Origin of universe and beginnings of life

Origin of the Universe - What's the Latest Theory?
When it comes to the origin of the universe, the "Big Bang Theory" and its related Inflation Universe Theories (IUTs) are today's dominant scientific school of thought. According to these interrelated notions, the universe was created between 13 and 20 billion years ago from the random, cosmic explosion (or expansion) of a subatomic ball that hurled space, time, matter and energy in all directions. Everything - the whole universe -- came from an initial speck of infinite density (also known as a "singularity"). This speck (existing outside of space and time) appeared from no where, for no reason, only to explode (start expanding) all of a sudden. Although this sounds contrary to our common sense everyday notions of what is possible or not, however, as has been frequently noted by men of science over centuries, the universe need not be in line with human expectations of common sense. Ok, I digress a little bit. Back to the original theme… over a period of billions of years, this newly created space, time, matter and energy evolved into remarkably-designed and fully-functional stars, galaxies and planets, including our earth.

Here's what the experts are saying about the origin of the universe:

NASA: "In the more than 70 years since the discovery that that the Universe is expanding, we have made some significant steps in understanding how the Universe began and how it must have evolved to be what it is today. We know this: galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed from tiny fluctuations in the early Universe. We can measure these fluctuations by mapping the cosmic background radiation and relate them to the structures which we observe today. However, many challenges remain…"
(http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/mysteries_l1/origin_destiny.html)

UC Berkeley: "The big bang theory states that at some time in the distant past there was nothing. A process known as vacuum fluctuation created what astrophysicists call a singularity. From that singularity, which was about the size of a dime, our Universe was born."
(http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/IUP/Big_Bang_Primer.html)

University of Michigan: "About 15 billion years ago a tremendous explosion started the expansion of the universe. This explosion is known as the Big Bang. At the point of this event all of the matter and energy of space was contained at one point. What existed prior to this event is completely unknown and is a matter of pure speculation. This occurrence was not a conventional explosion but rather an event filling all of space with all of the particles of the embryonic universe rushing away from each other."
(http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm)

PBS: There was an "initial explosion" of a "primordial atom which had contained all the matter in the universe."
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp27bi.html)

Origin of Life - What's the latest theory?

When it comes to the origin of life, "evolutionary theory" is still the foundation of today's scientific worldview. The conventional school text books teach that organic life sprung from non-organic matter exclusively through a natural mechanistic process on a pre-biotic earth. There is another school of thought that comets brought the necessary elements of life to earth and kick-started this whole process. To my mind, this is just skirting the issue. Even if comets did bring elements of life from extra-terrestrial, indeed extra-solar sources, life, in the end, had to originate somewhere. If not on earth, then somewhere else… in that sense, we are all, everything on earth, aliens in a manner of speaking… I digress again and apologies for that.

Back to the main theme of origins. That original life form then evolved into more complex life forms through a natural process of random mutations and natural selection. In a nutshell, the majority scientific hypothesis is that matter randomly acting on matter for a long period of time created everything we see. Although there are several holes in this theory as well.

Consider the highly evolved sense of echo location in bats. According to the theory, it would imply that that in response to the necessity of finding food during the dead of night, bats evolved this capability. However, if one looks closely, then there are several serious problems… how did the bats evolve both ultrasonic equipment to generate the sound waves and the ears to catch them back along with necessary brain capacity to process all of the information. Even today, doing that requires high level technology in form of radars and ultrasonic capabilities by humans and it wasn’t developed until Second World War… evolutionary theory does not adequately explain simultaneous evolution of higher order features in animals, let alone the origin of life itself. But that’s the best we’ve got…

However, there are serious questions… How can nothing explode? Where did all that matter and energy come from? What caused its release? How did this explosion of everything (from nothing) order itself? How can simplicity become complexity? Where did the chemical elements come from? Where did the mathematical laws and physical properties come from? How do we explain the design, complexity and fine-tuning inherent in spiral galaxies, solar systems, and stars? Questions such as these are pushed into the realm of meta-physics and avoided at best by the current scientific establishments. Religions, of course, have the simple answer – GOD or some other being answering to that description created this entire out of nothing, or his thigh or some other part. I do not wish to be irreverent or blasphemous but find all this just a plain way of saying – folks – although we seem to have microwaves, television, seem to be able to send out spacecrafts to other planets – we are still largely ignorant about the reality around us and how it came about.

The mad dash to find ever more number of elementary particles – does not seem to have an end. With ever more powerful colliders, we seem to find more and more elementary particles… we are getting besides the point again… habit of mine – opens up multiple threads of thought and execution simultaneously.

How did life come from an inorganic soup? How did the bacteria come about? How did a bird come from a lizard? Why don't we see birds come from lizards today? Why are there no transitional fossils in our museums today, the so called missing links? Why have we never observed beneficial mutations? Where did the information code in DNA come from? Where did the language convention that interprets DNA come from? How can we explain the random development of the human eye, reproductive system, digestive tract, brain, heart and lungs? What about the subconscious mind? What about love, morality, ethics, and emotions? Can these things really evolve gradually and randomly over time? By the way, I am in no way affiliated with or subscribe to – intelligent design philosophy. Never have, never will. Imagine if the question relating to terrestrial biology can be so difficult and mind boggling, what about extra-terrestrial biology, and beings? But first I wanted to get my head cleared up on terrestrial biology and open up the website – Google! This is one thing about the internet that I love. Google has turned the internet as it was supposed to be. Near instantaneous searchable repository of world information.

I opened the site on tree of life. The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 9000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. I opened one on life on earth, and was stunned by the first page I saw. They say and I quote - “The rooting of the Tree of Life, and the relationships of the major lineages, are controversial. The monophyly of Archaea is uncertain, and recent evidence for ancient lateral transfers of genes indicates that a highly complex model is needed to adequately represent the phylogenetic relationships among the major lineages of Life.”

Behind a lot of poppycock and scientific jargon hides the fact that they don’t know it yet! Regardless of any theoretical problems with the tree itself, what about all the evolutionary processes required to get to the first simple life forms at the bottom of the chart in the first place? This seems to be a big mystery and while there are debates, they mostly border on the Meta part of it rather than actual solid physics or biology. We seem to understand a lot of rules which shape the nature as we understand it today, but nothing about how these rules came about and more importantly why…

Watch out for this space... i'll be back with some more thoughts - profound and profane, both :-)