Sun, Jan 14, 2007 page19

• Pondering the imponderables and accounting the unaccountable

  Paul Davies asks the big questions and suggests the creation of life was somehow the `goal' of the universe withouth suggesting that it is the work of God

  • By Tim Radford / THE GUARDIAN
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  The universe is an open book, but open only at the present page. The authorship is permanently in dispute and no one will ever see the dustjacket or decipher the opening sentences. The entire narrative trajectory must be reconstructed from the lethargic action, incidental characters and indeterminate location visible right now. Nevertheless, in the past 40 years physicists have put together a story-so-far that confidently describes almost the entire history of the last 13.7 billion years. There is a catch: they do not know what happened at the very beginning, they have no idea why the story is at all legible and they do not understand why the book has any readers.

  Consider the problem: the universe seems to have inflated itself from virtually nothing to a vast tract of spacetime heavy with dark matter and dark energy, and lit up by 200 billion galaxies, each containing perhaps 200 billion stars. The stars, thermonuclear reactors stoked by their own gravitational force, burn primordial hydrogen into an ash of heavier elements that, in turn, become the raw material first for planets around a new generation of stars, and then for a potent biochemical detritus from which life must first have formed on one planet 3.5 billion years ago.

  But the universe could achieve this only because the fundamental forces that orchestrate creation are tuned with exquisite precision. If these forces were different, even in the smallest degree, stars would burn too brightly, or not ignite at all, or they would fail to form carbon and the heavier elements on which life depends, or they would collapse rather than explode, and thus fail to scatter water and life-supporting chemicals across the galaxy. This enigmatic display of cosmic fine-tuning provoked the British astronomer Fred Hoyle to suggest that the universe looked like a "put-up job." It prompted the physicist Freeman Dyson to say that it seemed as if, in some sense, the universe "knew we were coming."

  

  The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? By Paul Davies 360 pages Allen Lane

  Cosmologists call this the anthropic principle. Religious believers call it the hand of God. Neither of these labels explains anything. Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist who has turned to the new science of astrobiology: he is also a distinguished writer with more than 20 popular books behind him. The Goldilocks Enigma does not attempt to answer the great questions of where the universe came from, where life came from and where we came from. But it is a beautifully judged attempt at least to explain the questions and then address them logically.

  Is there more than one universe? Is the tract of spacetime that we inhabit just one of an infinite stream of universes, all with different physical properties, some of which might support life, but not as we know it, and others that are barren and fleeting? Are we, so to speak, just one volume in an infinite library? This is the multiverse theory of creation: in an infinite set of universes, anything can happen, including John Milton and Paris Hilton. In which case, humans are simply temporary tenants of a lucky universe: lucky, that is, for humans. Such a cosmic lottery rules out God as prime mover. In an infinite series, there can be no beginning. But in an infinity of universes there would also be an infinity of almost-Earths, and an infinity of identical Earths, some of which could be computer simulations, of the kind proposed in the movie The Matrix. The multiverse seems like a very contrived explanation.

  Then perhaps the universe really is designed for life. If so, life assembled itself, slowly and at random, but in some sense inevitably. If God had a hand in the design, then He acted at a distance: just as the universe runs itself according to some profound set of laws, so life assembled itself without any obvious help from a supernatural agency. Most serious theologians are content with Darwinian evolution as the explanation of life's variety. They see no room for a "God of the gaps" to account for the as yet unaccountable. They prefer a designer of laws rather than individual species, a God who works without miracles. This would be a God beyond time and space. The big question then is: did God have a choice? Could He have chosen not to make this universe? Does this universe have to be the way it is? If this is the only mathematically self-consistent universe possible, God would have had no choice in its design. If God had no choice, then in what sense is He necessary? And that still leaves the question: why does the universe seem designed for life?

  There are no answers. The fact that we can put such questions at all is a happy puzzle. Are Shakespeare and Milton, Dan Brown and Paris Hilton all manifestations of some enigmatic cosmic purpose? Or are they, and the rest of us, the pointless outcome of blind experiment, a haphazard throw of life's dice in the universal casino? Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. That implies the emergence of an entity to do the comprehending. This has only happened, as far as we know, once, and right now. Suppose the human race is snuffed out in some forthcoming cataclysm?

  "It may never happen again," says Davies. "The universe may endure for a trillion years shrouded in total mystery, save for a fleeting pulse of enlightenment around one average star in one unexceptional galaxy, 13.7 billion years after it all began."
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