THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE

Munnabhai was sipping his coffee in the lawn in front of his house. It was a moonless night, when the stars shone brightly in the firmament. It reminded him of an episode from the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, Watson.

The detective duo was camping out at night, when Holmes awoke with a start. Lying flat on his back in the grass he saw the bright stars in the sky. Shaking Watson out of his stupor he asked him, “Do you see what is happening?” Watson grinned and said, “That depends on who I am. If I were a meteorologist I would forecast a bright summer day for tomorrow. If I were a traveller I would say that I was moving northwards. If I were an astronomer I would say that I can see the Big Bear and several planets from our solar system.” Watson was immensely pleased with his clever answer, when Holmes jolted him into reality. “You fool, can’t you make the elementary observation that somebody has stolen our tent from over our heads. That is why you are now seeing stars!”

Stephen Hawking’s book, “A Brief History of Time”, is something like the conversation between the two detectives. Who makes the complex scientific observations, and who makes the elementary ones? Hawking’s book is an international best seller. Despite his severe physical disability and subsequent loss of speech he is acclaimed as one of the greatest astrophysicists and mathematicians of modern times. He is bracketed with all time greats like Aristotle (340 BC), Ptolemy (2nd century BC), Galileo Galilei (1609), Sir Isaac Newton (1687) and Albert Einstein in the last century.

The goal of Hawking’s book is to unravel a “complete description of the universe” (Pg 14). To arrive at such a conclusion he advances various scientific theories like Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (GR), Quantum Mechanics (QM) and the Uncertainty Principle (UP). Fair enough for scientific research. What is startling are the conclusions that Hawking arrives at. In his introduction to the book, Carl Sagan of Cornell University, New York, says that the author is “making an attempt to understand the mind of God”. His conclusion is that there “is no edge of space, no beginning nor end of time, and nothing for a creator to do”. This is indeed an amazing or alarming conclusion!

Mathew Verghese was one of Munnabhai’s neighbours. Born and brought up in Kerala in the Marxist heydays of the 1950s, he was a professed atheist. He did not believe in God or a creator. Everything just happened, or evolved as Charles Darwin had claimed. There was no such thing as an intelligent design that either created or controlled the universe.

Verghese was to drop in at Munnabhai’s house the next evening. Munnabhai had a beautifully crafted globe, gifted to his father by a Britisher. He placed the globe on his writing table and awaited Verghese’s arrival. Verghese was amazed at its beauty and attention to detail (the British are probably the world’s best cartographers). “Wow” he exclaimed, “Where did you get this beauty from?”

Munnabhai offered Verghese some home made biscuits and laconically answered, “It came here by itself, nobody made it.” Verghese choked on his tea and biscuit. “Are you mad? How can such a beautiful thing, with so much attention to detail, happen by itself, or not be made by somebody? Do you think that I am such a fool to believe that?” “I think that you are a big fool. You are not willing to accept that this small model happened by itself, yet you are willing to believe that the entire universe just happened? Open your eyes to reality” said Munnabhai.

Verghese was livid. He tried wriggling his way out, saying that it was an inappropriate analogy. So Munnabhai told him another story, about a little girl’s geography lesson. The teacher had shown the children a globe in school and said, “Children, this is the world”. Hopping and skipping back home the little girl excitedly told her mother, “Today I have seen the world”. In the language of a child she was correct, but in an adult’s rationale she was terribly wrong.

Just then Verghese’s cell phone rang. When he had finished the call Munnabhai asked him, “Isn’t your service provider the one with the slogan Kar lo duniya mutti mein?” (Put the world in the palm of your hand). “So what about it?” said Verghese, still annoyed. “Don’t you think that this slogan is illogical?” queried Munnabhai. “If you have something in the palm of your hand, it cannot be the world, it is just an illusion, a mirage”.

“I think Hawking’s book falls into this category,” he added. Verghese had been a science student, and admired Hawking. “Now you are talking rubbish”, he said. “Look at the wealth of scientific material that he has presented to prove that there is no beginning nor end of time and space. There is no such thing as a creator”.

