Creation

Stephen Hawking books are wonderful. There's an incredible amount of theory and speculation to think about in every chapter (and every paragraph.) For those of us un-trained in the language of physics, his meaning is often difficult to decipher. But sometimes an analogy lights up the mind as Hawking gets us thinking in new ways.

I particularly like the theory that our four dimensional space-time system is the intersection of other dimensions. Well, Hawking doesn’t put it quite that way, but that’s what I read into his stuff. If string theory is correct, then strings could exist in those extra dimensions. Perhaps a one-dimensional string is its own dimension, but more likely it touches multiple dimensions, and potentially can intersect with many other strings. Vibrations on strings don’t make sense – a one dimensional string would need a second dimension for vibrations. Not only that, but a vibration has to happen in the dimension of time. Perhaps the so-called vibration is just the way that strings intersect with each other. We in four dimensional space see the intersections as particles which move in time, and those particles would appear to be following inscrutable laws that we call weak, strong, gravitational and electro-magnetic forces. I’d even guess that two strings which make a glancing touch are perceived as zero mass particles. When two strings impede each other and pull each other between dimensions, we interpret the intersection as mass. And when a whole bunch of strings pile up together, they cause the resultant space-time particles to tend to stay close together, and we call this gravity.

Also, we’ve got the wrong idea about time. There are two different issues. One is a certain alignment of every particle in the universe. The other is a process of change. That’s the uncertainty of which Heisenberg wrote. If we did succeed in going back in time, we’d find that the time we ended up in was different than the original – we’d be there. So the process of change in that time interval would have been altered, and we could not positively say that what we observe is the same as what would have happened without us. Anyway, all you have to do to go time traveling is to rearrange every vibrating string into a specific order, and then carefully adjust the placement (in n-dimensional space) of certain strings until they form the exact combination of matter and energy that you call yourself. Good luck on that!

God may have started in zero-space and created all the dimensions. Think of what God did as grabbing a piece of silly putty and slowly stretching it out until it is has length but no width or depth. Of course, God didn’t start with silly putty. He grabbed a piece of nothing, stretched it out into new dimensions, and gave those dimensions laws on how to interface with each other; we interpret those laws as strings. He did that an infinity of times, because infinity is the same as once to God. These details are completely unimportant to us – we live in the macro world. But I’d like to rewrite Genesis to say something like,

Before time was, God took nothing and stretched it in many dimensions until it became something, and called it change. And somewhere in the first billionth of a nanosecond, and also at all times, God said, “this is good.”