The Universe and God in Twelve Dimensions

This is the opening chapter of my upcoming book, A Step Sideways: The Universe And God In Twelve Dimensions, and the primary purpose of the book will be made obvious very quickly. I hope you enjoy the premise, and that you'll be intrigued enough to want to read the book when it's finished. Enjoy! 

Dimension 0

A point.

A single point has no length, width, or height. It has no size whatsoever, no dimension. When we exist in one solitary point, we exist in Dimension Zero.

            Waxahachie, Texas, was a quiet enough town in 2017, when those four private investors decided that their way of “making America great again” was to finish the Superconducting Super Collider underneath the town – heck, underneath a good chunk of Ellis County, if you think about it. Dang thing’s over fifteen miles in diameter, fifty-four miles around, you know? And I think in their good ol’ boy Texas hearts and wallets, they’d’ve made the dang thing even bigger if more than a quarter of it hadn’t already been dug, just sitt’n there waiting for them to finish the job.

            But even now, thirteen years later, with the population doubled thanks to the SSC, Waxahachie’s still a pretty peaceful place. It’s still somewhere that you would feel good raising a family, you know?

            Too bad I don’t have a family to raise here.

            I’ve only been back here for a year, almost two, since they opened the SSC in late ‘28. I say “back” here, because one of my three degrees came from here, from the Southwestern Assemblies of God University, class of 2018. (Go, Lions!) Even played a little football there, like I did back in Burkbuckett – heck, you can’t be six-foot-anything in Texas and not play football, you know? Nothing special: NAIA-level lineman, was never going to start anyway, not even in the Central States League. But I got to play some, and I learned about teamwork on the field while I learned about God and a ton of other topics in the classroom.

            So, to fill in the missing years in my resume there, insert a second bachelor’s in mathematics from SMU – guarantee I wasn’t going to make the team there, even though I did have a year of eligibility left! – and my doctorate in particle physics from UT-Austin, knowing what was coming down the pike back there in Waxahachie.

            Because, see, here’s the thing: I’ve been a Christian all my life. Raised in the Assembly of God, went to church every Sunday, spoke my share of tongues, took enough communion to have eaten Christ’s entire arm off. (Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…) But even after being ordained, I knew there was something missing, something fundamentally wrong in the way I was connecting to the Lord. I was twenty-two years old, bachelors of divinity in hand, ready to go find me a nice church population to tend – and yet, I knew I wasn’t quite ready yet, you know? There was something… well, I don’t want to keep using the word “fundamental”, but that’s what it was: something foundational that was missing. A brick lacking in my cornerstone that would topple the entire structure one day through its absence.

            And as I was starting my senior year at SAGU, the news came out about the four oil men who had decided to take President Trump’s slogan to heart. They’d made a killing in the resurgent oil market that year, and wanted to do something significant. (I keep using the fundamental; they kept using the word significant. Guess we’re all a bit semantically fixated sometimes.) And they’d been looking into what the situation was with the Super Collider that was mothballed back in 1994 (I wasn’t even alive back then!), found out the tunnels that existed were still in great shape, that a chem company called Magnablend had bought the site but not done anything with it yet, and decided over beer and ribs to buy the thing and “to run them CERN folks into the ground.” (Their words, not mine. I’m a team player, remember?)

            So they did. Buy it, I mean. The CERN Large Hadron Collider’s done some amazing work in the fifteen, twenty years it’s been smashing particles, and its reputation is safe from us. But it wasn’t “us” back in 2017, of course; it was “them”. As in, “Them oil men are going to make fools of themselves, reinvesting in that white elephant! Don’t they know it got shut down for a reason?”

