1 The Big Questions
Confronting the Mystery of Existence

For thousands of years, human beings have contemplated the world about
them and asked the great questions of existence: Why are we here? How did
the universe begin? How will it end? How is the world put together? Why is it
the way it is? For all of recorded human history, people have sought answers
to such "ultimate" questions in religion and philosophy or declared them to be
completely beyond human comprehension. Today, however, many of these
big questions are part of science, and some scientists claim that they may
be on the verge of providing answers.
Two major developments have bolstered scientists' confidence
that the answers lie within their grasp. The first is the enormous progress
made in cosmology — the study of the large-scale structure and evolution of
the universe. Observations made using satellites, the Hubble Space
Telescope, and sophisticated ground-based instruments have combined to
transform our view of the universe and the place of human beings within it.
The second development is the growing understanding of the microscopic
world within the atom — the subject known as high-energy particle physics.
It is mostly carried out with giant particle accelerator machines (what were
once called "atom smashers") of the sort found at Fermilab near Chicago and
the CERN Laboratory just outside Geneva. Combining these two subjects —
the science of the very large and the science of the very small — provides
tantalizing clues that deep and previously unsuspected linkages bind the
micro-world to the macro-world. Cosmologists are fond of saying that the big
bang, which gave birth to the universe billions of years ago, was the greatest
ever particle physics experiment. These spectacular advances hint at a much
grander synthesis: nothing less than a complete and unified description of
nature, a final "theory of everything" in which a flawless account of the entire
physical world is encompassed within a single explanatory scheme.

The Universe Is Bio-Friendly

One of the most significant facts — arguably the most significant fact —
about the universe is that we are part of it. I should say right at the outset
that a great many scientists and philosophers fervently disagree with this
statement: that is, they do not think that either life or consciousness is even
remotely significant in the great cosmic scheme of things. My position,
however, is that I take life and mind (that is, consciousness) seriously, for
reasons I shall explain in due course. At first sight life seems to be irrelevant
to the subject of cosmology. To be sure, the surface of the Earth has been
modified by life, but in the grand sweep of the cosmos our planet is but an
infinitesimal dot. There is an indirect sense, however, in which the existence
of life in the universe is an important cosmological fact. For life to emerge,
and then to evolve into conscious beings like ourselves, certain conditions
have to be satisfied. Among the many prerequisites for life — at least, for life
as we know it — is a good supply of the various chemical elements needed
to make biomass. Carbon is the key life-giving element, but oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus are crucial too. Liquid water is
another essential ingredient. Life also requires an energy source and a stable
environment, which in our case are provided by the sun. For life to evolve past
the level of simple microbes, this life-encouraging setting has to remain
benign for a very long time; it took billions of years for life on Earth to reach
the point of intelligence.
On a larger scale, the universe must be sufficiently old and cool to
permit complex chemistry. It has to be orderly enough to allow the
untrammeled formation of galaxies and stars. There have to be the right sorts
of forces acting between particles of matter to make stable atoms, complex
molecules, planets, and stars. If almost any of the basic features of the
universe, from the properties of atoms to the distribution of the galaxies, were
different, life would very probably be impossible.1 Now, it happens that to
meet these various requirements, certain stringent conditions must be
satisfied in the underlying laws of physics that regulate the universe, so
stringent in fact that a bio-friendly universe looks like a fix — or a "put-up job,"
to use the pithy description of the late British cosmologist Fred Hoyle. It
appeared to Hoyle as if a superintellect had been "monkeying" with the laws
of physics.2 He was right in his impression. On the face of it, the universe
does look as if it has been designed by an intelligent creator expressly for
the purpose of spawning sentient beings. Like the porridge in the tale of
Goldilocks and the three bears, the universe seems to be "just right" for life,
in many intriguing ways. No scientific explanation for the universe can be
deemed complete unless it accounts for this appearance of judicious design.
Until recently, "the Goldilocks factor" was almost completely
ignored by scientists. Now, that is changing fast. As I shall discuss in the
following chapters, science is at last coming to grips with the enigma of why
the universe is so uncannily fit for life. The explanation entails understanding
how the universe began and evolved into its present form and knowing what
matter is made of and how it is shaped and structured by the different forces
of nature. Above all, it requires us to probe the very nature of physical laws.

