Universe in Creation: A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life

by Roy R. Gould

We know the universe has a history, but does it also have a story of self-creation to tell? Yes, in Roy R. Gould’s account. He offers a compelling narrative of how the universe―with no instruction other than its own laws―evolved into billions of galaxies and gave rise to life, including humans who have been trying for millennia to comprehend it. Far from being a random accident, the universe is hard at work, extracting order from chaos.

Making use of the best current science, Gould turns what many assume to be true about the universe on its head. The cosmos expands inward, not outward. Gravity can drive things apart, not merely together. And the universe seems to defy entropy as it becomes more ordered, rather than the other way around. Strangest of all, the universe is exquisitely hospitable to life, despite its being constructed from undistinguished atoms and a few unexceptional rules of behavior. Universe in Creation explores whether the emergence of life, rather than being a mere cosmic afterthought, may be written into the most basic laws of nature.

Offering a fresh take on what brought the world―and us―into being, Gould helps us see the universe as the master of its own creation, not tethered to a singular event but burgeoning as new space and energy continuously stream into existence. It is a very old story, as yet unfinished, with plotlines that twist and churn through infinite space and time.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Physics

288 pages, Hardcover

Published May 7, 2018

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not a physicist. Nor do I play one on TV. I am, in fact, an English major but I enjoy books about biology and physics for what they tell us (me) about the meaning of life (or lack thereof).

In many ways this book reminds me of Robert Wright’s Non Zero – in fact, Gould’s book seems to pick up a thread from that book. Whereas Wright’s book focused on biology and human evolution, Gould’s book looks at physics and the evolution of the universe.

Wright posits that “The more closely we examine the drift of biological evolution and, especially, the drift of human history, the more there seems to be a point to it all. Because in neither case is ‘drift’ really the right word. Both processes have direction, an arrow.” (p. 3)

This kind of statement, of course, causes much heartburn in the scientific community. And rightly so. But Wright uses a wonderful analogy to explain his idea of “direction” or “destiny.”

It is the destiny of a poppy seed to become a poppy, he explains. It may not become a poppy – it may be baked into a bagel – but it is made or programmed by its very DNA to become a poppy. “Indeed, you might say the seed is designed to become a poppy, even though it was ‘designed’ not by a human designer, but by natural selection.” (p. 8) And this is Wright’s argument for human destiny.

The section titled “The Spirit of the Second Law” in Wright’s book has always fascinated me. In essence, the second law of thermodynamics states that things tend toward entropy – that is disorder. They go from order to disorder. A neat stack of cans in the grocery story inevitably collapses. Wright notes, though, that the structure of life seems to defy the second law. Life (and intelligence) forms order from disorder. Though by letter of the law, this is not accurate, one can’t help but sense the disconnect and the mystery raised here.

Wright discusses this only briefly, but it left me wanting more. I was hoping Gould would pick up this thread, but he doesn’t.

I must admit to being disappointed with this book. The big idea of this book appears to be that life is natural byproduct of the universe and there is probably life in many forms across the universe. This isn’t really news to me. I didn’t realize it was a radical idea.

I, for example, am fairly optimistic that life will be found on Mars. It may be microbial, but it will be life. And, as Gould points out, it is very likely that life will be found on a moon of Jupiter.

The quest in physics is to find the unifying theory that combines general relativity and quantum field theory. I would add that a truly unified theory needs to also include natural selection. Life is part of the universe, and it needs to be accounted for just like gravity.

This book seemed to promise more – it seemed to promise that it would show that life was somehow central to creation. It points to many odd paradoxes of life – life’s seeming violation of the spirit of the second law of thermodynamics, and the observer effect in physics. Then there are the odd facts about time (past, present and future all seem to exist at the same time) and convergent evolution. These seem to suggest an unusual place in the universe for life and for consciousness.

I thought Gould’s book would focus on these issues. But it doesn’t. Instead, the book seems to content to show that life is part of the universe’s “plan.”

I guess I’m still looking for the book I’d like to read.

[Book Shark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Universe in Creation: A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life by Roy R. Gould

“Universe in Creation” is a fascinating new perspective on how the universe is able to create itself but also generate more of itself. Astronomer, researcher at Harvard Center for Astrophysics Roy R. Gould provides readers with a new thesis on the ongoing process of the creation of the universe. This provocative 271-page book includes sixteen chapters broken out into the following three parts: One: Where Does the Universe Come From?, Two: How Did Structure Arise from Chaos?, and Three: Is Life Merely a Roll of the Cosmic Dice?

