Is God a mathematician?
The term relativity is used on 13 occasions in The Urantia Book. Only two of them may possibly refer to a physical theory, Einstein's theories of special and general relativity. Both are in the form of warnings, one stating "do not permit the concept of relativity so to mislead you that you fail to recognize the co-ordination of the universe under the guidance of the cosmic mind, and its stabilized control by the energy and spirit of the Supreme," and "Let not your dabblings with the faintly glimpsed findings of relativity disturb your concepts of the eternity and infinity of God."
These comments have caused some readers to dismiss Einstein's marvelous theories as being of no significance. But a careful reading of the text in which the word, relativity, occurs in the book does not support that view. And recently, the General Theory of Relativity has been shown to be the most accurate known to man.
Many of our foremost physicists and mathematicians have expressed their amazement that mathematics, a discipline that commenced because of the needs of early mankind to keep records of "how much," can creatively generate descriptive and predictive concepts that reveal the deepest of secrets about how our universe operates.
When Einstein commenced a serious development of his general theory, he was not motivated by the need to account for the planet Mercury's elliptical orbit, nor whether light paths are bent by gravity, nor the slowing of clocks or the shortening of rulers, etc. The problem that bugged him was that the amazingly accurate theory of gravity as proposed by Newton implied "action at a distance"--meaning two things could influence one another even though they were in no way connected. Einstein could not believe that. For that matter neither could Newton--but Newton's gravity theory worked so well that its irrationality was simply ignored.
Einstein went looking for alternatives, a search that led him into unfamiliar and obscure mathematical fields in geometry and topology. There he had to turn to friends to teach him what he needed to know. Finally he got there.
Almost everyone knows and many understand E=MC2. It is both simple and elegant and high school students can use it. Not so for the General Theory. It is short, sharp, remarkable and can be used only by those having advanced mathematical skills. One version is:
Rab - 1/2Rgab = -8pGTab
The left hand side of the equation refers to space-time curvature, the right hand side to mass-density. How could such a tiny equation give rise to predictions about such gigantic cosmological processes as those for which Taylor and Hulse received the Noble prize in 1993?
In 1974 this pair commenced to observe the variations in the pulsing of signals emanating from two neutron stars that were orbiting around one another. And they were able to check their observations against what is predicted by Einstein's General Relativity. Over a 25-year period, they found a quite extraordinary overall agreement between Einstein's theory and their observations that, in the timing of the signals, amounted to a precision of one part in 1014--that is one part in one hundred million million!!
This same system also provided the first hard evidence for the existence of the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's General Relativity about 80 years earlier--and for which direct evidence is now to hand, though still in need of independent confirmation.
But this is only a small example of the amazing power of mathematics to unravel the wonders of creation. So is it an accident that almost surrealistic forms of mathematics are the basis of the laws used by the First Source and Center to provide us with a universe friendly to life--one in which you and I live, move, and have our very being?
