There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.  - Albert Einstein


Physicist and "Master of the Universe" Stephen Hawking has a theory of everything.  It is this theory that ties quantum physics (physics at the microscopic level) to Einstein's theory of relativity (physics at the macroscopic level).  According to this theory, we observe 4 dimensional space at a macroscopic level (time is the fourth dimension), but gravity works through 10 or 11 dimensional space at the microscopic level.  The analogy God gave me to use to explain this is God as an artist and we are a two-dimensional painting on a flat table. We only perceive forward, backward, left and right, but not "up (toward the ceiling or heaven)" or "down (toward the floor or hell)".  Quantum physics in this scenario would be like us trying to understand the 3-dimensional sheet of paper we live on. Gravity would be explained by dips in the paper that we could not see. Quantum physics is not able to tell us whether or not other sheets of paper exist. To extend the analogy, the fourth dimension of time would be like individual frames of a movie film.

Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret, has a theory called the "law of attraction".  She claims it is based on quantum physics, and says that we create our own future by thinking about the future we want (or inadvertently thinking about a future we don't want). This would be like the movie having multiple endings, and we follow the path to the ending we want by looking in the "direction" we want to go in time. Jesus said to keep our eyes on Him, because He is the path to heaven.

Christians have a theory called the rapture. For those of you who don't know what that is, it is the moment that the Church (living and dead) will be taken out of the world.

Scientists are starting to understand that the big bang is more like a balloon being blown up than an explosion. We live on the surface of the balloon, and see the other stars moving away from us as the balloon expands. Using current theories, they can explain history back to a fraction of a second after the big bang. They are still trying to explain that first fraction of a second.  Another recent discovery is that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate (rather than at a constant rate or slowing down).  They are trying to figure out what other forces may be at work to cause this. I think God's paper has a hump in the middle and the paint is flowing downhill.

For those of you who frown at a theory of creation that does not involve seven days, I could say that time from the artist's perspective may be vastly different from time within the painting.  Several passages of the bible support this, saying that a day in heaven is as 1000 years on earth (Psalms 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8).  Or I could tell you that the edge of my Thomas Kincade jigsaw puzzle starts in the middle of a tree, and that a person inside the puzzle would assume the tree continues beyond the edge, with trees on the other side of it.

I copied the following from the internet (look up the world according to Stephen Hawking).  I believe it was Sartre that said "I think therefore I am" (see the nature of reality).  Also, if I wanted to take a shortcut from one side of God's painting to another, He would just have to fold the paper (see travel by wormholes).

The following are excerpts from Stephen Hawking's speech on Oct. 13
On the theory of the universe:
The idea is that we live on the "brane," or surface, of a larger space. The word "brane" […] was introduced by my colleague Paul Townsend to indicate a generalization of the membrane to four dimensions. I suspect that the pun on "brain" was quite deliberate.

[…]Roger Penrose and I showed and predicted that time had a begi ing in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. At these places the general theory of relativity would break down, so one could not use it to predict how the universe began or what would happen to someone who fell in a black hole. The reason general relativity would break down in the Big Bang and black holes is that under normal situations the warping of space-time is very slight and is on comparatively long length scales, so it is not affected by short-range fluctuations. But at the begi ing and end of time, space-time will be scrunched up to a single point. To treat this, we need to combine general relativity – the theory of the very large – with quantum mechanics – the theory of the very small. This would create a theory of everything, and would describe the universe from begi ing to end.

We have been searching for the theory of everything for the last 30 years, and we now think we have a candidate, called M-theory. In fact, M-theory isn't a single theory, but rather a network of theories that all seem basically equivalent.

On the nature of reality:
A theory is just a mathematical model that describes and quantifies the observations. One can ask whether a theory reflects reality, because we have no theory-independent way of determining what is real. Even the everyday objects around us that we regard as obviously real are, in the positivist view, just a model we construct in our minds to interpret the data from our optical and sensory nerves. Maybe we are all linked into a giant computer simulation that sends a signal of pain when we send a motor signal to swing an imaginary foot at an imaginary stone. Maybe we are characters in a computer game played by aliens. To convert, the important point is that we can not say that one description is more real than another, just that it may be more convenient for a particular situation.