Hawking said in his book that the philosopher Immanuel Kant held that there was no concept of time before the beginning of the universe (Pg 9). St Augustine in the third century AD held a similar view. Earlier, scientists also believed that the universe was static and unchanging. However, the discovery of an ever-expanding universe by Edwin Hubble in 1929 turned conventional wisdom on its head. Through the observation of the red shift phenomenon, astronomers found that the galaxies and stars were actually moving apart at very high velocity, greater than the force of gravity. This eventually led to the Big Bang theory. This meant that there was a First Cause that occasioned the beginning of creation. This initial burst of energy, light and heat gradually converted into particles (matter) and was compatible with Einstein’s path breaking General Theory of Relativity (GR), through his famous equation e=mc2 (e stood for energy, m for matter, and c for the speed of light). Hawking states that astro physicists use two basic principles for studying the universe. The first is GR that is used to observe and investigate vast masses (the macro level). The other is QM that studies the nature and behaviour of the minutest particles (the nano level). Hawking calls them partial theories (Pg 12), incomplete or insufficient by themselves, to study the nature and origin of the universe, and its resultant implications. He then investigates the more recent phenomenon of the Uncertainty Principle (UP) an offshoot of QM.

There was a time when the atom was considered the smallest particle – it actually means “indivisible” in Greek (Pg 67). Later electrons, neutrons and protons were discovered. Again proton means “first”, or the fundamental unit of matter (Pg 68). But now we have discovered several other nano particles like neutrinos, quarks, anti-electrons, positrons, anti-particles, photons, gluons, mesons etc. (Enough to turn a non-scientist off, from all the ons). Such nano particles can only be observed by using very short light waves. However, using such waves to study them disbalances them, like waves rocking a boat. So there is an element of uncertainty about their nature (Pg 59). Equipment for accurately measuring such nano particles would have to be as big as the solar system itself (Pg 79). But even 20 years after Hawking published his work in 1988, the largest tunnel for observing such phenomena at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland is just a few kilometres in circumference. It does not stop Hawking from pushing ahead, with his own observations.

Hawking presents further scientific evidence that the universe is both cooling and reducing in velocity. The time could come, 10 billion years down the line, when the force of gravity would exceed velocity, and suck the universe back into a mighty black hole of infinite heat and density. This would be the reverse of the Big Bang, called the Big Crunch (Pg 49). The Big Bang and Big Crunch hypothesis is compatible with Einstein’s GR. It implies a beginning and an end, and something beyond that – a creator.

Some other significant observations of Hawking are that due to the force of gravity, space is bent into a curve. He compares it to a spherical object like the earth. He then makes his most audacious claim, that since the earth’s surface has no edges, and therefore no boundaries, you cannot fall off it and it has no end, nor beginning for that matter (Pg 48). He applies this analogy to the universe to arrive at the similar conclusion that space and time don’t have any boundaries. Hence they have neither beginning nor end. By combining together the various principles of GR, QM and UP he arrives at a contrived conclusion that the universe is self contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It could neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE (Pg 144). There would therefore be no place for a creator (Pg 149). From this ethereal level Hawking makes some more profound statements.

He considers time imaginary, a property of a created universe (Pg 176). Despite his self-assurance Hawking is still asking questions at the end of his book. How or why were the laws and initial state of the universe chosen? (Pg 183). Why does the universe exist? Does it need a creator? Who created him? (Pg 184). From the “how” he moves to the “why”, to which he has no answer.

He now conveniently blames the philosophers who have not kept up with scientific advancement (Pg 185). He ends his book with a question not an answer. His swan song is “Why do we and the universe exist? If we know the answer it will be the ultimate triumph of human reason – we would know the mind of God” (Pg 185).

Poor Hawking. Throughout his book he strived to present a single theory to describe the universe (Pg 11). In the process he belittled Einstein, all circumstantial and scientific evidence that points to a beginning, an end, and by consequence a creator, whose existence he doubts. He unfortunately ends up frankly admitting that he doesn’t really have the answers, and ultimately finds himself at the doorstep of the god whose very existence he had questioned.

Hawking’s work is an exercise in futility, as evidenced by his own statements. Here are some of them: -
· Any physical theory is always provisional … you can never prove it (Pg 11)
· GR is an incomplete theory as it cannot go beyond the beginning (Pg 55)
· Laws may have originally been decreed by God who then left the universe to evolve according to those laws, and then does not intervene (Pg 129)
· It is very difficult to explain how the universe began, except as an act of God, who intended to create beings like us (Pg 134).
· God may know how the universe began, but we cannot give any particular reason (Pg143)
· A scientific theory is just a mathematical model to describe our observations, it exists only in our minds (Pg 147)
· Theories are always being changed to account for new observations (Pg 178)
· Even specialists have a grasp of a small proportion of scientific theories (Pg 179)
· We don’t know how the human brain works, but do know how computer memories work (Pg 155)
· We have little success in predicting human behaviour from mathematical equations (Pg 179)
· Only a few can keep up with the rapidly expanding frontiers of knowledge (Pg 178)

It would therefore seem that Hawking, while on the one hand making a tall claim about a unified theory of the universe; was simultaneously admitting the limitations of the very scientific tools that he had employed to propound those theories. He used finite scientific tools to probe the infinite. If the tools of analysis are faulty, it is a natural consequence that the conclusions drawn are even more faulty. Hawking seems to be a victim of the Uncertainty Principle that he propounded to describe the universe with such certainty! The short wave of infinity seems to have rocked the boat of Hawking’s brand of scientific investigation.

