Creating the universe

Many parents will recognise this scenario. A child asks why, you give an explanation and the child asks why again and continues to ask why to every answer. Science is a little like that. You make an observation, possibly through experimentation, repeat it and if it happens enough times you may predict that it will happen again. A hypothesis may be put forward to explain the observations. Scientific laws, like Newton's laws of motion are reserved for matters that are considered universal and invariable. Then you get people like Einstein who realise that these laws aren't really laws at all but just the best ways of explaining things until something better comes along.

Therefore it was surprising to read last Thursday that Stephen Hawking had discovered that God did not create the universe. In his new book Stephen decides that the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics. If I could have a debate with him about the creation of the universe I would listen to his explanation and ask why. Like the child with their parent, I would continue to ask why until he gave up and I would win the debate. And people say Stephen Hawking is clever.

To be serious, I do suspect that Dr. Hawking might actually be clever, since you probably don't get to be Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (a seat formerly occupied by Sir Isaac Newton) by being a dunce. However, even the cleverest people make occasional mistakes. What science ought to tell us is not how much we know about everything, but rather how little we know about anything. That is what the child's "why" game actually does tell us. No matter how clever we are, we will always reach a point where we have to respond to the latest "why" with "Because. Just because. Now get to bed, it's past bedtime".

We occupy and know about only the tiniest pinprick in a vast universe. The nearest star (apart from the Sun) is a hundred million times more distant than the Moon is, which is the furthes place where humans have stood. The furthest star is, as far as we can tell, more than a hundred million times more distant than the nearest star is. Out of the billion billion or more stars that the universe contains, all except one are just points of light to us. Even most of our own planet is a mystery of which we know very little. And the sole real evidence that we have for the Big Bang is a reddening of light from the more distant of those distant points of light, something which is guessed to be caused by their receding from us, but which might have any number of causes. Given the amount that we still can't explain, I think it would be presumptuous of us to claim to understand the universe. At this point, I think the best we can hope to do is change it.

Change the world