Promoting peace and harmony from an Abrahamic perspective

'The Science Wall'

   by Dr Andrew Dore

BSC (Hons) MBG CPGS DPhil Cantab

 

 

My name is Dr Andrew Doré, it has been my pleasure to put together what has been dubbed “the science wall”. By trade I am a geneticist, molecular biologist, a biologist, a biochemist, a drug hunter, X-ray crystallographer and particle physicist.

 

I have spent the last 23 years working in biomedical research and been fortunate enough to work solely in the laboratories of Fellows of the Royal Society across the world, from Cambridge where I did my DPhil, to London and Boston, on quite a journey to where I find myself now. I have delivered keynote and plenary lectures at conferences across the world on my research, and published that research in all the top journals... and yet, just like everyone here, I Am still fascinated by the complexity, mechanics and workings of the universe, of our own world and our own bodies down to the subatomic scale .... and the age old question - what is the meaning of it all and why are we here?

 

So I first became interested in scientific philosophy at the age of 17, I remember borrowing a book from the Roman Catholic school I attended written by Jacques Monod (a famous French scientific biochemist who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1965 – famously he is widely picture enjoying smoking cigarettes in his laboratory – not unlike my first professor), anyway this book was entitled - Chance and Necessity.

 

I thought it would be cool to be seen around college reading scientific philosophy books! Little was I to know that book I had picked up was the spark that lit the fire at least in my own mind. Let me read you one of the most famous quotes ….

 

The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above …. or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

 

I remember reading this so clearly, and at first I was quite blown away by it, “that’s right, chance is all powerful” “indeed evolution is all powerful” -

 

And yet, the more I looked and experienced both at a practical level in the laboratory and on accelerator beamlines around the world, and all the emerging research that I was engulfed in, alongside the incredible advances in science just over the last 20 years, it became more and more apparent, an almost annoying niggling in the back of my mind, that such complexity of life cannot surely be just the product of random chance ….. however powerful pure chance is…

 

… For if it were, why had we not been exposed to complex life similar to our own beyond our own biosphere and planet in an observable universe 93 billion light years wide containing 100billion galaxies let alone the number of stars and solar systems and planets that exist within those galaxies.

 

The pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell wrote in her diary in 1854 “The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve,”, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.”

 

The meaning of life has indeed been pondered by some of history’s greatest minds …

 

….For Carl Sagan, it was about our significant insignificance in the cosmos;

 

….For Annie Dillard, about inhabiting impermanence;

 

….For Anaïs Nin, about living and relating to others “as if they might not be there tomorrow”

 

….For Henry Miller, about the mesmerism of the unknown

 

….For Leo Tolstoy, about finding knowledge to guide our lives

 

….For David Foster Wallace, about learning how to stay truly conscious

 

And yet this feeling and notion is perhaps most best described or captured by Richard Feynman in “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”, another Nobel laureate and American Physicist who died in 1988. Born on May 11th, 1918.

 

Richard Feynman is widely considered one of the most brilliant scientists to ever have lived – except perhaps by his mother Lucille, who once, as perhaps only a mother can, jokingly remarked :

 

“if that’s the world smartest man, God help us” … and yet in fact, in humility he used to love boasting at parties that he only had an IQ of 125 and had still got to where he was!  …..  Here is one of his most famous quotes:

 

What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence?

If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.

But, in admitting this, we have probably found the open channel.

 

Yet what is mostly not quoted is the paragraph that comes before this :

Through all ages men have tried to fathom the meaning of life. They have realized that if some direction or meaning could be given to our actions, great human forces would be unleashed. So, very many answers must have been given to the question of the meaning of it all. But they have been of all different sorts, and the proponents of one answer have looked with horror at the actions of the believers in another.

 

Horror, because from a disagreeing point of view all the great potentialities of the race were being channeled into a false and confining blind alley. In fact, it is from the history of the enormous monstrosities created by false belief that philosophers have realized the apparently infinite and wondrous capacities of human beings. The dream is to find the open channel.

 

I believe this to be much more significant. The open channel, the answer, the meaning, and all that divides us as a race? I believe it lies in both the delicate physics that underly our existence, that of the universe and the evolution of life on the incredible and unique planet we live on and call home. None of this I now believe is down to pure chance, it just cannot be, the evidence is too overwhelming.

 

To quote Albert Einstein :                 

 

science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind    

 

 

So let us examine this in detail, what precisely am I saying … now begin at the dawn of time, cast your mind back 13.8 billion years and to the creation of our universe.

 

Everyone here will be familiar with the big bang theory – but ask yourself what does that actually mean?

 

The so-called big bang, or the creation of our universe is theorized to have begun with a singularity of huge gravitational proportions. Consider it in your mind as a tiny LED light in the middle of a blacked out theatre like the Royal Albert Hall, for which we cannot see the edges, they are, for all intents and purposes, infinite.