Positives:
1. Well-written and well-researched book. Gould provides
2. The fascinating topic of how the universe emerged.
3. Gould does a great job of breaking down his thesis in manageable sections while providing readers with great explanations on fundamental concepts in astrophysics with a touch of philosophy.
4. Examines the history of understanding the scale of the universe. “In all, there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe—and possibly infinitely more beyond what we do see.”
5. New ideas and ways of thinking about space. “It turns out that the galaxies are not moving through space. It is space itself that is coming into existence, welling up between the galaxies. We are witnessing evidence for a universe in creation. The creation of the universe was not an event that only happened long ago and far away. It is happening now, as you read this.”
6. Revisiting historical theories. “The theory required giving up Isaac Newton’s long-held belief that there is a single, universal scale of length and time. Instead, it must be that two observers who are in relative motion do not share the same scale of length and time.”
7. Awe inspiring ideas. The universe expands inward! “There is no limit to the volume of space you can create inside any boundary if you shrink the scale of distance sufficiently.”
8. Explains the Big Bang. “The Big Bang is not a theory or a hypothesis or a guess. It is a conclusion supported by many lines of evidence painstakingly gathered over the last century. The phenomenon was predicted by Albert Einstein’s model of gravity, which to date has survived every test thrown at it.” “These three lines of evidence—the expansion of the universe, the abundance of hydrogen and helium, and the light coming to us from the infant universe—are three solid pillars of evidence for the Big Bang.”
9. Provocative statements worth understanding. “Order could not have arisen if the infrastructure of the universe were not orderly.” Example, Furthermore, nature has arranged that no more than two electrons can occupy a single orbit in an atom.”
10. Describes how the structure arises from chaos. “In fact, the universe is the ultimate seed, the überseed, because it is completely self-sufficient, developing without the help of any outside materials at all.”
11. Describes how stars are the manufacturing center for the elements. “To summarize: A large star is not merely the workplace for creating the elements. It also has a mechanism to deliver these elements to the cosmos, a mechanism built into its very existence by the laws of nature. The mechanism is its own death.”
12. Climate change. “And the report recognized the possible effects of an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, beyond global warming. Among them were the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rising sea level, and the warming of the oceans.”
13. Describes how the life is written into the universe’s building plan. The three claims backed by evidence. “In short, these three basic observations about life—that it is extremely robust across billions of years, that it is extremely diverse across millions of species, and that it is ubiquitous across the planet’s many environments—are strong circumstantial evidence that life didn’t merely show up: life seems to belong here.”
14. The power of the theory of evolution. “What was once a nineteenth-century theory is now supported by such overwhelming evidence as to be part of our heritage for all time. Darwin’s discovery of evolution through natural selection remains one of the most moving of all scientific breakthroughs—not least because it reveals that every living thing on Earth is our cousin. It unifies all life on Earth.”
15. Looks at the connection between chance and life. “Chance is necessary to ensure a diversity of proteins; if the bacterial population has enough diversity, then one of its members will survive the effects of the antibiotic.” “The immune system illustrates one way that nature can produce enormous diversity from a relatively small amount of information: just a few genes can create a trillion different antibodies.”
16. Life from nonlife. “These experiments provide further evidence that life can arise naturally from the universe’s initial conditions. If nature came with a manual for living things, one of its instructions would be simple: keep making a diversity of proteins. The proteins will do the rest. Life doesn’t need a magic formula for the amino acid sequence of a useful protein. It doesn’t need an infinity of universes to keep rolling the cosmic dice. The dice in our own universe are already loaded.”
17. Explores a few of life’s innovations that have appeared repeatedly (convergent evolution exists and is the norm). “Among fish, bioluminescent organs have arisen independently at least seventeen times.”
18. The challenge of describing physical sensations. “The reason is that there are no scientific descriptors for the sensation of seeing red or blue. For example, these sensations make no contact with the fundamental concepts of physics, such as mass, length, and time. You can experience the sensation, but you cannot characterize it with the parameters of science.” “The sensation of color is an example of an emergent phenomenon. This is a phenomenon that arises from a complex system and that cannot be understood simply as the sum of its parts.”
19. How the Mandelbrot pattern is important to understanding a universe without a designer. “It illustrates that simple rules can give rise to extraordinarily complex patterns.”
20. Describes the search for life on exoplanets.

