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The Mind of God, by Paul Davies. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Paper, $12.00. Pp. 254.
Paul Davies, who was professor of theoretical physics at the University of Newcastle and now holds the same position at the University of Adelaide, Australia, tries, as a scientist of distinction, to answer the question, does science lead to God? Others, like Stephen Hawking in his phenomenal best seller A Brief History of Time and Roger Penrose in The Emperor's New Mind, have also discussed the big question, but not as the main subject of their books, whereas Davies tackles it head on. Can modern physics, which claims to have reached the frontiers of "ultimate" knowledge of the Universe both as regards the history and structure of the cosmos and the constitution of matter, he asks, prove the existence of God and how he created the Universe? In order to give his answer to this question, Prof. Davies runs through what he regards as the most relevant advances in modern physics and mathematics without using any mathematics as such and in a way that is popular science at its best.
Davies starts by describing what is now the centerpiece of establishment cosmology, that is, what the majority of physicists and philosophers in this field hold to be the nature of the cosmos. This is that the Universe began in a "big bang," an inconceivably vast explosion from a point some ten to twenty billion years ago; that it may still be expanding, but that its future is not yet really known. For this future--a choice between continuing expansion or eventual collapse back to a point, which might possibly re-explode, so that this process repeats itself endlessly--depends, according to the theory, on the amount of matter in the Universe. Very simply, the more matter there is, the more gravitational attraction will act to bring about its recollapse. No one yet knows how much matter there really is: hence the current search for the "dark matter" that should bring about collapse. In any case, the "big bang" seems to require a Creator; and cyclical birth and extinction is a notion common in many Eastern religions.
But a significant minority, including some physicists of world stature, do not accept the orthodox...