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The cat in the box

by F J Willett

There was this cat, you see.

Someone took the cat when it was a very small kitten. So small it's eyes hadn't opened . They put the cat in a box. They fed the cat and looked after it. But they never let the cat out of the box. All the cat ever saw was the inside of the box. The inside of the box was painted with large vertical black and white stripes.

The cat grew up. It lived in the box. All the cat knew was the inside of the box. All it had ever seen was the vertical black and white stripes on the walls of the box. The box was the cat's entire universe.

One day the cat reached what would be middle age for a cat. The man who was conducting the experiment moved the cat into another box. The inside of this box was painted with horizontal black and white stripes.

But the cat had lived all his life in a world that had only vertical stripes. The cat's eyes had only ever seen vertical stripes. The cat's eyes didn't "know" about horizontal stripes. Horizontal stripes were something the cat's eyes and brain had never had to cope with before. The cat's eyes didn't know how to process all this new information about horizontal stripes, so they ignored the stripes. The eyes didn't tell the brain and the cat didn't "see" the horizontal stripes. The horizontal stripes were still there. The cat just couldn't see them.

This is a true story.

We are like that cat.

We are brought up in a particular world. The things around us have a particular shape. We learn about that world. We then think we understand the world. We seldom realise the extent to which the world has shaped us.

Consider. A child is born in India. He grows up speaking Hindi. A child is born in Australia he grows up speaking English with a decided Aussie accent. We think, "These two children are different. The first child is Indian. The second child is Australian ." The first child will not only grow up knowing Hindi as his "natural" language, he will think like a Indian, eat Indian food, wallow in Indian politics, live Indian values. He will view the world through Indian eyes. He will "be" Indian.

The second child will grow up in Australia. He'll say things like "goodonyer", and "howyergoin'", and "beauty", and "gimmeanotherie". He'll worship Alan Border and Steve Waugh, wear thick white zinc on his nose, and a floppy hat on his head, and have barbecues and a few "tinnies" in his back yard with his mates on saturday's in the summer. He will be "true blue" and "dinky die". In short, an Australian.

These two children will grow up worlds apart. The will grow up differently and have different values, languages and outlooks on life.

But what if we swapped the babies? What if, before the children had time to learn anything about the world we took the two babies and changes their places. The Indian kid would grow up in Australia, the Australian kid in India. Would they grow up differently? Would the Indian baby grow up speaking English with an Indian accent? Would the Australian kid speak Hindi with an Aussie twang?

The answer is not hard to find. Over the years many children, through the workings of fate, have found themselves in these sorts of situations. Their behavior has been studied. We know what happens to kids who get thrown into a new world, a new life and a new family. They adapt.

Children are born, like the kitten in the story, with a mind very much like a blank slate. Babies can't talk. They can't walk. They waggle their arms in a completely uncoordinated way. A baby is a blank slate onto which is drawn the picture of the world around them. Not totally, of course, but in very many ways the adult is the product of the experiences gathered by the child from the world around him. Like the kitten in the story we can only learn from the experiences in the world around us.

Put the baby in a different world and you'll get a different picture. A different adult. It doesn't matter where the baby comes from. Bring an Indian child up in an Australian family and the result will be a "Dinki Di", "True Blue" Australian. Bring an Australian child up in India and the child will become totally Indian.

Science and Religion are different worlds. A person brought up on one side of the cultural divide often can't see the value of the experiences available on the other side. The weight of their experience will lead them to reject out of hand the voice from across the divide. To many Christians the knowledge from Science is as invisible as the horizontal stripes are to the cat. Similarly to many who follow Science the knowledge of Christianity is invisible. We are not exposed to each others worlds, our brain s have never learnt to evaluate the experience, so we reject it.

It's not done consciously, of course. We all try and be fair in our judgements. We don't reject what somebody has to say out of hand, or maliciously. We hear them out. We listen to what people have to say, then we judge the value of what people say against our experience. The problem is that we seldom have the same experiences in common. We are blind to each others knowledge. So after we've heard the other person out we will more often than not reject the other person's knowledge.

