Beyond a Reasonable Doubt:
Evidence for a Designed Universe
by
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Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask, "What's in it for me?"
---Peter De Vries (1910-93), in The Glory of the Hummingbird, ch. 1 (1939)
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Should we conclude that the universe is a product of design? The new physics and the new cosmology hold out a tantalizing promise: that we might be able to explain how all the physical structures of the universe have come to exist, automatically as a result of natural processes. We would then no longer have need for a creator in a traditional sense. Nevertheless, though science may explain the world, we still have to explain science. The laws which enable the universe to come into being spontaneously seem to be themselves the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us.
---Paul Davies, Professor of Mathematical Physics, The University of Aldelaide, Australia, in Superforce, Simon and Schuster, New York, (1984)
The quartz crystal in your alarm/chronograph watch has faithfully oscillated some 30,000 times a second during the six-and-a-half hours that you slept. These oscillations were counted precisely by an integrated circuit. About 700 million oscillations after you closed your eyes, the watch's IC signaled the alarm to wake you. You groan and turn off the alarm, reminding yourself that you had made a commitment to get more sleep after reading Powersleep by James Maas.
But, such is life! Anyway, you are looking forward to today. You have taken a day's vacation to travel from your home, just west of the Route 128 beltway around Boston, to your new cottage at Spofford Lake, NH. It's early March and the ice is just starting to melt. You want to check the place out so it will be ready for a summer of relaxation and entertaining. Your wife made you promise that you would leave your pager and laptop home, but you sneak them into the car just the same. As you drive up Route 495 to pick up Route 2, you don't even think about how dependent your life is on the four fundamental forces of nature. Neither do you give it a second thought that the matter in the universe is perfect to allow for your existence. It doesn't occur to you that if electrical charge didn't exist, neither would you. You don't marvel that the physical laws are such as to enable the very universe to exist at all. And you probably are not astounded that the gold in your wedding ring was created in the far reaches of our galaxy when a supernova exploded over 5 billion years ago, as were most of the atoms in your body. You, and all that you see, are stardust. All of this you take for granted.
Yes, it's a perfect paradigm for not only life, but also for matter. For if the charge of an electron were only 5% greater, the Periodic Table would consist of nothing but hydrogen. This unenviable situation would also exist if the strong nuclear force that binds the nucleus together were a mere 5% weaker. If the force of gravity dropped off as the inverse cube of distance instead of the inverse square of distance, there would not be enough gravitational force to light the nuclear fire in the sun.
Alternatively, if it dropped off linearly with distance, the sun would have burned out by now. These and even more astounding "coincidences" are required for the "glorious accident," that is, our universe, to function.
As you catch your first glimpse of Spofford Lake, you marvel at its beauty and enjoy the vista of an ice-covered lake beginning to thaw. While soaking in this breath-taking view, it escapes you that if one simple thing in nature were different (for example, ice sinking instead of floating), life on earth would be an impossibility.
Yes, all of these finely tuned laws of nature are perfect for your world to exist. And they were set twelve to fifteen billion years ago in the greatest cataclysmic event in the history of the universe, its creation. At this event all of the matter in the 100 billion trillion stars that exist was at one infinitesimally small point in the form of energy. One thousandth of a trillion trillion trillion trillionth of all of this matter would end up in your body fifteen billion years or so in the future.
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About the Book
Since 1964 when Penzias and Wilson discovered the remnant microwave background from the 'big bang,' a converging understanding of the creation of the universe has been stable now for decades. Although small perturbations in this understanding occasionally occur as new information unfolds, these new findings are eventually understood in the context of the big bang theory. No theory appears on the horizon to supplant the big bang theory and most practicing astronomers and physicists currently accept it.
This book will briefly review the two thousand years of science that culminated in the big bang theory. It will then examine the evidence that supports a famous statement by acclaimed British physicist Stephen Hawking:
The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous... I think there are clearly religious implications whenever you start to discuss the origins of the universe. There must be religious overtones. But I think most scientists prefer to shy away from the religious side of it.
To examine this statement, I will discuss the unique nature of the physical constants and laws in our universe and their suitability to allow the creation of the cosmos. It will be shown that if these physical constants and laws were only slightly different there would be no matter at all, let alone life. As examples of the fine-tuning of these laws and constants, among others, our examination will include the formation of the elements from primordial hydrogen. In this analysis, I will review in some detail the creation of carbon, oxygen, and iron and show that were the physical laws and constants only slightly different, no elements with higher atomic masses than hydrogen would have been created.
The four fundamental forces of nature (gravitational, electrical, strong nuclear and weak nuclear) will also be presented, again arriving at the same conclusion...if they were only slightly different, the cosmos and life would not exist. From the tiny hydrogen atom to the mightiest galaxy, the universe cries out to us that it is designed.
About the Author
Ronald Lasky is currently a Consulting Director in Cookson Performance Solutions. In this role he is a world recognized expert in electronic and optoelectronic packaging. In his over twenty years in this industry he has co-edited three textbooks on these topics. Most notably he was the lead editor on the textbook, Optoelectronics for Data Communication (Academic Press 1995) the first in this field. Dr. Lasky is also the founder and president emeritus of The Institute for Optical Data Communication.
Ronald has authored numerous technical papers in these and related fields and has published twelve patent publications. He is the inventor of a packaging design for vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) when used in optoelectronics.
A gifted and entertaining speaker he has lectured over 100 times at Cornell, Dartmouth, Cal Tech, Princeton, West Point and other institutions on numerous occasions. The topics of these talks have range from the technical to the spiritual. He has also been an adjunct professor at several colleges and has taught over 20 different courses on topics ranging from materials science, physics, and mechanical engineering.
Dr. Lasky owns four earned degrees including a Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is also a licensed professional engineer. He lives with his wife and three college aged children in Massachusetts.