If you are reading this post. Congratulations! You’ve made it! The miracles that have happened to make this moment happen are simply unfathomable. And by miracle I am not talking about the biological one (that bit could have been a mistake :p). I am referring to the miraculous birth of our universe. Can you imagine one of the foundational elements that brought our universe into existence is dependent on a single ratio. The perfect ratio of hydrogen converting into helium, specifically only 0.007% of it’s mass had to convert into energy for everything to be the way it is. What’s crazier is that if this ratio would have been 0.006% the universe would never have formed, it simply would have been just hydrogen and nothing else. On the other hand, had this ratio been 0.008% the bonding would have been so abundant that all hydrogen would have been used up making the creation of the universe impossible. So it’s no grain of salt here or there that would mildly impact the taste. This is the difference between nothing and everything.
Speaking of the universe, another aspect of it’s creation is the time it took from a state of “singularity” to something that spans a hundred billion light years across. Would you care to guess the time it took for this to happen? How about one million million million million millionth of a second! Yes that long! It’s something impossible to visualize. Something so big that spans billions of light years was created in a time that is immeasurably small! It defies all human logic! The same thing can be said about gravity! It emerged at one ten millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second! I guess by now the concept is quite evident. The creation of the universe happened awfully fast! But what defies logic here again is the optimal amount of gravity that was created. Had it been fractionally weaker the universe would have remained a dispersed mass of matter void of life till eternity. Had it been fractionally stronger it would have collapsed onto itself to form a mass that would not have spread enough to form the planets, the stars and the suns.
So what’s the point? Is it just one big coincidence? Scientists argue that perhaps this process of the creation of the universe happened many times before, maybe even millions of times before. But only in our case did it happen just right! I guess it is hard to look at something like this without thinking about any religious connotations. So many things have gone right rather perfectly. Isn’t a more likely explanation that it is an act of God and that’s why it’s perfect. At least in my opinion, based on clear references in the Holy Quran, the act of creation of the universe was a simple divine command, “Be” and “It was!” The above to me are scientific explanations only confirming this idea of Divine Creation of the Universe. Whatever point of view you may hold or chose to take the birth of the universe is a fascinating occurrence that challenges our imagination in terms of how big it is and how fast it was created! So whatever you are doing…pause and reflect on this wondrous moment that gave birth to life as we know it!
Feature Image Courtesy of ESO/T. Preibisch