The great scientist - part 1

  “I think that we are like stars.

 Something happens to burst us open; 

but when we burst open and think we are dying;

 we’re actually turning into a supernova. 

And then when we look at ourselves again, 

we see that we’re suddenly more beautiful than 

we ever were before!”

- C Joybell C

I can never precisely explain how much the stars amaze me. I mean just look at them, a combination of gases ceaselessly burning billions of miles away, just so you can find them scattered like diamonds over the night sky one fine night. And what's the best part, they're probably dead by the time you have a chance to see them! Scientists claim that stars are so far away from the Earth that their light has to travel quite some light years to reach us, which means the stars you see tonight were probably alive and shining during the times of your great- great-  great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great grandparents or perhaps, even before that.

So you see, each star had to burn at exactly the right moment for you to find them hanging down the sky tonight. It's like hitting the bullseye, only here, the target is beyond anything you can ever imagine. 

You might argue that it's all just a series of unplanned, unorganized, random events that happen to be. If it wasn't one star, it would have been another. Either way, you'll find a star tonight. If it wasn't stars, it might as well be something else. Either way, you'd find light tonight.

It's similar to the right sperm hitting the egg. Billions and billions of them fighting with each other to hit the bullseye. It had to be the 'one' that made you, 'you'. Otherwise you might as well be someone else.

Let me introduce you to the land of improbable probabilities :

 In the words of John Polkinghorne, a well known British physcist, this is how exact and amazingly precise things had to be for humankind to emerge :

"It would be like taking aim at a one-square-inch target at the other end of the universe, 20 billion light years away, and hitting it bulls-eye"

Yeah, right. Read it again.

I cannot even fathom a probability like that. Imagine billions and billions of houses full of hay and finding one needle in there. Imagine the Pacific Ocean in all of its depth and majesty, and then there's you rowing a boat somewhere in the center of it, holding out a binocular in hopes of finding a single fish you accidentally dropped from an aeroplane. Good luck, my friend.

In my mind's eye, as I wriggle out of the earth, out of our solar system, out of milky way and fly somewhere into the universe, I look up and see a huge hand holding it all in place. Anyone who truly studies science cannot deny the existence of that huge hand. 

You can come up with a thousand possibilties of how the world and living things came into being. However, with all of that comes thousands and thousands of ways in which things could have gone wrong. For example, take the primordial soup theory.

Concisely speaking, the theory of primordial soup suggests that living things were formed in a warm pond or an ocean (the primordial soup) when the atmosphere around the ocean or the pond underwent some chemical reactions. In all these, there are about a million things that could go wrong. Imagine baking a cake as vast as the Earth. You need to heat things to the right temperature, add correct ingredients in exactly right proportions, stir it all for exactly the right amount of time, then let it cool off to precisely the right temperature and then let it bake until the exact time mentioned in the manual. One mishap and the whole thing goes down the drain. One mishap...... and boom! You and I are dead even before we're born!

This is the case with every scientific theory man has devised to explain the creation of the world. Don't take me wrong, my intention here is not to defy science. In fact, I want to introduce to you the greatest scientist of all time.

Before I talk more about him, let me explain why he is the greatest scientist of all time. And that is because, he answers the question 'why'. All sceintists, since time immemorial, has only been able to  answer 'what', 'when', 'how'. Sometimes, despite all the effort they put in, they fail at that too. However, this greatest scientist that I'm going to talk about has not only answered them all accurately, he aswers one more question additionally : 'why'

For example, scientists have discovered the force of gravity, how the earth is spherical, how there are several glaxies out there in the universe, all the organs in your body etc. They could figure out what they really are, what they're made up of, when they are used, how they work and so on. But, can they answer why? Why is there the force of gravity, sun, your stomach, stars and most importantly, you? Why did you have to be born?

I am pretty sure you might've guessed who this great scientist is. Since I don't want to stuff too much information into one post, I am going to split this into several parts. Stay alert for my future posts. I will tell you more about this great scientist and how he answers the question, 'why'.  Take care. Peace.

Love,
Sharon