The Cosmic Code

Throughout history, prominent thinkers have been convinced that the
everyday world observed through our senses represents only the surface
manifestation of a deeper hidden reality, where the answers to the great
questions of existence should be sought. So compelling has been this belief
that entire societies have been shaped by it. Truth seekers have practiced
complex rituals and rites, used drugs and meditation to enter trancelike
states, and consulted shamans, mystics and priests in an attempt to lift the
veil on a shadowy world that lies beneath the one we perceive. The word
occult originally meant "knowledge of concealed truth," and seeking a
gateway to the occult domain has been a major preoccupation of all cultures,
ranging from the Dreaming of Aboriginal Australians to the myth of Adam and
Eve tasting the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge.
The advent of reasoned argument and logic did nothing to dispel
the beguiling notion of a hidden reality. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato
compared the world of appearances to a shadow playing on the wall of a
cave. Followers of Pythagoras were convinced that numbers possess
mystical significance. The Bible is also replete with numerology, for example,
the frequent appearances of 7 and 40, or the association of 666 with Satan.
The power of numbers led to a belief that certain integers, geometrical
shapes, and formulas could invoke contact with a supernatural plane and that
obscure codes known only to initiates might unlock momentous cosmic
secrets.3 Remnants of ancient numerology survive today: some superstitious
people still believe that numbers such as 8 and 13 are lucky or unlucky.
Attempts to gain useful information about the world through
magic, mysticism, and secret mathematical codes mostly led nowhere. But
about 350 years ago, the greatest magician who ever lived finally stumbled on
the key to the universe — a cosmic code that would open the floodgates of
knowledge. This was Isaac Newton — mystic, theologian, and alchemist —
and in spite of his mystical leanings, he did more than anyone to change the
age of magic into the age of science. Newton, together with a small number
of other scientific luminaries who included Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes
Kepler, and Galileo Galilei, gave birth to the modern scientific age. The word
science is derived from the Latin scientia, simply meaning "knowledge."
Originally it was just one of many arcane methods used to probe beyond the
limitations of our senses in the hope of accessing an unseen reality. The
particular brand of "magic" employed by the early scientists involved hitherto
unfamiliar and specialized procedures, such as manipulating mathematical
symbols on pieces of paper and coaxing matter to behave in strange ways.
Today we take such practices for granted and call them scientific theory and
experiment. No longer is the scientific method of inquiry regarded as a
branch of magic, the obscure dabbling of a closed and privileged priesthood.
But familiarity breeds contempt, and these days the significance of the
scientific process is often underappreciated. In particular, people show little
surprise that science actually works and that we really are in possession of
the key to the universe. The ancients were right: beneath the surface
complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written in a subtle mathematical
code. This cosmic code4 contains the secret rules on which the universe
runs. Newton, Galileo, and other early scientists treated their investigations
as a religious quest. They thought that by exposing the patterns woven into
the processes of nature they truly were glimpsing the mind of God.5 Modern
scientists are mostly not religious, yet they still accept that an intelligible
script underlies the workings of nature, for to believe otherwise would
undermine the very motivation for doing research, which is to uncover
something meaningful about the world that we don't already know.
Finding the key to the universe was by no means inevitable. For a
start, there is no logical reason why nature should have a mathematical
subtext in the first place. And even if it does, there is no obvious reason why
humans should be capable of comprehending it. You would never guess by
looking at the physical world that beneath the surface hubbub of natural
phenomena lies an abstract order, an order that can't be seen or heard or
felt, but deduced. Even the wisest mind couldn't tell merely from daily
experience that the diverse physical systems making up the cosmos are
linked, deep down, by a network of coded mathematical relationships. Yet
science has uncovered the existence of this concealed mathematical
domain.We human beings have been made privy to the deepest workings of
the universe. Other animals observe the same natural phenomena as we do,
but alone among the creatures on this planet, Homo sapiens can also
explain them.
How has this come about? Somehow the universe has
engineered, not just its own awareness, but also its own comprehension.
Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make not just life, not just
mind, but understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are
able not merely to watch the show, but to unravel the plot. What is it that
enables something as small and delicate and adapted to terrestrial life as the
human brain to engage with the totality of the cosmos and the silent
mathematical tune to which it dances? For all we know, this is the first and
only time anywhere in the universe that minds have glimpsed the cosmic
code. If humans are snuffed out in the twinkling of a cosmic eye, it may never
happen again. The universe may endure for a trillion years, shrouded in total
mystery, save for a fleeting pulse of enlightenment on one small planet
around one average star in one unexceptional galaxy, 13.7 billion years after
it all began.
Could it just be a fluke? Might the fact that the deepest level of
reality has connected to a quirky natural phenomenon we call "the human
mind" represent nothing but a bizarre and temporary aberration in an absurd
and pointless universe? Or is there an even deeper subplot at work?

