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That apart, allow me to dwell a moment on Professor Hawkins”€™ notion that the LHC might open a door to another dimension. Which would mean that this dimension must be situated somewhere next door like Alice’s Wonderland, only to be entered by jumping through a looking glass. But this cannot be true. Because our known dimensions are not a thing apart, but a fragment of a much larger dimension which is above us, below us, around us, and within us. The only problem is that God in His wisdom has denied us access to it while we are alive. Yet there are instances when the gates open a fraction for the righteous as a foretaste of things to come.

This is known to any simple person, myself included, who keeps an image of the Holy Virgin on the dashboard of his car in the hope that she will bless our journeys. The same is true of any modern philosopher who has no tolerance for existentialism, deconstructionism, the Frankfurt School boobies, or any such godless nonsense, but merges Plato’s teachings and Christ’s message of love and compassion with perfect ease and inscrutable logic into one numinous body of thought that at times seems to light him from within.

Now you, as a staunch atheist or dedicated agnostic, may scoff at this bunkum and point out how much it reeks of frankincense and Catholic doctrine. To which I have nothing to add. But I could suggest that you too might have once had a similar experience, though without taking the pains to define it, let alone following it up.

Perhaps when you were a mountain climber who, after a long and arduous ascent, stood finally on a high summit and beheld the world around you. Who saw an endless succession of mountaintops in the clear and primordial light, saw clouds drifting between them, saw shimmering lakes deep down in a valley, saw an immensely high sky of an unbelievable pure blue. Saw it all and felt moved.

Or when you were a sailor holding the wheel during a star-studded night, perhaps while ghosting along with the trade winds toward Trinidad and Tobago, and the silent and all-encompassing immensity around you reverberated deep in your soul as a mysterious sentience, the intuitive recognition of a mighty and timeless river beyond any known dimension, one that could only be felt and never put into words…