A Marble, an Orange, and a Grape Seed:

In the twentieth century, science in its various disciplines gave us a radically new understanding of reality, an understanding far different from that which had prevailed since the last scientific revolution in the 18th century. We were blessed with an explosion of extraordinary, creative minds, many of them German: Albert Einstein, and less well-known physicists like Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg. Tools like radio telescopes, linear accelerators, and other highly technical equipment enabled researchers to confirm many of their theories, and deepen our understanding of our world.

This morning I want to take you on a tour from the outer reaches of the universe to the inner workings of the atom. I promise that it won't be too technical, though it will involve some very strange concepts. I am not a scientist, only an eager student. I did confirm the content of this morning's talk with a physicist friend of mine. I will be using a few numbers, but I have brought along some visual aids that I hope will ease the pain. When our tour is done, I'll look at the implications of these scientific findings for our religious understanding of the world.

Let's begin at the beginning: the Big Bang. The general consensus is that the Universe in which we live began some 15-20 billion years ago with a cataclysmic explosion called the Big Bang. Actually, the Big Bang was not exactly the beginning. Just prior to the Big Bang, everything that constitutes our Universe -- every last iota of it -- was compressed within a ball of pure energy. Some scientists believe that this was just the most recent event in a series of expansions and contractions, each lasting about 90 billion years or so.

We should stop our tour here for a second to talk about the size of a billion, which is a word I will be using often in this talk. For most of us outside the Washington Beltway, a billion is pretty much an incomprehensible number. I like to think of it this way. Imagine that you are counting seconds. Think of it as a slow heart rate of 60 per minute. Count those heartbeats -- one, two, three, four -- 60 beats per minute, 60 minutes per hour.

Let's say you work at this full time: eight hours a day, five days a week, with a two week vacation and a few holidays off. How long do you think it would take to get to a billion? The answer is that it would take you 145 years to get to a billion heartbeats. That's a long time until retirement. In comparison, the federal government spends five billion dollars every single day. They count a lot faster than the rest of us.

Let me try to put the size of the Universe into perspective. Let's go back to that concept of a billion -- are you still counting heartbeats? Anyway, suppose we shrink the entire Universe down by a factor of a billion. If we did so, the big blue marble that we call the earth would be the size of this blue marble in my hand -- about half an inch in diameter. At this scale, the moon is a grape seed - 1/8th of an inch in diameter -- about 15 inches away. The sun? That's a ball about 4 1/2 feet in diameter. It's out in the Telxon parking lot about 490 feet away from this pulpit. Pluto, at the edge of our solar system, is a tiny speck smaller than our grape-seed moon, almost four miles away. So if we shrank our solar system, way out to cold, distant Pluto, by a billion times, the entire thing could be contained in the area between Wallhaven and Medina Line Road.

And how far away would the nearest star be in this little model of the Universe? On our scale of one to a billion, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be about 25,000 miles out into space. No wonder they aren't as bright as the sun! And the diameter of our galaxy, the Milky Way, would be 25,000 times that distance. And the Universe contains at least 100 billion galaxies.

Outer space is just that - almost endless stretches of nothingness. At the same time, that nothingness contains random concentrations of matter and energy, every bit of which came from that initial explosion 20 billion years ago.

Some of you probably already have a headache just trying to imagine all of that space. So let's refocus our tour closer to home. I mean really close. Let's look inside that tiny building block of all that is - the atom.

When I went to school, and probably when most of you did, the drawings of atoms in the textbooks showed a nucleus of round balls marked protons and neutrons, surrounded at fairly close hand by smaller black spheres called electrons. This image, however, conveyed some very misleading information.

For one thing, these particles are themselves composed of combinations of items physicists call quarks. For another, like the stars, the particles are far, far apart, as I will describe in a moment. Lastly, the particles we know as protons, neutrons, and electrons can also be described as concentrations of energy. If you do an experiment looking for particles, such as those bubble track pictures you may have seen here or there, you'll find particles. But if you do another experiment looking for waves, like waves created by the wind rippling across a pond, you'll find . . . waves.

Before exploring that just a bit further, let me digress one more time with a few facts to give you an idea of the atom's size. Suppose we were to take this orange, and expand it about 200 million times, so that it became as large as the entire earth. What we would see, if we could see into it, is that it would be absolutely packed with little structures about the size of the marble. These are its atoms. Billions and billions and billions of them.

Now let's look inside one of those atoms. Remember, we had to enlarge the orange 200 million times just to get the atom as big as this marble. Now let's enlarge again, stretching that marble-sized atom to a sphere as large as this sanctuary. Let's stretch it a bit further and include the narthex. Out at the edge of our enlarged atom are the electrons flitting around in orbit. The nucleus will be there in the middle of the room. About where _____ is sitting. How big do you think the nucleus is? As big as this pulpit? The orange? The marble. No. The atom's nucleus will still be smaller than this grape seed.

Yet within all this space, are extremely important concentrations of stuff. We usually think of that stuff as matter: buildings like this church, people's bodies like yours and mine, cars and houses and trees and everything we think of as reality.

But physicists tell us that at the fundamental level, within the tiny structures we call atoms, those concentrations become not provable realities, but probabilities. I mentioned Werner Heisenberg at the beginning of my talk. Heisenberg showed that at the atomic level, if we measure a particle's location, we can not know its momentum or movement. If we measure its momentum, we can not be sure of its location. You may have heard of this idea. Physicists call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Actually, this Principle shouldn't surprise us too much. Let's take an example closer to our own experience. Suppose you have a pet cat. Now, if you know cats at all, you know that they occasionally have bursts of uncontrolled energy in which they hurtle themselves randomly about the house. This is sort of the way atomic particles behave.

