Religions > Bible > God's fine tuning of the universe through the angels!
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25 Nov 2004 02:52:51 AM |
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God's fine tuning of the universe through the angels! |
Cosmic Conundrum
The universe seems uncannily well suited to the existence of life.
Could that really be an accident?
By Michael D. Lemonick and J. Madeleine Nash
Dealing with cranks is an occupational hazard for most scientists,
but it's especially bad for physicists and astronomers. Those who
study the cosmos for a living tend to be bombarded with letters, calls
and e-mails from would-be geniuses who insist they have refuted
Einstein or devised a new theory of gravity or disproved the Big Bang.
The telltale signs of crankdom are so consistent—a grandiose theory,
minimal credentials, a messianic zeal—that scientists can usually spot
them a mile off.
That's why the case of James Gardner is so surprising. He seems to
fit the profile perfectly: he's a Portland, Oregon, attorney, not a
scientist, who argues—are you ready for this?—that our universe might
have been manufactured by a race of superintelligent extraterrestrial
beings. That is exactly the sort of idea that would normally have
experts rolling their eyes, blocking e-mails and hoping the author
won't corner them at a lecture or a conference.
But when Gardner's book Biocosm came out last year, it carried
jacket endorsements from a surprisingly eminent group of scientists.
"A novel perspective on humankind's role in the universe," wrote
Martin Rees, the astronomer royal of Britain and a Cambridge colleague
of Stephen Hawking's. "There is little doubt that his ideas will
change yours," wrote Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (seti) Institute in California. "A
magnificent one-stop account of the history of life," wrote complexity
theorist John Casti, a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute. Since
then, Gardner has been welcomed at major planetariums and legitimate
scientific conferences, explaining his ideas to a surprisingly
interested public.
It's not that anyone actually buys Gardner's theory. He admits
it's "farfetched," and even those scientists who find it stimulating
think it's wildly improbable. But it does have one thing in its favor.
The biocosm theory is an attempt, albeit a highly speculative one, to
solve what just might be science's most profound mystery: why the
universe, against all odds, is so remarkably hospitable to life.
Given that we haven't found any life beyond Earth yet, "remarkably
hospitable" may sound a bit strong. At a deep level, though, it's
true. Many of the most fundamental characteristics of our cosmos—the
relative strengths of gravity, electromagnetism and the forces that
operate inside atomic nuclei as well as the masses and relative
abundances of different particles—are so finely tuned that if just one
of them were even slightly different, life as we know it couldn't
exist.
If the so-called weak nuclear interaction were a tiny bit stronger
or weaker than it is, for example, stars wouldn't blow up in the
mammoth supernovas that spread elements like carbon and oxygen out
into space—and without those elements, there would be no water and no
organic molecules. If the strong nuclear force were just one-half of
1% stronger or weaker, stars could not make carbon or oxygen in the
first place. In 1999 Martin Rees postulated that there were "just six
numbers" that make life possible, although other theorists have since
added several. And because there is no known law that requires those
forces to have the values they do, scientists figure that there must
be another explanation for how we got so lucky.
The proposition that the cosmos is—against all odds—perfectly
tuned for life is known as the anthropic principle. And while it has
been getting a lot of attention lately, there is no consensus on how
seriously to take it. Some scientists are confident that there is a
law that dictates the values of those key cosmic numbers, and when we
find it, the anthropic problem will go away. Others think the answer
is even simpler: if the numbers were any different than they are, we
wouldn't be around to argue about them—case closed. "The anthropic
principle," complains Fermilab astrophysicist Rocky Kolb, "is the duct
tape of cosmology. It's not beautiful or elegant, and it sure as hell
is not going to be permanent."
A vocal sector of the religious community, on the other hand, has
seized on the anthropic principle as further evidence that God created
the universe just for us—adding intellectual support to the so-called
intelligent-design movement, which believes that the staggering
complexity of nature can be explained only by assuming that some
higher intelligence had a hand in designing it. Over the past several
years in the U.S., pitched battles have been fought in school boards
in Ohio, Kansas, Georgia and Montana and, just weeks ago, in Dover
County, Pennsylvania, over whether to give intelligent design and
Darwin's theory of evolution equal time in classrooms.
