The Face of Chaos
Victor J. Stenger
Published in Free Inquiry 13, 13, Winter 1992/93.

	Last year the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE)
satellite made the first observation of temperature
fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.   Over-
enthusiastic statements on the significance of the
experiment from several of the scientists interviewed
prompted the media to interpret the COBE results as an
unprecedented verification of the biblical view of
creation.  Consequently, an important scientific result
was so grossly misrepresented to the public as to turn
its actual meaning on its head.  
	Some said they saw the face of God.  However,
physicist Simon Swordy told me saw the face of Elvis -
the young Elvis.  When I looked at the pictures from COBE,
all I saw was the face of chaos.
	The COBE data added significantly to an impressive
collection of prior observations that had already
convinced most cosmologists that the big bang picture
was basically correct.  Far from demonstrating the need
for a creator, the results from COBE provided support for
the decade-old extension of the big-bang theory called
inflation that outlines how the structure of the universe,
including the laws of physics themselves, could have
come about by natural means - as the universe exploded
out of nothingness.
	The COBE observations were hardly revolutionary. 
Had ripples in the microwave background not been found
at about the level reported, then we would have had a
real scientific revolution on our hands.  The sound you
heard emanating from the cosmology community was a
collective sigh of relief.  Inflationary big-bang
cosmology, the only known scheme that is consistent
with the entirety of observations, had passed yet another
test with flying colors.  More nails were hammered into
the coffins of alternative models, such as the steady-
state and plasma cosmologies.  
	According to the inflationary big-bang theory,
about fifteen billion years ago our universe was confined
to a region of space as small as any region of space can
be:  a sphere of radius 10^-33 of a centimeter, the so-
called Planck length.   A volume of Planck dimensions is
necessarily a black hole, and the inside of a black hole is
a state of maximum entropy since no information can
escape.
	Thus, at this pregnant moment in time, the universe
had no structure or design.  Even if a creator, or some
less personified force, had brought the universe into
being prior to this moment, any record of that design
would have been wiped out by quantum fluctuations and
so can have had no influence on the structure of the
current universe.  Put simply, the inflationary big-bang
theory has neither need nor room for a creator.
	Most people cannot imagine how the universe could
have happened naturally.  They presume that some
transcendent force, capable of violating the laws of
nature, was required to bring the material world into
existence.  The common, intuitive arguments are
basically twofold, and I will express them as follows:
	(1)The no free lunch argument:  "You
can't get  something for nothing."
	(2)The argument from design:  "How could all of
this (gesturing to the world around us) have
happened by chance?"
These two familiar expressions of a perceived need for a
miracle to create an orderly universe can be directly
translated into the more precise language of physics.  In
fact, they represent vernacular statements pertaining to
the seeming violation, at the beginning of the universe,
of two of the most fundamental laws of physics.  The no
free lunch argument claims a violation of  the first law
of thermodynamics in producing the universe.  The
argument from design asserts that the second law of
thermodynamics must also have been broken at the
beginning of time.  
	Despite this intuition, the fact that organized
matter and energy are now distributed throughout
billions of light-years of space does not imply a
violation of either the first or second law of
thermodynamics.  The inflationary model, together with
Einstein's general relativity, show how a quantum
fluctuation at the Planck time, allowed by the
uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics and violating
no principle of physics, would take only 10^-42 of a
second to grow to a sphere the size of a proton
containing a vacuum energy equivalent to all the visible
mass in the current universe.
	Likewise, the organization of matter into galaxies
and planets does not require a violation of the second law
of thermodynamics - now or in the past.  Though the
universe starts as a black hole of maximum entropy, or
maximum disorder, it explodes into an expanding
relativistic gas having less than its maximum allowable
entropy.  Thus the microwave background is easily able to
absorb the entropy from any localized structure, like a
galaxy or a planet, that spontaneously forms - induced by
random statistical fluctuations of the type observed by
COBE. 
	Far from providing the evidence for a creator
sought by believers, any observations that support the
inflationary big-bang theory, such as the data from COBE,
make the existence of a creator that much more unlikely. 
The currently existing structure of the universe,
including the laws of physics, could very well have been
spontaneously generated after the Planck time, by the
natural processes of self-organization and perhaps even
a kind of Darwinian natural selection from among a
random sample of all possibilities.  Those who look to
science to bolster their faith in the fantasies of a
creator and an invisible world of the spirit won't find
such support in the ripples of the big bang or any other
scientific observation.  
___________________________________
These ideas are discussed in the author's books: Not
By Design: The Origin of the Universe, (Prometheus
Books,1988), Physics and Psychics: The Search for a
World Beyond the Senses  (Prometheus Books,1990) and
in his article "The Universe:  The Ultimate Free
Lunch," European Journal of Physics 11 (1990), p.
236.  Victor J. Stenger is Professor of Physics and
Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.