The Signature of God

Craig Venter announced today that they have created the first fully synthetic cell.  The DNA of these cells was created on a computer, assembled in yeast, placed into a bacterium and is now happily replicating itself without further intervention from man.

This is profoundly significant, but I'm not going to go into why.

I have a number of friends that believe mankind is overstepping it's bounds by mucking about with DNA like this. They think that we are trespassing into the reserved province of God.  I think that's a crock. I think God created the genetic code so that we could eventually read it and eventually change it and eventually have dominion over all the creatures on the earth.

And, well - you know - make cool new ones if we feel like it.

Venter's scientists signed the DNA inside the artificial life they created in a number of ways:

• They encoded the names of 46 of the contributing scientists.
• They embedded the URL of a website and an email address.
• They included three relevant and semi famous quotations.

I like this thing that we do when we create something cool... We sign it.

Some say we are created in God's image... I wonder if he signs the cool things he creates too.

Carl Sagan, in one of his books... I think it was Contact, suggested the idea that God might have signed the universe and he speculates on at least one way that God might have done that. [Note: this is from memory and I read that book a couple decades ago...] In the book, (but not in the movie) a character is told to study the number Pi. After doing this for a few years, a couple hundred thousand digits in, a section is found that is only ones and zeros. The character then discovers that if you arrange these ones and zeros into a square 100 characters wide and 100 characters deep, that the pattern of the ones forms a perfect circle in a field of zeros.

Think about that for a minute. Understand that Pi is not just any old number... It does not merely define the relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle: Pi is a number that defines the shape of euclidean space, it defines the relationship of length to width to area. it defines the relationship of space to itself.... it's a very special number. Of all the possible shapes that could have been embedded in any of the possible numbers in all of the universe... a circle secretly encoded inside of Pi is simply too awesome to be accidental. It irresistibly implies intention. It whispers to us that God himself is not above strutting a bit. It trumpets authorship by being so beautiful. So blatantly elegant. If God was going to sign the universe, that would be a pretty cool way to do it.

Well, I am often quite reckless in my writing. Now is no exception:

I have found two things that I believe to be signatures of God. If you have a tolerance for Mathematics - which seems to be the language that God used to write the universe - I'll share them with you now. I promise to keep the math as simple as I possibly can and to err on the side of oversimplification not complication.

The first signature is inherent in an equation that you are familiar with. It's the most famous equation in all of physics:

E = mc²

You think you know what this equation means, It means that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. Well, this is true enough. This equation does say that if you take the amount of matter in something and then multiply it by some number you will end up with another number that tells you how much energy is in that matter. Just as you supposed it did.

But this is not the coolest thing about this equation. If this was all it did, it would certainly not be a candidate as a possible signature of God. The coolest thing is what number it turns out to be that you multiply the mass by to get the energy. This number is called a constant: it does not change. There are many constants in physics - just one for instance is the Universal gravitational Constant. It is some rather obscure number that when used in a certain way will tell you the amount of force that gravity exerts between two masses. It's numeric value is .0000000000667300 and the units it is in: m³ kg^-1 s^-1 are physically meaningless. They are chosen so that the gravitational equations balance. The units have no actual real world interpretation and the number itself is seemingly arbitrary, without any relationship to anything else that we know of.  We discovered its value by experimentation and this is it's actual value, but it could have been anything. I mean there is nothing that says it could not have been a thousand times weaker or stronger, it's just a number - any number.

But lets consider the constant we find in E = mc². That c² part. c is the speed of light. The little 2 means to multiply it by itself, so c² means the speed of light times the speed of light. A speed is a distance divided by a time. The speed of light is a very very special number in this universe. The speed of light is the fastest that anything can ever go. It is the speed limit in our universe. There is no other speed limit. this is the only one. It is unique. So this equation expresses a relationship between the four things in the universe: Matter, Energy, Space (distance) and Time. Not only does it show a relationship between the four things that compose the universe (and only those four things), it shows that they have a beautifully simple and elegant relationship to one another. It says that if you take the amount of matter in a thing and multiply it - not by just any old number - but by the speed limit of the universe (squared) you will get the amount of Energy in that thing. This is truly astounding. if it does not astonish you to the point of stopping you dead in your tracks, then I'm not explaining it well enough.

The magic is that this constant COULD have been any old raggedy number - just something picked from the whole range of possible numbers - something mangy and arbitrary like the universal gravitational constant. But instead it is the limiting speed of the universe. If you were going to pick a number that would most miraculously represent space and time together... you would choose a speed, because that is what speeds are, the relationship between space and time. And if you were going to pick a speed, you might choose the highest possible one. And you might choose the ONLY speed in the universe that is constant to all observers regardless of their frame of reference [here I successfully resisted trying to explain relativity. Hooray!]..... And you might or might not expound proudly upon the fact that the existence of an upper limit to possible speed says very deep, very profound things about the nature and relationship that matter, energy, space and time have to one another... and well...

It is just so damned cool... can't you see it?  It is simply, flat-out, mind-bogglingly cool that these four things, matter energy space and time can have this incredibly simple relationship to one another. Like the circle inside of Pi, it simply trumpets authorship.

Well, it does for me anyway.

I'll not belabor this point any further - you either see it or you don't.

I once tried to explain this point to a friend over a barbecue grill. He said, "But that is just something that Einstein made up, isn't it?"

"No", I said, "It is something GOD made up - Einstein just discovered it."

He didn't get it. Far as I know he still doesn't.

Frustrating.

This post has become tooooooo long. I will share the second signature with you next week.

Craig Venter unveils "synthetic life" | Video on TED.com

-j