Feb 18, 2010

Our Digital Universe

Chuck MisslerBy Chuck Missler
Koinonia House

"The entire universe is a cryptogram set by the Almighty." - Sir Isaac Newton

Fans of the popular TV science fiction series, Star Trek, are familiar with the "Beam-me-up-Scotty" concept of "teleporting." In an Austrian laboratory several years ago, scientists were able to destroy bits of light in one place and make perfect replicas appear about three feet away. They did this by transferring information about a crucial physical characteristic of the original light bits, or photons. The information was picked up by other photons, which took on that characteristic and thus became replicas of the originals.

While broader applications of these techniques still remain rather distant on the horizon of our new 21st century, the experiment raises some basic questions. Is our universe itself digital?

Our Macro-Boundary

The startling discovery of 20th century science was that our universe is finite. Scientists now acknowledge that the universe had a beginning. They call the singularity from which it all began the "Big Bang." While the details among the many variants of these theories remain quite controversial, the fact that there was a definite beginning has gained widespread agreement. This is, of course, what the Bible has maintained throughout its 66 books.

From thermodynamic considerations, it also appears that all processes in the universe inevitably contribute their losses from their inefficiencies to the ambient temperature, and thus the universe ultimately will attain a uniform temperature in which no work - all of which derives from temperature differences - will occur. Scientists call this final ultimate physical destiny the "heat death."

Mankind, therefore, finds itself caught in a finite interval between the singularity that began it all and its inevitable termination. The mathematical concept of infinity - in any spatial direction or in terms of time - seems astonishingly absent in the macrocosm, the domain of the astronomers and cosmologists.

Our Micro-Boundary

In the microcosmic domain, there appears to be an even more astonishing boundary to smallness. If we take a segment of length, we can divide it in half. We can take one of the remaining halves, and we can divide it in half again. We naturally assume that this can go on forever. We assume that no matter how small a length we end up dealing with, we can always - at least conceptually - divide any remainder in half. It turns out that this is not true. There is a length, known as the Planck length, 10-33 centimeters, that is indivisible.

The same thing is true of mass, energy, and even time. There is a unit of time which cannot be further divided: 10-43 seconds. It is in this strange world of subatomic behavior that scientists have encountered the very boundaries of physical reality, as we experience it. The study of these subatomic components is called quantum mechanics, or quantum physics.

The startling discovery made by the quantum physicists is that if you break matter into smaller and smaller pieces, you eventually reach a point where those pieces - electrons, protons, etc. - no longer possess the traits of objects. Although they can sometimes behave as if they were a compact little particle, physicists have found that they literally possess no dimension. They call this non-locality.

The more we know about quantum physics, the less confidence we can have concerning the nature of our own physical reality. It seems that it is but a subset of a larger hyperspace we call the spiritual reality.

A Glimpse of Hyperspace

Current cosmological conjectures assume a universe of more than three spatial dimensions - mathematically called a hyperspace. Current views envision a universe of ten dimensions: four directly measurable (three spatial dimensions, plus time) and six that can only be determined indirectly. This is precisely what the ancient Hebrew sage, Nachmonides, writing in the 12th century, concluded from his study of Genesis!

The Bible is unique in that it presents a universe of more than three dimensions (Ephesians 3:18), and reveals a Creator that is transcendent over His creation. It is the only "holy book" that possesses such contemporary insights.

Related Links


Our Digital Universe? Quantum Teleporting: Part 1 - Koinonia House
Cosmos, Creator and Human Destiny: Answering Darwin, Dawkins, and the New Atheists - Dave Hunt (Book)
Algae Molecule Masters Quantum Mechanics - Institute for Creation Research
Quantum Teleporting, Part 2: Our Holographic Universe - Koinonia House
The Coming Digital God - Arno Froese (Book)
Learn the Bible in 24 Hours - Chuck Missler (Book)
God & Natural Law - Answers in Genesis