Munnabhai took a deep breath as he looked at Verghese’s crestfallen countenance. He said, “So far I have just quoted Hawking ad verbatim, to disprove his own hypothesis; it can’t be termed a proven theory. Now let me proffer some counter arguments of my own. In order to disprove the existence of a creator God, Hawking had to establish that there was neither beginning nor end of time. There was no Big Bang, no cause and effect. To do so he propounded two ideas; one, that space being spherical had no boundaries, and two, that the sum total of all matter and energy was zero, hence time was also zero, therefore imaginary.

This is not true scientific scholarship. It is like using a measuring tape to take a patient’s temperature, or using a thermometer to measure the length of a piece of cloth. This may sound absurd, but this is exactly what Hawking did. Just because space is spherical it does not mean that it has no dimensions. It has a circumference, a diameter and even a mass. Hawking himself admits that our galaxy is just one of some hundred billion galaxies visible with modern telescopes. Each galaxy in turn contains a hundred billion stars (Pg 39). Our galaxy alone has a diameter of 100,000 light years. The most distant object is 8 billion light years away (Pg 30). There are 1 (with 80 zeros behind) number of particles in the observable universe (Pg 136). Is all this imaginary, just because it is spherical? Does that globe on my table have no weight, circumference, height etc just because it is a seamless sphere without any boundaries or edges, as Hawking would have us believe? This is the theatre of the absurd.

Look at his second conclusion, that the sum total of all energy and matter is zero (Pg 136). Assuming this, without admitting it, does it mean that there is therefore no such thing as time, because the energy and mass totals zero? Einstein would turn in his grave. Hawking has again used the wrong tool for analysis. He should have consulted a Chartered Accountant. A ledger has debit and credit entries. It is possible that at any given time they may balance out, showing a balance of zero. Does that mean that all the transactions in that period were a mere illusion? Absurd isn’t it?”

Verghese had no answer. Hawking’s book seemed to have begun with a bang and ended with a whimper, quite like the Big Bang and Big Crunch that he had so assiduously attempted to disprove. The sun had set. Verghese looked up at the brilliance of the night sky. What Munnabhai said seemed to make sense. Indeed there seemed to be great power in the universe. The one who created it must have been even more powerful. Why did he do it?

After Verghese had left, another thought struck Munnabhai. Hawking stated that in 1951 the Catholic Church had accepted the Big Bang theory as being compatible with the Biblical account of creation (Pg 50). Thirty years later, in 1981, he gave a talk to Jesuits at the Vatican where he had presented his hypothesis that space and time were finite but had no boundary, hence no beginning or moment of creation (Pg 122). Ironically, after his presentation, and unaware of what Hawking had said, the Pope told the participating scientists that it was appropriate to study the evolution of the universe after the Big Bang, but not the Big Bang itself; as that was the moment of creation, and therefore the work of God (Pg 122). Who was right, Hawking or the Pope?

The Catholic Church has, rightly and wrongly, often been in conflict with science and the outside world. But the Genesis account of creation: a formless void (nothing), wind (energy or velocity – nano particles), light (an emanation of heat and energy – atoms and gases like hydrogen and helium), water (formation of oxygen, molecules and liquid), dry land (solid state with heavier atoms like carbon), vegetation, water creatures, winged creatures (fins evolving into wings), creeping creatures (wings evolving into limbs) and man (homo erectus to homo sapiens) was very much in accordance with the scientific evidence of the Big Bang, and the evolution of the species.

Munnabhai marvelled at the wonder of creation. The scientists told him “how” creation took place. He knew “why”. Because God is life and love. Both are dynamic and expansive, and seek expression. Creation was the natural consequence. Like Holmes, Munnabhai had made the correct observation, and arrived at what seemed the most plausible conclusion. Elementary my dear Hawking.

* This article is an extract from the author’s forthcoming book “The Jerusalem Code”