Blackhole and the Big Bang.

Sometimes, you wonder, if God created black hole, what was he thinking? A variant form of that question was asked by renowned scientists like Einstein and Hawking. 

For Hawking, at the point of singularity, at the core of the black hole, nothing exists or can ever exist in it.

The Big Bang was such a black hole of nothingness when it happened to just come into existence. The keyword is of course “when it happens”. What happens before that Big Bang then?

Here is how the late Professor Hawking explains it: -

“To understand this mind-boggling idea, consider a black hole floating in space. A typical black hole is a star so massive that it has collapsed in on itself. It is so massive that not even light can escape its gravity, which is why it’s almost perfectly black. It’s gravitational pull is so powerful, it wraps and distorts not only light but also time.”

“To see how, imagine a clock is being sucked into it. As the clock gets closer and closer to the black hole, it begins to get slower and slower. Time itself begins to slow down. Now imagine the clock as it enters the black hole - well, assuming of course that it could withstand the extreme gravitational forces - it would actually stop. It stops not because it is broken, but because inside the black hole time itself doesn’t exist. And that’s exactly what happened at the star of the universe.”

So, if you ask the good Professor whether God created the universe, that Big Bang, or at that point of singularity, he would say this: -

“When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Big so there is no time for God to make the universe in...No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science...I think that when we die we return to dust.”

Well, for the believer, it is a not-too-encouraging conclusion - that “returning to dust” part - that is, it implies a deflated promise of a resurrected life after death. 

I wrote that this morning because in the cosmology department, like finding the God’s particle by physicists years ago, they have finally managed to capture astounding photographic evidence of possibly the beginning of time and space and everything we can ever conceive on this earth.

If you look at it, it is all pitch black. It’s an image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87, and it was taken by a team of scientists from multiple angles fitted together under the name of the Event Horizon Telescope on April 6, 2017. 

Mind you, this is huge news for the intellectual scientific community. 

One Professor Tan Meng Chwan said: -

“By studying the data of the event horizon (the boundary marking the limits of a black hole), we can potentially gain insight into the finer workings of the black hole, in particular, the singularity at its origin where all of space-time has collapsed to a point, which in turn can give us a better understanding of the Big Bang.”

“Black holes are ultimately the most mysterious and energetic powerhouses of our cosmos.”

And here is the facts about this black hole recently captured. 

The ring around the black hole, the event horizon, measures 40 billion km across. Its estimated mass is 6.5 times that of the Sun. It is 55 million light-years from Earth “and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world because no single instrument would have been powerful enough to perform that feat.”

Lesson? ...

Alas, reading the mind-boggling stats, as a believer, you can’t help but echo the sentiments of the Psalmist: -

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?“

The ultimate mystery of the black hole is nevertheless significant to my faith because, if space and time are non-existent because of the immense gravity at its core, and nothing of material is of material inside, then the question is: can we see the face of God beyond the horizon or the face of, well, nothingness? 

As Hawking puts it, “This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. I think that when we die we return to dust.”

Mm...at this point, I recall this quote from the physicist Brian Cox, who was recently interviewed by the Straits Times’ Sumiko. She asked him about death and life, and its meaning and here is what he said: -

“...whatever the meaning of life is, the more light you can shine on it, you will see the shadows, and the more light we can shine, the angles cast different shadows, and we can fill up more of a picture of what it means to be human.”

“That’s how I view philosophy and arts and science and theology and other things. I view them as people really trying to shine different lights on that central question, which is before we go, what the hell does it mean to exist?”

Sumiko asked him: “What if he dies and finds out God exists?”

“If I die and it turns out that I’m still around, l’ll be, oh well, there’s something fundamental I didn’t understand about nature...l’ll be the most surprised ghost that there’s ever been.”

Mm...”surprised ghost” sounds a tad patronising, but Brian has got a point about the different light shining on a subject and the different shadow casts, which forms a blurry picture of our understanding. 

At this point in history, we have had many scientific breakthroughs, and the one we once thought could never be captured is the blurry image of the event horizon of a supermassive black hole 55 million light-years away from us, and mind you, 40 billion km across. That thought alone boggles our mind immensely. 

Yet, we have captured it, and with our exceeding ingenuity, working as a team worldwide, we have done so brilliantly. 

Thus, the different lights shone on the subject of our origin and the meaning of life (with reference to the black hole discovered) tells us about the hunger of our tireless curiosity and search for the ultimate truth of life, the universe and our purpose. 