Negatives:
1. Lack of supplementary material.
2. No timelines or links to outside material.
3. The chapter on Design Without a Designer was in my view the weakest. I wanted a bit more substance.

In summary, what a fun, enjoyable and provocative read this was. Gould expertly explores the “somehow” of physicist Wheeler’s conjecture, “Is the machinery of the universe so set up to produce intelligent life” (the creation of the universe)? In this wonderful book he embarks on a quest to provide readers with a compelling argument on how science answers these questions. Throughout the book you are being stimulated with a trip through the cosmos. I highly recommend it!

Further recommendations: “A Universe from Nothing” by Lawrence Krauss, “Until the End of Time”, “The Elegant Universe” and “The Hidden Reality” by Brian Greene, “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself and “From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time” by Sean M. Carroll, “Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution” by Neil deGrasse Tyson, , “To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science” by Steven Weinberg, “Why Does E=mc2?” and “Wonders of the Universe” by Brian Cox, “Longitude” by Dava Sobel, “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan, and “The Grand Design” by Stephen Hawking.

[Michael Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Universe in Creation is a fascinating, counter-intuitive look at the creation of the universe and the seemingly confounding emergence of intelligent life. Among Gould's most fascinating contentions is that the existence of life isn't a product of chance as so many physicists and biologists contend.
"Although we still don't know the answer for certain," Gould argues, "the available evidence suggests that the universe may well be set up to guarantee the emergence of intelligent life."

But Gould isn't making a religious or creationist argument (although his suggestion that the universe is operating with a "conscious" plan, can sometimes feel that way). Instead, he's arguing that more likely than the random product of chance over billions of years with trillions of molecular combinations occurring over vast time and space, the basic rules of the universe seem inevitably directed towards intelligent life.

The universe has "infrastructure rules" - what we think of as the basic forces of nature. No one really knows, he explains, "why the forces of nature have the relative strengths that they do. For example, electromagnetism is about a trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravity." Electromagnetism and other elements of the forces of nature are key to the way in which the universe exists.

But, "why these specifications and not some other set?" Gould asks. Ultimately, Gould argues that all of the infrastructure as we know it is linked together because each piece is necessary for life to emerge. Gould then goes on to list the many elements of the forces of nature that must exist exactly as they do in order for life to emerge. The fact that all atoms of a kind (hydrogen, for example) are "identical to every other. Not just 'sort of the same,' or very similar - absolutely identical." It turns out that this uniformity is essential for the elements of life to develop.

"Another feature of nature's building plan is that space has three dimensions.... But it turns out that only in a three-dimensional world do sable orbits exist. So neither atoms nor solar systems would exist without this specification." If may be hard to imagine a world with more than three dimensions, but science has already discovered and/or hypothesized multiple different dimensions so a structure with more or less than three dimensions isn't a new concept.

The fact that the building blocks of matter all have very specific masses, turns out to be a critical piece of infrastructure as well. "If you and I were to go on a diet and lose a few pounds this week, it might make us happy, but it certainly wouldn't alter the arc of our lives. But if a neutron lost the same proportion of its weight - say about 2 percent - the world would be very different, and you and I wouldn't be in it."

"So why is the infrastructure of the universe so hospitable to life" he asks? "How were these specifications made in the first place? This problem is known as the fine-tuning problem. It is one of nature's deepest mysteries." In answer, Gould goes on to review the three most widely recognized explanations for the fine-tuning problem but ultimately makes the case that it is the universe's "plan" (and not necessarily in a theological sense) that led to the structure of the universe we know and the emergence of life.

Near the end of the book, Gould argues that all the evidence he has laid out about the infrastructure of the universe "will support three claims: 1. Nature's crowning accomplishment is the creation of the molecular machinery of life, rather than any particular life-form. 2. The machinery of life is set up to preserve itself by replicating itself faithfully. To do this, it relies on the properties of molecules, which are ultimately dictated by the universe's building plan. 3. The machinery of life is also set up to innovate - to generate as many life-forms as possible, including intelligent life. The universe uses chance events to generate this diversity. But the viability of all the life-forms in existence is the result of molecular interactions whose properties, again, are dictated by the universe's building plan."

Universe in Creation takes us on a fascinating journey of discovery about our universe and along the way makes a compelling (at least to a scientific layman) argument that the existence of intelligent life may not be entirely a product of chance. Along the way he also notes that the universe didn't really begin in one moment with the Big Bang but rather is on a continuous journey of creation. I suspect that his theory is controversial in the scientific community, but he is not the first scientist to wonder about all of this. Esteemed physicist John Archibald Wheeler first introduced the idea of the "universe's plan" when he asked in 1983 "is the machinery of the universe so set up, and from the very beginning, that it is guaranteed to produce intelligent life at some long-distant point in its history-to-be?"

