Chapter 1
Morphogenetic Universe
1.1 Unplanned, Unfair but Benevolent
The book of Genesis (King James version) starts succinctly: In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and
darkness was upon the face of the deep. Modern science views the birth of our Universe much in the same way, perhaps substituting spacetime for heaven and matter
for earth but not offering much more detail. Indeed, what detail is needed when
matter is without form, in a disordered state of thermodynamic equilibrium that prevailed till the Universe cooled down to become transparent, leaving us to see the
cosmic background radiation cooled down to 3 degrees kelvin, as a remainder of the
day when God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light,
that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Max Tegmark (2014) imagines that our Universe grew right after the Big Bang
just as a baby human grows right after conception: “each of your cells doubled
roughly daily, causing your total number of cells to increase day by day as 1, 2, 4, 8,
16, etc.” – and in the same way unimaginably tiny Planck-size spacetime cells multiplied each unimaginably tiny time interval during the course of cosmic inflation. A
baby’s cell is, however, infinitely more complex. It carries an elaborate development
plan in its DNA that predicts in many ways the baby’s destiny. Ardent Bible readers
may believe in a benevolent Creator who likewise immersed in the baby Universe a
thoroughly planned morphogenetic program, to be realized during the ensuing days
of Creation and beyond – but this cannot be reconciled with our scientific outlook.
The Universe at large seems to be haphazard. We can, of course, observe with satisfaction a nice symmetry in the Standard Model with its quarks, leptons, and gauge
fields neatly fitting into their allotted places, and be thankful for lucky combinations
of fundamental constants allowing our world to last for billions of years, thereby
leaving enough time for the creation, first, of a long list of elements in the Periodic
Table, and then, of a variety of their combinations in complex chemistry and elaborate crystalline structures. But in what a roundabout way it has been achieved! Little
else but gravity was employed to gather together dispersed matter into dense clumps,
1
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
L. Pismen, Morphogenesis Deconstructed, The Frontiers Collection,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36814-2_1
Morphogenetic Universe
1.1 Unplanned, Unfair but Benevolent
The book of Genesis (King James version) starts succinctly: In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and
darkness was upon the face of the deep. Modern science views the birth of our Universe much in the same way, perhaps substituting spacetime for heaven and matter
for earth but not offering much more detail. Indeed, what detail is needed when
matter is without form, in a disordered state of thermodynamic equilibrium that prevailed till the Universe cooled down to become transparent, leaving us to see the
cosmic background radiation cooled down to 3 degrees kelvin, as a remainder of the
day when God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light,
that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Max Tegmark (2014) imagines that our Universe grew right after the Big Bang
just as a baby human grows right after conception: “each of your cells doubled
roughly daily, causing your total number of cells to increase day by day as 1, 2, 4, 8,
16, etc.” – and in the same way unimaginably tiny Planck-size spacetime cells multiplied each unimaginably tiny time interval during the course of cosmic inflation. A
baby’s cell is, however, infinitely more complex. It carries an elaborate development
plan in its DNA that predicts in many ways the baby’s destiny. Ardent Bible readers
may believe in a benevolent Creator who likewise immersed in the baby Universe a
thoroughly planned morphogenetic program, to be realized during the ensuing days
of Creation and beyond – but this cannot be reconciled with our scientific outlook.
The Universe at large seems to be haphazard. We can, of course, observe with satisfaction a nice symmetry in the Standard Model with its quarks, leptons, and gauge
fields neatly fitting into their allotted places, and be thankful for lucky combinations
of fundamental constants allowing our world to last for billions of years, thereby
leaving enough time for the creation, first, of a long list of elements in the Periodic
Table, and then, of a variety of their combinations in complex chemistry and elaborate crystalline structures. But in what a roundabout way it has been achieved! Little
else but gravity was employed to gather together dispersed matter into dense clumps,
1
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
L. Pismen, Morphogenesis Deconstructed, The Frontiers Collection,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36814-2_1