 

A single entity was ‘set” of such order (or entropy) that it exploded and distributed only two elements across this theatre (of space and time), these being hydrogen and helium. It is amazing to consider that only these two elements, were distributed with such order and in such a way that could give rise to the extraordinary beauty and diversity we see across the universe now.

 

And yet the real beauty is in the precision, not only of the distribution of those two elements across our universe, but of their massess. This is where I will now start to introduce the concept of “fine tuning” – or as it was previously known “intelligent design”.

 

The difference between the mass of the proton and the mass of the neutron has to be fine-tuned for life to be possible. If the mass of a neutron was a seventh of a percent more than it is, stars like most of those we can see would not exist. If the neutron mass was 0.085% less than it is, the Universe would be full of neutrons and nothing else. There is no reason why protons and neutrons should have the masses they do.

To quote Stephen Hawking, who needs no introduction:

 

The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life ... For example, if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium or else they would not have exploded. It seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the numbers that would allow for development of any form of intelligent life

 

Nuclear scientists measure the mass of protons and electrons in units of millions of electron volts (MeV). If this is unfamiliar, it’s important not to be distracted by it. MeV are convenient units. We could just as well use any other units – kilogrammes, say, or even ounces. It really doesn’t matter. The argument would be the same.

Strictly speaking, an electron volt is a unit of energy, but as Einstein famously showed, mass and energy are equivalent, through E = mc2, so it is not a problem to use energy units to measure mass (or vice versa if you are so inclined).

Atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons

Protons and neutrons are heavy – they carry nearly all the mass of the atom, and they are concentrated in the atomic nucleus

Electrons are much lighter, and orbit forming a cloud around the nucleus (a very thin cloud – most of an atom is just empty space), such an orbit is replicated in how our earth orbits the sun.

So protons have a positive electric charge, electrons a negative charge, and neutrons have no charge. In a neutral atom, the number of protons and electrons is the same

Basic textbooks sometimes say that protons and neutrons have the same mass. This is almost true – but not quite, and the difference is VERY important:

Protons have a mass of 938.27 MeV

Neutrons have a mass of 939.56 MeV

So the difference between them is small: a neutron is about 1.29 MeV heavier than a proton.

Now, there is no obvious reason why protons and neutrons should have just these masses, but if they were even slightly different ………. we wouldn’t be here.

The number of protons and neutrons in the Universe was more or less settled in the first few minutes of the Big Bang as I said.  A hundred protons were created for every sixteen neutrons.

Because of this, there is now more hydrogen than helium – about three times as much by mass, or twelve times as much if you count atoms. This is important for at least a couple of reasons:

If there wasn’t any hydrogen, there wouldn’t be any water – I’ll come back to this later….

The search for life in space looks for places where there could be water as one of the key markers.

Stars can be made from hydrogen or from helium. But stars made from hydrogen last much longer than stars made from helium (billions of years instead of hundreds of millions). 

Science argues that there wouldn’t be time for complicated life to evolve around stars that only burned for a few hundred million years.

‘There would be no hydrogen available for key biological solvents like water and carbonic acid, and all the stars would be helium-burning and hence short-lived. Almost certainly, helium stars would not have the long-lived nuclear burning phase necessary to encourage the gradual evolution of biological life-forms in planetary systems.’ (Barrow & Tipler 1986:399)

The key reaction by which hydrogen ‘burns’ in stars involves two protons colliding, and producing a deuteron -  a particle made of a proton and a neutron. This reaction produces 1.42 MeV of energy. If the mass of a neutron was one seven hundredth more than it is (that is, a seventh of a percent), this reaction would need energy poured into it, rather than producing energy. This means that stars would not be able to burn hydrogen.

 

Stars like those can see today in our universe would not exist. To quote Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist from Arizona State, and Yale University still alive today:

 

It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren't created at the beginning of time.

 

And this is an important point, because only through stars burning and exploding over  millions and billions of years acting as nuclear furnaces, have the complex elements for life here on earth been created. Which relates to why we are all created from Stardust. The atoms in your right hand may well have come from a different star to those in your left, and vice versa. In any event, theye were not created at the dawn  of time

 

Dr Paul Davies Profesor of Theoretical Phytsics at Adelaide university famously quotes:

 

The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly. You see even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life—almost contrived—you might say a ‘put-up job’.”

 

The chances of the masses of protons and neutrons occurring by chance and therefore sustaining life, and / or the universe itself then are the same as throwing a Dart from one side of the observable universe to the other and hitting a target with a millimeter diameter… to quote Sir Fred Hoyle who sums it all up so eloquently:

 

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintendent has monkeyed with the physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce within stars.

 

pretty mind blowing huh?

