Through the Wormhole

Colossal beauty.

Awe-inspiring intricacy.

Are the wonders of our universe a cosmic accident

or the result of intelligent design?

For centuries, religion and science were bitter foes.

Now science actively searches for our creator.

Some physicists think he's hidden in the math.

Neurologists think she might be in our brains.

And computer coders believe God is one of them

and that our world is nothing more than his simulation.

Through the Wormhole 1x01 with Morgan Freeman Is There a Creator? Original air date on June 9, 2010

Space.

Time.

Life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

Through the Wormhole 1x01 with Morgan Freeman Is There a Creator? Original Air Date on June 9, 2010

every culture claims a God,

an all-powerful entity

that created the world and directs our fate.

But why do we share this belief in a cosmic creator?

Did we dream it up to serve a need in our psyche or culture?

Is God really out there --

up there?

This is a journey into the science of God.

I promise you it's quite a trip.

Some of what we'll find almost defies belief.

Sometime in the early '70s,

I bought my daughter an ant farm.

She soon got bored, but not me.

I was memorized by this little menagerie

squeezed between two panes of glass.

And I wondered, what could they ever know about me,

the one who built their world?

What can we ever learn about who or what created us,

stranded as we are in this colony of humanity?

For as long as scientists

have struggled to understand our place in the universe,

there have been those who've hoped to get a glimpse of God.

400 years ago, the great astronomer Galileo Galilei

had a ground-breaking insight.

Nature's grand book is written in the language of mathematics.

From that time to this,

scientific geniuses like Newton and Einstein

used math to dig deep into the workings of nature,

to search for God

through the equations that defined the laws of physics.

The latest mind hoping to join these illustrious ranks

is Garrett Lisi.

The universe

can very successfully be described mathematically.

You have to imagine how the world's working

in a certain circumstance

and then use reason and mathematics

to develop a description of how that might be happening.

But it's imagination

that breaks the trail before reason enters.

After earning his Phd,

Garrett escaped the confines of academia

in search of adventure and a space in which to think.

Rather than go into a normal academic-track job,

I just split off for Maui, became a surf bum,

and did the research I wanted to --

mostly spent time doing physics research and surfing.

But all of our attempts to understand nature

so far have been fragmentary.

There's one set of rules for tiny atoms,

another for giant objects like stars and galaxies.

And the two sets of math don't fit together.

What physicists like Lisi seek

is a single, overarching theory,

a mathematical design that explains everything.

Garrett thinks he may at last have found

this theory of everything.

And if he's right, God could be one heck of a mathematician.

Garrett's work is at a leading edge of physics.

Before we plunge into this mind-bending math,

we first need to back up a bit,

because it's possible

there's already evidence for a creator in the math.

Andy Albrecht is a leading cosmologist.

Hello, how are you?

He's also a renowned chocoholic.

I'll have the chocolate soufflé and a latte.

Just as a perfect chocolate soufflé

relies on a precise mixture of ingredients

baked at a specific temperature for an exact time,

so our universe looks the way it does

because of a precise balance between four fundamental forces.

The four forces we know and love

in the world around us

are gravity, electromagnetism --

those you've probably heard of.

Then there's also the weak force and the strong force.

They're a little bit more specialized

but absolutely essential

to make the world work the way it does.

Gravity, in many ways,

is the force we know first.

We try to walk, and we fall down.

That's because of gravity.

When you carry something a little too heavy and it falls,

it's because of gravity.

Electromagnetism tells us how the chemistry works.

When you cook something, the energy you use

is ultimately electromagnetic energy.

Weak force is about a billion times less strong

than electromagnetism,

and it's responsible for radioactivity.

The potassium in a banana is radioactive.

If the rate were too high, it could destroy us.

The sun is basically a nuclear reactor.

The strong forces release energy in the nuclear reactions.

One of the remarkable things is, when you add it all up,

all these forces have to be exactly the way they are

for life as we know it to exist.

Change any one of them, dial the parameters,

and something will go wrong --

the planet will disappear,

the sun will shut down,

the DNA will come unraveled.

Some people call it the Goldilocks paradigm --

not too much, not too little, everything's just right.

Oh, that's perfect.

Some physicists believe

this precise calibration of forces is evidence of God.

Dr. John Polkinghorne did pioneering work on the quark,

a fundamental subatomic particle.

He is also a knight commander of the British Empire, a Sir.

And after a lifetime

of distinguished scientific inquiry,

he was inspired to follow a new line of work...

As a priest.

I do indeed believe in God, yes, indeed.

Yes, in fact, I'm an Anglican priest,

so it would be rather shocking if I didn't.

Those four fundamental forces are the portfolio of things

that bring about the physical processes of the world.

And a very interesting fact about the world

is that those forces,

in their specific strengths that they have,

have to be very close to what we actually observe

if we were to be here to observe them,

because it turns out that only a world

whose forces are very similar to the ones that we experience

would be capable of producing carbon-based life.

John finds it difficult to imagine

that the fine-tuning of our universe

has happened by accident,

that there is no divine hand behind it.

This fine-tuning makes it clear we don't live in any old world.

We live in a very particular universe.

And why is that? Why are we so lucky?

Of course, religious belief offers you

a very straightforward and attractive explanation.

But scientists are split

over whether this balance of forces

is a sign of intelligent design.

In fact, it could be nothing more

than a roll of the cosmic dice.

Dr. Alan Guth is a revered figure in cosmology.

His theory of inflation

is the accepted idea of how the early universe formed.

Inflation says that right after the big bang,

the universe expanded phenomenally fast,

doubling in size 100,000 times in just a fraction of a second.

Inflation helps explain

how the world we know could have come into existence.

But inflation has another head-spinning implication --

there ought to be more than one universe.

An important feature of this process of inflation

is that when inflation stops,

it doesn't stop all over at the same time.

What tends to happen is it stops in some places,

and those then become universes.

And elsewhere, in what we now call a multiverse,

inflation would go on,

and only later, more pocket universes would form.

And there can be an infinite number of these pocket universes

formed altogether by this process

that we call eternal inflation.

The point is that if there really is a multiverse,

we would be living in just one of these many pocket universes.

That could be, for example, our universe right there.

Each of these pocket universes

could have different laws of physics.

In our universe,

the four forces are aligned in a perfect way.

Together, they allow life to coalesce and flourish.

But each pocket universe in Alan's multiverse

could have a completely different balance of forces.

Maybe electromagnetism is weaker,

and perhaps gravity is way more powerful.

The result --

an entirely different universe with no chance of human life.

To Alan, our universe

is not carefully crafted by a divine being.

It's just a lucky roll in a cosmic crap shoot.

The precision and complexity of our world

is enough to make even the sanest cosmologist

go just a little bit crazy.