[to window #5]  When the universe was just a tiny fraction of a
 second old--about 10 to the minus 35th of a second, to be exact--it's
 thought that the electroweak  force had not yet diverged from the strong
force. For one brief, shining moment, the natural simplicity envisioned
 by the grand unified theories was reality.  Exotic X particles and free
 quarks sailed the subnuclear seas. Gluons, photons, and weak bosons
 danced interchangeably.

    So only two forces were  operating in the extremely early universe--
 gravitation and this electronuclear, or grand unified force, as it's
 called. Yet it's possible that even earlier in the history of the
 universe, things were even simpler.

    [to the top window] We've reached the first instant of time. The
 fraction of a second that has elapsed since the universe began to expand
 is so small that it has no name. To express it, you'd have to write a
 decimal point and then a string of 40 some odd zeros. The universe,
 everything that there is or can be, was contained, we think, at this
 point, within a single spark of energy rapidly expanding, but still
 smaller than the nucleus of an atom and ruled by a single primordial
 law. If we knew what went on at this epoch, we might finally understand
 the relationship between the laws of nature, and between space and
 time and matter and energy.

    [tries the latch on the shutter. It won't open]  But--we don't yet
 know. We lack a theory that can explain how nature would have behaved
 under these extreme circumstances. A lot of people are looking for such
 a theory. Some think it will be a kind of quantum gravity, or what's
 called a superunified theory, or a supersymmetry theory. And, of course,
 we don't know what the theory will say. But whoever hits upon that theory
 will be the first to have glimpsed the very threshold of creation.
                                   *****

 MICHAEL TURNER:  [cosmologist] Probably the  most fundamental question
 that we can ask about the universe is: what got it started?  Where did
 it come from, the moment of creation?  And that's probably the  most
 difficult thing to try to answer, because in cosmology, the way we
 reconstruct the history of the universe is to run the movie backwards.
 The way we  run the movie backwards is  by using the laws of physics.
 The laws of physics that we presently know are probably good enough to
 take us back to within 10 to the minus 43 seconds of the Bang, or the
 moment of creation. That's pretty close. But in order to go all the
 way back,  we've got to get a better theory of gravity.  We need a
 quantum theory of gravity.

    And I suspect that we may always find ourselves in this position--
 that to go that last tiny fraction of a second, we need some knowledge
 that we don't have. And so I think it may be a very long time, if ever,
 before we can answer the question that everyone would like to know: what
caused creation?

 STEPHEN HAWKING:  [physicist, on camera, Nick Warner translating] It
 may be that the  universe did not really have a beginning. It may be
 that spacetime forms a closed surface without an edge, rather like the
 surface of the Earth,but in two more dimensions. If the suggestion that
spacetime is finite but unbounded is correct, the Big Ban is rather
 like the North Pole of the Earth. To ask  what happens before the Big
 Bang is a bit like asking what happens on the surface of the Earth one
 mile north of the North Pole.   It's a meaningless question.

 ALLAN SANDAGE:    [astronomer]  If  there was a creation event, it
 had to have had a cause.  And this  was Aquinas' whole question--one
 of the five ways he did the God.   If you can find the first effect,
 you have at least come close to the first cause, and if you've found
 the first cause, that to him, was God.

    What do astronomers say?  As astronomers,  you can't say anything
 except here is  a miracle,  what  seems  almost supernatural--an event
 which  has come across the horizon into science, through the Big Bang.
 Can you go the other way back, outside the barrier, and finally find
 that answer?  Why is there something to nothing?  No, you cannot,
 within science.  But it still remains an incredible mystery:  why is
 there something instead of nothing?

                                  **+**

 TIMOTHY FERRIS:   [voice over video of a Chinese landscape,  a
 Japanese lacquer, early Haggada illustrations]  The ancient Chinese
 thought of being as having arisen from its opposite, nonbeing.
 "Nothingness," they wrote, "produced the universe and space
and time." Prehistoric myths portrayed genesis in biological terms. 
"The primeval
 God transformed himself into an azure egg."

 In the Judeo-Christian tradition, creation involved order arising from
 chaos, and light from darkness.

   [video:   stained glass  windows]  "In the beginning God created the
 heaven and Earth.  And the Earth was without form, and void, and
 darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the spirit of God moved
 upon the face of the waters, and God said, 'Let there be light."'
 [video, exterior  of Beauvais  cathedral, France.]   A cathedral was
 the medieval equivalent of a giant particle accelerator.  France in
 the 14th century spent a greater proportion of its wealth on cathedrals
 than the United States in the 1960s spent to send a man to the moon.

 [video, interior of the cathedral] Like spaceships or particle
 accelerators, cathedrals  pushed  existing technology to its limits.
 This cathedral in Beauvais, France, the tallest in the world, twice
 collapsed under its own weight and had to be rebuilt.

 [Ferris walking inside cathedral] Religion and science are sometimes
 depicted as if they  were  opponents,  but science owes a lot to religion.
Modern science began with the  rediscovery, in Renaissance,  of the old
 Greek idea that nature is rationally intelligible. But science from the
beginning incorporated another idea, equally important: that the universe
really is a universe, a single system ruled by a single set of laws. And
science got that idea from Judeo-Christian and Muslim belief in one God.

 [he sits in a pew]  Let me read you a prayer. "Great is God our Lord.
 Great is His power, and there is no end to His wisdom.  Praise Him,
 your heavens.

 Glorify Him, sun and moon and your planets.   For out of Him, through
 Him, and in Him are all things, every perception and every knowledge."
 That prayer was written in the 17th century, not by a priest but by an
 astronomer, Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws that govern the
 motion of the planets. The founders of modern science--Kepler and
 Copernicus, Isaac Newton, and even Galileo, for all of his troubles
 with the church--were, by and large, profoundly religious men.

 continued...

--- FMail 1.22