Where does my faith then enters into the many lights that are cast on this subject then? What does the Cross have to say about the seemingly insuperable black hole we have just captured on telescopic image? 

And mind you (again), according to the last count, there are about more than 100 galaxies that can be detected (ours is the Milky Way), and each of them has a black hole at the centre. 

So, there might easily be about more than 100 billion of these black-hole beasts gobbling millions of stars and planets in its destructive pathway, and alas, we as a tiny speck in this incomprehensible cosmo is blissfully going about our business trying to catch that last dollar from another man’s tattered pocket. 

Reading all that, you can’t help but feel insignificant in the larger (much larger) scheme of things, way way above the pathetically petty things we hold on to with arthritis-grip all the way to our lonely, morbid grave.

Where is my comfort, focus and anchor then? Where is the rock that is higher than I in the cosmological mess of all this? Where is the core of my understanding? Is it to be as black as the black hole, or is it to be the penetrating light that goes beyond it? 

I can’t give a good answer to all that, but I can give one that my limited understanding can personally embrace. Here goes. 

Just as the mystery of the black hole, the same intellectual mystery confronts my faith. And just as the almost-infinite vastness of the cosmos, seen and unseen, challenge the finitude of my human mind, the same almost-infinite vastness challenges my humanity when a man who claims to be the summation of all, that is, the cosmos, seen and unseen, offered himself at the Cross. 

While atheists see that as a form of excessive sentimentality arguing from a point of intellectual cowardice, I however see it as no different from a message in a bottle floating in the vast universe written just for me, and us, and meant to arrive at the place and time to reconcile us back to all that is seemingly incomprehensible in this world and the invisible beyond. 

But don’t ask me why omnipotence has not made itself more, well, omni-obvious. I have no answer to that. 

Maybe, just like the black hole, it was never meant to be fully comprehended by us. This is where my faith takes this leap and trust that the same person behind the core of the black hole and beyond, is the same person who declared, “It is finished.” 

And I can only say that if this gap is to be filled, it is to be filled, first and foremost, not so much by human knowledge, but love. 

That is, a love, I believe, far greater than the nothingness of the black hole that took the same leap of faith in us to come forward in the beginning of even time and space to form the somethingness that is me and us, and the endless yearning that possesses us to seek after the ultimate meaning of life, and the life thereafter.

Prof Hawking's bets and what we as believers can learn from it.

Prof Hawking was an avid bettor. But his bets come with a positive twist. It seeks to advance science and knowledge. It is nothing personal.

So, it is not about winning and losing with Prof Hawking. He was prepared to lose a bet and to be proven wrong because his attitude towards losing is that the winner gains for science and the world is better for it.

Science is therefore the ultimate beneficiary of the direct challenge to humanity's ego to prove another wrong. That's the irony of reverse psychology and Prof Hawking was a master of placing such bets to spur man's (sometimes desperate) drive to be right.

In the above article written by Adam Minter, he wrote this about Prof Hawking's penchant for betting:-

"For years, he had been making - and losing - public bets on fundamental questions of physics. He felt no shame in these repudiations but rather revelled in them, knowing that science advances when its participants are wrong as well as right."

Prof Hawking had made many bets over his lifetime. He once bet in 1974 that "a bright object in the Cygnus constellation was not a black hole". He lost that bet in 1990 and had to pay it off with a subscription to Penthouse.

In another bet that he lost, he challenged Physicist John Preskill by stating that "information swallowed by a black hole could never be retrieved." However, his own research in 2004 would undermine that statement.

So, in a major physics conference, he announced, "he had devised a calculation that proved he was wrong."

For that bet, he "presented Professor Preskill a baseball encyclopedia from which information could easily be retrieved."

Prof Hawking's most famous bet was with another Professor, namely, Peter Higgs, who won the Noble Prize for finding the God's particle, eponymously named after him - Higgs Boson. But that discovery came partly (or largely) from a professorial taunt (a bet) by the notorious bettor himself.

In 2000, Prof Hawking wagered with University of Michigan's Gordon Kane that the God's particle would never be found. Although it was not a wager directly with Prof Higgs, the latter took it personally and strove to prove him wrong (or himself right).

Alas, Prof Hawking lost that bet too.

In 2012, Higgs Boson was confirmed and Prof Hawking "made a global spectacle of paying off the US$100 wager, admitting he was wrong." But he did not stop there.

Ever a gentleman in losing, Prof Hawking called for Prof Higgs to be awarded the Nobel Prize.

