ct, 12.2010, p47. Christ of the klingons by trevor persaud..collins is a philosophy professor at messiah college and gerald cleaver is a physics professor at baylor who works in a branch of theoretical physics called string theory, specifically m-theory - the same theory that gives ..stephen hawking the confidence in..the grand design, to declare philosophy dead and God unnecessary.
at first, string theory at its simplest had a lyrical - or at least musical explanation. every particle in the universe was a tiny, one-dimensional string and different particles existed because of the different ways a string could vibrate. physicists say that just as different vibrations produce different notes on a violin or cello, the vibrations of a string could produce an electron, a quark, a neutrino, and so on. that, the theory said, was how the universe worked.
those were the days. by the mid 1990s, debates over the exact properties of strings had created 5 competing string theories. princeton university's edward witten came up with a way to stitch them together, but the result was not really a 'string' theory anymore. a new, single theory arose, called m-theory, which remains so sketchy that theorists don't agree on what the m stands for. it might be membrane.
in the old string-theory days, many theorists had come to believe that space had 10 dimensions - the 3 directions that we see, with time as a 4th dimension, then 6 curled-up spatial directions that are too small to see unless you happen to be a string. m-theory added an 11th dimension revealed multi-dimensional objects dubbed membranes (branes for short). hidden from us with our 3-dimensional perception, branes could be as small as a string or as large as a universe. in fact, some have suggested that our universe is a massive brane inside a much larger reality.
the violin metaphor doesn't really seem to encapsulate all this. but if experiments prove it accurate, m-theory might solve several technical problems that have previously kept scientists from creating a unified 'theory of everything'. at the moment, m-theory is the best chance scientists have for arriving at a complete picture of the universe. some m-theorists, cleaver included, think ultimately it will take us even further; that our entire universe - planets, stars, great walls, and all - is just a bubble on an ocean of existence covered with many more like it.
these aren't star trek style mirror universes, in which duplicated of each one of us live on parallel earths where hitler won the war or the twin towers never fell. the multiverse made possible in m-theory predicts an incredibly diverse array of possible universes with different sets of physical laws - maybe as many as 10 to the 500th power possible realities. we likely cannot ever reach them and only a few would be hospitable to human life. some suggest that universes are continually created and maybe destroyed, as branes collide with one another.
according to hawking, the multiverse eliminated the need for God. 'm-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing..their creation did not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law'. (Jesus asks, 'do you know the laws of the heavens? job 38.33, i'm guessing all of us come up a bit short..)
but collins says hawking can't escape God that easily: if the universe arose from the laws of physics, then who designed the laws of physics? why does the multiverse work the way it does? trying to apply science to the question of god, collins said, 'is where scientists are way overstepping their area of competence.'
one of the problems with those arguments is it really puts God..in a very small box..it portrays God as someone who can only fill in the gaps that science can't explain. as theists, we need to perceive god as the primary source, the fundamental laws of physics as the secondary'.
to cleaver, m-theory's multiverse, with its dizzying variety, unending moments of new creation and perhaps infinite scope, makes perfect sense as the work of 'a God of the infinities, who creates eternally'. if God is truly eternal, infinite and self-consistent...'we should expect God to create eternally and infinitely or not at all'.
paul says in romans 1 that creation manifests the eternal attributes of god - God's eternal and infinite power..you may expect an infinitely creative being to create more than one universe, in fact, many and maybe more kinds of reality'..if God did create multiple universes, He likely populated more than one.
theoretical physicists like cleaver spend time in the land of possibly and potentially. experiments are in the works at places like europe's large hadron collider that might possibly determine the truth of m-theory. a large # of scientists doubt that m-theory is anything more than a collection of fascinating but fictional equations. and even if it is correct, that doesn't guarantee a multiverse.
collins and cleaver remind us that we serve a god who is easily capable of holding 10 to the 500th power universes in the palm of His hand.
the beauty of it suggests that this is the true picture of reality..the beauty of a theory is extremely important'.
the universe is structured for beauty and elegance, says collins, noting paul dirac, a famously nonreligious physicist, who said in 1963 'it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit an experiment..if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress'..
'to me, that is showing the beauty and the order in the creative nature of God, says cleaver..it allows us to expect science to reveal physical truth to us, that the universe - or the multiverse - is not just some random existence that happens to be
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In "The Grand Design" Hawking says that we are somewhat like goldfish in a curved fishbowl. Our perceptions are limited and warped by the kind of lenses we see through, “the interpretive structure of our human brains.” Albert Einstein rejected this subjective approach, common to much of quantum mechanics, but did admit that our view of reality is distorted.
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity has the surprising consequences that “the same event, when viewed from inertial systems in motion with respect to each other, will seem to occur at different times, bodies will measure out at different lengths, and clocks will run at different speeds.” Light does travel in a curve, due to the gravity of matter, thereby distorting views from each perspective in this Universe. Similarly, mystics’ experience in divine oneness, which might be considered the same "eternal" event, viewed from various historical, cultural and personal perspectives, have occurred with different frequencies, degrees of realization and durations. This might help to explain the diversity in the expressions or reports of that spiritual awareness. What is seen is the same; it is the "seeing" which differs.
In some sciences, all existence is described as matter or energy. In some of mysticism, only consciousness exists. Dark matter is 25%, and dark energy about 70%, of the critical density of this Universe. Divine essence, also not visible, emanates and sustains universal matter (mass/energy: visible/dark) and cosmic consciousness (f(x) raised to its greatest power). During suprarational consciousness, and beyond, mystics share in that essence to varying extents. [quoted from www.suprarational.org on comparative mysticism]
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