Happenings 23 September 2020

Dave Goldberg, a physics professor at Drexel University (and I would suspect from his writings, not a person of faith) writes this:

You’re almost unfathomably lucky to exist, in almost every conceivable way. Don’t take it the wrong way. You, me, and even the most calming manatee are nothing but impurities in an otherwise beautifully simple universe. We’re lucky life began on Earth at all, of course, and that something as complex as humans evolved. It was improbable that your parents met each other and conceived you at just the right instant, and their parents and their parents and so on back to time immemorial. This is science’s way of reminding you to be grateful for what you have. But even so, I have news for you: It’s worse than you think. Much worse. Your existence wasn’t just predicated on amorousness and luck of your ancestors, but on an almost absurdly finely tuned universe. Had the universe opted to turn up the strength of the electromagnetic force by even a small factor, poof! Suddenly stars wouldn’t be able to produce any heavy elements, much less the giant wet rock we’re standing on. Worse, if the universe were only minutely denser than the one we inhabit, it would have collapsed before it began. ... Matter and antimatter should have completely annihilated one another in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang.... if the perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter remained perfect, you wouldn’t be here to think about it. Sometime very, very early on in the universe (roughly 10 -35 seconds after the beginning, if you can wrap your mind around a number that small), there was a small break, and about a billion and one particles of matter were produced for every billion antiparticles. As for how that happened, we honestly can’t say, because nobody’s been able to reproduce it in a lab. 

What Goldberg sees as luck, we of course see as the sovereignly powerful work of the Master Builder, but his reminder is a good one nonetheless. Physics tells us that you are a miracle; the Word of God tells us that you are a greatly loved miracle. Live in that wonder!

In Him,
Murray