29.3.06

Against the Odds

My interest was piqued by an article titled God by the Numbers where Charles White discusses some fairly large numbers and some fairly abstract ones.

He discusses the probability of the universe occuring through pure chance; 1 in 1010123 according to Beckenstein and Hawking.

In biology, he alludes to the Dembksi hypothesis, which suggests that for a one-celled organism to have enough time to evolve into a human being (at least one trillion cells) the universe would have to be 10162 times older than it is.

Then, in theoretical maths he explores the connection between e, pi and i - which is purely baffling. The serendipity of it caused one mathematics professor (an atheist) to write on the blackboard "There is no God, but if there were, this formula would be proof of his existence."

I'm not so sure that numbers or formulas can prove that, but these discoveries do tend to suggest that there is something else going on, that we don't yet fully understand.

To quote the subtitle from the article "Coincidence and random mutation are not the most likely explanations for some things."

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