If you took a picture of this, using very fast film, with instant developing, you could know where the cat was at the time you took the picture. But you wouldn't know how fast the cat was moving or what direction it might go in after you took the picture.

On the other hand, suppose you put a video camera on a tripod and tape the cat running by. You could tell whether the cat was running from left to right or right to left. And with a few calculations you could probably figure out its speed. But your tape is actually a series of frames, so you couldn't actually prove where the cat was in between the frames, no matter what frame speed you taped at.

The problem with atomic particles is even worse. Say you want to measure a single electron. To observe its location, you have to shine a light on it. That means bombarding it with photons, which are particles of light. But they are very unusual particles. They have no mass. They are tiny bits of pure energy, moving at the speed of, well, light. So when we hit the electron with one or more photons, we add a bit of energy to it. This changes the electron's momentum. Furthermore, changes in energy levels are associated with electrons jumping into higher or lower orbits around that tiny nucleus so far away.

The bottom line of all this is that when we speak of atomic particles, we can only speak in terms of probabilities, of calculations of the likelihood that such and such a particle can be found in a given area. Sort of like the probability that x number of teenagers will be found at a given Gap store at a given mall on Saturday afternoon. You can figure the odds, but you can't know for sure. And with atomic particles, you can't stand at the door and count them.

Recall that I talked about our perception of reality as concentrations of stuff. Well, to us it certainly looks like stuff. But again, at the atomic level, all bets are off and all the rules change. Actually, there aren't even very many rules at all.

There is one rule we have all heard of. That's the rule of Albert Einstein that E = Mc2. What does that mean? Well, the rule has complex meaning. One aspect of its meaning is mathematical, but a more profound aspect of its meaning leads us to a deeper understanding of the true nature of the universe.

You may have heard of the conservation laws. No, I am not talking about conserving rain forests or land, though those are good ideas. I'm talking about the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of matter. In our daily lives, we are constantly converting one form of energy into another, like turning the potential energy in gasoline into kinetic energy in our automobile engines, and controlling that energy in such a way that it brought us here. Or we convert matter from one form to another, in ways like burning a log in a fireplace, using a little heat energy to convert the wood into carbon and water and various gases.

What Einstein did was to combine those laws. He said that at least at the atomic level, you could convert mass into energy. And vice versa. His calculations showed that you could obtain enormous quantities of energy from even tiny bits of matter. The most well-known result of this knowledge was of course the atomic bomb. Suppose you could convert my orange here into energy. If you could do that completely, this little orange would yield the equivalent of about six billion kilowatt hours of electricity. And if you could convert all the energy in ten such oranges, about five pounds worth, you would get roughly the same energy output as all the nuclear power plants in the United States produce in an entire year.

So twentieth-century science tells us that the world is a vast unity. The universe, every bit of it, comes from that Big Bang at the beginning, that explosive conversion of primal, pure Energy into the stuff of the Universe as we know it, all of its matter, and all of its energy in all its forms.

The constituents of the Universe, whether in the form of energy or of matter, are an unfolding of its Unity. Not Uniformity, but Unity. The Universe contains randomly distributed diversity in constant flux. It is "lumpy" if you will. We readily notice that lumpiness. We distinguish between this and that, between you and me, between us and them. But at bottom, we must also acknowledge the essential Unity of the Universe and everything in it. We are truly part of an interdependent web of all existence.

From the Sufi Ibn Arabi come these words:

Allah is essentially all things. He permeates through all beings created and originated. . . . He who knows himself understands that his existence is not his own existence, but his existence is the existence of Allah.

In the third century A.D., Plotinus used the term Soul in writing about the divine energy:

This universe is a single living being, embracing all living things within it, and possessing a single Soul that permeates all its parts. . . . And vast and diversified though this universe it, it is one by the power of soul and a god because of soul.

David of Dinant wrote in the 13th century:

It is manifest that there is only one substance, not only of all bodies, but also of all souls, and that this substance is nothing else but God Himself. It is clear, then, that God and Matter and Mind are the same substance.

Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake, wrote:

There is one simple Divinity found in all things, once fecund nature, preserving mother of the universe in so far as she diversely communicates herself, casts her light into diverse subjects, and assumes various names. . . . This Nature is none other than God in things.

Some Christian theologians expressing similar thoughts were not martyred. The famous mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, "God is in the innermost part of each and every thing . . . All things are contained in the One." He was not killed for these beliefs, though he was condemned as a heretic.

Nicholas of Cusa was a 15th century scholar who developed a skill for finding and collecting ancient manuscripts. This skill was of value to the Church, and Nicholas spent many years as a papal legate, traveling throughout the world building up the papal collections, and simultaneously his own private library. Eventually, he was even made a cardinal.

In the course of building his collection, Nicholas was exposed to much esoteric thought. Listen to his words:

Divinity is the enfolding and unfolding of everything that is. Divinity is in all things in such a way that all things are in divinity.

My final quotation is from the 17th century Jewish philosopher Spinoza:

Nothing exists but God. God is one, that is, only one substance can be granted to exist in the universe . . . Whatsoever is, is God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

In 1720, an Irish writer named John Toland gave these kinds of beliefs a name: pantheism. Toland dreamed of a network of pantheist clubs. He was not able to establish this network, but thanks to the internet, those of us who share pantheist beliefs can come together even though we are scattered all over the globe.

I began with an updated version of the Gospel of John, Chapter 1, Verse 1. John goes on to talk about the light of the world, identified with Jesus. Let me end my talk with a slightly altered version of the next few verses, substituting the words "Divine Energy" for the masculine pronouns, and "Universe" for the word "God". His Gospel would then continue thus:

Divine Energy was in the beginning with the Universe; all things were made through Divine Energy, and without Divine Energy was not anything made that was made. In Divine Energy was life, and the life was the light of humans. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.