 

…. And it is mind blowing, but maybe even more so when we look at how our own planet came to be, and our own evolution resulting in the cells that make up our bodies.

 

We have just examined briefly the amazing and apparent fine tuning of the universe and its creation on a MASSIVE scale (or macro scale)… but also at the same time on a very small scale in terms of the weight of protons and neutrons ….  Now let us look at the existence of our own solar system and planets, including earth, orbiting the sun, an intermediary scale if you will.

 

So the earth then is 3.8 billion years old. We orbit our sun in a region termed “the goldilocks zone” … from the old fairytale, everything aligned perfectly and at the correct distance for our earth to be able to sustain life.  To break it all down, the porridge was precisely the right temperature, not too thin and not to gloopy…

 

One possible theory of how planet earth came to be created is through the cataclysmic collision of two sister planets, that also gave rise to our moon.  This is termed the “giant impact hypothesis”.

 

Theia is a hypothesized ancient planet in the early solar system that collided with Gaia around 4.5 billion years ago. Recent evidence suggests that Theia originated from the Kuiper belt, a region of rocks that orbit the outer most reaches of our solar system, much like pluto, and that Theia brought with it much of earths water when it was knocked off orbit and began moving inwards towards the gravitational pull of the Sun destined to ultimately collide with Gaia.

 

Yet the astonishing thing is the elements that make up the core of earth (molten iron), the overall size, and the rate of cooling after the collision of these two planets. Cooling too fast would have created a planet that did not have the intact magnetic poles to make it resistant to the radiation and solar winds of the sun, and therefore unable to support life as we know it. Indeed, it is widely believed this is what happened to Mars, too large and cooling to fast, it lost it’s atmosphere as a result of the lack of a protective magnetic shield. Of course it was also destined to be our savior after this.

 

The great bombardment hypothesis describes one of the large rock bodies in the Kuiper belt, much like Theia, breaking distant orbit from the sun, but carrying with it many other asteroids or rocks inwards towards the sun. These hit mars at an astonishing frequency as it effectively broadened it’s shoulders like a big brother would and protected the earth from these incoming rocks.

 

It is estimated 32,000 tonnes of rock hit Mars per metre squared during this period, and that finished off any hope of life or atmosphere being sustained on the Martian planet. What was left over, or made it through, either then or more recently, created the craters on the moon that we see today, and then the impact of meteors on earth that caused the Precambrian extinction when our planet was hit and resulted in both the extinction of the dinosaurs and waking the planet from an ice age.

 

SO, we have now gone through a whistle-stop tour of the infinitesimally small chances of life occurring on a macro (that is huge universe scale), to an intermediate planetary scale ….. BUT …. how about the origins of life as we know it and are more familiar with, to be more blunt, that of complex plants and animals here on earth.

 

Before we begin this, let us consider how our planet began it’s life as a very inhospitable place to that, that it is now … what we now see around us is a thriving planet teeming with life of all sorts of extreme diversity. From simple bacteria, to extreme thermophiles that live at high temperatures in deep sea volcanic vents devoid of oxygen, to the complex organisms that make up fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals… it was not always like this.

 

But where did we come from here on earth? How did we evolve? What does evolution truly mean? The truth is that we all very likely began as simple single celled bacteria, and indeed if we are ever to see life in the rest of the cosmos it will probably take this form.

 

The fact is that after all the fine-tuning of the universe we have discussed had taken place, alongside the unique position of our planet next to the right star with the right protection and composition, one more, once in a billion event had to occur, that knocks quantum string theory backwards in terms of disproving our unique position amongst multiverses.

 

You see all animals, plants and fungi evolved from one ancestor, the first ever complex, or “eukaryotic”, cell from the primordial soup on earth. This common ancestor had itself evolved from simple bacteria, but it has long been a mystery why this seems to have happened only once: bacteria, after all, have been around for billions of years.

 

However, whenever simple cells start to become more complex, they run into problems generating enough energy.

 

“The basic principles are universal. Even aliens need mitochondria”

“It required a kind of industrial revolution in terms of energy production,”

 

This was a once in a billion chance, that our ancestor bacteria would engulf and merge (a symbiosis) with another life form that would provide all the energy it needed to evolve, to create birds and animals, and humans and make different cell types…  i.e. eyes, nose, limbs etc etc.

 

This life form we call mitochondria, even has it’s own DNA that it still carries today and lives in every one of the cells in your body, our early ancestor cells came to an “agreement” with it, ultimately “you give me energy, and I’ll mop up the mess and give you nutrients”, it appeared it was a match made in heaven…

 

To become more complex, cells need more genes and more proteins – and so they need to get bigger. As the volume of any object increases, however, its relative surface area falls: an elephant has less surface area per unit of volume than a mouse, for instance. This is a major problem because simple cells generate the energy they need using the membrane that encloses them.

