Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking – Dear Dr. Hawking: Questions About God And The Universe

Dr. Stephen Hawking is one of our best-known cosmologists, a person who studies the universe and develops theories to explain its creation. Dr. Hawking suffers from a debilitating disease, is in a wheel chair, and speaks with a special computer. You may have seen him on television at times.

Dr. Hawking is an example of a man that did not let adversity conquer him. Despite his illness, he has outlived the prediction of his doctors by years. He has children and a loving wife who cares for him despite what his outcome was supposed to be. He is known and respected worldwide. He should be admired by youth and held up as an example of a person who did and does very difficult things despite his physical short comings. All of us have shortcomings. All of us can succeed.

When my children were young I told them to do things that were difficult for others. Many people shy away from mathematics, chemistry, physics, foreign languages, political science and other difficult subjects. When you do difficult things, you improve your ability to do still more difficult task. Why are engineers, scientist, medical doctors, nurses and architects paid more than other people. It’s because they form a smaller part of our population with special skills. Rarity has always paid off. That is why gold and diamonds are worth more than iron and coal.

So what happened to my children. My oldest son is a neurosurgeon, hand surgeon, and neurologist, my second son, a ventriloquist and juggler in his spare time, is a pediatric anesthesiologist, my daughter married a cardiac anesthesiologist and is a professional portrait artist, my second son, who has 13 children here in my hometown (9 adopted), is a veterinarian, and my youngest son, who has triplets, is an attorney. All of my children have musical ability and music is a major part of their lives and the lives of their children.

One thing that some youth don’t know is that people who are not as smart or able are doing things that they themselves could be doing. The difference is hard work and desire. Be like Dr. Hawking. You can ask Dr. Hawking questions at

[http://www.hawking.org.uk/home/hindex.html] Please be patient for an answer to your question.

Would you like a more detailed explanation of cosmology? There is a good article at

http://www.reference.com/search?q=cosmology

I have asked Dr. Hawking for answers to universe questions before and I got an answer from his staff. I have some more questions for Dr. Hawking but first we must explore the universe a bit.

Here is the time-line for a Big Bang theory universe:

Too-Big Boom: Energy blows everything apart too rapidly, matter that form never coalesce into stars, everything is dark and boring. God takes not-so-deep a breath and tries again.

Too-Little Boom: Too little poop to pop. Not enough time for stars to form. All is black. God again decides to start over.

Ah, Ha! Just Right!: God gets it right this time. The universe is created from nothing everywhere at the same time (that’s what one member of Dr. Hawking’s staff told me in an e-mail some years ago).

As the universe expands, stars form. I think black holes may be already around from “incomplete combustion.” (Well what do you expect from a ceramic engineer?)

Anyway, black holes form at some time as stars and galaxies get confused and forget that they are supposed to be moving apart from each other.

Stars go supernovae spreading the stuff that men are made of into the surroundings. Planets form and gather up the star dust as they do so. A planet of just the right size and composition forms at just the right distance from just the right size star and Taylor Jones, the Hack Writer, is created in Salt Lake City in January of 1932. The universe continues to expand, things get colder as even the background radiation of the universe dissipates (well, it wasn’t enough to keep us warm anyway) everything gets so far apart that except for local traffic, entropy wins.

I’m sorry I threw “entropy” in there. Now you will have to read about thermodynamics at http://www.reference.com/search?q=laws%20of%20thermodynamics

Read about entropy at http://www.reference.com/search?q=entropy

Here are the Three Laws of Thermodynamics in simple terms if you are a gambler who likes Texas Hold’em (read my EzineArticles.com article Texas Hold’em is Not a Sport:

First Law: You can’t win.

Second Law: You can’t break even.

Third Law (entropy): You aren’t even in the game!

Back to cosmology.