Gould tells a great story, full of wonder and amazement and does so with the basic elements of our universe as the main characters. It is a surprisingly easy to read, enjoyable, and compelling narrative about why we exist, and it kept me glued to the pages until the conclusion. One of the best and deepest "science for laymen" books that I ever read. Highly recommended.

[Wing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterly crafted, this book is about the Participatory Anthropic Principle. It starts by explaining how the universe creates and maintains entropy density gradients. This is the source of disequilibrium which in turns powers life. It then poetically presents the teleological argument for the inevitability of life by describing the concept of the fine-tuned universe, the ubiquity of life, and evolutionary convergences. To refine the argument, the relationship between stochasticity and causality is examined. It is a pity that the metabolism-first hypothesis of the origin of life is missing from the account, otherwise the argument would have been even more cogent. The hard question of the emergence of first-person qualia is briefly brought up, which refutes the completeness of any materialist reductionism. At this point, it becomes clear that the author tries to link transcendental idealism with the Participatory Anthropic Principle so as to render ontology and epistemology intertwined and self-referential. If there is anything to criticise, it is that very occasionally some analogies can be a bit strained and almost gratuitous, and can loosen the underlying logic very slightly. Otherwise it is succinct and clear. Four stars.

[Larry Schweinhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Putting It All Together

I bought this book because I wanted to understand the origin of the universe better. It did achieve that goal. But then it turns past astronomy, the author’s home discipline, to life, as the epitome of the continuing growth of the universe. Although I did not expect to learn about biology from this book, it is well-done and flows from the author’s recognition that the universe continues to grow. This book presents the intriguing idea that the universe has a plan, an idea that borders on the heresy of religion, but that this plan does not mean it has a planner. While plan does imply a planner, I can’t think of a better word than plan; “structure,” for example, doesn’t really get it. Another approach might be that we have little idea what the word “God” might mean, although some of us pretend like we do.

[luna ☽︎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Voy a estudiar astrofísica you mfuckers no han podido descubrir las razones de la existencia ill do it myself then !!

Que mejor forma de curar las crisis existenciales/suicidas que leer un libro sobre como hay un plan implícito en el universo y que existimos por una mera casualidad cósmica.

La vida es para vivirla, para experimentar todo lo experimentable con los sentidos, podemos morirnos todos mañana y las estrellas siguen brillando y todo sigue existiendo hasta el equilibrio final pero al menos estamos aquí para verlas a billones de años luz !

Quizá y solo quizá somos el resultado no esperado del universo creciente, quizá no fuimos destinados a ser pero lo hacemos existo solo para ser testigo de aquel show interdimensional que jamás podré tocar.

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 5 out of 5]

In turns lyrical and speculative, Universe in Creation makes both a cosmological and evolutionary case that life's emergence was inevitable. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2020...

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but informative book that takes us from the origins of the universe to the origins of life, and more, explaining complex phenomena in an entertaining and accessible fashion. I learnt many things I didn't know, and Gould puts forward a convincing case for the creation of life and the existence of the universe being integral to one another.

[Michael Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brief history of universe. Argues that life is built in function of nature, convincing arguments.

[Imran Nasrullah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice little book on Cosmology that argues the universe was pre-programmed for life and intelligence. Author of course does not say who did the pre-programming.

[PRANAB KUMAR KUMAR · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is an excellent book. I refer everyone to read.

[Thomas Ray]

QH325 .G68 2018 Steenbock Library

[Mark Sebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is amazing. It challenges the current idea that chance is the only good explanation for the phenomenon we call life and that in a strange way, the universe has a plan. Or seems to have a plan. It doesn't seem to really answer the big question, but it shows the bias that scientists can have by overlooking the design or built-in plan the universe seems to have. No Designer or God is posited. Rather, the author shows that appealing to such arguments isn't necessary, and the mystery of life and how it arises is baked into the universe. Much in the same way, the beauty and infinite diversity of the Mandelbrot set was not designed but encoded into simple mathematical rules. I do feel like he could have explored this even further. However, I am floored by this book and the possible implications. I would give this a 4.5, largely because I feel like he could have sent the argument home even stronger.


The book was also easy to read, and i would recommend it to anyone.