The great irony is that both Christianity and Science are on about the same thing. Where Christianity concentrates on understanding the spiritual message brought to us by Christ, Science concentrates on unravelling the mysteries of God's creation, the world around us.

As the world around us is God's creation, the knowledge of the world that is being gathered by Science is a proper field of study for Christians. The insights that the Science can give into life, Christian living and the problems of the world that confront us, amount to a book. A book that shows the hand of God at work in the world. A book that I have elsewhere called God's Other Bible.

I believe that Science and Christianity are not conflicting views of the world at all. Christianity and Science are complimentary. They are opposite sides of the same coin. The gap between Science and Christianity is illusory. It is a gulf created partially by fear and largely by ignorance.

It's this gulf these essays are about. Bridging that gap. Importing the experiences of God's creation (for that is what Science is all about) to Christians. Exporting religions values to the Sciences.

There is another reason I started this essay with the story of the kitten in the box. It clearly illuminates the difficulty we have in understanding the world.
The sad fact is we human beings are very limited creatures. We are not the swiftest or the strongest of God's creatures. We don't like the cold. We don't swim very well. We can't fly. Our bodies are weak (compared to other animals) and easily damaged. Yet humans are the most successful of God's creatures.

Humanity is successful because of our brain. We are the thinking creature. And doesn't God charge us to use our brains? In the parable of the talents (Mathew 25-14) isn't Jesus urging us to make the most of what we are given? Our brain is what makes us different to every other creature on the planet. God's message is "Use them."

Not everybody has the same intellect, of course. God doesn't expect everybody to be an Einstein. But his message is clearly that he does expect all of us to use our God given talents to the fullest. "It's too hard", or "I'm afraid" are not adequate excuses . We owe it to ourselves, and to God, to try.

Like the kitten in the box we have limits that are not always obvious, but unlike the kitten we can learn to overcome them. That is our task. To overcome the stripes on the wall of our upbringing so that we can see the glory of God revealed in His creation.

But there are limits. These limits within us, and in God's creation, define what we can know about the world. Define what we can learn about God from the study of his creation. Before we begin, it is important to know our limitations.

The greatest limits are ourselves. Our bodies have physical limits. There are limits to what we can see. We can't see in the ultra-violet, or the infra red. We can't see radio waves, or microwaves. We can't see bacteria, or microbes. We are blind on a moonless night, and stumble over the furniture in a dark room.

What's worse, all of our other senses have similar limitations. You only have to look at some of the things God's creatures can do to realise how limited we are. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to hear like a bat? Smell like a fox? Sense the earth's magnetic field like pigeons? Or "see" body heat like a snake? Then to top it all off we only have five senses. Sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. You can't help but conclude that when it comes to our ability to sense the world we're really rather poorly equipped.

How then does man survive? He survives because he has a brain. A brain that gives him the ability to build tools to overcome his limitations. Telescopes and microscope that extend his sight. Amplifiers that extend his hearing. Planes that give man wings. And trucks, bulldozers and jack hammers that give man the strength of a thousand beasts.

What man can imagine man can do....well not quite. There really are limits. Even with the best machines it is possible to build there are fundamental laws of nature that limit what we can do, what we can perceive, and what we can understand about God's creation.

These are the limiting laws of nature. One such limit is the size of the universe itself. Scientists have worked out that looking out into space with ever more powerful telescopes is like looking back into time. The further away a star is the longer the light from that star takes to travel to earth. For example the nearest star to earth (apart from the sun, of course) is Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is 4.3 light years away. That means the light leaving Proxima Centauri takes 4 years and four months to reach us here on earth. We can never know what's happening on Proxima Centauri now. We can only see how things were 4 years and four months ago.

This is very limiting. We can never know what the universe is like at this instant we call "now". We can only know what it was like some time in the past, depending on how far away the star we are looking at is. And this has an amazing consequence. When we look out into space, we are actually looking into the past. The light from distant stars is a history of God's creation written in the sky. What is limiting in someways turns out to be an advantage in others.

