Chaos and Cosmos

The sidereal empire of divine universes glimmers infinitely and majestically in an indescribable profusion of lights, colors and sounds. Countless multitudes of nebulae and galaxies move dizzily through endless spaces. They carry innumerable agglomerations of billions of dwarf or giants, new or pulsed, white, yellow, blue and red stars with their planets and satellites, comets and meteors, in a symphony of beauty that surpasses all our powers of imagination.

Everything moves and agitates in unimaginable ways, in harmonious or turbulent abysses and explosions, in transformations and rebirths, in an unstoppable frenzy where everything is balanced under the invisible command of the supreme order that presides to everything: the Spirit of God.

From the Greek, cosmos or cosmoses mean order, organization, beauty and harmony. It is a term that designates the universe in its totality, the universal structure, from the infinitely small or microcosm to the infinitely large or macrocosm. The cosmos is the whole, the sum of all things in the orderly universe, from the stars and the colossal galaxies, to the group of elementary, subatomic particles that form the matter that constitutes all its integral parts.

Human beings have sought, passionately, to understand the origin of the universe throughout the entire course of history. Maybe no other quest can transcend the passage of time and cultural differentiation and inspire human imagination, those of our ancestors as much as researchers of modern cosmology. There is a collective, permanent and profound anxiety in searching for an explanation for the fact that the universe exists, for the reasons for the form we know it to have, for the logic and the principle that powers its evolution. It is fabulous that, for the first time, humanity is at a point that an outline starts to appear, one that can supply scientific answers to some of these questions.

The scientific theory for the creation of the cosmos accepted today declares that the universe underwent the most extraordinary conditions during its first moments – enormous energy, temperature and density. These conditions, as we know today, require us to consider quantum mechanics as well as gravity. This is the reason that the origin of the universe is a profound field of study where new theories and concepts are formed in the horizon of knowledge.   

Before electrons were captured, the universe was inundated by dense plasma of electrically charged particles 

Only 10-43 seconds after the Big-Bang, the temperature of the universe, the so called Planck time, was about 1032 °K (Kelvin degrees), which is ten trillions of trillion times hotter than the deepest point in the sun’s interior.  The universe started to expand and cool quickly, and as it did that, the homogenously and torridly hot primordial cosmic plasma started to form whirls and concentrations. Approximately a hundredth thousandth of second after the Big-Bang, hot things started to cool down enough (something like 10 trillion Kelvin degrees – 1 million times hotter that the sun’s interior) so that quarks could be organized in groups of three forming protons and neutrons.  Approximately a hundredth thousandth seconds later the conditions were ready for the nucleus of the lighter elements in the periodic table to start to take form, beginning with the original plasma. In the 3 minutes that followed, when the universe had cooled to a temperature of 1 billion degrees, the predominant nucleus was of hydrogen and helium, with residual traces of deuterium, the so called heavy hydrogen and lithium. This was the period of primordial nucleus synthesis.

Nothing special happened during the first hundreds of thousands of years that followed, besides the continuation of the expansion and cooling. But when temperature fell a few thousands degrees, the speed of electrons which moved in a disordered frenzy was reduced enough for the atomic nucleus, specially the hydrogen and helium ones, to captured them, thus forming the first electrically neutral atoms. This was a crucial moment: from this point on the universe, as a whole, became transparent. Before electrons were captured, the universe was inundated by dense plasma of electrically charged particles – some as the nucleus, with positive electrical charge, others, as electrons, with negative electrical charge. Photons that interact only with electrically charged objects were thrown about incessantly from one side to the other in the dense ocean of ionized particles. They were practically unable to travel the distance to be deviated or absorbed. This thick cloud of ionized particles impeded the free movement of the photons; this is what made the universe almost totally opaque, just like the air we know, a very dense fog or a vigorous snow storm. But when electrons with a positive electrical charge went into orbit around the nucleus, with positive electrical charge and produced electrically neutral atoms, the fog disappeared. We can surmise that from then on, a long period of millions of years of real chaos or disorder characterized the evolutions of the universe. From this point on, in a dynamic universal inflection, the path to progressive order of the Cosmos was definitely open. From that point on, the photons that were created with the Big Band traveled freely and the entire extension of the universe became visible. 

One way to measure the profundity of a theory is to verify the degree that it challenges our vision of a world 

Approximately one billion years later, after what many physicists and cosmologists believe to be the beginning of the formation of the universe – the Big Bang – when the universe was already substantially calmer, the galaxies, stars and lastly the planets started to appear as agglomerations of primordial elements, united by gravity. Today, about 14 billion years after the colossal episode, we marvel at the magnificence of the Cosmos and our collective ability to gather knowledge in a reasonable and experimentally stable theory about the origin of the universe.

Although we are physically and spiritually connected to earth and its surroundings in the solar system, our power of thought and experimentation allow us to probe the profundity of the interior and exterior space. The collective effort of many physicists, especially during the last 100 years, revealed a few of nature’s best kept secrets. And, once these inexplicable jewels were revealed they opened new insights into a world we thought we knew, but whose splendor we do not even come to close to imagining. One way to measure the profundity of a physic theory is to verify the degree that it challenges our vision of a world that seemed immutable before.

