I have been struggling, as a ‘layperson’ for a while now trying to wrap my head around how the universe functions. And, beyond that, if there is some great master design that we just can’t see or if we are simply smart monkeys on a rare earth. And at the end what does this do to our faith? Modern worshippers of ‘scientism’ would say those things are unrelated, but the ancients knew they were connected.

I read Sean Carroll’s book as part of this quest. It is an excellent introduction to how physics built upon itself over the last 200 years, the names of the geniuses who each added one idea to the top of the pile, and the math that underpins it. I’ve never been great at math, and I’ve used that statement as an excuse to “run away, run away” (like the Monty Python sketch). Now, I say ‘introduction’, but there is nothing introductory about the math in Carroll’s book. Which sent me to Amazon to buy a refresher math workbook, which I’m working my way through hoping to get through Algebra and Calculus. But you have to love the math – like Sheldon Cooper said “I wanna do the math!!”

It is a pretty tight knit group, working over many hundreds of years – each putting in thousands and thousands of man hours to, hopefully, maybe, one day, add a tiny thought or new idea to the pile and be counted with the greats. Everybody else just tries to understand Einstein or Heizenberg or Schrodinger, tries to replicate their experiments, tries to catch a tiny glimpse, a blurred reflection of what they might have seen.

The things that still blow my mind-hole are the basics. Gravity, entropy, and spacetime. Light speed, the constant and consistent pull of gravity and the inevitability of entropy as the three constants around which our universe is built. Spacetime giving us distance and location, gravity giving us the bend into general relativity and entropy giving it all directionality. I find that remarkable.

All of this is still part of a massive argument. Even at the basic level, does the math show us the nature of the universe or is it all just a mathematical trick to describe the way it works. Is the math only an immense Van Gogh painting that tells us nothing of the reality of that being drawn, only what it looks like? And the book didn’t even start to address quantum entanglement or dark matter (or the lack thereof) or the universe’s unexplained ‘inflation’ and other ideas we invented to try and explain what we see (or don’t see).

And none of this does anything to faith, except reinforce that there is a lot going on out there which doesn’t seem to be coincidence, that the likelihood of something working as well as this cosmic machine works on the macro level to give us gravity and the micro-level to give us mitochondria is, well, unlikely. And, like Fermi’s paradox, we might be more special and more lonely than we would like to admit. That, for us to exist, we not only need food and water and air (which require a global ecosystem), but we need gravity and entropy and light (which require a universal one).

Maybe it was all made for us.