"In the beginning, there was darkness." "And then, bang!" "Giving birth to an endless, expanding existence of time, space, and matter." "Every day new discoveries are unlocking the mysterious, the mind-blowing, the deadly secrets of a place we call the universe." "Looking at the Earth's incredible complexity people have always wondered what made it all possible." "What breathed fire into the equations of physics." "Religion has long offered a spiritual explanation, that God created the universe." "But is science now starting to find elusive evidence of God or does physics tell us that no creator was necessary?" "Stephen Hawking and I say in the book, The Grand Design, that the universe could have come from nothing." "Let's embark on a scientific search for God in the universe." "The universe can be a very violent place." "Where galaxies routinely collide." "And exhausted stars..." "explode." "But it is also a place that gave birth to something absolutely extraordinary, at least here on Earth," "conscious, sentient beings." "It is, of course, a mystery to why the universe exists in such an intelligible manner, but it suggests me at least, that there's a deep link between the universe, the grand scheme that's unfolding, and beings like ourselves." "Somehow the universe has become self-aware." "It's engineered the emergence of comprehending, thinking beings like ourselves, who can come to know the universe." "Some people marvel at the fact that the universe has over billions of years, giving birth to beings who can appreciate its complexity." "We can even ponder where and how we fit in." "But at the dawn of history, people thought they knew the answers to these profound questions." "The ancients viewed their world as a snow globe." "It's essentially a flat earth, say a disc, covered by a dome." "And we call this, in English, a firmament, and in the firmament is where all the stars and planets were hung." "Almost all ancient cultures believed their universe existed in a dome similar to this one." "And they never questioned who created it." "The ancients assumed that there was a God or gods responsible for the creation and the maintenance of the universe." "The idea that God created the universe went largely unchallenged until the Middle Ages, when scientists made a sacrilegious suggestion, based on their observations" "The Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the universe." "There was a paradigm shift." "There is now another way to explain the natural occurring phenomena around us, and this is science." "Since the Middle Ages, scientists have developed sophisticated new theories about the enormity of the universe and our place in it, theories that often have no room for God." "Many phenomena have appeared mysterious or miraculous or magical, and then through the process of science, we've eventually understood them." "Scientists gradually realized that the Sun really is just one star among a multitude of stars in a gigantic galaxy having hundreds of billions of such stars." "And all this was created in a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago." "But while scientific theories, observations, and experiments tell us where we are in the cosmos, they don't answer the eternal questions:" "Why we are here and who, if anyone, created us." "So some physicists continue to search for those answers." "What they're finding is extraordinary." "A remarkable unseen order that may govern the universe." "We're all struck by the beauty and majesty of the natural world, about us, the trees," "the sky and the beauty of a sunset." "It is awesome and it's majesty." "How can we make sense of it all?" "We need to look at the hidden subtext of nature, the mathematical relationships that underpin it, forming a sort of shadow world." "Some people think of this as a cosmic code." "Regardless of whether or not they believe in" "God, most scientists agree the cosmic code appears to exist." "Everything in the universe is determined by the fundamental forces of nature." "The strength of those forces are characterized by numbers, called" ""fundamental constants" that are so sensitive that if they changed by just a little bit, the universe, as we know it, wouldn't be here." "For example, if the rate of expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang had changed by one part in a quintillion-- a quintillion is one with 18 zeros after it-- the universe would continue to expand... or collapse back on itself..." "And none of this would be possible." "To illustrate just how small a number one part in a quintillion is imagine all the grains of sand on this beach, in fact, imagine all the grains of sand in all the world's beaches." "That number's probably somewhere around a quintillion." "In this analogy, if all that sand represents the rate of expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang, how many grains of sand would I need to add or subtract to wreck the Universe?" "Just one grain, one in a quintillion--that's how precise things had to be for us to be here." "But even though the Big Bang was perfectly calibrated, intelligent life would never have formed, if matter had spread evenly across the universe." "Had it been perfectly smooth, then there wouldn't be any clumps, which would gravitate and form stars and galaxies." "So, we needed slight irregularities in the distribution of matter in the universe." "Had those irregularities been much smaller, stars and galaxies wouldn't have formed." "Had they been much larger, everything would have collapsed to form black holes." "But even with the right distribution of matter throughout the universe life would still never have formed without a complex