Towards The Unified Cosmology
Towards The Unified Cosmology
By Lonny J. Brown
Cosmology is the study of everything there is. It asks nothing less than the ultimate questions about the origin, composition, behavior, and destiny of the entire universe. It approaches this lofty endeavor with a sophisticated protocol of observation, calculation, prediction, and confirmation. Within your lifetime, this rigorous discipline (using very powerful observatories and computers) has rendered such knowledge as the age of the universe (13.7 billion years), the number of galaxies in it (125 billion), and even their overall structure (a homogenous foam, with bubble-like voids)
As an empirical science, cosmology assumes nothing that cannot be proven – which means located, isolated, measured and replicated – and therein lies its blind spot. The one manifestation within the universe which space-age cosmologists do not examine is the examiner itself, AKA: mind, consciousness, awareness, sentience, spirit, intelligence, soul.. the persistent, mysterious innate property of life itself.
Although everyone is somehow certain that “it” exists, hard science has historically delegated all speculation about the unseen, metaphysical side of reality to the “soft” domains of religion and philosophy. This convenient agreement lasted centuries, and allowed universities and churches to coexist and thrive in relative peace. But, just as dogma has kept religious institutions lagging in Modern knowledge of the cosmos, so astrophysics without soul will never discover its Holy Grail of Grand Unification: the final Description of Everything.
Precision & Uncertainty
Most recently in the evolution of science, the necessarily super-precise discipline of sub-atomic particle physics has run head-on into the fuzzy influence of the observer on the observed, the experimenter on the experiment. In other words, the age-old assumed and rigorously enforced border between the objective and subjective worlds turns out to be quite porous. In cosmology as in life, everything affects everything else. The mystics were right: what we see depends on what we’re looking for. Thus was born quantum mechanics, with its famed Uncertainty Principle. On the most fundamental level of existence, predictability itself fails. Einstein resisted this new indeterminacy, famously contending that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” But evidently, He/She/It does like surprises.
The Last Great Question
Stephen Hawking – arguably the world’s greatest living theoretical physicist, and often compared to his academic predecessors, Newton and Einstein – was recently asked to name his ultimate unanswered question. He did not pose any of the remaining grand mysteries of classic cosmology, such as, what came before the Big Bang? What’s inside a black hole? What are dark matter and dark energy? Will the universe expand forever? Are there parallel universes?
Through a lifetime of research into the fundamental components and forces from the Big Bang forward, Hawking – like all good modern physicists – had become all too aware of the absurdly unlikely elemental coincidences necessary for matter and the universe to exist at all. On top of the critical formation of quarks, neutrons, electrons, atoms, molecules, elements, stars, planets and galaxies, the odds of conscious life spontaneously appearing – particularly a self-reflective, artistically creative, and cosmologically curious organism like mankind – approach absolute zero; and yet all this turned out to be inevitable. Now, in the last season of his glorious quest for ultimate knowledge, Stephen Hawking’s over-riding question has become “Why are we here?”
