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Our Origin and Destiny
by Len Schwee
| Occam's Razor, or the principle of parsimony, instructs us to make no more than the minimum number of assumptions when explaining something. This principle is used often in science, and it leads to the conclusion that God, angels, the devil, heaven, hell, and the human soul are all unnecessary hypotheses. William of Occam was a Franciscan monk who was excommunicated by Pope John XXII. |
Lawyers are trained to believe that anything can happen in a courtroom, especially with an unpredictable judge. But everything certainly is not possible to a physicist. Everything that does not conform to the laws of physics will not happen. A physicist is likely to say, "If something can happen, it might." A central principle in physics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Hence, most things are not possible. If the universe came from nothing, or zero energy, its total energy must still be zero, and it is. Gravity, a negative energy, balances out the positive energies of matter and motion. |
When Einstein wrote down the equation that describes the universe, he knew he should enter a constant, and he used the Greek symbol, lambda. He chose a solution that made the universe stable, and used a value for lambda that kept the universe from expanding or contracting. Two centuries earlier, when Newton developed his law of gravity, it appeared that his universe would collapse because gravity is an attractive force. Newton claimed that God held it apart. Einstein's lambda replaced the need for God, making Him an unnecessary hypothesis. (An informative book on cosmology written for the layman is called God in the Equation.) Another solution to Einstein's equation which described a universe that expanded from a point was found by Willem de Sitter, a mathematician. A few years after Einstein described his stable universe, Edwin Hubble found that most galaxies are red shifted which means that the universe is expanding. Einstein got together with de Sitter, and they derived the Einstein-de Sitter solution. At this point, Einstein dropped lambda from his equation and died thinking it was his "greatest blunder." Recently, scientists determined that not only is the universe expanding, but that its expansion is accelerating. Now lambda is back in the equation. |
The beginning of the universe is now known as the Big Bang, and NASA says it began 13.7 billion years ago, give or take one percent. Our earth formed from stardust 4.6 billion years ago, and evolution began about a billion years later. |
Big Bang theory is not just a theory anymore. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, an observatory orbiting earth a million miles away, has produced a baby picture of the universe. The picture can be seen at http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/, and it shows what the universe looked like when it was only 379,000 years old. |
The story of our destiny is much easier to figure out. Each of us will die and remain dead. We will know nothing -- like when we sleep without dreams. We will decompose into our elements -- water, carbon, some iron, etc. We will return to the earth's stardust. Thanks to William of Occam, we do not have to worry about hell, whether our dead relatives are watching us from heaven, or whether there will be an intermission at the beatific vision. |
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