On the existence of extra dimensions:
I must admit I have been reluctant to believe in extra dimensions. But the M-theory network fits together so beautifully, and has so many unexpected correspondences, that I feel to ignore it would be like claiming that God put fo ils in the rocks to trick Darwin into believing in evolution. In some theories in the network, space-time acts as yet another indication of the fact that space-time and its dimension are not absolute, theory-independent quantities, but derived concepts that depend on the particular mathematical model.

So how is it that space-time appears four-dimensional to us, but as 10- or 11-dimensional in M-theory? Why don't we observe another six or seven dimensions? The conventional answer to this question – which was generally accepted until recently – was that the extra dimensions were all curled up in a space of small size, leaving four dimensions that are nearly flat. It is like a human hair. If you look at a hair from a distance, it looks like a one-dimensional line, but if you look at it under a magnifying gla you see the thickne and that the hair is really three-dimensional. In the case of space-time, a sufficiently powerful magnifying gla should reveal the curled-up extra dimensions if they exist.

[…]However, there has recently been a more radical suggestion that one or two of the extra dimensions may be much larger or even infinite. Because these large extra dimensions have not been seen in particle accelerators, it is nece ary to suppose that all the particles of matter are confined to a brane or surface in space-time. They would not be free to propagate through the large extra dimensions. Life would have to also be confined to the brane, or we would already have detected large extra dimensions, and the same is true of the nuclear forces between particles.

On travel by wormholes:
The theory of relativity forbids travel faster than the local speed of light. However, the theory does not forbid shortcuts, so one might think one could get quickly to the other side of the galaxy through a wormhole. The trouble is that if such rapid space travel were po ible, it would also be po ible to travel back in time. As we have not seen tourists from the future, it seems that warp drive is not po ible. We have to explore the galaxy the slow way with rockets.

According to Stephen Hawking's theory of everything, time began with the big bang and will end in a black hole.  According to the bible, hell is a pit. According to scientists and the bible, the earth will end in fire, either when the sun becomes a red giant and expands past the orbit of earth in a few billion years, or earlier if God so chooses.  I wonder if we will be able to view this from our seat in heaven, a few billion years from now.

In another speech, Stephen Hawking joked that if a person wanted to take a shortcut through a black hole to the other side of the universe, he should make sure the black hole is large enough, because otherwise he would be shredded into spaghetti.

In his movie Contact (which my husband is downstairs watching on a local Atlanta television station as I type this, coincidentally (if I believed in coincidence)), scientist Carl Sagan speculated that travel through a wormhole in space-time would be like traveling through a tunnel towards a light at the end.  In the movie, the main character travels to her vision of heaven through a wormhole opened up by a particle accelerator.

Scientists at CERN have built a particle accelerator (the Large Hadron Collider) that has the capacity to accelerate electrons 7 times faster than any current particle accelerator can.  They are hoping to find the Higgs boson, which has been nicknamed the God-particle, because it slows down all of the other particles at the moment of their creation to be either protons, electrons, or one of the other particles of matter.  I call it God's paintbrush. When they find it, they will say "Look, this paintbrush created everything, so there is no God". 

The last time man tried to reach God by building a tower to the heavens (called the tower of Babel in Genesis, and called a ziggurat by archaeologists), God scattered us to the corners of the earth and changed our languages so we could not understand each other.

When the LHC was turned on last September, a wire overheated and caused some damage before the scientists shut it down.  They have fixed the damage and plan to turn it back on at half-capacity (still 3.5 times faster than any other machine on earth), as early as November 2009.

There has been some speculation that the machine will open up a black hole for the earth to be sucked into. The scientists have considered this, and feel the chances of this are about the same as a person winning the lottery 3 weeks in a row.  I wonder what the chances of a universe springing into existence and creating me are?

The scientists do admit that the machine is more likely to create "micro-blackholes" that will exist momentarily and close up on themselves.  I hope so, because although I like spaghetti, I don't think I'd like to be spaghetti. I am so glad God has a sieve so I won't fall in. I'll be caught up with Him in His other painting called heaven.