“I’VE BEEN THINKING about it,” I said to Bernie the next morning, after we’d set ourselves up in his study and I’d turned my phone on, “and I can see why you’re so cautious about people writing about this Higgs and Zero Point Field stuff. When you were talking about them, I realized that both fields reminded me of something. I tried to think of what that ‘something’ was, and then it came to me. They reminded me of the Force in the original Star Wars.
“I’d just turned fifteen when the original Star Wars came out in the summer of 1977, so was basically the perfect target for the film, and for all the mythical and religious imagery and ideas concealed in it. For me, and obviously for millions of other people, that idea of the Force was instantly appealing. George Lucas didn’t have to spend much dialogue in the movie getting across what he was talking about, because people just instantly picked up on it. An invisible, universal field that records and unifies everything, everywhere. A force that’s all-pervasive, that’s sensitive to your thoughts and actions, that records every activity . . . who knows, maybe even your thoughts.”
“Well,” said Bernie, “I’m more of a Star Trek man myself, but I see your point.”
“Star Trek!” I said. “I could never get with Star Trek myself. Spock’s too logical.”
“Logic is important!” Bernie said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But anyhow, whether you’re a Star Trek or a Star Wars man, it just seems to me that that notion of the Force was an incredibly powerful idea. It’s one that our minds just say ‘Yes’ to so immediately that you can’t help but wonder if there’s a reason for that. By introducing that idea of the Force, Star Wars allowed millions of people living in what they thought was a post-religious world to feel, once again, a very potent religious feeling: that they were immersed in an invisible world of some sort, one that they’d known was there all along, and had secretly felt all along, but had just forgotten about on a conscious level. It’s an incredibly powerful idea, but it’s also, I think, the kind of idea that an awful lot of nonsense could be written about very quickly.”
“A lot of nonsense has been written about it,” said Bernie. “If ever there was a place where Mr. Spock’s logical mind is needed, it’s in the world of books on the Zero Point Field. And, I’m sorry to say, I’ve played a part in that, as I’ve been interviewed by authors who took what I had to say and then twisted it to suit their purposes.”
Bernie then, as was his habit, reached behind him and produced one of these books. He was all for my mentioning it by name, but I said that in my experience, calling specific people out didn’t really get one anywhere.
“I think it might be best just to sort of turn the other cheek,” I said. Then for good measure, I regaled him with several grievances that I’d suffered as a writer, getting ever more worked up as I did so.
“Anyhow,” Bernie said, pulling me back on course, “it’s a shame that this material gets cheapened like that, because this material is so interesting just as it is, there’s no need to overstate any of it. You get pop science or pop spirituality authors writing about it so much that eventually it becomes associated with flaky thinking, with phony science. The Zero Point Field is very precisely, rigorously, and mathematically defined in physics. And its chief characteristic is that it is totally random. All those particles popping into and out of existence do so in a completely wild, chaotic manner. By definition you cannot convey information with them. Most of the new age, fuzzy-wuzzy theories about the Zero Point Field use the extraordinary fact that it’s present everywhere to turn it, basically, into, as you say, a kind of equivalent of George Lucas’s idea of the Force. The Zero Point Field is an extraordinary phenomenon, but a phenomenon is all it is. It’s a part of this world. And as we’ve covered again and again, God is not part of this world. He’s above, apart from it, even if in another sense he’s deeply immanent in it. Again, if God were just another part of the world, instead of a being categorically above and beyond it, he wouldn’t be God.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s standard theology. Or as you would put it: he created the program, so He’s not part of it. God is not a thing-among-things. Not even if that ‘thing’ is something as crazy and fascinating as the Zero Point Field.”
“Right,” Bernie said. “But the problem is that when a scientific idea gets popular, it can actually turn out badly for the idea. Crazy as it may sound, if a new scientific idea takes on too much cache in the media, especially the world of fringy writing that tries to slap science and spirituality together in too quick and easy a fashion, the idea can get . . . tainted. Serious researchers get scared to touch it. The subject acquires a stigma, and before you know it, the grant money dries up, the solid research stops, and you don’t learn anything more about it. By being so interesting, the subject sinks itself.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Grant money for an idea shouldn’t dry up just because a subject is interesting, for God’s sake.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Bernie said. “But you see, the public images that come from the descriptions and names applied to new scientific discoveries have important ramifications. Look at the Higgs Boson. A boson is a kind of particle, named after an Indian physicist named Satyendra Bose. There are two basic classes of particles: bosons and fermions. All particles can be classified as one or the other of them. So the Higgs Boson is just a particular kind of particle that Higgs and his associates suggested existed. Whether it does exist or not, the excitement around its possible existence has earned it its nickname, the ‘God Particle.’ And that’s a terrible name.”
“Right,” I said. “Because as soon as you give something a name like that, you not only cheapen the discovery by sensationalizing it, you also do God a disservice by demoting Him down to the physical realm, which is as good as throwing Him in the trash altogether. Traditionally, God is thought to transcend the physical realm completely, but the physical realm reflects His glory all the same. And that means that the more we learn about the world, the more we learn about God, because the world is His handiwork, right? Not that this is a perspective the average scientist would share, I imagine.
