The theoretical physicist at Cambridge University, John D. Barrow, winner of the 2006 Templeton Prize for advances in research or discoveries about spiritual realities, is a man of many talents.
The author of 17 books and more than 400 journal articles, as well as a play exploring the meaning of infinity, Barrow is perhaps best known as a co-author, with the mathematical physicist of Tulan University, Frank Tipler from a book in 1986 Entropy cosmological principle , which he explored when the Earth is really tuned for life. Looking at the New York Times, science journalist Timothy Ferris notes, "I was furious with her, disagreed with her and loved to read it."
In his next essay, written on the occasion of the victory at Templeton Land, Barrow reflects on the greatness of nature, on our ever-expanding knowledge of the universe, and why religion should always take place at the table with science.
Just over a year ago I was in the great church - the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. His predecessor was raised in 832 to accommodate the mortal remains of St. Louis. Mark Evangelist, who allegedly was bought to Venice from Alexandria four years ago by two Venetian merchants. They are identical to hide the remains of a tortured saint under layers of pork, in order to avoid the attention of Muslim customs officials.
A real Byzantine-style basilica with its separate cluster of low domes was launched in 1063 and assembled in 1089. Today it is located next to the Doge's Palace on the edge of St. Louis. Mark, attracting tourists and pigeons, and not pilgrims with a facade to run a thousand cards.
I arrived at the church early in the evening with a small group of other scholars for excursions after it closed to visitors during the day. When we entered, it was almost in complete darkness. There are several windows, and they are small and far from transparent. We were asked to sit in the center, allowing only a few raised floor lights and a random electric candle to lead us to our places. There was only darkness above us.
Then, very slowly, the levels of light rose above us and around us, and the interior began to be illuminated by a low-key system of hidden sodium lights. The darkness around us was replaced by a spectacular golden light. Embroidery ceilings above us were covered with a spectacular mosaic of glass and gold. Between the 11th and 15th centuries, about 11,000 square feet of golden mosaic was made into a square square, mixing gold with glass through a delicate process that is still not completely understood to produce this sparkling golden shrine. Appearances can be deceptive.
But, reflecting, for me it was a more impressive realization that hundreds of masters who have worked for centuries to create this fabulous spectacle have never seen it in their full glory. They worked in a gloomy interior, helped by candlelight and smoky oil lamps to illuminate the small area in which they worked, but none of them had ever seen the full glory of the golden ceiling. For them, like us, after 500 years, the performances were deceptive.
Closer to the stars
Our universe is also the same. The ancient writers who celebrated heaven, the Declaration of Glory of the Lord saw only through the glass. Unbeknownst to them and the countless others who followed them, the universe manifested itself through tools that modern science has made possible to be much bigger, more impressive, and more humiliating than we ever imagined.
The universe seems large and old, dark and cold, hostile to life, as we know it, dangerous and expensive to explore. Many philosophers of the past came to the conclusion that the universe was meaningless and contrary to life: a dark and black kingdom, in which our small planet is a temporary way out for the blind forces of nature. However, appearances can again be deceptive.
Over the past 75 years, astronomers unexpectedly lit the vault of heaven. The universe is not only big, but it is getting bigger. It expands. Large clusters of galaxies move away from each other with increasing speed. This means that the size of the universe that we see is incompatible with age. He is big because he is old.
These huge periods of time are important for our own existence. We are made of complex atoms of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, along with many others. Perhaps one day other forms of the earth's mind will be made of silicon atoms. The nuclei of all these atoms do not come in readiness with the Universe. They are united by a long slow sequence of nuclear reactions in stars. This stellar alchemy takes almost 10 billion years to burn hydrogen into helium, as well as beryllium, carbon and oxygen further, before dying stars explode in supernovae and spread their life-giving debris around the universe, where it finds its way into dust grains, planets and extremely in humans. The core of each carbon atom in our bodies was through a star. We are closer to the stars than we could ever imagine.
To understand
Astronomy has transformed the ingenuous, life-keen, senseless universe of skeptical philosophers. He breathes new life into many religious questions, representing ultimate care and infinite infatuation. Many of the deepest and most sought-after questions that we still face about the nature of the universe originate in our purely religious quest for meaning.
The concept of a legal universe with an order that can be understood and rested has arisen largely from religious beliefs about the nature of God. The atomic picture of the matter of Aros long before there could be any experimental evidence or against it.
From these beliefs arose the belief that the appearance, which is worth exploring, was unchanged. Big questions about the origin and end of the universe, perhaps the sources of all observable complexity and the potential infinity of space, different from our religious orientation to the great questions of the existence and nature of God.