            They did, in fact, know. Cost overruns. Mostly the cost of the magnets they needed, not so much the tunneling, which it turns out isn’t as big of the budget as you’d think (and even less in 2018, when they’d already had fourteen miles in place before day one!). And the magnets? Well, twenty-five years is a loo-oong time in technology years, and those magnets were much more easily produced, more powerful, and a tenth of the price they were in 1992. So when the original was shut down, the government had spent two billion dollars already, with an expected ten more to spend, before Mr. Clinton reluctantly signed off on its shutdown. By the time these four dudes finished the project in 2028, it had only cost them eight billion, and that’s in today’s pesos! Someth’n to be said for private management and a lack of government bureaucracy, but a big chunk of that savings was the improvement in tech since the nineties.

            And it flicked a switch in me. I’d gotten hooked on science from our chem and physics teacher back in high school, over my mother’s objections. At the time, the big thing in particle science the search for the “God Particle”, the super heavy boson that Peter Higgs and Francois Englert theorized, and CERN found before I graduated from Burkbuckett High School, up on the OK border. When I heard about the Superconducting Super Collider project starting up again in 2017, it renewed that love in my gut for the physics I’d set aside in my devotion to God.

            And it was then that I realized what the missing brick was in my foundational belief system:

            How can I believe the literal translation of my Lord’s Word, as He has given it to us through the prophets in the sixty-six books of the Bible, when the scientific world was making discovery after discovery that seemed to put that Scripture in question?

            Which was right? The Bible, or the Universe?

            Mind you, it’s not like they’re really as contradictory as some people make it sound like they are. Most people don’t realize, for example, that the Bible always assumed the earth was a sphere, unlike most of the societies alive fifteen hundred years before Christ. I was just reading Isaiah 40, which happens to be where I am in my yearly reading straight through of the Bible (and like any lifelong college student, I take such copious notes that I have to work to remember to listen to what God is telling me with his Word each day, not just read and digest it untested). In verse 22, he casually throws in this verse:

It is He who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers…

            The “circle of the earth”? The actual Hebrew word means “sphere” – so they called it a globe for hundreds of years before the Greeks and Romans watched sailors disappear below the horizon and famously realized the earth is round. (Yes, there were backwards stragglers who thought Columbus and Magellan would fall of the edge, but they were just stupid, not the norm.)

            We could go on and on… Do you know why God told man to circumcise male Hebrew babies on the eighth day of life in particular? Scientists have recently ascertained that the combination of wound coagulation (which increases over time as babies live their first month) and comfort of the surgery (while babies do feel pain, despite calls to the contrary by fools, it is less at birth than down the road) makes the eighth day the ideal date for circumcision for the health and well-being of the baby! And God knew that already and ordered it for His People from the very beginning!

            Many of the food restrictions of the Old Testament were obviously designed to keep the nomadic Israelites healthy and alive, and that’s partially why some of them were rescinded in Christ’s time – they were no longer medically necessary. The most obvious of these is the restriction on eating pork, a meat that turns deadly when it starts to go unrefrigerated. God chose simply to forbid his nomadic people the deadliest meats (there are long lists of animals that are ‘unclean’, although some of those are designed to keep up away from animals that the idolatrous pagans around them worshipped).

            There are literally dozens of these “coincidences”, and all of these things add up. I was certain that there was more method than madness to the Bible’s many rules, statutes, commandments, and so forth. But I couldn’t put my finger on it.

So I decided, two months before graduation, that I needed to find an answer to that all-important question if I was to become a true servant of God, and certainly before I could shepherd anyone else. So I applied to and got accepted at Southern Methodist University in Dallas (Go, Mustangs!), majoring in mathematics with an engineering specialization, with the sole intent on going on to graduate work in particle physics. Three years later, I was working with amazing physicists like Willy Fischler and Duane Dicus and Jacques Distler at the University of Texas at Austin (Go, Longhorns!), learning everything I prayed I would need to get on at the SSC when it opened in a few years.

            Four years there left me just enough time to get some practical experience at one of the National Accelerator Labs (the one out in the South Bay, near where the 49ers played. Even got to see a couple of NFL games there, including seeing my beloved Cowboys play!), plus a trip to Switzerland as a “visiting scientist” (sounds like I was some high-fallutin’ hotshot!) for three months to study what the folks at CERN were doing now, before I landed the cherished gig back here in Waxahachie, studying and working on whatever our calling would be.