“All of this also makes me think of the ancient Greco-Egyptian document known as the Emerald Tablet, where it says: ‘As above, so below.’ What those words have always meant to me is that while spiritual realities might not, for most of us at least, be directly perceptible, we can gain hints of what the spiritual worlds are like by paying attention to what this world is like. But that doesn’t mean the two are the same.”
I didn’t mention this to Bernie at the time, but all of this, it seemed to me, was also illustrated in the way the word “light” appears in the Bible. In the New Testament, especially in the Gospel of John, the state of consciousness Jesus advocates and identifies himself with is constantly compared to light. But the “light” the Prologue to the Gospel of John talks about is clearly not ordinary light—not the light made up of photons that the sun bathes our planet with every day. It’s a higher light. It’s the light God speaks of on the first day of creation when he says: “Let there be light.” As is often pointed out, Genesis describes God creating the sun and moon on the fourth day of creation, so the “light” the Bible is talking about on that first day of creation clearly cannot be ordinary physical light. It is, more likely, the same light-that-is-not-light that the Gospel of John talks about when it says:
“In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
(Later, when I brought this up with Bernie, he pointed out that in the Haggadah, a collection of legends from the tradition of Jewish Kabbalah, it is specifically written: “The light created at the very beginning is not the same as the light emitted by the Sun, the Moon, and stars.”)
“As above, so below,” I said again to Bernie. “The important thing to remember in discussing the Zero Point Field, it seems to me, is that it can appear to have God-like properties, but that doesn’t make it divine. God is God, the physical world is the physical world. But just as humans, being made in God’s image, have qualities that can tell us what God is like, so the physical properties of the Zero Point Field have properties that can tell us what God is like as well.”
“That also goes,” said Bernie, “for what we were talking about the day before yesterday, when I talked about how mathematics ‘fits’ this universe. You can come up with some extremely abstract mathematical theory, and then later discover that, my God, this fits the laws governing quasars, or galaxy formation.”
“So what’s the single most important lesson that someone like me, a layman, as they used to say, can learn from this fact that mathematics ‘fits’ this universe?”
“The lesson,” said Bernie, “that we were discussing the other day. That you cannot look at the world around you and take anything for granted, take anything as just ‘being there,’ with no further discussion of it. Any law of physics that exists has to have come from somewhere. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, it’s a law. It has to be that way.’ No it doesn’t! When the universe came into being with the Big Bang, some fourteen billion years ago, all kinds of laws were already in place, and the universe went about organizing itself according to those laws. But where did those laws come from? The materialistically based scientists who believe in the Big Bang have no trouble accepting that these laws existed. They have to, because without a law, physical matter doesn’t know what to do with itself. Indeed, without a plethora of laws, it can’t exist to begin with.
“But the important thing is that a lot of those laws didn’t have to be ‘set’ at exactly the setting they have. In principle—and everyone agrees on this—they could have been set any old way at all. If any of the laws that were in place when our universe came into being—any single one of them at all—were set differently, then our universe would either be profoundly different from the way it is, or it wouldn’t exist at all, because the Big Bang would have been nothing more than a big blip, with the universe coming into being, and popping back out of it, instantly.
“Imagine the universe is like an oven. The knobs could be turned up to high, down to low, or anywhere in between. But the thing about our universe is that the settings for at least half a dozen constants were tuned so finely that the precision of it boggles the imagination.
“Take,” Bernie continued, “the gravitational constant, the ‘setting’ that gravity is set at. Gravity, as you know, is yet another of those many aspects of our life that we largely take for granted. We are all so used to gravity that we tend not to give it much thought, but that’s just because we’re used to it. After all, it’s been around as long as we have, so it’s easy to ignore it—as people in fact did for thousands of years before Newton drew our attention to its existence.
“Why does the earth attract objects to itself, so that if you climb a ladder and step off, you risk breaking your leg? Because, of course, of the force of gravity. But gravity does not need to be set at the specific setting it is in fact set at. It could be stronger (you’d break both legs falling off that ladder, and have a harder time climbing up it as well), or weaker (once you got to the top of that ladder, you could step off and drift slowly back down to earth). We understand how gravity is stronger or weaker on different planets, because of the different size of those planets. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a ‘setting’ that takes place before all that—a setting that defines exactly how strong the force of gravity is going to be that precedes the coming into existence of matter itself. A setting that was set at the very dawn of the universe.
“So . . . the common assumption is that the gravitational force just is what it is, and that’s the end of it. It could have been no different. But this is far from the case. Gravity in our universe has been set at a certain strength, and it has been set very precisely. We use mathematics to understand how God created the cosmos, because mathematics is the language this cosmos speaks. So if you want to understand God in our universe, you need to understand mathematics, because God is one hell of a mathematician.”