Black Holes In A Brief History by Niraj Pant (the reading list book TXT) 📕

students. They scoured the continent

and came up with some surprisingly brilliant students, and me. I went because they allowed me

to and because I detested going back on that oily drilling rig. And while I would never have had

the courage to put a pistol to my own head, I’m sure there were several of my teachers who

would like to have.

Why do I rake up all this oilfield trash? To emphasize that if physics and cosmology excite a

man like me because they illustrate design in the universe, they can excite you, and should. If

you follow the logic of those many science books that sag the shelves, and not their illogical

prejudices against design, you’ll enjoy the splendor of science and remain as convinced as I am

that the evidence for design in the universe is, if not unassailable, compelling.

Nothing rewards like love. It’s its own reason to exist. The same goes for wonder. Love and

wonder are what humans are made for. But when one is confronted with evidence that makes

him suspect that all he has had faith in is fantasy, then wonder turns to despair. That happened to

me when first I peered through a microscope at fossils washed to surface from the bottom of a

ten-thousand foot oil well. There was no more hiding of the facts from what little faith remained

after a lifetime of sheltering it. No chance of holding Galileo in house arrest. I knew that the

earth was no longer the center of the universe, that fossils existed older than Noah’s flood, that

fifteen-billion years ago the universe deployed in what we call the big bang. No Grand Inquisitor

in my lifetime could stifle that knowledge. One follows for years a weak faith that allows only a

biblical interpretation of the physical universe until one day he suspects that he is arguing more

with God’s evidence than with the scientists who interpret it. Better, engage the evidence early.

Ah, there’s the rub; the rules for engaging God through his physical evidence are the same as

those for engaging him in meditation–ask honest questions, accept honest answers and prepare to

have your perspective changed forever.

There was no point at the end of my wandering where faith suddenly stepped forward like the

priests bearing the ark of the covenant, their feet striking the flowing waters of the Jordan and

halting it and Joshua leading the children of Israel into the promised land. Mine was a journey

like “Child Roland To The Dark Tower Came.” I was not sure I was even on a quest, I had

wandered aimlessly so long. “Burningly it came on me all at once. This was the place,” and I

was dauntless before the dark tower. But I was a battered old man at the end of a quest I began as

a boy. I had not conquered fear; somewhere on the long journey fear became disinterested in me,

shrugged his shoulders and walked away. Go early into science, it will alter your faith, but if this

book is successful it won’t destroy it.

What this book won’t do: It won’t change–does not attempt to change–people whose tragic

experiences in life have robbed them of faith–“If there were a God, how could He have let such

an evil thing happen?” I have nothing but compassion for such people. Not pity, compassion.

God’s existence is not contingent upon our belief in him, nor is he good or evil because we think

he is or is not. If God is good and someone rejects him because their experience in his creation

has been tragic and they can’t believe that a good God would allow such bad things to happen,

then their reasons for rejecting God as evil are good reasons. If God exists and is good, he thrives

in such doubts. But it is the good that drives these doubts. It is not scientific observation and

mathematical calculations. This book is zeroed in on scientific and mathematical calculations

aimed to dissuade people from believing in design in the universe. Physical things are neither

good nor evil, and physical existence is the study of physics. Scientists who argue that it is

impossible that a good god could have created a world riddled with evil should frame their logic

in theological or ethical proofs, not scientific ones.

But this book is not about religion poking holes in science, it is about logic poking holes in the

non-scientific claim against design in the universe. I’m convinced that the universe was

designed. Why it was designed as it is, and why there is evil in it, I do not know. The tsunami in

south Asia, the day after Christmas, two-thousand-four, left me shaking my fist at the heavens

one moment and perplexed the next at why a lotus eater like me, who flees catastrophe, is

privileged to share the same planet with others who rush to it risking their lives to bring relief;

and others who voluntarily leave the wealth and comfort I avidly pursue, to live in squalor so as

to make life less miserable for those who can’t escape it. When in this book I reason from first

cause, which has traditionally been called God, it is not because I aim to sell anyone on religion,

I am not associated with organized religion and have nothing to sell. I am grateful that mine is a

rich niche in time and place, a paradisaical time warp in man’s usual fare of famine, disease, war

and death. I cannot show you how a path back to the beginning will put you at the feet of a

beneficent First Cause of creation. But as I follow logic back to the big bang it leads inevitably to

the yawning question of First Cause and before I know it I have fallen in and can no more escape

than if it were a black hole.