series of processes inside stars that converted helium and hydrogen into heavier elements, like carbon that formed the bases of all living beings." "Some of those stars explode, providing raw material with which to form new stars, planets, and, ultimately, life." "Had the laws of physics been a little bit different, or even if physical constants had been a little bit different from what they really are, this process of nuclear fusion and the explosion of stars might not have been possible, and we wouldn't be" "here discussing it." "I don't know a single scientist who would disagree with the statement that the world is exceedingly ingenious..." "Not just mathematical, not just beautiful, not just elegant, but the manifestation of something truly extraordinary." "How could this extraordinary fine-tuning of the universe be anything less than unmistakable evidence of a divine creator." "It's often said that the delicate fine-tuning must be evidence that some agency tuned it that way." "Most physicists' take on this is actually not to go in that direction." "When you see something that's finely tuned in physics, it usually means there's a mechanism that you don't yet understand that is playing a role there." "So, while it appears a divine creator planned the universe, many physicists say apparent fine-tuning doesn't prove anything of the sort." "Something else must be at work." "But what other than God could possibly explain the remarkable series of events that led to the creation of life in our universe?" "One very popular contender is the idea that seems at least as incredible as the idea of God." "It's the multiple-universe theory." "A very large number of universes perhaps even an infinite number, could, in principle exist in a vast hyperspace." "We can understand the idea of hyperspace by comparing it to a mug of beer." "The beer mug would be the hyperspace and the bubbles would be these individual universes." "The bubbles in a beer mug are all physically about the same." "But suppose they span a range of properties." "Some of them might have carbon, oxygen and stars and gravity, and others don't." "We would be in one of the ones that leads to a rich, complex universe combinating with life as we know it." "If there are an infinite number of other universes the fine tuning that seems to be present in ours isn't an example of God's plan but rather the law of statistics." "Most of these universes wouldn't naturally develop in ways that fostered intelligent life..." "But a few, would." "So then the explanation for the specialness of the universe is that we are winners in a gigantic cosmic lottery." "It stands to reason that we couldn't be living and discussing this in a universe that was hostile to life, only the bio-friendly ones get populated with thinking beings." "Having a multitude of universes is actually a simple and natural consequence of some of the most basic models for the birth and early evolution of our universe." "It's kind of like stars and planets." "As long as you have the capacity to make one, it's easy to make lots of them." "But some theologians say the idea of an infinite number of universes isn't any more likely than an unseen creator ensuring our universe is habitable for life." "A multiverse requires as much belief as belief in a transcendent God." "There is simply no evidence for it right now, and it may be very difficult to prove it in the future." "Physicist Paul Davies said, "to postulate trillions upon trillions upon trillions of universes, just to explain one" ""like ours is bringing excess baggage to cosmic extremes."" "This debate about the question of God and the universe may soon enter an explosive phase." "Startling new theories suggest something could exist in an unexplored dimension just millimeters away from each person on Earth." "While the search for God in the universe heats up, some scientists are working to develop a theory that has been called "the holy grail of physics"." "A theory that could explain everything in the universe including how it started." "It's called string theory." "String theory is the latest ambitious popular attempt to pull all of the disparate strands of physics together into one grand unified theory." "Since it promises to answer nearly every question in physics, will string theory be able to tell us whether it was a transcendent creator or the laws of physics alone that gave birth to the universe?" "This is getting us one level deeper." "Every time we find new links between things, we go down a level." "It's getting us closer to the total package and when we get that complete description of the universe well, we can't do much better than that." "Whether or not string theory leads us to God, it already offers tantalizing suggestions about unexplored dimensions that humans have never detected." "The basic idea of string theory is that there are these little fundamental packages of energy." "You could call them little strings, and they vibrate in different ways, and the different modes of vibration correspond to the different kinds of fundamental particles we observe in the universe." "According to the theory, these infinitesimally small strings are the fundamental building blocks of all energy and matter, but the mathematics behind the theory suggests one astounding conclusion." "The strings have to vibrate not just in the three dimensions we see, but in a larger number." "And so this raises a question..." "Where are all these extra dimensions?" "Some physicists believe those extra dimensions may be so small, we've never been able to detect them." "But others say that some of them may lie outside our universe..." "In a so-called "bulk