scientists who designed it and built it. Thank for you for the scientists who planned and executed its mission. Thank you for its safe ten-year journey through space. Thank you for the pictures and other information it is sending back. Thank you that it is moving on beyond Pluto. Thank you for what it is yet to teach us.

They also taught me at Gordon Grammar School that atoms are the basic building blocks of matter and that every atom has a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, with electrons outside the nucleus.

Then, physicists discovered that smaller units that they called “quarks” make up the protons and neutrons. And now, thanks to experiments done at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, scientists have tentatively confirmed the existence of pentaquarks, which are comprised of four quarks and one anti-quark and which will help us to understand better how matter is constituted.

Thank you for the scientists who have done and who are doing such important work.

Thank you for science.

So, whether we look farther out or farther in, we keep being amazed by the intricacies of physical reality.

And we keep being amazed by you …

Amen.