CALIFORNIA, U.S., March 17, 2014 (Mercury News): In the beginning, there was nothing. And then, in an explosive instant: Everything. That explains not just Stanford physicist Andrei Linde’s landmark theory, but also his moment of epiphany, in Moscow 30 years ago, that transformed our understanding of the beginnings of the universe. Astronomers announced new findings last week that, if corroborated, validate his pioneering vision that the universe was born in a fraction of a second, expanding exponentially from a size smaller than a proton.
Last Monday, a team of scientists reported that a telescope at the South Pole had detected gravitational waves that are the first tremors of the Big Bang, when the universe was a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. The news, heralded as one of cosmology’s biggest discoveries, lends “smoking gun” evidence to Linde’s once-radical Chaotic Inflation theory about the universe’s violent expansion.
“Even if one tries to interpret our results in religious terms, I think that it would be such a waste of energy for ‘God’ not to use this way of creating a universe — to take a milligram of matter and then the universe does the rest of the job by itself, producing infinite number of universes,” he said.
If there was a creator of the universe, was the work signed? Is there a hidden message? The inflationary expansion could make it too huge to read, he concedes. But perhaps the message is encoded in the laws of that universe — legible only to physicists. The thought brings him joy. “Maybe God is a physicist hacker,” Linde laughed. Then he turned quiet. “I am not so sure this is just a joke.”