The Face of God

As a youth, my favorite activity was to lay on the trampoline at night, whether alone or with friends, and fall asleep watching the sky while pondering space and eternity. I was (am?) a nerd. Being well versed in astronomy and physics, I would spend hours laying there with friends explaining how relativity worked, why most galaxies were moving away from us, why the more distant ones looked redder, and how you look back in time as you peer deeper into space. Despite my unnaturally strong interest in science and astronomy, I was also intensely religious, and this activity was one of my sacraments- I and my friends communing and partaking of the wondrous works of the Creator. Looking into deep space one literally sees the creation itself. Over time however, like most people, my testimony of an actual God has ebbed and flowed.

This year's Nobel prize winners were announced this week. The physics prize winner, George Smoot, once *said of his discovery, "Its like seeing the face of God". What exactly did he discover? Take a look for yourself.

Wow. What am I looking at? you ask.

That, my friend, is a map of the minute variations in temperature of the cosmic background radiation of the entire observable universe.

....um....

Its a map of how hot space is.

I didn't know space had a temperature.

It does. Its about 3 Kelvin, or 270 degrees below zero Celsius, or 454 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Oh.... Why is that even remotely important?

This map, and newer, more detailed maps can tell us exactly how old the universe is, why we have matter clumped in some places with empty space in others, what will eventually happen to the universe, how much of the universe is matter, among other interesting tidbits of information.

Cool. Can I go now?

As it turns out, the data obtained from this type of experiment tells us that the universe is just about 13.7 billion years old. That would make our universe approximately.....wait a sec, let me do the math.....13.7 billion light-years across. It also tells us that the geometry of the universe is flat, meaning that straight lines will never intersect, that the universe is only 4% matter (that includes all forms of matter and energy we are familiar with), and that the universe will keep expanding forever until it dies a cold, silent death.

Now, a word about expanding universes. When most people hear about the big bang, they think about this tiny, nearly infinitely massive particle that blows up, sending all its contents hurtling through space. That is incorrect. Unfortunately, the correct way to think about it is rather difficult. What is really happening is that the entire universe- space itself, is a tiny point, that blows up, causing space itself to expand. What is it expanding into?- is the usual question. Well, you can't really ask that question, since you can't be outside of space. Space, and time, turn out to be things that change and move and expand and compress, much like matter. If you think about it, every point in space then becomes the center of the universe, such that as you look out, it appears that everything is flying away from you.
Tricky, isn't it?

So where is this "face of God"?

One of my pet peeves is hearing people say- "Oh, what a big mountain range! There MUST be a God!" or, "Life is so complex that the only explanation is that there is a God".

No.

There is a big mountain range because of tectonic forces. Life is complex because the less complex lifeforms could not compete with the newer, better ones. Yet I still find myself on my trampoline looking up at the sky wondering, "Why does the universe exist? Why 3 spatial dimensions? Why are spatial dimensions reversible, but time is not? Why isn't there just ....nothing? Why? Why? I realize that all this cool science is able to answer more and more questions of how, and what, and when- questions that my faith cannot answer and that most **"religionists" get wrong. In turn, science cannot begin to approach the everpresent... why.

I do not claim to see God's face in that picture. That experiment does not prove the existance of God, nor can any experiment. But, to my small mind trying to comprehend eternal things, it feels a lot like his fingerprint. And that to me is a sacrament- the physical intertwined with the eternal; as we probe that incomprehensible singularity from which our universe sprung and which our physics fails to describe, the hows and whys merge, and I become still- and know that He is God.


*He claims he actually said "If you're religious, this is like looking at God."
**I define a religionist as a person who is dedicated to their religion instead of to their God. They will use their interpretation of texts like the Bible to dictate what science can and cannot say.