C and the Mind of God Or How Hubble changed my view of the universe. |
 By Fernando Ribeiro |
Save the Hubble.com was first uploaded in 1/26/2004, just ten days after the cancellation of SM4. For four years I’ve kept this site up and running. Well, sometimes crawling more than running but anyway, I’ve kept it. During this time Hubble never ceased to amaze me. I do believe it is the greatest scientific instrument ever made, for a number of reasons. I feel that if we could see with the eyes of God, we would see what Hubble shows us. Hubble Space Telescope connects the general public with the infinite wonders of the cosmos and makes us feel part of a bigger universe. These four years brought many changes into my personal life. I fought depression, got married, built a house, changed jobs, and did an internship at the Smithsonian Institution in DC. During all this time Hubble touched me in more ways than I could possibly tell. I’ll just mention one of them. For years I’ve kept an image of the M81 galaxy as my wallpaper. As a professor who has to deal with hundreds of students and all sorts of problems, looking at the magnificent M81 every time I turned on my computer helped me keep things in proportion. One day, after staring at the picture for a long while, I realized the enormity of what I was seeing. That galaxy was 95,000 light years across and I could see the whole of it in a glance. That set in motion a train of thought that would change the way I saw the universe. Here it is: If light takes almost a hundred thousand years to cross the galaxy, I thought, so does information. That would render information leaving one end of the galaxy almost useless, if that end would need, for instance, help from the opposite extremity. If people from Earth needed help from people from Planet X, located on the other side of the Milky Way, and asked for it, it would take some 180,000 years for the answer to arrive. All that is pretty much obvious but then I asked myself how the mind of God would work with such a constraint and THAT was puzzling! Now let’s begin by agreeing on the following points:
Very well, God is everywhere
and knows everything, fine, but what does He/She/It do with His/Her/Its
knowledge? How does He/She/It integrate all that information across
the universe? How does He/She/It act on the entire universe based
on that information?
My troubling conclusion was: even if God is expanding together with the boundaries of the universe, even if He/She/It is bigger than the universe itself, He/She/It can only act locally, based on local knowledge, over finite amounts of time. After coming to these conclusions I talked to several friends, from physicists to doctors to mathematicians (I don’t have many religious friends, unfortunately). Those discussions led me to the following possibilities:
Whatever the truth is, if there is one truth after all, it must be amazing, extraordinary. We are, in fact, dealing with very real things: space, time, C and the immemorial human belief in God (again, in whatever form you choose Him/Her/It to be). If those cannot coexist the way we imagine them, then something has to give. Would it be God? Would it be C? Would it be space? Would it be time? Would it be causality? Well, at the end of the road of my humble
campaign to Save the Hubble I wanted to share with everyone who supported
my efforts, either by visiting the web site, by signing the petition
or by writing to me, my transformed views of the infinite universe. Godspeed SM4, Godspeed Hubble. Fernando Ribeiro |
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