The sincerest expression of love is the desire to know everything about that love. I love nature. Therefore, as a scientist, I want to obtain as much experimental data about nature as possible. There are an infinite number of virtual realities, and some of them flatter our ego. However, just expressing them without knowing whether they relate to reality is like imagining a possible love story with an idealized fictional character, like “Prince Charming” or “Princess Charming.”
This was my message to the fifty spiritual leaders hosted by “Harvard Law School Program in Biblical Law and Christian Legal Studies“. My fireside chat was moderated by Tim Dalrymple, president and CEO of Christianity Today. After Tim introduced me as a farm boy born in the Holy Land who became an astrophysicist, I added the caveat that my knowledge was constrained to the observable universe. “What lies beyond is Tim's knowledge,” I retorted.
During the next hour of conversation, I explained that both science and spirituality seek to understand the unknown. Our knowledge is an island in the ocean of ignorance. After a hundred years of observational research, cosmologists do not even know the nature of 85% of the matter and 95% of the energy in the Universe. Not to mention what happened before the Big Bang. One hundred years ago Albert Einstein thought that a unchanging universe is more attractive from a philosophical point of view than a universe that begins in time.
Between 1935 and 1939, Einstein also argued that gravitational waves do not exist, quantum mechanics shouldn't have ghostly action at a distance and black holes they don't exist. The experimental teams that proved Einstein wrong by discovering the cosmic microwave background, black holes, gravitational waves and quantum entanglement were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. These are all good reasons to remain humble and treat learning as a learning experience. Nature has no obligation to make us elated.
We tend to place ourselves at the center of the Universe, but our default assumption should be that we are not crucial in the cosmic scheme of things. Nevertheless, it is our ability to explore the richness of nature that makes life worth living. The more we learn, the harder it is to avoid marveling at what nature had before we arrived. It is humbling to realize how challenging it is for our current technologies to imitate nature.
Our brain's natural neural network uses 12 watts, while artificial intelligence neural networks have fewer connections but consume gigawatts of power. In 2024, physicists demonstrated nuclear fusion at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore by creating a megajoule of energy that the Sun produces in a few thousandths of an attosecond (namely, several times 10 to the power of -21 seconds). Our current technologies cannot produce a self-healing car or a self-reproducing gadget, while the human body heals itself from minor accidents and can produce novel bodies that are the same.
Nevertheless, science holds the potential to fulfill our greatest spiritual aspirations. If physicists develop a predictive theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity, they may be able to determine the conditions that led to the Big Bang. Having this recipe would enable science to artificially create these conditions in the laboratory and give birth to a miniature universe. This would fulfill the task set before the biblical God, who, according to the beginning of the Book of Genesis, created our Universe.
It may take a very long time to achieve this, perhaps billions of years of science and technology instead of the one century we have had since the discovery of quantum mechanics. But there is a shortcut. Most stars formed billions of years before the Sun, and another civilization may have already discovered quantum gravity. Knowing what aliens already know would save us time. Forget about revealing what our government knows about aliens. What really matters is revealing what aliens know about the universe.
Having a smarter student in our classroom creates an opportunity to combine science and spirituality in the future. The Messianic Age may be ushered in by a visitor from another star. This will provide much-needed shock therapy to humanity, which is currently wasting resources in pointless conflicts on Earth that are a petite remnant of the formation of the Sun.
Tim noted that Americans are religious less likely believe that wise life exists on other planets, although in his view God has enough attention span to care for creatures on many planets. I confirmed that I have two daughters and the love I have for one does not diminish the love for the other. We often think in terms of zero-sum games, but the most rewarding aspects of our lives involve infinite-sum games. A recent survey showed that more Americans believe in extraterrestrial intelligence than in the God of the Bible. “You have an opportunity to attract them to your church,” I suggested to Tim.
I hope that humanity will encounter an interstellar messenger with an uplifting message in my lifetime. Just like in our private lives, finding a cosmic partner will give our existence a novel meaning. From now on, the night sky will no longer be so obscure and lonely. Standard cosmological knowledge will not regard the universe as a meaningless mixture of particles and radiation. If we find other actors on the cosmic stage, we can ask them what the play is about. We can visit their homes and see their technological infrastructure, like children visiting neighbors who admire their toys.
To continue this search scientifically, I direct Galileo project which searches for near-Earth objects that may have been produced by extraterrestrial technological civilizations. After the discovery of the first interstellar object “OumuamuaOn October 19, 2017, I became interested in scientific research on anomalous objects that visit us from outside the solar system. The brightness of sunlight reflected from `Oumuamua varied tenfold as the football-field-sized object toppled over every eight hours. These extreme differences in brightness suggested that `Oumuamua was pancake-shaped.
This mysterious object was moving away from the Sun with no signs of comet evaporation and was moving away from Earth faster than any man-made rocket. A similar effect of sunlight reflection was detected for another object, 2020 YESwhich was verified as a rocket booster launched by NASA in 1966. To separate technological artifacts from rocks, astronomers can now collect better data on interstellar objects using the Webb Telescope and the emerging Rubin Observatory in Chile.
My conversation with Tim and the spiritual leaders ended after an hour because I had to teach a group of students in Harvard's astronomy department. Training young students is key to ensuring that we continue to learn more about our cosmic neighborhood. Let us hope that the messianic message of peace and prosperity will come before humanity creates existential catastrophe with its emerging technologies.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
