Why black holes unlock the quantum majesty of the Universe
Imagine you find a watch lying on the ground. On close inspection you are compelled to marvel at its delicate sophistication and exquisite precision. The mechanism was surely designed; there must have been a creator. Transpose ‘watch’ for ‘Nature’ and this is the argument for God presented by clergyman William Paley in 1802. We now understand that the argument is seriously undermined by the overwhelming evidence in support of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The watchmaker is Nature, and it is blind. ‘There is grandeur in this view of life,’ wrote Darwin, ‘with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’
But what of the fixed law of gravity, a prerequisite for the existence of the planets on which the endless forms evolved? Or the laws of electricity and magnetism which glue the animals together? Or the menagerie of subatomic particles out of which we are made? Who or what laid down the laws; the framework within which everything cycles on?