There is another limit we see when we look out into space. This is the "Event Horizon". When astronomers got around to studying the more distant stars they discovered that all of the stars are moving apart. It's just as if some time in the past the universe began in a gigantic explosion.

Matter was hurtled outwards from the exploding center of the universe, cooling and forming into stars and galaxies as time passed. The result we see today is the still expanding cloud of galaxies and stars that remain. This is the Big Bang theory accepted by most astronomers today. It's implication is that the further away a star is from earth the faster it will be traveling away from us. And this is exactly what we see when we look out into space. The more distant stars are traveling away fastest.

In fact the most distant stars are traveling away from us at speeds that are a large fraction of the speed of light. Suppose a star was traveling away from us at just above the speed of light. Light emitted from the star would never reach earth. It would be "over the horizon" of the universe.

Hang on. Isn't the speed of light supposed to be constant according to Mr Einstein? And how can anything, much less a star be going faster than the speed of light when Einstein said nothing, absolutely nothing, could go faster than the speed of light?

The answer is that Einstein was right. The speed of light is constant. Somebody measured it once. The speed is definitely constant to the limits of our measuring ability. Nor can anything go faster than the speed of light. This grows out of Einstein's famous equation

E=MC^2.

Put in to plain language this means that E(energy) is basically the same as M(matter). Or to turn it around the other way, matter is energy. We saw this demonstrated very clearly when the Americans dropped one of their bombs on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki. Both bombs turned just a little bit of matter into an awful lot of energy. The results devastated both cities and changed the world forever. How Einstein's equation limits travel at or near the speed of light goes something like this: Speed something up and you add energy. To speed it up a bit more you not only have to add more energy, you have to add an extra dash of energy to speed up the energy (matter) that you added before. Speed the object up again and you are accelerating your initial lump of matter plus the first lot of energy plus the second lot...and so on. At low speeds the amounts of energy involved are relatively small and the change in mass is not measurable. But at high speeds (near the speed of light) the change in mass becomes very important.

If Einstein was right, you can't travel faster than the speed of light. Then how can a star be traveling away from us faster than the speed of light? Either Einstein is wrong or stars can't possibly be traveling that fast. The answer is that both are correct. Einstein is right, and the star is traveling faster than light. How can this be so?

It turns out that space isn't the flat, simple place we assumed it was. Space is curved. Curved not in any of the dimensions we understand as length, breadth and height, but curved none the less. When you stand in the middle of a plain how far you can see is limited by the curvature of the earth. So how far we can see across the universe is limited by the curvature of space itself. There is an "event horizon" beyond which we can not see.

If we could go beyond the event horizon to the part of the universe where the star we were thinking about exists we would find that because of the curve of space there the star was not really traveling at anything like the speed of light. But to us, here on earth the star is forever out of sight beyond the event horizon. We can never reach it. We can never see it. It is beyond the limits of the observable universe.

Just where the edge of the universe is is difficult to say, except that it's a long way away. In 1973 Mrs. M Burbridge, working at the Lick Observatory in California found a Quasar with the appealing name QSO OQ 172 at a distance from the earth of fifteen thousand and six hundred million light years. It is traveling away from us at 95% of the speed of light. Any way you cut it that makes the universe very big. And very old. We'll have more to say about that in a later essay. For the moment it is sufficient to note that space does have limits, but you could hardly call them restrictive.

The observable universe is big enough to hold something like ten thousand million galaxies each containing around one hundred thousand million stars. In one of these galaxies on one little blue-green planet circling around a G type star is the human race.
When I look into space and see the magnitude of God's creation I am filled with awe. We like to think of God as a comfortable being who is always there to listen to our prayers, sort of like a doting parent. Fond, forgiving and comforting. It is well to remember, sometimes, this other aspect of God revealed in the sheer magnitude of his creation.

From the very big let's move to the very small. All matter is made up of tiny particles. These particles are called atoms. Atoms are extremely small. So small it's hard to imagine how on earth you could measure it.

