Time to stop regarding the Universe as a billion-to-one accident

 

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In many ways, we’re all looking for a pattern. Well, not quite all of us: Ralf Dahrendorf believed life in total was an anarchic conflict so fluid and unstable that all searching for Utopia was a pointless exercise. While I agree with that final conclusion, my opinion has always been that Ralfie was working slightly too hard to attack the structural functionalist school of blokes like Talcott Parsons, who was desperate to put everything and everyone into a box from which there was no escape.

I could never take the latter seriously while at University, because his name always made me think of Talcum Powder, but that’s not really got anything at all to do with my point, which I shall get to in due course. What I’m saying is, as almost always, the truth lies somewhere between the two of them.

Most of us look for a pattern, because (a) it might suggest that God is not dead (b) it makes us feel able to put up a defence against outrageous fortune and (c) we are accustomed to the idea of knitting, patchwork, abstract art and architectural statements as evidence of thought. The elements of a design pattern repeat in a predictable manner, or have an artistic balance, or an appearance of composition.

Some things do appear to be random: natural disasters, psychos who go into politics, men-haters who got raped aged 13, trees falling onto cars and so forth. In fact, they aren’t: it’s just that our predictive abilities are limited by our lack of comprehension – and an unerring desire to know who’s going to win Strictly next weekend. We are a butterfly-mind species, and very easily distracted by everything from tits and shoes to footie and George Clooney.

Here is my carefully researched and uniquely explanatory theory of the Universe:

I must apologise for this illustration being completely out of scale: to truly understand what I’m on about, you need to multiply the white space using this equation:

white x (18.4 trillion)³ & perhaps even more

Science witters on endlessly about the random universe while grasping less than 0.0000001% of whatTF it all means.

“Yes, but does it mean anything?” I hear you ask with doubtful emphasis. To which the answer is, “Search me squire, but I’m not about to start pontificating about that until we’ve raised our knowledge to a point where we can wipe out six of the noughts there, and beef up the figure 1 to, say, 73, or something similar”.

But there are some things – even at this early stage – that make it easy to question the Random Universe theorists. For example:

• If there was no Time before Big Bang, how did it happen….given that every explosion needs a catalyst to create it, and that catalyst needs Time in order to do it?
• It can’t have gone “bang” because it took place in a vacuum, where there is no sound
• Why did the bang only expand the Universe in one direction, thus making it the only bang ever to do so?
• What was the Thing there before the bang, and how did it get there?

Every time I meet a physicist (it’s not a regular occurence) I wind him up with these awkward riddles. But most of them are not to be dissuaded: they respond with an all-knowing sneer, and accuse one of being a creationist.

What they don’t have is a substantive defence of their belief system.

There is, however, one observation that really can heat up the debate. Here it is:

e = mc²

If you’re looking for elegant simplicity, then look no further than e = mc². 

Examine it: one mathematical sign, three letters and an exact exponential number. Five symbols in a row that explain why nothing and nobody can escape from our three-dimensional Universe.

There is a purpose to it, there is a pattern to it, and – unlike Time, Space and Tony Blair – it is not relative.

Purpose and pattern on such a grand scale cannot possibly be random: to create anything requires intelligence. To create something so sublime demands wisdom.

You cannot have intelligence and wisdom without life in some form. Even if it’s in a form we cannot possibly envisage, it didn’t come from a lump of dead volcanic granite somewhere in the Andromeda constellation.

The theory of a random Universe is bunk invented by atheist pointy-heads.

I rest my case. What think you?