Night of Worship introductory speech

Dear readers, 

The following below is my opening speech for the event that I was working very hard to create, the Night of Worship. I think it's a good idea to read through this as it illustrates the development for my love for both physics and God at the same time. 

Cheers,

Matthew Tan

Hello all,

I’m Matthew Tan, the Secretary of Faith for the Senior Council 2014. Welcome to the second year of Night of Worship. This night is dedicated for those who wish to share their experiences with God and praise him with song.

So how I found God was very ironic thing; through science. In grade 9, I came across the sitcom that was very famous. Raise your hand if you know about “The Big Bang Theory”. So if many of you don’t know, the Big Bang Theory is about a group of physics nerds that are the best of friends. One of them, Sheldon Cooper, always tends to bring up very intriguing physics concepts like Shrodinger’s cat, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Antropic principle and the Higgs’ boson. So I thought to myself “What are these words?” and on that day I spent 4 hours clicking through links and looking at all these different concepts. What was very fun for me was that a lot of physics questions go into thought experiments with obvious paradoxes. The aim was to find a way through that paradox. However I digress. 

One way or another I found myself looking at particle physics, specifically photons. Now what’s very interesting about the photon is that at a quantum level, it’s not really a particle nor is it wave but rather a mixture of both. There are also cases where photons communicate with each other, as if they’re alive. But the thing is is that if they’re travelling at the speed of light, so the form of communication, whether a wave or particle, has to travel twice that. This is the question that physicists are dying to understand and for me it has a very spiritual context.

Genesis 1 verse 3 says “Let there be light” and although the bible says it rather simply, it does exemplify how much thought that God has put into making this world to the extent that we can’t after so many years understand the fundamental thing that makes up most of the universe. It also for me represents the idea that the more we try and understand God, the more he eludes us. We never know who God really is. Over the years there are multiple religions to try and understand him, because we can’t look at the world today, at the planets in the solar system to the particles that we are made out of and say “this was all coincidence”.

And God loved us so much that he created a world where we are given free will. A world to explore on our own, from the different countries we can go to the planets in the heavens. And although we are given an infinite amount of space to explore, we only have a little time to do it.  It is at this moment that I fell in love with physics, but more importantly, fell in love with God.

As Catholics, God has given us the chance today to celebrate his presence, and what a lovely chance it is. A lot of people here have put in a lot of effort for this event happen and I can’t thank God enough for giving me such lovely, hardworking people to support me in the creation of the event. Thank you all very much.

Without further ado, I will pass the floor over to Tuan, who will give an introduction as the pioneer of this event.