The Concept of Laws

I may have given the impression that Newton belonged to a small sect that
conjured science out of the blue as a result of mystical investigation. This
wasn't so. Their work did not take place in a cultural vacuum: it was the
product of many ancient traditions. One of these was Greek philosophy,
which encouraged the belief that the world could be explained by logic,
reasoning, and mathematics. Another was agriculture, from which people
learned about order and chaos by observing the cycles and rhythms of
nature, punctuated by sudden and unpredictable disasters. And then there
were religions, especially monotheistic faiths, which encouraged belief in a
created world order. The founding assumption of science is that the physical
universe is neither arbitrary nor absurd; it is not just a meaningless jumble of
objects and phenomena haphazardly juxtaposed. Rather, there is a coherent
scheme of things. This is often expressed by the simple aphorism that there
is order in nature. But scientists have gone beyond this vague notion to
formulate a system of well-defined laws.
The existence of laws of nature is the starting point of this book,
and indeed it is the starting point of science itself. But right at the outset we
encounter an obvious and profound enigma:
Where do the laws of nature come from?
As I have remarked, Galileo, Newton, and their contemporaries
regarded the laws as thoughts in the mind of God, and their elegant
mathematical form as a manifestation of God's rational plan for the universe.
Few scientists today would describe the laws of nature using such quaint
language. Yet the questions remain of what these laws are and why they
have the form that they do. If they aren't the product of divine providence, how
can they be explained?
Historically, laws of nature were discussed by analogy to civil law,
which arose as a means of regulating human society. Civil law is a concept
that dates back to the time of the first settled communities, when some form
of authority was needed to prevent social disorder. Typically, a despotic
leader would concoct a set of rules and exhort the populace to comply with
them. Since one person's rules can be another person's problem, rulers
would often appeal to divine authority to buttress their power. A city's god
might be literally a stone statue in the town square, and a priest would be
appointed to interpret the god's commandments. The notion of turning to a
higher, nonmaterial authority as justification for civil law underpins the Ten
Commandments and was refined in the Jewish Torah. Remnants of this
notion survived into the modern era as the concept of the divine right of kings.
Appeal was also made to an invisible higher power in support of
laws of nature. In the fourth century BCE the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes
described "Universal Nature, piloting all things according to Law."6 The order
of nature was perhaps clearest in the heavens — the very domain of the
gods. Indeed, the word astronomy means "law of the stars." The first-century
bce Roman poet Lucretius referred to the way in which nature requires "each
thing to abide by the law that governs its creation."7 In the first century ce,
Marcus Manilius was explicit about the source of nature's order, writing
that "God brought the whole universe under law."8 It was a position
wholeheartedly embraced by the monotheistic religions: God the Creator was
also God the Lawmaker, who ordered nature according to his divine
purposes. Thus the early Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo wrote
that "the ordinary course of nature in the whole of creation has certain natural
laws."9
By the thirteenth century, European theologians and scholars
such as Roger Bacon had arrived at the conclusion that laws of nature
possess a mathematical basis, a notion that dates back to the
Pythagoreans. Oxford University became the center for scholars who applied
mathematical philosophy to the study of nature. One of these so-called
Oxford Calculators was Thomas Bradwardine (1295–1349), later to become
archbishop of Canterbury. Bradwardine has been credited with the first
scientific work to announce a general mathematical law of physics in the
modern sense. Given this background, it is no surprise that when modern
science emerged in Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, it was perfectly natural for the early scientists to believe that the
laws they were discovering in the heavens and on Earth were the
mathematical manifestations of God's ingenious handiwork.

