A Whole New Universe

Science classes in the sixties were different than they are now. While hippies protested, science kept its calm. Matter was arranged in tidy molecules of atoms with tiny electrons spinning around. Everything was in order and could be predicted with a slide-rule. Sir Isaac Newton may have died in 1727, but he still got us got us to the moon and back. Some two centuries or so after Sir Isaac, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, statisticians, and who knows who else, got together and decided to go into cosmology. The universe of Newton and Einstein was set on its random ear. Quantum Mechanics was in, and became cooler than absolute zero. Electrons started jumping randomly from one energy shell to another around their bewildered nucleus, instead of circling like planets in an ordered, predictable fashion. The constantly-changing universe the scientist saw became a function of the moment in time the scientist observed it. Subatomic particle-waves were discovered which could not decide whether to be matter or energy. Space was not empty after all, but filled with darkmatter. Everything was expanding. And now, string theorists talk about arallel universes! It’s enough to give anyone a headache. A universe actually affected by the onlooker’s looking? Empty space filled with unseen dark matter? Matterenergy or energymatter? Parallel whats? Sorry, Dr. Einstein, but it’s beginning to look like God may role dice with the universe after all. I still want to believe, though, that God created the dice, and the odds, and knows the outcome in advance. I know it sounds counter-counterintuitive, but really now, how else could God risk the random nature of human choice in a quantum mechanical cosmos? We’ve already changed our minds about some pretty basic stuff. Sometimes I think I’ll put all my energy into becoming a particle-antiparticle pair. Then I can disappear in the mutual annihilation of both of me, and take a break for a while. Oh, wait just a cosmic nanosecond . . . is mutual self annihilation reversible? Maybe I’ll just go out in the yard tonight and see if I can spot some of that dark matter lurking around the stars.