The Eternal Quest

The Eternal Quest is the urge to learn about the creator and the creation. The ideas about creator belong in the domain of philosophy and belief. Creation Science on the other hand is based upon solid foundational theories confirmed by observations. Both the ancient and modern scholars faced some conceptual problems when thinking about creation. In this book, we hope to show how the ancients and the moderns developed models to answer those issues. Here are some of those unknowns common to ancients and moderns in the understanding of the creation of the universe. The Beginning Our universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years. Based upon Einstein’s theory of relativity, Lemaître, the founder of big bang theory, theorized that the universe must have started from an infinitesimal size at birth which he called primal atom at time zero. Both space and time originated at that moment called big bang. Currently, nothing is known about what environment within which the universe emerged exactly at time zero. Scientific understanding begins after a trillionth- trillionth- trillionth of a second after the big bang. The ancients faced the same problem. They also thought that the universe started from a tiny seed. The universe is real to us. How can something real come out of nothing? The ancient modelers believed that before creation, there was a metaphysical environment that did not have the five elements of reality including earth, air, water, fire, sky, and space to place them all. Yet, the universe came out of that unknowable metaphysical environment. What Was There Before? A related issue, common to both the modern and ancient theories, is the environment before the birth of the universe. The relativity theory tells us that space and time originated at the moment of big bang or at time zero. There was nothing before it. 3 However, time is simply a sequence of events measured by the ticks of a clock. It is hard to believe that there were no events prior to big bang. There is no reason to believe that the creation of our universe is a unique event. Let us introduce the term metaverse to describe the environment before time zero. At this point the metaverse is unknowable, as science cannot even say it exists. Ancients also faced the same problem. They believed in metaverse, cyclical universes and the idea universe is unreal like a mirage. The metaphysical environment prior to the moment of creation is a second common problem faced by both. The trick is to explain the jump from meta-environment to reality. Who or What built the Laws of Nature into everything in reality? The next issue relates to the laws of nature. Science can delineate these laws very accurately. The problem is that science cannot tell us what makes real things follow these laws. Who or what created these laws of nature and embedded them into things? Such an entity must have the knowledge, ability, and resources to create space-time and matter-energy and make them obey the laws observed in nature. The quantum theorist Dirac mused to the effect that God must be the greatest mathematician to build the reality. We are just beginning to understand the complex mathematics of the laws of nature but have no concept of how to build them into space-time, and energy-matter. Why our universe is so fine-tuned to allow development of intelligent life? In our universe, the values of the fundamental parameters appear to be fine-tuned to permit formation of atoms to build galaxies, stars, and planets that support life. Very slight differences in the values of one or more of those parameters would not have permitted the development of our universe. The probability of such perfect alignment is infinitesimal. Simplicity behind the Bewildering Complexity of the Universe Our universe has been growing for 13.8 billion years. Science tells us that all things happened like a spring wound toy; once released the universe has gone through a very complex sequence of developmental events without needing outside action. One of the themes in this book is that there is simplicity behind all the complexity that manifests in the present day scientific theories. As yet there is no theory of everything. Conceptually that theory must have this simplicity. Space, Time, Matter and Energy We do not understand what these basic ‘things’ are. That sounds crazy but true. Space is perceived by the distance between objects and time is determined by sequence of events. Our science predicts how these behave very precisely but not that they are. At the Boundary between Science and Philosophy There are many other unknowns in the science of the creation. Future scientific discoveries may answer some of these questions. A real possibility is that answers to 4 some of these questions may be beyond human capability. The ideas about a creator attempt to answer the scientifically unanswerable issues based upon hypothetical models. How the Book Addresses These Issues The Eternal Quest covers ancient philosophical models and their evolution in the first part of the book. The focus is on addressing as many of these issues as possible based upon the ancient literature. These models are: A single metaphysical creator; Two interacting creators with a triad of resources; Eternal particles combining and de-combining to form and dissolve the universe; and No creator is needed as the universe in steady state, was not created and will not end. The second part of the book covers the theories and experimental evidence for the science of creation of our universe. The issues listed above are discussed and how as yet unproven theories are trying explain them with theoretical models. Despite of this resolving some of these issues may be beyond human capability. The book includes a discussion of String Theories that predict multi-dimensional metaverse, multiple universes, and the universe is a hologram. The Quantum Gravity Theories predict bounce back universe or cyclical universe.