So how do you measure the size of something as small as an atom? Surprisingly it's not difficult. There are several methods. One way is to take advantage of the special properties of oil. A drop of oil when placed on water will spread out until it forms a layer one atom thick. The thickness of the layer and therefore the diameter of an atom is worked out by dividing the volume of the drop by the area it covers. The edges of the oil layer can easily be made visible by sprinkling chalk dust on the surface o f the water before you begin. And, of course, the more accurate your measurements the closer your answer will be to 0.00000001 cm, the diameter of an atom.

The ancient Greeks had worked out that matter had to be made up of small particles, and that most of matter had to be empty space. It's easy to demonstrate. Get a jar and half full it with flour. Then put in a layer of gravy mix, and finish filling the jar right to the top with flour so that the gravy mix forms a darker band across the middle of the jar. Make sure that there's no free space in the jar at all and screw on the lid. Now shake the jar.

If the particles in the jar could move about freely you would expect the flour and gravy mix to become mixed. But it doesn't happen. The gravy mix remains a darker band across the centre of the jar undisturbed no matter how much you agitate the jar. The particles of flour and gravy mix are jammed tight up against one another like people on a train in the rush hour and there is no room to move.

If matter were composed of particles packed in like that then all motion would be impossible. Rivers wouldn't flow, breezes wouldn't blow. The world would be forever fixed in one place like a painting of a still life.

Of course the world is not like that. Motion is possible. The atoms in the air around us are so loosely packed we can walk and move about as we will. At least, within limits. We find it tougher going to push our way through water, and nobody yet has pushed their way through a mountain.

But even in the hardest rock the atoms are widely spaced. Atoms rarely come into contact. They are held in place by forces acting between the atoms. These forces, how they work, and the nature of atoms themselves have only become clear since the development of Quantum Theory in the early years if the twentieth century.

Quantum Theory has been very successful. It has described the behavior of atomic particles with incredible detail, predicted the existence of families of sub-atomic particles and helped in the design and construction of many of the electronic devices we take for granted as part of life in the late twentieth century. Quantum Theory, like all good scientific theories, justifies itself by the fact that it works.

But not everybody in the scientific community was happy with Quantum Theory. Quantum Theory accurately described the behavior of atomic particles, but there was a cost. The cost is called indeterminacy, or the Uncertainty Principle. It states that you can't know everything about an atomic particle. The more accurately you measure the position of a particle, the less you know about the particles' momentum and vice versa.

For Albert Einstein and many other scientists at the turn of the century, this was not good enough. Up until this time it had been an unwritten assumption in all of physics that a fundamental property of nature was that every action has a cause. Saying that the actions of atomic particles is somehow indeterminate weakens this principle. It becomes a matter of chance whether two particles will interact or not. There are no longer any hard and fast rules, only probabilities and statistical outcomes.

Admittedly these effects don't extend beyond the realm of the very small. But even so it means that we can never be one hundred percent sure of anything. To Albert Einstein this seemed intolerable. Life should not be built on the roll of a dice, therefore Quantum Theory must be wrong. "God may be subtle," Einstein is reported to have said, "But he's not malicious."

TIme marched on and experiment after experiment showed that chance does indeed rule in the world of the very small. The only truths in sub-atomic physics are statistical ones. This reaction occurs once in a hundred events. That reaction once in a thousand. Einstein was wrong.

Einstein had fallen for the same 3 card trick that has claimed so many people over the centuries. It is the sin of pride. The sin of thinking 'I know better than God how the universe must be put together'. In Einstein's case it was an understandable trap. After all we expect God to be honest with us. Hiding the secrets of the universe in the roll of a dice seems so unlike the God who orders the march of the planets in such a open and fixed way.

For when we look at the planets that is exactly what we see. Planets and stars march across the sky with a rhythm as regularly as the march of an army. From the location of the planets today you can work out where they will appear in the sky next year, next century or a thousand years from now. And you can do it with a very high degree of accuracy. We've known how to do that since the 18th century when Newton developed his laws of motion and theory of universal gravitation.