Although intelligent design may appear to have found tiny pockets
of support in the scientific community, most scientists consider
appeals to a supernatural designer to be an intellectual dead end.
Over and over in our history, natural phenomena—lightning, the
changing of the seasons, the nature of the sun and moon—have been
explained simply by saying God (or Zeus or Odin) did it, only to have
that explanation fall away as science provided a more satisfying
answer. Maybe we really have reached the limits of intellectual
understanding, but few scientists are willing to give up quite yet,
even on seemingly intractable problems.
In fact, lots of astrophysicists think the anthropic issue, rather
than signaling a problem with modern science, points toward a deeper
understanding of the universe. Rees likes to use our solar system as
an analogy. Says Rees: "If Earth were the only planet in the universe,
you'd be astonished that we just happened to be exactly the right
distance from the sun to be habitable." That would be absurdly
improbable, but it becomes much less so when you realize that the
Milky Way almost certainly has millions of planets. With so many
possibilities, it's not surprising that at least one planet is
friendly to life.
And so, he contends, it might be with the cosmos. What we think of
as the "universe," argues Rees, could well be just one of trillions of
universes on an indescribably vaster stage called the multiverse. Each
of those universes would have different laws and characteristics. Most
of them are totally unlivable; like Earth, ours just happens to be one
of the lucky ones.
On its face, the idea that multiple universes exist simultaneously
in some parallel spheres of being sounds as farfetched as Gardner's
biocosm theory. But scientists have been warily edging toward that
conclusion from other directions for reasons that originally had
nothing to do with the anthropic principle.
Take black holes. In the 1960s, Princeton physicist John Wheeler
coined the term to describe a region where matter is so dense and
gravity so intense that even light can't escape. At the core of a
black hole is a singularity, a spot where density and gravity appear
to become infinitely great—unleashing forces that could rip a hole in
the very fabric of space-time and send a brand-new universe expanding
in a direction undetectable and imperceptible to us. Since giant black
holes lurk at the cores of many billions of galaxies and smaller holes
are left behind by many billions of individual exploding stars, that
could mean our cosmos has given birth to a staggering number of baby
universes. And each of those could give birth in turn to billions
more.
Then there is inflation theory, which came along in the 1980s as a
kind of amendment to the original Big Bang. Its basic premise is that
when the universe was less than a billionth of a billionth of a
billionth of a second old, it briefly went through a period of
supercharged expansion, ballooning from the size of a proton to the
size of a grapefruit (and thus expanding at many, many times the speed
of light). Then the expansion slowed to a much more stately pace.
Improbable as the theory sounds, it has held up in every observation
astronomers have managed to make.
And inflation, it turns out, leads once again to multiple
universes. The inflationary period in our own region of space ran out
of steam early on, but theorists, including Stanford University's
Andrei Linde and Tufts University's Alexander Vilenkin, have shown
that it should continue in others. Our own part of the cosmos took a
sort of off ramp to evolve into the universe we see today, but the
rest kept going, at breakneck speed—and that part is still going,
spawning universes along the way, beyond our comprehension. In some,
says Linde, the laws of physics could easily be so different that our
sort of life would be impossible.
Multiple universes emerge from so-called superstring theory as
well. This still evolving theory is based on the notion that, matter
is made, not of particles, but of tiny, vibrating loops of energy
called strings. The strings exist in a world of up to 10 spatial
dimensions, all but three of which are too minute for us to perceive.
Strange though it sounds, most physicists agree that it is the most
likely candidate for the long-sought theory of everything that could
finally unite relativity and quantum mechanics, the two great but
mutually incompatible ideas of 20th century physics.
Superstring theory, which has lately been renamed M-theory for
reasons that interest only theoretical physicists, is so dauntingly
complex that the smartest scientists in the world are still trying to
nail it down. But among other things, it provides for multiple
universes.