universe."" "It's quite possible that our universe, the four easily observed dimensions-- is like a membrane within a higher-dimensional bulk." "In theory, the higher dimensional bulk could exist just millimeters away from us because it is in a different dimension." "But how could things exist so close to us without our knowing?" "And what might that imply about the existence, or the nonexistence, of God?" "Astronomer Laura Danley demonstrates this concept from her three-dimensional world of height...width... and depth by trying to communicate with physicist" "Alex Filippenko, who's on a television screen with just two dimensions-- height and width." "Alex?" "Alex?" "Alex can't see Laura because he's trapped in two dimensions." "He has no dimension of depth, that would link him to Laura's world." "He can't see in front of him and he can't see behind him, because in his two-dimensional universe, there is no in front or behind." "I, on the other hand, can see behind me and see Alex on that screen." "And she can also hear what Alex says." "If the laws of physics are constrained to work in a certain number of dimensions, then we can't physically see or touch or experience a dimension that's perpendicular to those dimensions." "So, for example, suppose your universe, your hypothetical universe, was just the surface of this television screen." "You can go up, down, left and right, or any combination of those motions, but you can't go in or out." "That dimension would be a mathematical describable but physically inaccessible dimension." "Alex?" "Just as Alex can be in the same room as Laura without being able to see or hear her, there could be hidden dimensions right beside us that we can never detect." "If God or other *** creatures exist in a higher number of dimensions they might be able to see us, and get very close to us without our knowing it." "You can imagine and speculate that there are intelligent forms of life that live in these higher-dimensional scenarios that we see the effects of somehow in our dimensions, and we don't realize that they're actual living agents affecting" "our lives." "I think right now science can certainly not disprove that." "I think it's-- it's very much in the realm of speculation." "String theory predicts that our universe extends into other dimensions, but doesn't predict that anything in particular lives in those other dimensions." "There's no bearded fellow there creating the universe or pulling the strings." "Theologians argue we'll never find God in the 11-dimensional reality predicted by string theory, because he transcends the bulk universe." "Hidden within the 11 dimensions of string theory is a remarkable amount of fine-tuning..." "But hidden within the 11 dimensions of string theory is not an unconditioned, completely intelligible, unrestricted, continuously creating reality." "However some scientists believe that even if God doesn't exist in the bulk universe" "the reason for the Big Bang, might." "There's one hypothesis that the Big Bang resulted when two of these parallel membranes crashed together in a higher-dimensional hyperspace." "I personally don't subscribe to that hypothesis, but it is an interesting idea." "But how can science proof or disproof what happens in these proposed extra dimensions and whether they support or undermine the existence of a creator" "when we're destined to remain in our 3 dimensional world?" "One possibility is that we can find the effects of those other dimensions by interacting with particles that may be able to move into those other dimensions." "To find matter that moves into higher dimensions scientists have built enormous accelerators that smash subatomic particles together at tremendous speeds." "But these particle accelerators may soon do something else as astounding, something that seemed impossible only a few years ago." "They may allow scientists to go back in time to nearly the moment our universe was created..." "And perhaps as some have suggested, catch a glimpse of our creator." "To help determine whether God or the law of physics alone created the universe," "scientists are using multibillion-dollar particle accelerators to take them in a journey back in time to nearly the moment of creation." "To achieve this remarkable feat physicists send subatomic particles screaming in opposite directions around enormous oval tracks." "When these tiny pieces of matter reach nearly the speed of light scientists steer them into each other." "But how can these violent explosions, possibly allow scientists to look back far into the past to shed light on the question of God?" "What particle accelerators do is take us beyond the realm of theory and give us some direct access to the physics that prevailed at the first split second after the Big Bang." "These high-energy collisions of elementary particles that go on in these experiments create enough energy to create, for a moment, the conditions of the very early universe, and then we can actually study that moment of creation, using the laws of physics." "The enormous energy that comes out of these particle collisions is a microscopic version of the super-heated conditions that existed just after the Big Bang." "A useful analogy for what goes in a particle accelerator is to actually use remote-controlled cars going around an actual racetrack." "I'm actually here at the racetrack with an expert Dana **** who's been showing me how to use these remote controls to drive these cars around the track." "Dana, how fast are these cars going?" "They're going around 25 miles per hour." "And if it was a real-sized car, it would be going to 125 mph." "Hmm." "That's actually great for a