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Baking a Universe the Hard Way
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16846 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1989 |
3,259 Words |
| Author
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Richard L. Lewis
Richard L. Lewis is a biochemist currently working as a free-
lance science writer in New York. |
Barring a few dissenters, scientists and theologians agree that the universe we live in originated out of nothing, a process that theologians, who delight in Latin phrases, call "creation ex nihilo."
The prevailing scientific theory of creation is called the "Big Bang" theory. Theological views, on the other hand, can be divided into those that say God created the universe the easy way and those that say He did it the hard way.
The easy way is similar to the method used by the good fairies in the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty. The secret is in the wands. When they wave them, a misty, spark-filled rainbow leaps from the tip, and a cup of tea with a slice of lemon appears.
Many religious people assume that God created the universe the easy way (with or without the misty rainbow and sparkles). The creationist movement takes "And God said, 'Let the earth bring forth creatures …' And it was so" to imply the easy way of doing things: Lions and tigers and bears, for example, just popped into existence. Essentially, this viewpoint has God saying a word or so, and the universe promptly responding to this command.
The hard method of creation is quite different, and involves mathematics. If you dislike math, please persevere; I promise not to use any equations!
Cosmic Math
Why mathematics? The reason is simple: The universe is nothing but relationships, and math is simply a convenient shorthand for describing relationships. In science, one prefers the term interaction to relationship, but modern science is very clear about one thing: Take away all interactions between electrons and protons in the material world, and you've got no material left. Without interaction, the whole universe could fit inside a pinhead with room to spare (which it may have done for the first few microseconds of creation).
So the universe is relationships, and so is math. This is why, even when you study the most difficult and exotic areas of math, you will always find the familiar = symbol, which simply says that whatever the symbols on the right side create by their relationship is the same as what is created on the left side. For this reason math is perfectly suited to describing the intricacies of the real world. Math and reality are constructed in the same way;
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