The Special Status of the Laws of Physics

Today, the laws of physics occupy the central position in science; indeed,
they have assumed an almost deistic status themselves, often cited as the
bedrock of physical reality. Let me give an everyday example. If you go to
Pisa in Italy, you can see the famous leaning tower (now restored to a safe
inclination by engineering works). Tradition says that Galileo dropped balls
from the top of the tower to demonstrate how they fall under gravity. Whether
or not this is true, he certainly did carry out some careful experiments with
falling bodies, which is how he came to discover the following law. If you drop
a ball from the top of a tall building and measure how far it falls in one
second, then repeat the experiment for two seconds, three seconds, and so
on, you will find that the distance the ball travels increases as the square of
the time. The ball will fall four times as far in two seconds as in one, nine
times as far in three seconds, and so on. Schoolchildren learn about this law
as "a fact of nature" and normally move on without giving it much further
thought. But I want to stop right there and ask the question, Why? Why is
there such a mathematical rule at work on falling bodies? Where does the
rule come from? And why that rule and not some other?
Let me give another example of a law of physics, one that made a
big impression on me in my school days. It concerns the way magnets lose
their grip on each other with separation. Line them up side by side and
measure the force as the distance between them increases. You will find that
the force diminishes with the cube of the distance, which is to say that if we
double the distance between the magnets, the force falls to one eighth, treble
it and the force will be one twenty-seventh, and so on. Again, I am prompted
to ask the question, Why?
Some laws of physics bear the name of their discoverer, such as
Boyle's law for gases, which tells you that if you double the volume of a fixed
mass of gas while keeping the temperature constant, its pressure is halved.
Or Kepler's laws of planetary motion, one of which says that the square of
the period of an orbit is proportional to the cube of the orbit's radius. Perhaps
the best-known laws are Newton's laws of motion and gravitation, the latter
supposedly inspired by an apple falling from a tree. It states that the force of
gravity diminishes with distance as the square of the separation between the
two bodies. That is, the force that binds the Earth to the sun, and prevents it
from flying off alone across the galaxy, would fall to only one quarter the
strength if the Earth's orbit were twice as big. This is known as an inverse
square law. I have drawn a graph depicting it in Figure 1.
The fact that the physical world conforms to mathematical laws
led Galileo to make a famous remark. "The great book of nature," he
wrote, "can be read only by those who know the language in which it was
written. And this language is mathematics."10 The same point was made
more bluntly three centuries later by the English astronomer James
Jeans: "The universe appears to have been designed by a pure
mathematician."11 It is the mathematical aspect that makes possible what
physicists mean by the much-misunderstood word theory. Theoretical
physics entails writing down equations that capture (or model, as scientists
say) the real world of experience in a mathematical world of numbers and
algebraic formulas. Then, by manipulating the mathematical symbols, one
can work out what will happen in the real world, without actually carrying out
the observation. That is, by applying the equations that express the laws
relevant to the problem of interest, the theoretical physicist can predict the
answer. For example, by using Newton's laws of motion and gravitation,
engineers can figure out when a spacecraft launched from Earth will reach
Mars. They can also calculate the required mass of fuel, the most favorable
orbit, and a host of other factors in advance of the mission. And it works! The
mathematical model faithfully describes what actually happens in the real
world. (Of course, in practice one may have to simplify the model to save
time and cost of the analysis, making the predictions good only to a certain
level of approximation, but that is not the fault of the laws.)
When I was at school I took a fancy to a young lady in my class
named Lindsay. I didn't see much of her because she was studying mainly
the arts and I was studying the sciences and mathematics. But we did meet
up in the school library from time to time. On one occasion I was busy doing
a calculation. I even remember what it was. If you throw a ball in the air at a
certain speed and angle, Newton's laws let you work out how far it will travel
before it hits the ground. The equations tell you that to achieve maximum
range you should throw the ball at 45° to the horizontal. If the ground on
which you are standing slopes upward, however, the angle needs to be
greater; by how much depends on the amount of slope. I was deeply
engrossed in calculating the maximum range up an inclined plane when
Lindsay looked up and asked what I was doing. I explained. She seemed
puzzled and skeptical. "How can you possibly know what a ball will do by
writing things on a sheet of paper?" she asked. At the time I dismissed her
question as silly — after all, this was what we had been taught to do! But
over the years I came to see that her impulsive response precisely captures
one of the deepest mysteries of science: Why is nature shadowed by a
mathematical reality? Why does theoretical physics work?12

How Many Laws Are There?