demonstration, because having these small objects, the cars, going around the track at high speed is exactly what goes on in the particle accelerator, where you have the tiny fundamental particles begin driven around" "the track at incredibly high speeds, almost the speed of light." "The guided rounded track, using powerful magnets." "We actually want the cars to represent these super-fast particles that are going around in the particle accelerator." "So now that we've got the cars up to speed, I'm thinking a fun thing to do would be to actually guide them into each other and collide them." "Could we do that?" "We could, but we're gonna get a big crash." " What would happen?" " Oh, parts are gonna go everywhere." "Well, let's do it." "Oh, that's great!" "Pieces everywhere, let's go and have a look." "This is great." "Wow, we have all of these great pieces." "A lot of pieces here." "The energy created in this collision immediately shatters the cars into dozens of pieces." "When this explosion is amplified exponentially, in a particle accelerator, it creates so much energy that, for a split second, the conditions around the crash site begin to resemble those near the moment our universe was created, and scientists may" "be able to see the hand of God starting it all." "You actually get a glimpse of what the universe was like very early on." "So we get a glimpse of creation." "We can actually see how things got the way they are now through physics that was going on billions of years ago." "So it's as though as going back to the factory of creation by creating a little piece of it in the experiment and allowing us to look at the creation moment and see that the laws of physics can tell us what really happened" "In the same way here, if we look at the output of the collision, and we can use the laws of physics to figure out how the cars collided and what the cars were made of." "Particle accelerators have not yet answered the God question, because the latest technology can't generate enough energy to go all the way back to the exact moment of creation." "So far, scientists have reached to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang." "Without finding anything that can't be explained by physics." "Of course, people want to go back to the very first moment itself." "That's where they might imagine that one would see, so to speak, the hand of God or the maker's mark." "We haven't got there yet." "With all the experiments and observations that we've made, we've never found any single exception to physical law, so we believe that there's a good case to be made that miracles don't happen, and everything can be explained by the laws of nature." "Just because up to this point, one has not discovered anything that couldn't be explained by a physical law doesn't mean that in the future there couldn't be literally thousands of things newly discovered that aren't" "explained by any physical law." "Why is that?" "Because science itself must always be open to new discoveries." "However, if scientist are eventually able to use the laws of nature to explain everything, will be someday be able to understand, in scientific terms, concepts like the soul, consciousness, heaven and hell?" "It's probably asking too much in science to find that one day there'll be solutions of equations that represent heaven or hell or some other great thing from mythological legends of old." "It's probably going to be a lot more subtle than that." "Physicists hope to eventually have a complete scientific explanation for how the universe was created, but they say it may be beyond their grasp to determine whether or not God created these scientific laws." "Unless we had a creator who left a message inside the universe's cosmic code when he programmed it." "Are there clues to the architect of that cosmic program," "Buried deep within it, with all those ones and zeros, like the maker's mark stamped on the architect of the universe at the outset?" "Well, the problem is tantalizing that is one might follow those ones and zeroes forever and ever and still not find this mark." "I think that's a lost cause, a hopeless exercise, but in some deeper sense, the fact that the universe is mathematical-- and we want to explore Mathematical realm, we are, in a certain sense glimpsing the mind of God." "What we're really doing is exploring, at a hidden level, the order in nature." "But one of the most respected scientists in the world recently rocked the planet when he said he's explored the hidden order of nature and found mathematical proof that God doesn't need to exist." "As the debate over God and the universe rages fame physicist Stephen Hawking said in his book" "The Grand Design that the latest calculations in quantum theory suggest a universal creator need never have existed." "Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow assert that the laws of physics allow entire universes to form spontaneously." "Stephen Hawking and I say in The grand design that the universe, the galaxy, the Solar" "System, the Earth, this rock, that everything could have come from nothing." "They could have been created spontaneously from a quantum vacuum." "And so we don't really need God as a creator of the universe." "It follows from the laws of physics." "The universe could have formed spontaneously out of nothing, because according to quantum physics, particles can form for a short time out of nothing, and then they disappear again." "We see this happening in labs." "We've measured it." "Well, maybe there are lots of quantum fluctuations which go away, but in some cases conditions become conducive to further expansion." "That can then create a giant universe