As you’ve probably heard, over Easter they switched on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland again, hoping to find out something more about the ‘dark matter’ that seems to make up 96% of the mass of the universe.  Like most people, I can’t begin to contemplate the complexity of the questions that are being asked, let alone the machine they’re using to answer them.

Mind you, lots of other things are even more mysterious to me. I can’t draw, or plaster a wall or play cricket – so I’m amazed at the things other people – artists, builders and batsmen – can do.  I’m amazed that my little sister, who’s a midwife, can deliver a baby, and that my daughter, who’s doing her A levels, already understands more maths and physics than I ever will.

I work in a museum, the Ashmolean at Oxford University, which is a good place to be amazed as I’m surrounded every day by amazing things from drawings by Michelangelo, to delicate ceramics made by Chinese potters a thousand years ago.

Recently though, the most amazing thing I’ve found in the Museum hasn’t been an object but a person.  I’ve been working with a neuroscientist, Dr Chrystalina Antoniades, who does research into Parkinson’s disease.  We’re using the collections of the Museum in teaching and research, thinking about how looking at art can help us understand something about how the brain works.

But the most extraordinary thing about working together has been discovering just how much of the brain we don’t understand at all.  In particular, we don’t understand just how the seven billion brains on the planet, all made of the same stuff and working in the same way, somehow produced seven billion different, individual people

Oddly, this ignorance is actually rather exciting.  It stimulates scientists like Dr Antoniades to do more research – and it makes us realise just how amazing we are.

The writer of Psalm 139 in the Bible praised God because, as he put it, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made”.  Never mind the universe, then: every one of us is complex beyond understanding. We are all amazing.  We are all fearfully and wonderfully made, no matter how you think that might have happened.  We are all unique.  And part of me, even after all the research, hopes that we never work out exactly how.  It’s good to be a mystery.