    66

    Epilogue

    Seventeenth century thinkers described the universe as a decaying

    creation, a remnant of a paradise corrupted by sin.  The world, they said, had

    been crafted as a perfect and unblemished sphere.  Then Adam and Eve had

    stolen fruit from the tree of knowledge.  A roaring, wrathful God had thrown

    the primal pair out of Eden and visited his anger upon the newly-conceived

    planet.  He had smashed the surface of this perfect place, leaving the

    wound-like gashes of valleys and the upturned pustules of mountains as

    eternal signs of His displeasure.  Ever since that time, said the philosophers,

    the earth has been decaying like an ancient ruin, showing only the faintest

    signs of a beauty that was no more.

    Nineteenth Century physicists expressed the old view in a new way.

    They created the concept of entropy.168  All matter, said the Second Law of

    Thermodynamics, tends toward chaos.169  Leave the most carefully contrived

    bit of complex form alone, and it will slowly be devoured by decay.  The

    universe, said these scientists, is like a sugar cube.  Drop the

    highly-structured block of sweetness into a glass of water, and it will

    dissolve in a random swarm of glucose molecules, a liquid swirl of chaos.

    So, too, said the physicists, will the world we know someday disappear,

    eaten away by entropy.170

    The Renaissance thinkers and the 19th Century scientists were both

    wrong.  The universe has not been drifting from order into chaos.  It has,

    instead, been marching in the opposite direction.  Since its first second of

    being, the cosmos has coughed up fresh forms of creation.  From an

    explosion of energy it spun one of its first great leaps forward--the atom.

    Then came another extraordinary innovation--the molecule.  Billions of years

    later, the universe spat forth another brilliant twist--a molecule that could

    produce copies of itself, the molecule responsible for life.  And three billion

    years beyond that, the universe conceived an even more revolutionary

    upward step: intelligence.

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