I'm  not saying that you have to believe in God in order to do science.
 Atheists  and agnostics  have won Nobel Prizes, as have Christians and
 Jews, and Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists.   But modern scientific research,
 especially unified theory, testifies to the triumph of the old idea that
 all creation might be ruled by a single and elegantly beautiful principle.

   The churchmen of the Middle Ages built their cathedrals out of stone,
 but they built them to express ideas.  Stone can only go so high.  But
 ideas can reach across the universe.

    [video:  camera pans up to ceiling of Beauvais cathedral, then
 dissolves to interior of Wilson Hall, Fermilab]  Wilson Hall, head-
 quarters of the Fermilab particle accelerator, was modeled in part on
Beauvais  cathedral.

   Robert Wilson,  the physicist and sculptor who built Fermilab, said
 he was impressed by what he called the curious similarities between
cathedrals and accelerators--the way a cathedral achieved soaring
 heights in space and an accelerator achieves unprecedented heights in
 energy, and the way both embody what Wilson called an ultimate expression.

   But whatever the similarities between a Fermilab and a Beauvais
 cathedral, there are also profound differences between them, and between
science and religion.  Scientific theories are held hostage to
 experimental results, and Fermilab is being souped up to even higher
energies, to submit the new theories to ever more stringent trial by
 ordeal.

   The men and women who  built Fermilab share a scientific belief that
 the universe is rationally intelligible,  and they built this machine
 to test their faith.

    [video:   Fermilab sculpture] "Broken Symmetry,"  a  Robert  Wilson
 sculpture that stands at the entrance to Fermilab, expresses one  of the
 beliefs  of modern physics--that the universe may have begun in a state
 of perfect symmetry.

   [video: time lapse freezing pond]  The theories say that matter froze
 out of energy  while the early  universe was expanding  and cooling,
 that form arose from formlessness like ice crystals congealing in a
 freezing pond.

   The mathematical symmetries  that the unified theories  have  exposed
 at the foundations  of natural  law  are  more subtle and  complex than
 those of snow flakes, but their principle is the same.  They imply that
 we live in a crystallized universe of broken symmetries.

   [Pigeon Point area]  Perfect symmetry may be beautiful, but it's also
 sterile. Perfectly symmetrical space  means nothingness.   As soon  as
 you introduce an object into  that space,  you  break the symmetry,
 creating a sense of location. There's a place where the object is, and
 other places where it isn't.  And out of that comes tumbling all of
 the geometry of space as we know it.

    Perfectly symmetrical time means that nothing can happen. As soon
 as you have an event, then you break the symmetry, and time begins to
 flow in a given direction.  We live in a universe that's full of objects
 and events, and that means that the universe is imperfect, and that the
 symmetries in the universe that we live in are broken.

   It may  even be that we owe  the very origin of our universe to the
 imperfection of the breaking of the absolute symmetry of absolute
 emptiness. There's even a theory to this effect.  It's called vacuum
 genesis, and it suggests that the universe began as a single particle
 arising from an absolute vacuum.

   Curious as  it may  seem,  this  idea violates none of the known laws
 of physics.  We've seen how virtual particles come into existence all
 the time from a vacuum and then fall  back  into  nonexistence.  There
 appears to be no upper limit on the size or longevity of the particles
 that can be created in this way.

    It's  just possible that  there might have been absolutely nothing
 out of which  came a particle  so potent  that it  could blossom into
 the entire universe. It's not very likely, but then, it only had to
 happen once.

   The theory of vacuum genesis is a new idea and nobody knows whether
 or not it's  true, but  it does satisfy  two of the  criteria  of  a
 sound scientific theory. It seems, at first, so strange that it  must
 be preposterous,  and like the universe itself, the longer you get to
 know it, the more beautiful it becomes.

    Out  of nothingness  could  have come the spark of genesis. As the
 universe expanded and cooled, darkness descended. Then light dawned
 anew with the formation of the first stars.  Each star is a nuclear
 furnace where matter is coaxed into releasing a little of the energy it
inherited from the primordial fireball.

    Thanks to imperfection, to  the fractured symmetries that produced
 differences  among the  particles  and forces, atoms in their variety
 could build themselves  into  molecules,  and  molecules rise  up in
 alliance as life,  and life give birth to thought, and thought produce
 theories about the creation of the universe.
                                  *****

 JOHN WHEELER:  There's nothing deader than an equation.   You write that
 down in a square on a tile floor, and on another tile on the floor,  you
 write down another equation, which you think might be a better description
 of the universe.   And you keep on writing down equations, hoping  to get
 a better and better equation for what the universe is and does.  And then
 when you've worked your way out to the end of the room and have to step
 out, you wave your wand and tell the equations to fly.   And not one of
 them will put on wings and fly. Yet the universe flies.  It has a life
 to it that no equation has.  And that life to it is a life with which
 we are also tied up.

 ALLAN SANDAGE:   Out of the Big Bang has come a nonchaotic system,
 because otherwise cause and effect,  which  surely exists, would be
impossible. So the design that one sees in the universe may be
 completely natural as an outcome of the  differential  equations,
 but the mystery is, why is the world describable in terms of differ-
 ential equations? And it is. That's the answer physics gives.  All
 students that ever study are mystified  by the recipes that the great
scientists have found, but the universe works by those recipes.  So
 the universe that we observe is not a chance phenomenon.

 MURRAY GELL-MANN:  I find that loving nature and working to conserve
 nature at the level of tropical forests, and animals and birds, habitats
 in general, creatures  of the  ocean, and so  on, is related to being
interested in studying the laws of nature--how nature operates, for
 example, at the level of physics, fundamental physics. To me, these
 are all parts of the same whole. And the beauty that nature exhibits
 if you see some glorious creature in the wild, like the giant river
 otters in the Cochas of Amazonian Peru, that beauty to me is related
 to the beauty that we see when we study the fundamental laws of physics.
 All of these are different ways in which nature shows its beauty.

 continued...

--- FMail 1.22