Last year a Stanford theorist named Shamit Kachru set out with
some colleagues to calculate just how many different universes one
particular version of string theory could produce. The number he came
up with was a 1 followed by something like 100 zeros—roughly a hundred
billion billion times the number of atoms in our universe. It was an
answer that didn't please anyone. Says Max Tegmark, a theorist at the
University of Pennsylvania: "People have tried very hard to get rid of
these multiple universes and failed. They just don't like the concept;
they think it's weird. And they're right. But don't we already have
good evidence by now that the cosmos really is weird?" To Einstein's
celebrated musing about whether God had a choice in creating the
universe, the answer seems to be a resounding yes: all sorts of
universes are possible.
Not everyone is convinced that the anthropic principle is sound
evidence for a multiverse, though. "In my view," says cosmologist
George Ellis, of the University of Cape Town in South Africa: "Belief
in multiple universes is just as much a matter of faith as any other
religious belief." Even scientists who are willing to entertain the
anthropic position are wary, with good reason. "Astronomers have been
burned over and over again," says seti's Shostak, "on beliefs that
seemed to imply we're special—that we're at the center of the solar
system or the center of the galaxy, or that the Milky Way is the only
galaxy in the universe. Every time, it turned out that we weren't
special after all. We just didn't have enough knowledge."
Besides, it's easy to see the anthropic principle as an
explanation of last resort. When he first began looking at it back in
the late 1980s, particle theorist Steven Weinberg of the University of
Texas hoped the anthropic principle might go away. But the opposite
happened. "It's not something that we're particularly happy about," he
says. Every physicist dreams of being able to calculate everything
from a set of fundamental laws. But at the same time, Weinberg says,
"it's important to be realistic. We may just have to get used to the
fact that some of the things we call fundamental constants may be
historical accidents."
For example, he observes, when it was first realized that planets
go around the sun, astronomers hoped they might find an underlying
principle that would explain why the planets orbit at the precise
distances they do. But now we know the orbits are the result of pure
chance. The elliptical shapes of planetary orbits, on the other hand,
led to the truly profound discovery of Newton's laws of gravity. "My
own feeling," says Brian Greene, a superstring theorist at Columbia
University and author of the best-selling The Fabric of the Cosmos,
"is that we can give a deeper explanation of why this universe, with
its particular properties, came to be."
That may be the most important result of anthropic thinking: it
pushes scientists to ask all sorts of new questions—questions that may
ultimately provoke a new scientific revolution. For example, how
improbable is our universe? If the answer is not very, there ought to
be lots of universes like our own. Or if multiple universes come about
through inflation, as M.I.T. cosmologist Alan Guth suspects, "does it
produce all types of universes about equally, or does it produce just
a few types? We don't know the answer—yet."
We also don't know how different from our own a universe could be
and still support life. Change one thing—the strength of gravity,
say—and life might be impossible. Change several at once, though, as
Anthony Aguirre, of the University of California at Santa Cruz, has
tried in his calculations, and you get a surprise. It is possible, he
says, to get life-friendly universes by twiddling with multiple knobs.
The anthropic principle still makes many scientists
uncomfortable—and not just because it gives comfort to theologians.
That discomfort, says Stanford theorist Leonard Susskind, is all to
the good. "In the end," he observes, "it doesn't matter whether the
anthropic principle makes us happy. What matters is whether it's
true"—that is, whether cosmic numbers really are as arbitrary as they
seem. If they aren't, physics may eventually succeed in explaining
many features of our world that seem so puzzling today. And if the
anthropic principle is true? Well, then, says Aguirre, "the universe
will seem even more preposterous and baroque than before."
Copyright © 2004 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
______________________________________________________________________________
Job 38:4-7 (NRSV)
4 "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
7 when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
God formed creation out of His own Word and Spirit. The Word gave form
to what the Spirit created. Much detail from the Word gave birth to
the sons of the Holy Spirit we know as angels who formed this detail.
By coming apart from the Holy Spirit they became individuals, some
obedient to God other's not.
Man was created in the image of God, in specific the Word of God,
Jesus. Man can either contain the Word of God or reject it. The angels
of God will try and bring man closer to God through the Word of God.
Those of Man who put God's Word (Jesus) as king of their lives will
one day be one with their angels of God to become Sons of God in God's
image in the truest sense of the word!
End
times:
http://www.geocities.com/mart1963/
.
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