My Theory of the Universe

In the far north there is a rock which is 1000 miles high, 1000 miles wide and 1000 miles deep. Once every thousand years, a small bird comes and wipes its bill on that rock. When the rock has been completely eroded from the bird wiping its beak, then one second of eternity shall have passed.

The universe has been estimated to be 13.8 billion years old. That is less than one second of eternity. So let’s imagine that the universe is in fact eternal — infinite in its duration. Also consider how unlikely it is that life would evolve in the form we know it simply by chance. How many rolls of the dice would it take to come up with the exact combination that would have resulted, by chance, in life as we know it? I think it would be a very, very large number of dice rolls.

I believe the current universe, which is expanding, obeys the laws of thermodynamics which state that energy can be neither created nor destroyed but entropy tends toward a maximum. When that maximum entropy is reached, further expansion will be impossible and the universe will start to contract. Once fully contracted into a tiny space, with all of its energy intact (since it can be neither created nor destroyed), the situation will be unstable and another big bang will occur. Thus we have in all of eternity an infinite number of expansions and contractions, so many that in one of these, life is likely to evolve given that there are an infinite number of rolls of the dice. So I think Einstein was wrong. In response to the uncertainty of quantum theory, he famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” In fact, I believe God does exactly that.