Science & Spirituality

Why Does CERN Have a Statue of Shiva?

CERN is the world’s largest and most respected centre for scientific research in the field of particle physics.

The CERN shiva statue was gifted by the Government of India to celebrate its association with CERN, which started in the 1960s and remains strong today. In Hinduism, this form of the dancing Lord Shiva is known as the Nataraj and symbolises Shakti, or The Life Force Energy – the animating current of all of life and that which forms the basis of Quantum-Touch.

As a plaque alongside the statue explains, Lord Shiva danced the Universe into existence, He sustains and motivates it, and will eventually extinguish it. He is thus considered creator, preserver, and destroyer of the Cosmos, and conveys the Indian conception of the never-ending cycle of time.

All is Energy

Carl Sagan, American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, science communicator, author, and professor, drew the metaphor between the Cosmic dance of the Nataraj and the modern study of the ‘Cosmic dance’ of subatomic particles. It is these subatomic particles that we are working with in Quantum-Touch, these are so-called “God” particles.

You and everything around you are made of particles.

But when the universe began, no particles had mass; they all sped around at the speed of light.

Stars, planets and life could only emerge because particles gained their mass from a fundamental field associated with the Higgs Boson. The existence of this mass-giving field was confirmed in 2012, when the Higgs Boson “God” particle was discovered at CERN.

The God Particle

The Higgs Boson is better-known by its colloquial name, “the God Particle,” so-called because for a generation, scientists had to take it on faith that it existed. It was on July 4, 2012, that scientists announced the observation of the Higgs Boson, the elusive particle that gives almost all other particles their mass—and thus lays the foundation for the matter that forms us and everything we see around us in the Universe. The news thrilled the world and made international headlines.

Physicist Fritjof Capra further explained in The Tao of Physics: “The Dance of Shiva symbolises the basis of all existence. At the same time, Shiva reminds us that the manifold forms in the world are not fundamental, but illusory and ever-changing. Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter.”

Creation & Destruction

According to Quantum field theory, the dance of creation and destruction is the basis of the very existence of matter. Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. For the modern physicists then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter, the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomena. The statue captures Shiva performing the Tandava, a dance believed to be the source of the cycle of creation, preservation and destruction.The dance exists in five forms which shows the cosmic cycle from creation to destruction: