The Magic of our Universe

There may be no such thing as ... a central mechanism of the universe. Not machinery but magic may be a better description of the treasure that is waiting.

--Quantum Physicist John Wheeler (Herbert, 1985, p. 29)

Science is revealing a universe that is indeed magical, and the magic is eerily similar to what religious traditions have long embraced. Yes, it is grounded in serious experimentation, but what is discovered seems unreal to our senses, so I prefer to call it magical. It is magical enough that the universe even exists, based on what we know about gravity, atomic forces, and probability, as the likelihood of it coming into being is absolutely miniscule unless it was somehow intended. I realize that this may sound presumptuous, but this blanket statement has solid evidence behind it. Science has uncovered enough peculiarities about the universe to realize that the probability of our universe arising by chance is almost statistically impossible.

One of the more enthralling facts uncovered early in the twentieth century is that our universe is expanding. This fact hardly shakes one's boat and may sound rather irrelevant and unenchanting in itself, but its implications are quite revelatory. Expansion was theorized by the Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter, but like so many pioneering theories of astronomy, his theory was initially ridiculed. Obviously, no one felt any motion on our planet, and the universe was assumed to be static, endlessly repeating its same cycles of motion in the same place. Albert Einstein first rejected the notion of an expanding universe, but the red shifting of light from stars revealed that all the stars were moving away from us. Einstein struggled to accept expansion, a theory which created a mathematical nightmare, and in a classic case of new scientific evidence that forced a review of accepted concepts, he actually remarked that it irritated him. Vesto Slipher, Milton Humason, and Edwin Hubble developed Hubble's Law and eventually provided the astronomical proof that the universe is expanding in all directions.

The sensational part lies in the rate of expansion. If this rate was increased by a tiny amount — "just a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one percent", as described by the mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme in Canticle of the Cosmos, atomic forces would be too weak to allow matter ever to become more than simple atoms (Swimme, 1990). Given what physics has ascertained about the binding forces of atoms, no molecular combinations could remain steady with the weaker binding forces of (an ever-so-slightly) faster expansion, so no heavy elements would be stable enough to form. "No heavy elements" means no planets, no animal life, and yes, no anything except boring atoms. The verification of the rate of expansion meant that there was an obvious upper limit on the speed of expansion, and our universe was awfully close to this limit. How lucky we were that it was not just a tad faster. On the other side, how much slower could the rate of expansion have been before it encountered some other cataclysmic consequence? It turns out to be not much. Not even a little bit, in fact. "If you decreased the expansion rate by a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one percent, the universe would expand for a few million years, hatch a few atoms, and then collapse. That would be it." (Swimme, 1990) That is, the expansion rate would not be great enough to counteract the gravity of all the stars and other matter, and the universe eventually would crunch in on itself.

So, if you are not amazed by this tiny window of opportunity that allows our universe to exist at all, brush up a bit on your statistics. A trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one percent on one side or the other leaves almost nothing to chance. Science has revealed that for our universe to emerge as it is, with its vibrant creation of stars and yes, life, the slit of possibilities is so infinitesimally small that its existence is asymptotically close to impossible. An example can elucidate how unlikely this is statistically. It is akin to the probability of shooting a bullet from the earth to a target on the surface of the moon — having only one shot to do so — and needing to be so accurate that the bullet would require grease to slide cleanly through a narrow target cylinder on the moon. The odds for our universe to exist in a way that can support life make the odds of winning a lottery jackpot look insipidly routine!

But if that is not enough to float your duck, I want to share the description of such a tiny probability shared by the popular author Wayne Dyer, used as evidence for faith in his book, There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. For all his wealth of talent, Wayne Dyer is no statistician, but he shared an excellent illustrative example originally published by John Horgan (Horgan, November 25, 1996) that describes what a "trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one percent" probability would look like. He describes a tornado that roars through a junk yard, and the tornadic winds whip everything around. As the tornado moves on, it has rammed the junk together into a mass that looks exactly like a 747 jetliner, complete with engine, seats, fuel tanks, and instruments. When fueled, this cobbled junk works like a 747 jetliner. This seemingly impossible scenario is possible at a tiny likelihood of about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one percent. Such is the probability our universe had of coming into existence and remaining so, based on scientific information on atomic forces, gravity, and the witnessed rate of expansion. Our universe is a living model of that working 747 thrown together by a tornado.

What this indicates is an intention to produce stars and life. This tiny probability that our universe exists is not proof of intention, but it is overwhelmingly powerful evidence that the characteristics of our universe did not arise by chance. Exploring this a bit, philosophy's anthropic principle allows that as long as something is not impossible, it can arise by chance. It allows that one way for this to be possible would be an infinity of dead universes, where we just happen to be part of an infinitesimally unlikely one. The fact that we can observe our universe at all is because we are conscious, and if we were in almost any of the other universes, we would not exist in any conscious way. There may be a gazillion universes where consciousness does not exist, and we are obviously in an unusual universe to have the capacity to witness it. All those other universes are the normal ones, basically full of randomness and disorder. Because of our consciousness, ours is exceptionally weird.

But there is another reason our universe should not exist in the form it does. According to the second law of thermodynamics, a universe so highly ordered as to allow consciousness to exist violates the laws of entropy, unless something is manipulating it. This law says that everything is ruled by entropy, which says that if left unchecked, order will always give way to disorder. Entropy is very obvious to anyone living in our physical world. If you build a house and never do anything with it, climate and time will reduce it to rubble in a few centuries and to dust in a few millennia. Entropy would take a house back to the raw materials that comprise it, which are more disordered than the construction materials. In fact, because of entropy, no house will take shape from raw materials unless a builder intervenes to manipulate those materials. So it would go with our universe without design and maintenance, but that is not what we see. Our universe clearly is more than random matter and space, and the existence and birth of new suns and planets, not to mention life and consciousness, are highly ordered states. Without a builder, our universe effectively violates the second law of thermodynamics. A philosophical way around this limitation, which would allow our universe to exist as it is without an external force of maintenance, again would be to have an infinite number of universes, but this obviously has its own scientific doorstop. With an infinite number of universes, everything can and will happen, regardless of how unlikely it is. For example, with an infinite number of rooms filled with oxygen, there are ordinary rooms where you would die from asphyxiation. That is, all the oxygen atoms, based on a probability distribution alone, would collect in a different part of the room, leaving none in every place in the room where you were trying to breathe. The probability of gazillions of oxygen atoms randomly distributing themselves this way without an external force, like the probability of our universe existing as it does, is so remote as to be nearly impossible. But it would still happen in the case where an infinite number of rooms exist. Although allowing a way for this to happen, the concept of an infinite number of universes violates another commonly held scientific theory — Occam's razor — which says that the most plausible explanation for something happening is the simplest explanation — the one requiring the fewest number of assumptions.

Physical life itself violates the concept of entropy, since without an underlying designer, entropy would not allow cosmic material to reach a thermodynamic equilibrium sufficient for life to form. It is not scientifically impossible for life to exist without an external designer, but a nearly infinite number of possibilities would need to happen by chance, rather like that tornado whipping up a working 747 jet from a junk heap. Of course, this still leaves the question of why the designer is not subject to these same physical laws, unless one assumes that the designer designed the physical laws as well.

The astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle calculated an extremely tiny probability for the spontaneous evolvement of a unicellular organism in our universe, given the chemical and physical raw materials available. Life would not exist unless organic chemicals first coalesced to become a unicellular organism. Beyond that, the burst of multicellular organisms appearing in the Cambrian geologic era happened much too fast for evolution alone to be the operator. Gerald Schroeder notes (Gerald L. Schroeder, 1997) that the number of gene mutations necessary for the diversity of multicellular organisms to develop without intervention would take hundreds of millions of years. Nonetheless, geological evidence tells us that the process took five million years. Unless directed or intended by an outside force, the timing is inconsistent with the materialist theory that assumes the process happened randomly. It is possible to flip an unbiased coin 100 times and get heads on every single flip, but the probability of this is tiny. Such is the case with these gene mutations. There simply was not enough time for randomness to allow multicellular organisms to form.

Although physics points in the direction of "intelligent design", I shrink from that term, since it has been used to describe a rather single-minded religious perspective that pretends to know more than the evidence provides. Using a term that has become entangled in religious politics is not an ideal term to provide evidence for why our universe exists and operates the way it does. Although the evidence from physics indicates an intelligent design of the universe, I have no desire to politicize or dogmatize the argument. When tiny probabilities unfolded into reality, it seems like magic, and that is fascinating in itself.

An early statistician studying thermodynamics, Ludwig Boltzmann, offered another scientific explanation for our unlikely universe, since our universe seems to have ignored its own law of entropy in order to exist in a tremendously unlikely state. (Boltzmann, p. 20) To be statistically possible without being prohibitively unlikely, our universe could be infinitely old. If so, it could have spent all but its most recent cosmological instant, which would be a few billion years, in an innumerably huge number of arrangements of disordered chaos. We just happen to be observing it during the miraculous instant in which it is ordered enough for galaxies and life to exist. During its vast existence of disorder, there would have been no one to observe it, since it was too disordered for life to form. We could only observe it if a miraculous exception to this rule has occurred. The problem with this theory is that the evidence points in a different direction, as science now accepts that our universe is not infinitely old, but began in an instant about 18 billion years ago. And this was the Big Bang, the dominant scientific theory of our universe's beginning, which harbors its own secrets — secrets that point to a universe that was designed rather than randomly cobbled together.

Did Anyone Hear a Big Bang?

The dominant and only widely-held theory about the origin of our universe is the Big Bang, and it is supported by such overwhelming scientific evidence that it might be called a fact. Speaking of magic, the Big Bang itself is almost too improbable to have occurred without intention. Scientific data, grounded in the relative amounts of hydrogen and helium that exist, show that our universe began explosively from a single tiny point, from which all the galaxies emerged. Because of hydrogen's chemical valence and reactivity, there would be no more hydrogen in the universe had the universe existed in a steady state without the Big Bang.

Fred Hoyle originally coined the name "Big Bang", but he did so derisively. He considered it a pejorative term for a theory he felt to be steeped in the superstition of creation. Known for stellar nucleosynthesis, Hoyle originally was a materialist who never embraced the Big Bang theory despite strong evidence grounded in cosmic microwave background radiation. It was another piece of physics that made him conclude that our universe could not have been accidental. His analysis of carbon revealed that the window of resonance that would allow it to be formed was a virtual impossibility, and yet it is one of the primary building blocks of physical life. Despite his dismissive attitude toward creation stories, the abundance of carbon in our universe made an unlikely Hoyle come to the conclusion that the universe must have had a designer:

Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom; otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. --Fred Hoyle (Hoyle, November, 1981)

If that is not convincing enough to anyone embracing a random or accidentally formed universe, astrophysicist Brandon Carter noted in a 1974 paper referenced by Paul Davies in his book entitled God and the New Physics, that the probability that a star such as our sun exists is also insanely small. (Davies, 1983, p. 188) This is because the gravitational force, a fundamental constant of nature, places an upper and lower limit on allowable stellar masses. Science has revealed that an alteration in the strength of this gravitational force by as little as one part in 10 to the 40th power would be all that would be necessary to imbalance the forces that allow a sun such as our own to exist. In case you are challenged by scientific notation, this means that an alteration of one part out of a number starting with 1 and followed by 40 zeroes occurs, the gravitational force would be too strong or too weak for our sun, and all stars in our universe would be either blue giants or red dwarfs. Consequently, all life that depends on yellow solar-type stars would have no environment allowing them to be here.

In this same vein, Roger Penrose in a 1979 article entitled "Singularities and time-asymmetry", noted that a random initial state of our universe after the Big Bang would mean that entropy would have created a universe of random disorder rather than stars and galaxies. The probability he estimated for our hospitable universe, as opposed to this? It is a mind-numbing 1 over 10 to the 10th to the 30th power (Penrose, 1979). Even if his estimate is off by a factor of a few trillion, the universe we live in appears to have been intended by a particularly precise design. Our sun does not implode into a black hole because of the enormous central pressure of its internal furnace. After lining up these startlingly small coincidences that allow us to exist as we do, the brilliant scientist Paul Davies wrote that "the seemingly miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design." (Davies, 1983, p. 189)