Thank you for printing the advice of Stephen Hawking in the Sunday Monitor Forum to stay curious about the stars and our purpose among them. Hawking beat Lou Gehrig’s disease for more than three decades, while his body twisted and withered into mind. His math modeled a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after stars sprayed from a single point so we could someday stare in marvel. That’s the anthropic principle he laid out in his very readable book for nonmathematicians, A Brief History of Time.
Hawking showed that our winning sky has just the right 15 power balls, including the force of gravity, the speed of light, and the charge of the proton to produce a universe with our brains. The odds against us? Infinity times itself about fifteen times. That’s according to Hawking. So we’re plain miracles, and we face some hard questions.
Who or what made this deliberate universe? An evil god? A god who farms the galaxies of a parallel universe? A god who died billions of years ago? A living, omnipotent god of love? What do these possible gods say to the Khmer Rouge? We know this much. Hawking was as brave as a martyr, and he suffered a hundred thousand times as long as Jesus on a cross.
CHRISTOPHER DORNIN
Concord