As scientists have probed deeper and deeper into the workings of nature, all
sorts of laws have come to light that are not at all obvious from a casual
inspection of the world, for example, laws that regulate the internal
components of atoms or the structure of stars. The multiplicity of laws raises
another challenging question: How long would a complete list of laws be?
Would it include ten? twenty? two hundred? Might the list even be infinitely
long?
Not all the laws are independent of one another. It wasn't long
after Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Boyle began discovering laws of physics
that scientists found links between them. For example, Newton's laws of
gravitation and motion explain Kepler's three laws of planetary motion and so
are in some sense deeper and more powerful. Newton's laws of motion also
explain Boyle's law of gases when they are applied in a statistical way to a
large collection of chaotically moving molecules.
In the four centuries that have passed since the first laws of
physics were discovered, more and more have come to light, but more and
more links have been spotted too. The laws of electricity, for example, were
found to be connected to the laws of magnetism, which in turn explained the
laws of light. These interconnections led to a certain amount of confusion
about which laws were "primary" and which could be derived from others.
Physicists began talking about "fundamental" laws and "secondary" laws,
with the implication that the latter were formulated for convenience only.
Sometimes physicists call these "effective laws" to distinguish them from
the "true" underlying fundamental laws, within which, at least in principle, the
effective, or secondary, laws can all be subsumed. In this respect, the laws
of physics differ markedly from the laws of civil society, which are an untidy
hodgepodge of statutes expanding without limit. To take an extreme case,
the tax laws in most countries run to millions of words of text. By
comparison, the Great Rule Book of Nature (at least as it is currently
understood) would fit comfortably onto a single page. This streamlining and
repackaging process — finding links between laws and reducing them to ever
more fundamental laws — continues apace, and it's tempting to believe that,
at rock bottom, there is just a handful of truly fundamental laws, possibly
even a single superlaw, from which all the other laws derive.
Given that the laws of physics underpin the entire scientific
enterprise, it is curious that very few scientists bother to ask what these laws
actually mean. Speak to physicists, and most of them will talk as if the laws
are real things — not physical objects, of course, but abstract relationships
between physical entities. Importantly, though, they are relationships that
really exist "out there" in the world and not just in our heads.
For brevity I have been a bit cavalier with my terminology. If you
confront a physicist and say, "Show me the laws of physics," you will be
referred to a collection of textbooks — on mechanics, gravitation,
electromagnetism, nuclear physics, and so on. But a pertinent question is
whether the laws you find in the books are actually the laws of physics or
just somebody's best stab at them. Few physicists would claim that a law
found in a book in print today is the last word on the subject; all the textbook
laws are probably just some sort of approximation of the real ones. Most
physicists nevertheless believe that as science advances, the textbook laws
will converge on the Real Thing.13

Are the Laws Real?

