Review of God's Universe by Owen Gingerich (Margaret Wetheim, LA Times)
The creator's thumbprint is here for all to see (Margaret Wertheim, LA Times)
A lump of uranium seems an unpromising place to look for God. But in this lethal material Owen Gingerich, an emeritus professor of astronomy at Harvard University, detects a signature of divine action in the world. In his slim and elegant new book, "God's Universe," Gingerich finds that indeed everywhere he looks he can discern the hand of a benevolent Creator — all without compromising his adherence to a rigorous methodological scientific naturalism.
Take the uranium. Curiously, Gingerich writes, "in the cosmos as a whole gold is at least ten times more common than uranium, but here at the surface of the earth uranium is about five hundred times more abundant than gold." The reason is that uranium is radioactive and gives off heat in Earth's interior, generating slow convection currents that carry the element up to the surface. This convection has been crucial in the development of life on Earth, for "over hundreds of millions of years it helps build the continental zones [and] gives rise to continental drift."Remarkably, the half-life of uranium (a measure of its rate of decay) is 4.5 billion years, which is also the age of the Earth. Were its half-life much longer, Gingerich tells us, uranium would not produce nearly so much heat, hence our planet would be less geologically active; were it shorter, most of the Earth's uranium would be gone by now and the mantle would be correspondingly quiescent. In sum, the half-life of uranium seems curiously timed to create conditions that have made our planet hospitable to life.
In "God's Universe," Gingerich recounts many other examples of the ways in which the universe as a whole, and our planet in particular, seems suspiciously primed for life.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:05 | Books/Culture | Technorati
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