And, like all great questions, they can get answers that lead us to unexpected ways, farther and farther away from the familiar and everyday: multiversity, extra dimensions, the bend of time and space — everyone can reveal a universe that contains more than what is needed for life, even more than you need for speculation. Now we see how the universe can display infinite complexity and excellent structure, governed by several simple laws - perhaps only one law, which is symmetrical and reasonable, the laws that govern the most remarkable things in our universe: elementary "particles" that are absolutely everywhere are the same.
Hidden Logic of Reality
It is to this simple and beautiful world behind - where the legitimacy of nature is most elegant and fully disclosed - that physicists are looking to find a sign of the universe. All others look at the results of these laws. The results are often complex, difficult to understand and of great importance - they even include ourselves - but the true simplicity and symmetry of the Universe can be found in things that are not visible. The most remarkable thing is that we find that there are mathematical equations, little quirks on a piece of paper that tell us how all the universes behave. There is more logic than universes, which is more surprising because we can understand its significant part and, therefore, share it with its appreciation.
As soon as we thought that everything in the Universe was made of the material that we find on Earth. We now found that this, too, was only the first assumption. More than 70 percent of the universe consists of a form of dark energy that is unknown. He reveals his presence due to his dramatic influence on the expansion of the universe. Unlike all other known forms of matter that exert gravitational forces of attraction to other forms of matter and among them, this dark form of energy pushes toward gravity, causing all material to accelerate from it, creating acceleration in the expansion of the Universe that began to occur when it reached about 75 percent of her presence. This discovery about our universe was a surprise - like the discovery of something completely unexpected with respect to an old friend. Again, the performances were deceptive.
So from the universe, like it was that night in St. Louis. Mark, things are not always as they seem when we look up. All this is much more than the sum of its parts. The architects of our religious and scientific paintings of the universe and many commentators on their meanings that followed them could see only a small part of what is, and only a small part of what it needs to teach us about our place in the Universe. Once again we begin to see the extraordinary nature of our local environment and the connection that gives life to vast space and time. Appearances can really be deceptive.
Knowing that we don't know
There are some who say that just because we use our minds to assess the order and complexity of the universe around us, there is nothing more of an order than that imposed by the human mind. This is a serious misunderstanding. If this were so, we would expect to find our largest and most reliable understanding of the world in everyday events, during which millions of years of natural selection sharpened our thoughts and prepared our feelings.
And when we look towards the outer space of galaxies and black holes, or into the inner space of quarks and electrons, we should expect to find several resonances between our minds and the paths of these worlds. Natural selection does not require an understanding of quarks and black holes for our survival and reproduction.
And yet we find that these expectations have turned to their heads. The most accurate and reliable knowledge that we have about anything in the universe is events in the binary star system, more than 3000 light years from our planet and in the subatomic world of electrons and light rays, where it is more accurate than nine decimal places. And it is curious that our biggest uncertainty is related to the local problems of understanding ourselves - human societies, human behavior and the human mind - everything that is really important for human survival. But this is because they must be complex: if our minds were simple enough to be understood, they would be too easy to understand.
In all the science we pursue, we are accustomed to seeing progress. Our first attempts to help the laws of nature are often incomplete. They capture only part of the truth, or see it through the glass only dark.
Some people think that our progress is like an endless sequence of revolutions that overthrew the old order, sentenced never to go to something more specific than a more useful style of thinking. But scientific progress is not like that from the inside. Our new theories are spread and spread to old ones. The first theories are restored in some limited situation — slow motions, weak gravitational fields, large sizes, or low energies — from new ones. The theory of mechanics and gravity of Newton was replaced by Einstein, who in the future will follow the theory of M or its unknown successor. But after a thousand years. schools of time will still be studied by Newton’s theories and engineers, who will continue to rely on them just as they are today. They will be a simple limiting form for slow engines and weak gravity of a finite theory, however.
In our religious concepts of the universe, we also use approximations and analogies to have some idea of the final things. This is not the whole truth, but it does not prevent them from being part of the truth - a shadow that rushes into the ultimate situation of some simplicity. Our scientific picture of the Universe revealed again and again how often and how conservative our worldview was, how self-serving our temporary picture of the Universe, how worldly our expectations and how our attempts to find or deny the links between scientific and religious approaches to the nature of the Universe.
Sir John Templeton bought to encourage this impartial dialogue in the firm belief that religion and science can provide mutual enlightenment and appreciation of the wonders of our entire universe and inspire us to seek and understand the truth in a new way - a truth that is unsurpassed by surprise and so often not at all like how it first appears.