There is a subtlety buried in all this that will turn out to be of paramount
importance when I come to discuss the origin of the laws. The idea of laws
began as a way of formalizing patterns in nature that connect physical
events. Physicists became so familiar with the laws that somewhere along
the way the laws themselves — as opposed to the events they describe —
became promoted to reality. The laws took on a life of their own. It is hard for
nonscientists to grasp the significance of this step. One analogy might be
made with the world of finance. Money in the pocket means coins and
notes — real physical things that get exchanged for real physical goods or
services. But money in the abstract has also taken on a life of its own.
Investors can grow (or shrink, in my case) money without ever buying or
selling physical stuff. For example, there are rules for manipulating different
currencies that are at best tenuously connected to the actual purchasing
function in your local corner shop. In fact, there is far more "money" in
circulation, much of it swirling around cyberspace via the Internet, than can
ever be accumulated as coins and notes. In a similar vein, the laws of
physics are said to inhabit an abstract realm and touch the physical world
only when they "act." It's almost as if the laws are lying in wait, ready to
seize control of a physical process and compel it to comply, just as the rules
of monetary conversion are "in place" even when nobody is actually
converting anything. This "prescriptive" view of physical laws as having power
over nature is not without its detractors (namely, philosophers who prefer
a "descriptive" view).14 But most physicists working on fundamental topics
inhabit the prescriptive camp, even if they won't own up to it explicitly.
So we have this image of really existing laws of physics
ensconced in a transcendent aerie, lording it over lowly matter. One reason
for this way of thinking about the laws concerns the role of mathematics.
Numbers began as a way of labeling and tallying physical things such as
beads or sheep. As the subject of mathematics developed, and extended
from simple arithmetic into geometry, algebra, calculus, and so forth, so
these mathematical objects and relationships came to assume an
independent existence. Mathematicians believe that statements such as "3 ×
5 = 15" and "11 is a prime number" are inherently true — in some absolute
and general sense — without being restricted to "three sheep" or "eleven
beads."
Plato considered the status of mathematical objects and chose to
locate numbers and idealized geometrical shapes in an abstract realm of
perfect forms. In this Platonic heaven there would be found, for example,
perfect circles — as opposed to the circles we encounter in the real world,
which will always be flawed approximations to the ideal. Many modern
mathematicians are Platonists (at least on weekends). They believe that
mathematical objects have real existence yet are not situated in the physical
universe. Theoretical physicists, who are steeped in the Platonic tradition,
also find it natural to locate the mathematical laws of physics in a Platonic
realm. I have depicted this arrangement diagrammatically in Figure 2. In the
final chapter I shall take a critical look at the nature of physical laws and ask
whether the Platonic view has become an unwelcome fixation in the drive to
understand the mathematical underpinnings of the universe.

Goodbye God?

Religion was the first systematic attempt to explain the universe
comprehensively. It presented the world as a product of mind or minds, of
supernatural agents who could order or disorder nature at will. In Hinduism,
Brahma is creator and Shiva destroyer. In Judaism, Yahweh is both creator
and destroyer. For the traditional Aboriginal people of the Kimberley in
Australia, two creator beings acted in synergy. Wallanganda, a male space
being, sprinkled water on Wunngud, a female snake coiled in jelly, to make
Yorro Yorro — the world as we see it.15 In these sorts of schemes, things
are as they are because a god (or gods) decided they should be so. The
major world religions devoted centuries of scholarship in attempts to make
these theistic explanations cogent and consistent. Even today, millions of
people base their worldview on a religious interpretation of nature.
Science was the second great attempt to explain the world. This
time, explanations were cast in terms of impersonal forces and natural,
physical processes rather than the activities of purposive supernatural
agents. When scientific explanations conflicted with religious explanations,
religion invariably lost the battle. Mostly, theologians retreated to concentrate
on social and ethical matters such as spiritual enlightenment, content to
leave interpreting the physical universe to the scientists. There are still
people who believe that rain is made by rain gods rather than by atmospheric
processes, but I wouldn't rate their chances in a debate with a meteorologist.
When it comes to actual physical phenomena, science wins
hands down against gods and miracles. That is not to say that science has
explained everything. There remain some pretty big gaps: for example,
scientists don't know how life began, and they are almost totally baffled by
consciousness. Even some familiar phenomena, such as turbulent fluids, are
not completely understood. But this doesn't mean that one needs to appeal
to magic or miracles to plug the gaps; what is needed are advances in
scientific understanding. This is a topic I shall address in detail in Chapter 10.
When it comes to metaphysical questions such as "Why are
there laws of nature?" the situation is less clear. These sorts of questions are
not much affected by specific scientific discoveries: many of the really big
questions have remained unchanged since the birth of civilization and still vex
us today. The various faith traditions have had hundreds of years to ponder
them carefully. Religious scholars such as Anselm and Thomas Aquinas
were not pious simpletons, but the intellectual heavyweights of their age.
Many scientists who are struggling to construct a fully
comprehensive theory of the physical universe openly admit that part of the
motivation is to finally get rid of God, whom they view as a dangerous and
infantile delusion. And not only God, but any vestige of God-talk, such
as "meaning" or "purpose" or "design" in nature.
These scientists see religion as so fraudulent and sinister that
nothing less than total theological cleansing will do. They concede no middle
ground and regard science and religion as two implacably opposed
worldviews. Victory is assumed to be the inevitable outcome of science's
intellectual ascendancy and powerful methodology.
But will God go quietly? Even within the world of organized
religion, the concept of God means many different things to different people.
At the level of popular, Sunday-school Christianity, God is portrayed
simplistically as a sort of Cosmic Magician, conjuring the world into being
from nothing and from time to time working miracles to fix problems. Such a
being is obviously in flagrant contradiction to the scientific view of the world.
The God of scholarly theology, by contrast, is cast in the role of a wise
Cosmic Architect whose existence is manifested through the rational order of
the cosmos, an order that is in fact revealed by science. That sort of God is
largely immune to scientific attack.

