Walking in a miracle

When God’s Cosmic Cookbook was first published, several people asked if any of the science had surprised me… ‘Had it given me any WOW moments?’

That was easy – YES!

It happened every time I learned of another natural law or parameter that had to be ‘Just so’ –in order for the universe to exist.

I’ll be summarising a few example ‘WOWs’ over my next few blogs, but I first wanted to explain that we’re not talking about normal levels of precision, say getting something 99.9% right (or to one part in a thousand)… The precision required for some of the parameters in universe making can be more like one in 10⁴⁰!!

10⁴⁰ is such an enormous number you can’t get your head around it. It’s 10 x 10 x10… forty times or a ‘1’ with forty ‘0’s after it. A million or a thousand thousands (10⁶) is just about understandable, but imagining a billion – a thousand million (10⁹), or a trillion – a million million (10¹²) is really tough. If it helps I can tell you that if you’ve reached 32 you’ve lived over a billion seconds, the universe is about 14 billion years old, each of us has around 30 trillion cells in our bodies and the chances of winning the lottery 2 weeks in succession is roughly 1 in 200 trillion!!

In everyday language, you’d call winning the lottery 2 weeks in a row ‘impossible’ (and be rightly suspicious if anyone did it!) but a chance of only 1 in 10⁴⁰ is much, much worse and there are several examples like this needed for the universe to exist.

Yet here we are – alive and kicking - literally walking in a miracle!!