After 20 hours of travel from Cambridge, England, one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists and cosmologists finally arrived in Richmond.
Torrential rain and a press conference with one attending journalist greeted him. But John D. Barrow was eager to talk about his work, first saying that contrary to popular belief, it does not rain nearly as much in England as in Richmond.
A research professor of mathematical sciences at the University of Cambridge, Barrow has published 17 books, more than 400 journal articles and a prize-winning play. He was the 2006 recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.
“The hallmark of Barrow’s work is a deep engagement with those aspects of the structure of the universe and its laws that make life possible and which shape the views that we take of that universe when we examine it,” John Templeton said when he announced the 2006 Templeton Prize of his namesake in March. The prize of $1.4 million is the largest monetary award ever given to a scientist.
Barrow has spoken at Windsor Castle, the Vatican and 10 Downing Street, the residence of the British prime minister. He spoke Oct. 6 in the humbler venue of the School of Business Building’s auditorium.
His speech, “Our Place in the Universe,” was the second lecture in VCU’s Life Science and Religion Community Forum’s six-part series titled “Science, Reason and Faith.”
“This talk is a partial overview of modern developments that have come from interest in the philosophical interaction between us and the nature of the universe as a whole,” Barrow said.
Barrow presented his speech about the universe’s nature in a humorous and easily understandable way. More than 100 Richmonders braved the rain to spend their Friday night exploring the wonders of the universe with him.
“The universe is not made for our convenience,” he said. “There are still things we can’t explain, like consciousness, human behavior and ethics. These problems can’t be reduced, so you can’t use typical scientific methods to explain them.”
Barrow asked the audience to imagine the universe as the surface of a basketball, lacking an edge or center. He used an M.C. Escher drawing of infinite girders, “Cubic Space Division,” for illustration.
“Our universe is one among many. Think of it as a bubble within foam: they come into being and then pop,” Barrow said. “Our visible part of the universe may have a beginning and an end, but the series of self-reproducing expanding universes created has no ending or beginning.”
He said that even though the universe is expanding, we are not; just as bread dough expands in an oven, the raisins in it do not. Other forces are stronger than the expanding force, which means that Earth, the Milky Way and even our local cluster of galaxies do not expand.
Barrow explained how empty the universe is and how far apart its contents are spread. He described the inflationary universe theory, which holds that if there is not enough matter in the universe, the universe will expand forever. Barrow’s overall message was that our universe is big, cold, dark and old because these are the only conditions at which life can exist.
When pitting science against religion, Barrow said we need to distinguish between specific scientific fields and religions. He said we have to remember that religion led to the development of science in its effort to describe the order of nature. But religion can pick up where science leaves off.
When he accepted the Templeton Prize in May, Barrow said, “In cosmology we know that we’re never going to be able to answer some of the questions that you read about. . . like ‘Did the universe have a beginning?’ or ‘Is it infinite?’ These questions are fundamentally unanswerable by science.”
Barrow is currently researching elements in the light from quasars and comparing them to those of Earth.