The certainty of a well regulated, ordered and pre-determined universe that Newton described and that Einstein extended with his theories of gravitation, gives way in the domain of the very small to the less fixed, indeterminant universe of Quantum Theory. And experiment confirms Quantum Theory at every turn.In the world of the minute chance really is king. The question is must ask is no longer "is it so?", but "why is it so?". Why does God allow chance to rule the world of the atom? The answers to this question have only begun to emerge in the last few years.

The first clue as to which way the winds of science were blowing came from, of all places, the weather. A scientist was using one of the biggest and fastest computers to run a weather forecasting program. He fed in his data, and started up the computer program.

The computer started to crunch away at the numbers. Knowing the weather at all the points on it's map it calculated the weather ten minutes into it's future. Then knowing the weather ten minutes into the future it could use that information in turn to calculate the weather a further ten minutes into the future. So, step by step, ten minutes at a time the computer calculated away until it had worked out a weather forecast for a fortnight into the future.

This was the first weather forecasting program, and all the weather forecasting programs built since that time operate in essentially the same way. The weather is calculated in small steps from a known point, the results of each calculation being the input to the next step. The problem is simple to see. If there is any error in your initial data then the error is going to be compounded at each step of the calculation. Perhaps you can already guess what happened to that very first weather forecast.

The scientist, wanting to check the results of his weather forecast, ran the program again. He used exactly the same data as he had used the first time. The program was exactly the same and the computer was the same computer. The only difference was that instead of working out the weather to an accuracy of ten decimal places, this time he chose eleven decimal places.

When the computer had finished it's work the scientist checked his two weather forecasts. The answers were totally different. Small, apparently inconsequential differences were magnified at each stage of the calculation until the small random variations were very large features of the weather indeed. Scientists call this, more than half seriously, "the butterfly effect".

The beating of the wings of a butterfly, it is asserted, is enough to totally change the course of the weather given time. In fact this accumulation of errors through the butterfly effect limits reliable weather forecasting to little more than two or 3 days, even in this age of super computers. Even if we could track down and measure the effects of every individual insect and take them into account in forecasting the weather it still wouldn't be enough. We would only succeed in extending the accuracy of our predictions by a few extra days.

For even if we knew the location and effects of every living thing on the face of the planet it wouldn't be enough because the effects of the vibrations of individual atoms and molecules would still be unknown. The errors introduced into our weather forecast by these unknowns would accumulate. The best we could achieve would be a few extra days accuracy. And if we got the position and momentum of even one atom wrong at the start of our calculation the errors caused by that one atom would quickly compound and reduce our forecast to meaningless nonsense.

But hang on. Didn't we find a few pages back that the position and momentum of an atomic particle can't be precisely determined because of Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle? Of course we did. So the weather can never be predicted accurately more than a week or so ahead, even in principle.

More importantly the weather itself is indeterminant. The weather works itself out at the visible level according to well understood laws, but down there among the atoms there are a myriad of small particles colliding and interacting, or colliding and not interacting. The outcome of each collision is unknown and unknowable until it happens, and each has it's own minute effect on the weather. The course of the weather, then, is not fixed, but works itself out from moment to moment.

At one level, God's universe is ordered. The stars move in regular orbits according to fixed rules. At another level, in the world of the atom, all is undecided, indeterminant. It is the tension between these extremes, order and chaos, that forms God's universe.

There is one other system we should look at. In the human brain are billions of cells. The operation of the brain depends on the movement of atoms and molecules within it's cells. The brain is operating, ultimately, in the realm of the atom. Random atomic events, random thoughts flick across the mind, an idea. Reject that one, accept that one. It's here among the cells of the human brain we find God's greatest gift to his creation. Free will.

For any further information about this site, the plays, or anything else Fred, he can be E-Mailed @

willettfj@hotmail.com

The cat in the box

copyright © 18-4-2001 Fred Willett