Introduction...(3)

That is why to me describing the beginning is like describing photosynthesis: God is at the background and the full controller of what we see. And whatever one wants to believe should not be based on illogical denial of reality rather than what the numbers say.

As scientists, we take these laws governing our world and use them to hypothesize systems and processes to get scientific theories. In all accepted scientific theories on the origin of the universe. There are no facts that can disprove the existence of an Intelligent Design-the scientific description of God. Because even as we trace the beginning of the universe to billions of years back it is inevitable to consider at some point a "hand" hat works the achievement of this creation.

Even though a scientific theory can be accepted by the science community it is important to remember that these are just theories of a universe that started (if it ever did) at a time past. There are no video captured and/or sound recorded. And even though observations ,calculations and equations may be as good as these we may never be close to the exact description of the beginning in the next hundred years given the present laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity to go by. Therefore, even the extremists of cosmologists will still find a comfort in the book of Genesis chapter 1 for an explanation that is logically flawless.

For a scientific theory to be accepted, it must be able to stand the test of time. A new good theory is never impressive enough to scientists until it can be tested and be applicable not just to one situation but to all related scenarios. The critics look at it naked and give a pass or a fail. And here criticism is not based on people's feelings or blood relations. Rather on the laws of nature.

For instance when I was in sixth grade I made a simple discovery and came up with a very short lived theory. I found out that the hypotenuse of the right angled triangle 3, 4, 5 can be calculated by ½ × longer side + shorter side. I tried to test my discovery. The first right angled triangle that came to mind was 6,8,10. I applied the formula and it worked. I was so amazed by my findings I almost ran around screaming Eureka. But before showing everyone my little manhood, I thought I could try with another triangle. The next triangle that came to mind was 5, 12, 13. My "formula" didn't work this time round. And after running it through several right angled triangles, working in some and not in others, I noted that my equation was only true for triangles of the form n(3,4,5) where n is any real positive number. I recoiled in my chair like a scared dog and started counting the days left to the weekend like any other average school kid!

And as Stephen Hawking puts it in a Brief History of Time: "Any theory is always provisional in the sense that it is a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of the experiment agree with some theory you can never be certain that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of theory."
Despite this fact, the beginning of the universe had such unique conditions that trying to come up with a theory that would hold from time zero to the present has become a vain quest up to and including this moment in the history of science. And I think I will need Hook's Law analogy to put this across. In Hook's Law, force applied to a wire is directly proportional to the extension. This is true for all forces applied to the wire until the force is so much that it produces a permanent stretch. Then the law becomes obsolete on application of more force. Because the behavior of the wire after the yield is determined by a lot including the material of the wire , the temperature ,pressure previous history of the wire and so much more. Trying to come up with the Genesis theory is the same as trying to work out an equation that would hold true for the wire given any amount of force.








Fig1.2 diagram relating force and extension by hooks law.
Now that sounds like science fiction. And science fiction is what cosmology has become as we try to relate the laws of everyday life to the conditions at the beginning of time, to unify them in a single "Theory of Everything". In such conditions where temperature, pressure and density were in the order of billions it doesn't come as a complete surprise that the force of gravity we see its trivial effects everyday garb a whole new meaning.

However we have been able to come up with a theory that holds true for most of the time that the universe ha s bean around. The Big Bang Theory. I first heard of it when I was in high school. It is in those days that I spent a lot of my study time wondering on the possibilities of parallel universes and regions beyond the universe where nothing exists. Not even space. An activity that pulled a lot my grades with its gravity leaving me hanging up there without lots of them!