out of essentially nothing." "But Filippenko and other physicists say we don't know how or when the laws of physics originated." "This is significant, because critics say spontaneous creation requires nature to exist prior to the Big Bang." "The nothingness Hawking is talking about is a quantum vacuum ruled by physical laws." "It's like saying, "I have a bank account, but unfortunately in my bank account I have a zero Balance."" "Does that mean that I don't have a real bank account in a real bank?" "Of course not." "Just because I have a zero balance." "The bank account really exists in a real bank." "When theologians talk about what existed before the beginning of the universe they imagine it was a true void." "The universe was really nothing, that implies something beyond the universe, something transcending the universe created it." "To move it from nothing to something when it was nothing." "And that transcendent entity, well, that would be God." "Stephen Hawking responds with an elegant and startling theory that can be demonstrated inside a southern California landmark." "I'm walking under the planetarium dome of" "Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles." "The dome gives a good illustration of one idea for the origin of the universe called, "the no boundary proposal."" "Our best theory for the origin of the universe tells us that the universe came from a single point." "All matter, space, time, energy, and even the laws of physics seem to have exploded into existence from that single point." "However, when scientists use the classical laws of physics to figure out how the Big Bang started, they encounter what's called" ""a singularity"--a place where the laws of physics seem to break down and a transcendent God is theoretically needed to start the universe." "This is a real problem for scientists, but Stephen Hawking and other proponents of the "No boundary proposal" have found a way around this by saying that the universe didn't begin in a singularity." "They say the beginning of the universe wasn't a point." "It was more like a dome." "Just after the Big Bang, space and time curved together." "As hard as it is to imagine," "Hawking says time actually started out as another dimension of space." "With the no boundary proposal, there was never a time when the laws of physics didn't work." "Space and time had no boundary, no edge, no beginning, no singularity..." "So trying to travel back in time to the beginning of the universe is like trying to travel north of the north pole or, in this analogy higher than the top of our perfect dome." "Can't get there, because no such place exists." "If you trace the great story back to what you thought was the first moment, it all merges in some quantum fuzz, so there's never a singular switching on." "So it's a really neat idea that the universe is, somehow, self-contained." "There was no before." "Time does not extend back for all eternity." "Time begins with the universe." "Space begins with the universe." "But in such a way that there isn't a single or first moment." "If the no boundary proposal and spontaneous creation are true, Hawking says, the universe had no true beginning and would have required nothing outside the laws of physics to come into existence." "So why do we need a transcendent creator?" "There was no point in sitting there and going, "let's start a universe."" "You don't have that point of time anymore." "And the idea that the universe can come spontaneously from nothing also means you don't need a God to make everything." "So, taken together, those two ideas show that the standard arguments for why we need a God don't really hold." "Hawking and Mlodinow's critics say the no boundary proposal is an elegant theory and may actually be correct, but it's beside the point." "You're not really saying that the universe extends infinitely backward into time." "All you are saying is that your initial point is a kind of fuzzy condition." "Which quite frankly means you still need a beginning." "To counter Stephen Hawking and support the idea of God, many theologians signed the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem." "Formulated by three prominent mainstream physicists, it states that any expanding universe must have have had a beginning." "This is true, they say, even if the universe is part of a multi-verse, as long as those universes are also expanding." "What they showed was that every inflating universal model would have to have a boundary to pass time." "And even if that boundary only indicated a transition to a new kind of physics, even that condition would require some kind of boundary to past time, so eventually you are going to get to a beginning, prior to" "which the universe was nothing, implying some sort of transcendent force to create it." "With each side of this debate siding their complicated mathematical evidence about a possible beginning and a possible creator, whose equations are right?" "Stephen Hawking expresses this very well." "We have all this contending mathematical descriptions of a possible worlds." "What is it that breathes fire into one particular set of equations and makes a universe form all together?" "That's a good question." "What is it that literally breathed reality into these equations that enabled them to do something, to burn, to explode, to become a universe?" "That's a very good question, and it does imply a transcendent creator." "This debate about whether a transcendent God or the laws of physics alone breathed fire into the universe will rage until we find definitive evidence one way or the other." "But some physicists have come up with an intriguing third possibility." "As