 

So from the simple bacteria that underwent their own industrial revolution by engulfing an energy machine in the form of mitochondria, to the life in the oceans, to fish moving between rock pools and developing limbs and trading fills for lungs that then gave rise to reptiles, to the evolution all the way through to Homo sapiens and the development of language...

 

…. You see, all of this was designed in that tiny LED sitting in the middle of the Royal Albert Hall……that initial singularity with infinity on all sides…… the order and entropy of magnitude that gave rise to the physical constants we observe today and a universe able to sustain life... that is where evolution TRULY began, not on HMS beagle, Charles Darwin merely scratched the surface…..  but he created something more powerful than turtles and birds in the Galapogos islands, he uncovered the beginning of our universe, for if it had not been so as Stephen Hawking the famous astrophysicist says :

 

This would have given rise to universes incredibly beautiful but unstable and that would collapse back on themselves, and with no-one to wonder at that beauty.

 

If no-one is present to wonder at that beauty, then I must ask the question, what then would be the point?

 

From the simple bacteria that underwent their own industrial revolution by engulfing an energy machine in the form of mitochondria, to the life in the oceans, to fish moving between rock pools and developing limbs and trading fills for lungs that then gave rise to reptiles, to the evolution all the way through to Homo sapiens and the development of language... you see, all of this was designed in that tiny LED sitting in the middle of the Royal Albert Hall, that initial singularity with infinity on all sides, the order and entropy such that it gave rise to the physical constants we observe today and a universe able to sustain life... that is where evolution TRULY began, not on HMS beagle, but at the beginning of our universe, for if it had not been so as Stephen Hawking the famous astrophysicist says

 

Would have given rise to universes incredibly beautiful but unstable and that would collapse back on themselves, and with no-one to wonder at that beauty.

 

How people argue that creation theory is incompatible with that of evolution is, in my humble opinion, beyond me, for they are perfectly and clearly both compatible and synchronised.

 

Returning now to Richard Feynman (who theorized the human race would not exist past 2050 … how true that might be…..)

 

“Once in Hawaii I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple a man said, "I am going to tell you something that you will never forget." And then he said, "To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.”

 

Perhaps this is free will? Perhaps this is our choice on this planet? It is up to us, both physically and spiritually speaking as to which of those we chose to unlock, and how, and if, we chose to protect this incredible planet we call “home”.

 

I know one thing, and that is that I am in complete agreement with both Galileo and Le Metre:

 

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

 

We must stand up and realise our place in the universe, and what we are doing to our own planet, Shakespeare talks to us as to the positive, and yet what he says with irony, I say with conviction :

 

What a piece of work is  man, how noble in reason,
how infinite in faculties, in form and moving,
how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension,
how like a god.

 

Our race faces the most challenging time it has possibly ever. The doomsday clock puts us at the most severe risk the world has ever seen ( 100 seconds to midnight – worse than the Cuban missile crisis --- for those that remember it)…. as a result of the risks posed to humanity by nuclear stockpiling and Climate change and cyber attacks.

 

Carl Sagan, an famous American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist who died in 1996 also famously wrote ;

 

We are rare and precious because we are alive,

because we can think.

We are priveleged to influence and perhaps

control our future.

We have an obligation to fight for life on Earth -

not just for ourselves, but for all those,

humans and others, who came before us

and to whom we are beholden,

and for all those who, if we are wise enough,

will come after”

 

If not stopped, continuing unabated climate change and the growth of the global population past 10 billion and the carbon dioxide footprint that creates (58 tonnes per year per person)  will create positive feedback loops crossing a point of no return in terms of rising water levels, millions will be displaced, poverty will worsen, food shortages and starvation will be even more apparent, natural disasters will increase in frequency, flooding (as we have seen in Africa this year), fires (akin to those that have ravaged Australia killing a billion animals and setting ablaze an area the size of the UK), with global temperatures continuing to rise….. Indeed Covid-19 has pertinently shown us that we are part of Nature, not above it!

 

 

Yet here we stand on the precipice, ready to be judged by history itself…. with the ability to protect the once in a universe (let alone multiverse, lifetime or generation) chance we have been given and reverse the damage …. The question is will we wake up, act and protect our delicate and precious home, or will we abscond and leave it to our children to face this alone and pay the ultimate price for our mistakes and inaction….

                                              

So as I said at the start, these are only MY beliefs…. born from my experiences, we are nothing if not a product of our experiences. I can only tell you what I think and how I see the world and our universe. I would ask you all to personally explore the beauty of all this yourselves because ultimately you will, and must form your own opinion, if not for any other reason than for your own conviction to be true…. Indeed the measure of a person may well be defined as how well they succeed at being who they are.

 

Finally, I will leave you with some words from Albert Einstein;

Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.

 

Dr. Andrew S. Doré   BSC (Hons) MBG CPGS DPhil Cantab