Here is a homework assignment: Read the article at http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010625/story.html

Here is an excerpt from that article:

“THE FATE OF THE COSMOS

“That means that the 100 billion or so galaxies we can now see though our telescopes will zip out of range, one by one. Tens of billions of years from now, the Milky Way will be the only galaxy we’re directly aware of (other nearby galaxies, including the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Andromeda galaxy, will have drifted into, and merged with, the Milky Way).

“By then the sun will have shrunk to a white dwarf, giving little light and even less heat to whatever is left of Earth, and entered a long, lingering death that could last 100 trillion years—or a thousand times longer than the cosmos has existed to date. The same will happen to most other stars, although a few will end their lives as blazing supernovas. Finally, though, all that will be left in the cosmos will be black holes, the burnt-out cinders of stars and the dead husks of planets. The universe will be cold and black.

“But that’s not the end, according to University of Michigan astrophysicist Fred Adams. An expert on the fate of the cosmos and co-author with Greg Laughlin of The Five Ages of the Universe (Touchstone Books; 2000), Adams predicts that all this dead matter will eventually collapse into black holes. By the time the universe is 1 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years old, the black holes themselves will disintegrate into stray particles, which will bind loosely to form individual “atoms” larger than the size of today’s universe. Eventually, even these will decay, leaving a featureless, infinitely large void. And that will be that—unless, of course, whatever inconceivable event that launched the original Big Bang should recur, and the ultimate free lunch is served once more.”

If you read the article as you were supposed to, you know that “dark energy” and “dark matter” confuse things. Present thinking is that there is little or no curvature to our universe. Now that is confusing. Here’s why:

The universe didn’t exist until about 15 billion years ago. We know that because everything we see in the universe seems to be moving away from us that we are on the surface of a great celestial sphere. Like two dots on a balloon, if we blow the balloon until the circumference has doubled in length, the distance of the two dots will have doubled too. Cosmologist do not thing in three dimensions as we do. They like to think in “n” dimensions where “n” is any whole number they want it to be. Solid state physicists do this to. They like to think of “momentum space” and “energy space,” and such.

Since I’m a simpleton, I like to think of the universe as a spherical annulus. Draw a circle inside a circle both having the same center. I’m talking about the space between the circles.

So, you can blow a balloon up inside a balloon, can’t you?

Of course you can.

If you can center the smaller balloon, the space between the two balloons is my “spherical annulus.”

Okay, so you couldn’t center the inner balloon. Neither could I. Actually, old men have an evolutionary discrepancy in their DNA. We can’t blow air into balloons without our teeth flying across the room.

So, here are my questions for Dr. Hawking and his staff (other cosmologist may jump in—we will assume that cosmological forces have not yet completely pancaked the universe):

If Galaxy “A” is on one side of the annulus and Galaxy “B” is on the other side of the annulus on the same diameter line, can I turn my super-telescope around 180 degrees and see the galaxy from the other direction?

What if I draw a straight line across the balloon to the galaxy? Will the galaxy look different from this view or will light refuse to enter a “central forbidden zone” and refuse to look in that direction?

What if I hop into my super-spaceship (For those who read my UFO articles at http://www.ezinearticles.com this is the spaceship owned by Xrytspet© from

Fanton in G10009845788899990766, the FnL7 Time Craft), can I fly in any direction from Galaxy “A” and get to Galaxy “B” as long as I stay in the annulus of the sphere? (Will my FnL7 Time Craft ignore the annulus and shoot across to Galaxy “B” following a diameter line? (String theory says it might do more clever things.)

Back to the flat universe idea: What does a cosmologist mean when he or she says that the flat universe lets him or her see God? Was he obscured by the curvature back in the old days?

Well, that should do it.

Dr. Hawking and you other cosmologist, send me your answers by e-mail: tjbooks@yahoo.com

I thank you!

The End

copyright©2007 John Taylor Jones, Ph.D.

By: John T Jones, Ph.D.
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Dear-Dr.-Hawking:-Questions-About-God-and-the-Universe&id=449826
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