Chapter One : “Infinite Fear, Infinite Regress,”

Infinite Fear, Infinite Regress

...the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from (man) in an impenetrable

secret: he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in

which he is swallowed up.

Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

Standing aquiver beside my desk, I was a biblical fundamentalist of the strictest order

confronting a teacher who was describing how life began and evolved to what we see today.

“Where did the water that the amoeba formed in come from?” I asked.

“The earth’s gravity drew oxygen and hydrogen to it and these mixed and became water.”

“Where did the earth that drew the oxygen and hydrogen come from?”

“It began as a gaseous cloud that got closer and closer together until it began to form into a

“Where did the gaseous cloud come from?” And so on, an infinite regress.

“Sit down, Donald, I am your teacher, you are not mine.”

She was, and would have been the following year had my family not followed the old drilling rig

from the gas fields of Rio Vista, California to an oil well two-hundred miles south at Greenfield

and spared me the embarrassment of having to repeat her class. But there was more afoot in the

world of science in nineteen-fifty than a seventh grade teacher trying to sort out how a failing

student had got her in an infinite regress--Einstein was in search of a unified theory, a theory that

would explain everything. I had no knowledge of Einstein’s search in those days, little of

Einstein. I could not have understood the first thing about a unified theory if it were explained to

me. Nor had I the slightest formal concept of such a thing as an infinite regress. But I knew what

infinite fear was. I was silently terrified that one day science would arrive at an explanation for

everything and it wouldn’t be God. That fear dogged me for forty years.

The impulse that moved my argument in the seventh grade, that there must be a first cause for

there to be any following affects, was a natural knee-jerk kind of impulse, had to be. Any

concept demanding brain power was hopeless with me--I was and am a slow learner. But knee-
jerk impulses have served me well over the years. Drilling rig roughnecks keep their fingers and

toes by going with first impulse--if things feel unsafe, they probably are. In my whole oilfield

career I’ve only mangled one finger.

Slow learner that I am, should I come into an apparently empty pool hall and see balls knocking

around on a pool table, I wouldn’t scratch my head and say, now if those balls are moving, either

they moved themselves or something moved them. I’d impulsively look around for a pool

shooter. If there really is no one in the pool hall, a pool hall in California, I’d run into the street

Something set those balls to moving. The logic to ask what is basic--cause and affect. The

process of following cause to affect, cause to affect, until one arrives at a first cause is regressive.

If the trail leads forever back, one cause to another, infinitely, it is an infinite regress.

Plato denied that there was an infinite regress--one must come to a stopping place, he said. His

stopping place was at a first cause -- the soul that moves all things but is moved by no other. This

first cause, a prime moving soul, he called the self moved mover and referred to it as God.

Aristotle went a step beyond his teacher, Plato, and reasoned that a first cause would move only

if he desired or needed something. Since he is complete in himself, desires or needs nothing, he

himself does not move. All things that exist have coexisted with him forever, but only because he

moves them to exist. They need him to exist, he does not need them. He needs nothing, he exists

by necessity, the existence of all other things is contingent upon him. Aristotle called this

Twenty-three-hundred years after Plato and Aristotle, Stephen Hawking, in his book, A Brief

History of Time and subsequent books, sidesteps the term, first cause. He says instead, there was

a time, called the big bang, “when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely

dense.”What this infinitely small dense object was that banged time, space and matter into

existence, Hawking never says. Nor does he say what it existed in if not in time and space.

It’s unwise for a person who is no historian to disagree with a history book, but unless one is a

cosmologist with expertise in quantum theory, he’d be a fool to disagree with Stephen

Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I’ve never claimed to be a historian or a cosmologist with

expertise in quantum theory, and I’ve admitted being a fool. So, with my backside covered by

the assurance that fools have little to lose, I take issue with Stephen Hawking’s book.

Chapter Two : The Smallest Ball

 The Smallest Ball

 

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question

T. S. Eliot, “The