Whether right or wrong, Adam wrote, "Prof Hawking's humility and graciousness would be rare in any age, but particularly at a time when conceding even the slightest error is viewed as a weakness to be derided and exploited."

Lesson? I am curious about what we as believers can learn from Prof Hawking. Of course I am not talking about betting here, for an atheist's bet against faith or omnipotence will take an eternity to unravel.

What I am however talking about is his gracious attitude towards the possibility of being wrong, thereafter accepting it and moving forward with it.

Can we Christians consider that, accept and learn from that? Can we accept that we are not always right about our belief? Can we accept that we are not always that certain about what we claim to be certain about?

What Adam writes below about science in the article is relevant to our belief:-

"Public-facing scientists become reluctant to concede uncertainty about data for fear that the admission will undermine funding and support for their research. The result: well-intentioned intellectuals who feel obligated to present science as a series of truths not to be argued or rebutted."

The issue I have with belief is absolutism. When we claim that we can't be wrong, we suffocate our belief into insufferable tyrant.

We turn every interpretation of scriptures into a truth never to be argued with. We close off debate. We shut out the light of reasonable doubts. We become an epistemological Dead Sea surrounded by a fortress which is constantly pampered, or mollycoddled, by the harem of our own confirmation bias.

We are thus trapped in the hermitage of our own arrogance whereby we voluntarily deny ourselves of a whole, almost infinite, world of discoveries out there.

However fallible we are as a believer, it seems like what we say about what the Bible has to say becomes an infallible pronouncement very much like the ex cathedra declarations of the pope as the church's universal shepherd.

But the church has been wrong on many occasions. They have been wrong about sex, about masturbation, about science, about cosmology, about demonology, and about evolution.

Now, the modern megachurches are repeating the same mistake with an incomprehensible level of self-conceited panache.

Preachers in their glamorous suits and glittering hairdo unpack self-proclaimed revelations with every sermon about how they are so cocksure about God's will, direction and even emotions. Ironically, their certainty seems to be equated with their believability. The more cocksure they are, the more persuasive they become. Go figure.

With every ex cathedra pronouncement, they conveniently sweep away all mysteries and wonders and leave their audience with the remnants of reality that just doesn't reconcile with the reality they have come to know when they walk out of the sanctuary with light feet and head.

If you need examples, here goes.

"God is never angry with you. God has "retired" the Holy Spirt to convict you of sins. God is happy when you are happy. God is even happier when you ask big because he gives big. God no longer punish you for sins. God is your new buddy in Christ. God can't wait to bless you beyond your wildest imagination. God is a cheerful giver, you should be one too. When you prosper, God rejoices with you. God's will without exception is your healing and longevity, because death can wait. God hates it when you speak bad about his anointed".

They seem to have God all figured out, fully unpacked, with an exhaustive manual inside...(and I can go on and on with this).

I guess the worse infraction in the modern church today is to allow the preachers to do all the thinking for us, to spoon feed us with the spiritual stuff, essentially with what we would like to hear.

And we want answers, fixed answers, good answers, answers of certainty, answers that are easy to swallow, well crushed out, like sweet liquids fed into the estuaries of our self-confirming belief system, the fortress of our own pet theories.

Alas, by embracing or hallowing certainty, or cocksureness, we unknowingly garland our faith with the condolent wreaths of wonders, curiosity, uncertainty, and discovery.

We therefore become anti-Berean believers spoon-fed with the junk food of self-conceited revelations dished out in an all-you-can-eat buffet from the mouth of equally ignorant preachers.

Let me end with the article’s conclusion:-

“If Prof Hawking’s life can teach anything to scientists, public intellectuals and social media users (and believers?), it is that humility and a willingness to change one’s mind are a sign of not weakness but an adventurous and intellectually engaged mind and polity. This is a legacy as worthy as Prof Hawking’s monumental scientific achievements.” 

Amen, RIP Professor. Cheerz.

Einstein's theory of happiness.

Ever wonder what advice the smartest man on earth would give to the world about happiness?

Well, wonder no more. Einstein gave the advice on two ex tempore hand scribbled notes. And there is a background to them. Here it is as reported.

In November 1922, Einstein was informed that he had won the coveted Nobel Prize in physics. At that time, he was travelling from Europe to Japan for a speaking tour.

In Japan, the crowd thronged to see him and he was impressed by their enthusiasm and passion. Inspired, Einstein then penned down his thoughts and feelings from his hotel room. 

