Are there a god

We learn at school that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — not even the USS Enterprise in Star Trek when its dilithium crystals are set to max. But is it true? A few years ago, a group of physicists posited that particles called tachyons travelled above light speed. Fortunately, their existence as real particles is deemed highly unlikely. If they did exist, they would have an imaginary mass and the fabric of space and time would become distorted — leading to violations of causality and possibly a headache for God.

It seems, so far, that no object has been observed that can travel faster than the speed of light. This in itself does not say anything at all about God. It merely reinforces the knowledge that light travels very fast indeed. If God exists, one question would be whether they would be bound to the laws of sciences such as physics Credit: Alamy.

Things get a bit more interesting when you consider how far light has travelled since the beginning. Or rather, the observable Universe's existence. As time goes on, the volume of space increases, and light has to travel for longer to reach us. There is a lot more universe out there than we can view, but the most distant object that we have seen is a galaxy, GN-z11, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This is approximately 1. But when the light "set off", the galaxy was only about three billion light years away from our galaxy, the Milky Way. We cannot observe or see across the entirety of the Universe that has grown since the Big Bang because insufficient time has passed for light from the first fractions of a second to reach us. Some argue that we therefore cannot be sure whether the laws of physics could be broken in other cosmic regions — perhaps they are just local, accidental laws.

And that leads us on to something even bigger than the Universe. Many cosmologists believe that the Universe may be part of a more extended cosmos, a multiverse , where many different universes co-exist but don't interact.

Inflation is an important theory because it can explain why the Universe has the shape and structure that we see around us. But if inflation could happen once, why not many times? We know from experiments that quantum fluctuations can give rise to pairs of particles suddenly coming into existence, only to disappear moments later. And if such fluctuations can produce particles, why not entire atoms or universes?

It's been suggested that , during the period of chaotic inflation, not everything was happening at the same rate — quantum fluctuations in the expansion could have produced bubbles that blew up to become universes in their own right. But how does God fit into the multiverse? One headache for cosmologists has been the fact that our Universe seems fine-tuned for life to exist.

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We need you. Events Find a Cru event near you. Explore Your Interests Use your hobbies and interests to find the best place for you to serve. In addition to that, we need them to have the right ingredients to bring about complex life. What about those building blocks; how likely are they to be there? Organic molecules are found in star forming regions, stellar remnants and interstellar gas, all Humphreys University of Minnesota. Believe it or not, these heavy elements — assembled into complex molecules — are unavoidable by this point in the Universe.

Enough stars have lived and died that all the elements of the periodic table exist in fairly high abundances all throughout the galaxy. But are they assembled correctly? Taking a look towards the heart of our own galaxy is molecular cloud Sagittarius B, shown at the top of this page. Organic molecules found throughout the Universe, particularly towards the galactic center.

Like ethyl formate left and n-propyl cyanide right , the former of which is responsible for the smell of raspberries! So with tens of billions of chances in our galaxy alone, and the building blocks already in place, you might think — as Fermi did — that the odds of intelligent life arising many times in our own galaxy is inevitable.

But first, we need to make life from non-life. This is no small feat, and is one of the greatest puzzles around for natural scientists in all disciplines: the problem of abiogenesis. At some point, this happened for us, whether it happened in space, in the oceans, or in the atmosphere, it happened, as evidenced by our very planet, and its distinctive diversity of life.

A young planet with the potential conditions for life could grow into an Earth-like world, or could But it could be far fewer than that as well. Was life on Earth likely? In other words, if we performed the chemistry experiment of forming our Solar System over and over again, would it take hundreds, thousands or even millions of chances to get life out once? So while, by many measures, there are plenty of intelligent animals, we are interested in a very particular type of intelligence.

Specifically, a type of intelligence that can communicate with us, despite the vast distances between the stars! So how common is that? From the first, self-replicating organic molecule to something as specialized and differentiated as a human being, we know we need billions of years of roughly constant temperatures, the right evolutionary steps, and a whole lot of luck. What are the odds that such a thing would have happened? Well, optimistically, maybe.

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. As we travel back in time towards the moment of the Big Bang, the universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until it finally comes to a point where the whole universe is a space so small that it is in effect a single infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole.

And just as with modern-day black holes, floating around in space, the laws of nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that here too time itself must come to a stop. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed 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. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful. One day, I hope we will know the answers to all these questions. But there are other challenges, other big questions on the planet which must be answered, and these will also need a new generation who are interested and engaged, and have an understanding of science.

How will we feed an ever-growing population? Provide clean water, generate renewable energy, prevent and cure disease and slow down global climate change? I hope that science and technology will provide the answers to these questions, but it will take people, human beings with knowledge and understanding, to implement these solutions. Let us fight for every woman and every man to have the opportunity to live healthy, secure lives, full of opportunity and love.

We are all time travellers, journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit. Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done. The Marginalian participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from any link on here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses.

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