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...