It was at this time that a messenger arrived with a delivery and Einstein wanted to tip the messenger. But he found out that he did not have money with him. 

So, the Nobel laureate was heard to have said this to the messenger: "If you are lucky, the note themselves will some day be worth more than some spare change." He then handed those two historical notes on happiness to the messenger. 

Those thoughts about happiness would go on to benefit the lucky holder richly. 

The first note was sold for S$2.1m and the second note was sold at US$240,000. The seller who received the lucky windfall was a relative of the messenger. 

Lesson? Two, and it is about what was written or scribbled on those two notes. I am sure you are dying to know. 

Those words like his famed E=mc(square) equation must be time and space bending for us. It may even hold the key to the universe of happiness. 

First note reads: "A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness." (note that it is a constant restless success that makes an unhappy soul).

I guess that was with reference to the tsunamis of attention he was getting and how it had thrown his life into a dizzy tailspin. 

And the second note reads: "When there's a will, there's a way." 

I guess that was with reference to his perseverance to break the code of the universe and beyond with his general and special theories of relativity. It has practically transformed our understanding of the law of nature here and beyond. 

Mind you, this is a man who once challenged God, that is, the God that he understood to be (the Spinoza's God). 

He once said that: "When I am judging a theory, I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way."

And when he couldn't understand quantum physics to the extent that it did not fit into his theory of scientific predictability, he said these famed words:- 

"God does not play dice with the universe." 

To which, Neils Bohr would reply: "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!"

The reality is, just as in the quantum world, the world we live in, the circumstances we operate in, is such that things are arranged in a way that defies simple equations and formula. 

Each of us is trekking on our own uncharted journey both inside of us and out (as in how we sort our feelings within to respond to the changing circumstances without). 

No notes, wise sayings or aphorisms can capture the essence, struggles, victories and stumbles of a life just like scientists can never know for sure both the momentum and location of a subatomic particle at any given time in any given experiment (referring to the vexing Heisenberg uncertainty principle).

The truth is, Einstein had many happy moments in his life - his courtship with first wife Maric, his discovery of the greatest equation on earth, the Nobel Prize and the attention and fame, and birth of his first legitimate son, Hans Albert. 

But he also had many unhappy moments like the time he gave away his first child (Elizabeth) for adoption, his failed marriages, his extramarital indiscretion, and at the end of his life, he was isolated, treated somewhat like a pariah, because he refused to embrace that dastardly theory of quantum mechanics. 

In fact, Einstein once wrote this to his close friend's adult children when their father died:-

"What I admired most in him (Besso) as a person was the fact that he managed for many years to live with his wife not only in peace but in continuing harmony - something in which I have rather shamefully failed twice."

The grim fact is that the love of his life (his two wives and beloved sister, Maja) all died way before him. And ironically, he died alone on 18 April 1955 due to an aneurysm burst. The brilliant mind of his just gave up. 

And as he bled to death, he called out to a nurse. When she arrived, he whispered to her. But he spoke in German, so the nurse never knew what was said by the greatest mind of the last century. 

If I'd to hazard a guess, his last words may just be his last request to gather all his children to be by his side. 

I presume this because no one I know or read about who is heaving his last breath is ever interested in how much money, estate and fame he has achieved in life. He never asked to see his balance books or investment portfolios for the last time before the final breath. 

It is unfailingly the touch of family, the embrace of love, and the exchanges of tears that occupy the heart of the dying.

So, to his first note of happiness where he advised one to strive for a "calm and modest life," I can't say that his life is anything but calm and modest. 

A great scientist like him was swept away by fame and fortune beyond his wildest imagination. And when it comes to power, fame and fortune, we are all like children playing with dangerous industrial tools and radioactive materials. 

His pursuit of success has led him to a different garden-path of so-called happiness. It is one where he died alone, by the side of a panicky stranger, and leaving behind an utterance that the nurse could not understand. 

But having said that, when asked whether he wanted to undergo an operation to slow down the process of a possible aneurysm tear, Einstein said: "It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share."

Indeed he has, and the world will forever be grateful. He had transformed the world of science but the world within him like quantum mechanics was still very much uncharted territory for him. 

Lastly, his second note talks about a will and a way. This refers to a determined spirit to never give up in all your pursuit of what endears to your heart and soul. 

Indeed, there is always a way when there is a will. 

But as we embark upon our journey to pursue our dreams, we should never forget to return home because home is where the heart is, and where true, enduring success lies. Cheerz.