Life, the Universe and Everything

I was sitting the other day in Bullock’s Pasadena while my wife shopped for a wedding present. I was in a room that seemed to be filled with objets d’art, such as porcelain figurines. I was thinking of nothing in particular, just waiting for my wife and watching other shoppers.

I was seated at a desk on which I saw a small gold case filled with note paper. On the top sheet was written, in ink, the word Why? Nothing else.

As I sat there contemplating the anonymous “Why?” I began to wonder why whoever had written it had done so. Evidently the author was a person, presumably a woman, who, like the rest of us, had no real answer to that question.

Perhaps she had been waiting for someone else, too, and felt, as I did, rather desolate and abandoned. The question, of course, goes back to first things. Why are we here?

As I think I mentioned here recently, the brilliant British physicist Stephen Hawking says in his book “Black Holes and Baby Universes” that he too is searching for the answer.

“Since 1974,” he says, “I have been working on combining general relativity and quantum mechanics into a consistent theory. One result of that has been a proposal made in 1983 with Jim Hattle of the University of California at Santa Barbara: that both time and space are finite in extent, but they don’t have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The Earth’s surface is finite in area, but it doesn’t have any boundary. In all my travels, I have not managed to fall off the edge of the world. If this proposal is correct, there would be no singularities, and the laws of science would hold everywhere, including at the beginning of the universe. The way the universe would begin could be determined by the laws of science. I would have succeeded in my ambition to discover how the universe began. But I still don’t know why it began.”

That suggests to me that my guess as to why we are here is as good as his, though I know nothing of quantum mechanics and can’t even get my VCR-Plus to work.

The question was raised plaintively in that refrain of some years ago: “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

Those among us who believe in God have no problem. God created us for reasons of his own. But I keep wondering why, if God is infallible, did we turn out so bad? Assuming that he created us for his own entertainment, he must find watching us much like we find watching sex and violence on television. Surely he could have found some better way for us to procreate than by sexual union. Why did he create two sexes to begin with? Surely he could have foreseen the problems that would cause.

In the evolutionist view, we simply began as one-celled creatures who developed over the millennia into monkeys and then into human beings. That still leaves the question: Why?

Einstein once said, “I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.”

I don’t understand what Einstein meant by that any more than I understand his fourth dimension. But it suggests that he believed in God, and that God was responsible for us. That still doesn’t answer the question of why?

(As I was sitting there in Bullock’s, several young women strolled by. Some had toddlers at their sides or in strollers. It was a Friday. Why weren’t these young women working at their jobs while their children were in day-care centers? Isn’t that the way it is?)

I’m not a physicist, but I’m entitled to my own theory. I think we have evolved from one-celled creatures, but I think that somewhere along the line something went wrong. Perhaps the creator erred in giving us two sexes and letting us choose our mates. Obviously we have made a lot of other bad choices, and the result is war, crime and what’s happened to baseball.

As for why we’re here, I think Hawking and his colleagues will discover some day that we’re here because there’s nowhere else to be.

We might go to the end of the Earth looking for somewhere else to live, but of course, as Hawking points out, the Earth has no end. One good thing about the Earth being round is that you can’t fall off.

My wife finally came back for me. She was empty-handed. She had been unable to find a proper present. “What have you been doing?” she asked.

“Oh, thinking,” I said.

“What about?” she said.

“Oh,” I said, “nothing.”

What’s it all about, Alfie?

* Jack Smith’s column is published Mondays.