From this viewpoint, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity were well beyond our most daring expectations: wave functions, probabilities, quantum tunneling, incessant fluctuations, tumults of energy in a vacuum, the intertwining of space and time, the relative nature of simultaneity, the curvature of the fabric of space-time, black holes and the Big Bang. Who would have thought that Newton’s mechanic and precise intuitive perspective would become almost shy – that there would be a new and extraordinary world a little lower than the things we see every day.

Even the discoveries that shake our paradigms are only part of a bigger story one that encompasses everything. The laws of what is small and of what is large must be in harmony with each other in a coherent unit, thus with unshakeable faith, physicists continue in their incessant struggle to find a definite theory. The search has not ended the string theory and its evolution, in terms of the M theory, already created a convincing scheme for the fusion of quantum mechanics, general relativity and strong and weak electromagnetic forces.  

The search for the fundamental laws of the universe is an eminently human drama, one that expands our vision 

The challenges that these advances present to our way of thinking are monumental: string loops and oscillating globules unite all creation in vibratory patterns that are meticulously executed in a universe with several ‘hidden’ dimensions, capable of undergoing extreme contortions, as its special fabric breaks and is repaired. Who would have imagined that the joining of gravity and quantum mechanics in a unified theory of all matter and all forces would provoke such a revolution in our understanding of how the universe works?  

Undoubtedly, we will find even bigger surprises as we advance in our quest to understand our cosmic reality. We may glimpse at a strange kingdom, underneath Planck’s distance, - a scale under which quantum fluctuations of the fabric of space-time become enormous, possibly where notions of space and time do not exist. In the extreme opposite, our universe may be simply one among innumerable bubbles spread on the surface of a vast and turbulent cosmic ocean called multiverse. These ideas are at the forefront of current speculations and presage the next leaps through which our conception of the universe will go through.

Our minds fixated in the future, we wait for the dazzling revelations that have been reserved for us, but we should not forget to also look back in wonderment of the journey we have taken. The search for the fundamental laws of the universe is an eminently human drama, one that expands our mental vision and enriches our spirits. Einstein gave us a living description of his struggle to understand gravity: “the restless years of searching in the dark, brought him intense feelings of anguish, alternating between trust and exhaustion and finally light.” As we climb our knowledge mountain, each generation stands on the shoulders of ancestors (maybe we ourselves returning to the school of life) arrives at the summit and enjoys, with infinite clarity, the superb view that opens over the vastness and elegance of our universe. Today, our generation is awed by our vision of the universe and plays its role as it contributes with one more step of human ascension which it conducts, through knowledge and virtue as acquisitions of the soul that returns, humble, serene and reverent, with Christ, to the Mansions of the Creator.  

In the Never-created Creator's exalted breast and at the summits of evolution, Divine Christs 

Likewise, in planetary genesis, according to scientific knowledge as well as spirituality, there was an immense general confusion about the primordial elements, before the formation of the world. A type of disorder, called chaos. An immense laboratory where incandescent matter, telluric forces, and physical-chemical energies conflicted with one another. Standing apart from the system’s central nucleus, the Sun, a new orb where all intelligent and harmonious humans would manifest, during countless millenniums. It was beginning to be prepared by the Divine Sculptor and his legions of angelic workers for its sacred destiny toward future.

Such project, under Jesus’ tutelage by divine delegation, would take the initial chaotic conditions of the process to the magnificent realities of the blessed orb, stable and inserted in the Divine Cosmos. It is so that we would have the evolutionary spiritual itinerary for 22 billion human souls, gravitating in it, as Emmanuel informs us in the book “Roteiro” (Itinerary), published by the Federação Espírita Brasileira (Brazilian Spiritist Federation). This is one of the star books from our longed-for Francisco Candido Xavier’ mediumistic output. In the Never-created Creator's exalted breast and at the summits of evolution, Divine Christs pontificate; the Archangel sages, whose sublime glory and sovereign power overcome whatever the human mind can imagine to be magnificent and formidable. They are the ones who, under the inspiration of the Supreme Architect of the Universe preside, in the Infinite, to the construction, development and disintegration of globes. They determine their routes, physiochemical laws and bio-mathematics and managing their destinies and their inhabitants’.

Human science was, and is, always a necessary and valuable tool for progress. It is a divine worker at the service of the evolution of spirits. It is a valuable frontrunner in combating the dark side of ignorance; it ignites ever-more shining lights of knowledge on its way to the truth.

Our recognition of these extraordinary minds who work for the entire humanity is admirable and worthy of esteem. They work at the cost of great fatigues and untold sacrifices overlaying the primacy of accomplishing intelligence and the wonderful powers of intuition which are born of faith, their own personal interests. They elevate their souls to sublime peaks in resplendent spheres in an ascendant march toward God. 

Sérgio Thiesen, professor de Medicina e Físico, reside no Rio de Janeiro-RJ.