mind boggling as it sounds, they say the universe may have been created by an alien species, so advanced it's become indistinguishable from nature itself." "As physicists search for answers to fundamental questions about the beginning of the universe and the role a God may have played in it," "some wondered how this quest would change if we made contact with an advanced alien civilization." "There is no doubt in my mind that if we discovered the existence of other intelligent beings out there in the universe, it would be the greatest scientific discovery of all time, but it would inevitably have an impact on the" "world's religions, because these refer to human beings, one species, and planet earth, one planet--inevitably so, because the religions were put together at a time when that was all anybody knew." "But would an advanced alien species pray to an entirely different God or set of gods..." "Or, more profoundly, would they have such an incredible grasp of science that they've proven a divine consciousness does not exist?" "I don't think we're gonna discover any surprising facts from an intelligent, developed alien culture, because I think they're going to have the same transcendent desires that we do." "I'm not sure that meeting extraterrestrials, if they exist, will give us any more insight on God." "We've more or less done that already when the old world met the new world, and the denizens of the new world observed certain gods, and they were different from the denizens of the old world." "Every time we encounter a new culture, we learn new things about that culture and how it appreciates and describes God." "But perhaps a more pressing question is whether aliens might be the God that people have been seeking." "The entity that created the universe." "We can imagine the very far future where science advances to the point where we cannot just manipulate matter locally around us, but we could make entire universes." "We could design them and create them to our own liking." "And if this manipulation extends to choosing the laws of physics themselves, well, we could make universes of a sort that maybe may have never existed." "We could make and design our universes." "Now, this is wild and speculative stuff, but it's actually not so very far of what string theory predicts." "Perhaps we will someday be able to create a new universe, almost as if it was a physics project." "Scientist could eventually focus enough energy on a microscopically small space to create a black hole in our universe, well on the other side, a Big Bang would create another universe." "Well, it's just a small step from this to the speculation that maybe our universe is the product of a super duper intelligence that existed in another universe." "If this speculation turns out to be true, it would echo the ancient hindu teaching that there are an infinite number of universes, each with a different God, dreaming its own cosmic dream." "But would this God be the transcendent being that many people imagine our creator is or would it simply be an advanced mortal?" "Well, a mother creates a child and that doesn't mean that mother is the God to that child." "We are all created out of the Earth." "That doesn't mean that the Earth is God." "Even if you did have multiple gods thinking of multiple universes, you're still going to logically have to have some super God that's thinking all of the other gods into existence along with all of the universes about which they are thinking." "Of course, the famous hindu teaching goes on to say that everything may be reversed." "The people might not be the dreams of the gods, but that the gods might be the dreams of people." "This is the fundamental question that people are trying to answer." "Are we just dreaming about a divine order to the universe?" "Or is the divine order drawing us to it?" "Ultimately the point is if there's no way to scientifically test a hypothesis through experiments and observations, it's not truly a scientific hypothesis." "And so, since the question of the ultimate origin and the ultimate creator is fundamentally an untestable question, it's really not part of science." "Science cannot disprove something which is beyond our universe, and the reason is, it's taking its data from within the universe itself." "I mean that's tempt to saying, "oh, the cartoon character is going to use data from the cartoon to disprove the cartoonist"." "It just simply can't be done." "The role of God has been pushed back by the advance of science." "Nevertheless, it is not a battle between the two." "I don't think there'll ever be a time when we understand everything." "I think there'll always be the unknown." "There'll always be a frontier." "So there will always be questions that are beyond our ability to answer them at a current time, but then there's always hope that we might explain things better." "Physics and mathematics can never explain where the laws or where logic came from." "That's where we start from, and if people want to say, "well, that must come from God," we certainly don't argue against that." "In some ways, the laws of physics are as eternal as God is to a theologian." "But we could imagine that there's something underpinning the laws of nature, upholding them, explaining them." "Why are they mathematical?" "Why do they have the properties that they do?" "Why are they intelligible?" "I'm not sure God is the right answer to this, 'cause of the cultural baggage that goes with it, but I do think that accepting the universe and its underlying laws is a package of marvels that just happens to be, is deeply unsatisfying." "I think we must go beyond, and I think we can go beyond."