Is the Universe Pointless?

Even atheistic scientists will wax lyrical about the scale, the majesty, the
harmony, the elegance, the sheer ingenuity of the universe of which they form
so small and fragile a part. As the great cosmic drama unfolds before us, it
begins to look as though there is a "script" — a scheme of things — that its
evolution is following. We are then bound to ask, Who or what wrote the
script? Or did the script somehow, miraculously, write itself? Is the great
cosmic text laid down once and for all, or is the universe, or the invisible
author, making it up as it goes along? Is this the only drama being staged, or
is our universe just one of many shows in town?
The fact that the universe conforms to an orderly scheme, and is
not an arbitrary muddle of events, prompts one to wonder — God or no
God — whether there is some sort of meaning or purpose behind it all. Many
scientists are quick to pour scorn even on this weaker suggestion, however.
Richard Feynman, arguably the finest theoretical physicist of the mid-
twentieth century, thought that "the great accumulation of understanding as
to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behavior has
a kind of meaninglessness about it."16 This sentiment is echoed by the
theoretical physicist and cosmologist Steven Weinberg: "The more the
universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems
pointless."17Weinberg came in for some flak from his colleagues for writing
this comment — not because he denied that the universe had a point, but for
even suggesting that it could have a point.
To be sure, concepts like meaning and purpose are categories
devised by humans, and we must take care when attempting to project them
onto the physical universe. But all attempts to describe the universe
scientifically draw on human concepts: science proceeds precisely by taking
concepts that humans have thought up, often from everyday experience, and
applying them to nature. Doing science means figuring out what is going on
in the world — what the universe is "up to," what it is "about." If it isn't "about"
anything, there would be no good reason to embark on the scientific quest in
the first place, because we would have no rational basis for believing that we
could thereby uncover additional coherent and meaningful facts about the
world. So we might justifiably invert Weinberg's dictum and say that the more
the universe seems pointless, the more it also seems incomprehensible. Of
course, scientists might be deluded in their belief that they are finding
systematic and coherent truth in the workings of nature. It could be we who
weave a tapestry of dazzling intellectual elegance from what is nothing more
than a banality. Ultimately there may be no reason at all for why things are
the way they are. But that would make the universe a fiendishly clever bit of
trickery. Can a truly absurd universe so convincingly mimic a meaningful
one? This is the biggest of the big questions of existence that we will
confront as we embark on our investigation of life, the universe, and
everything.

Key Points
• Many big questions of existence are now on the scientific agenda.
• A really big question is why the universe is fit for life; it looks "fixed up."
• The universe obeys mathematical laws; they are like a hidden subtext in
nature. To appreciate this book you have to be comfortable with that idea.
• The mathematical laws of physics underlie everything. Many physicists
think they are real and that they inhabit a transcendent Platonic realm.
• Science reveals that there is a coherent scheme of things, but scientists do
not necessarily interpret that as evidence for meaning or purpose in the
universe. Most, but by no means all, scientists are atheists or agnostics.
• Somehow I am supposed to explain all this.

Copyright © 2007 by Orion Productions. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.