Read in "A brief history of time," about Steven Hawking's encounter with the Pope. Hawking thought he was explaining away the mysteries of the universe to the Pope, nullifying the need for God. The Pope asked many questions, and Hawkings notes how the Pope understood what he said with uncanny brilliance. He asked the Pope what he thought about it all. The Pope asked to meet him again the next day. The Pope's reply, highly paraphrased, was "See? We told you so."
Hawkins understood at that moment that cosmology had actually been certifying as correct the Catholic Church's understanding of the nature of the universe. From that time on, he has been maniacal in his attempts to undermine the theories he had presented to the Pope, with preposterous results that have been proved wrong at every opportunity to observe excpected consequences.
IIRC, Hawkins believed in many dimensions, but rejected the string theory's notion that they were flat. Rather, he believed that the 5th dimension was quantum probability, where every possibility occurs in an infinite number of "parallel universes."
Just wait 'til he finds out that the 5th dimension is stitched together like a quilt, and the junctures in time and space occur at the Holy Sacrifice.
(I'm sort of playing: The Catholic Church holds that time and space are suspended so every instance of the Holy Sacrifice of Mass, is really the same Holy Sacrifice at Calvary, presented miraculously through time and space into every tabernacle in the world. Pretty heady stuff to have come up centuries before Galileo had tried to use Copernicus' observation to prove God as we know him did not exist. And yes, to all the Protestants who love to cluck at the Catholic Church's heresy trials of Galileo, that was what the fuss was about.
And I'm sort of not playing: I truly will be fascinated to go to heaven and find how all this multidimensional stuff relates to mystical constructs. It's way above my understanding to relate two incredibly divergent topics like I've done, but I'd seriously love to know if there is any relation.)
"The Catholic Church holds that time and space are suspended so every instance of the Holy Sacrifice of Mass, is really the same Holy Sacrifice at Calvary, presented miraculously through time and space into every tabernacle in the world."
Thanks, dangus, that is the simplest explanation I have ever heard.
Strings, dimensionality, time/space issues are all endlessly fascinating. One does have a tendency to become unstuck (ala Billy Pilgim in Slaughterhouse 5) unless one is grounded in the reality that: "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." Col 1:17
It's interesting how you pointed out that Hawking was peeved at the Pope's responses and then spent time trying to disprove the Pope's position. I'd never heard about that. Thanks again for posting.
Hawkins understood at that moment that cosmology had actually been certifying as correct the Catholic Church's understanding of the nature of the universe. From that time on, he has been maniacal in his attempts to undermine the theories he had presented to the Pope, with preposterous results that have been proved wrong at every opportunity to observe excpected consequences.
Odd; I've read "A Brief History of Time," and don't recall anything like that in it. Perhaps you could provide a citation or link to substantiate your claim.
In the meanwhile, the readers may find this quote from the text of interest, as it indicates quite the opposite of what you have claimed.
Throughout the 1970s I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican. The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went around the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the Pope. He told us that is was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference--the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!
I'd settle for figuring out what you think you said.