I had no idea what projects I’d be working on, but I knew it would have importance. And I knew it would bring me closer to my goal – the understanding of the relationship between God and the Universe he’s created.

            So, there’s my life and career in a nutshell up until now. And all of it was aimed at answering one question, reconciling one conflict in my world’s paradigm. For example, in all my years, I’ve never had a serious girlfriend. Why? Well, before I left high school, it was mostly because I was a math geek, and afterwards, my studies always took precedence. And today, thirty-one years after birth, I’m still lost in those studies, in the question that supersedes all other questions:

            How do I reconcile what the Bible says with what modern science says?

            Amazingly, I got the chance to find out.

            And now, I get to share that knowledge with you.

Perseverance, as told by my daughter

After our four sons were born (three surviving), my wife and I thought we were done, but God had other plans. Apparently, we didn't wait for our baby girl, so we got two as a result. Dorothy was the stronger of the two at birth; Charlotte should have died twice - once at birth, and again three months later (she had to have a needle directly into her heart, so she had a paralyzing drug to keep her from moving). Dorothy was waiting at the door to be born; Charlotte was looking for an exit out her mother's rib cage. So, she's a survivor.

She's an outstanding student and as creative as all of her siblings. This week, the Gifted-Talented class she and her sister are in self-published a book of their writing. I want to share Charlotte's story with you, partly as a papa-brag, but also as a tale of perseverance from the eyes of an eleven-year old who sees the world differently than adults do. It's amazing to me what her memory latched on to! Here is her story (with very slight editing by papa):

Writing Stories (by Charlotte Smith)

     Ever since I was only six years old I wanted to be like my dad, writing books. Whenever I tried, though, I'd always find myself forgetting or saying it was too hard. That year, I wrote a story about dummies who got killed, and (I) drew pictures of them.

     Looking back at it, the stories seem brutal, but (they were) a great start. 'Til this day, I still haven't deleted all of my unfinished stories. They seem to give me inspiration.

     After I was about eight I gave up. 

     "I can never actually finish a single book, can I?"

     Dad told me to keep trying though, so I started writing another book, to find myself only to fail and forget what I had been writing. That summer Dad decided to start our own summer school. We each had three subjects: math, (Bible) reading, and we got to choose a summer project. I suspect Dad knew what I was thinking to do, because after he said it, he looked right at me.

      I had to try again.

     First, I ran through what I had learned, write the story, then type, and don't work too hard. That just leads me to telling myself, "It's too hard." 

      The next year, I wanted to write again, just so I could prove that I was getting better. I had always found something that was better each year. That's what kept me from giving up. The next two years, I found myself writing as much as I could, keeping the stories a secret to learn something again.

    When I was ten, I started writing a story I called "Tarts". The story was based on Alice In Wonderland, in which the main character fell into another world where there were talking animals and magic. I already knew how it was going to end, and how I would begin. I was so excited to start! After that summer, though, I forgot about the book and lost it. 

      I grew bored, doing nothing after school, not having a project, so I began another book. I named this one "Leavaes", but soon changed it to "Lavender". 

     Dad gave me two more tips about writing: "Write and type at the same time - write a chapter, (then) type a chapter. You also have to write what the chapters are about before you start writing them." I took his advice, and now I'm writing a book with confidence for the first time in a while.

It's fun to watch your children follow in your footsteps. My oldest son is a bio-mechanical science major, and every once in awhile he'll shoot me an advanced mathematics question that we can hack over for awhile. My two teenagers (stepson and second son) are both outstanding actors, and to watch them on stage is a delight and a throwback to my thirty years on stage (though usually with my back to the audience!). My youngest son is more inclined to be a behind-the-scenes guy, and was actually asked to help with the high school musical stage crew as a seventh grader, because of his success running the stage crew at the middle school level earlier in the year. He loves knowing that what he does makes everyone else look good. (My oldest has that trait as well.) And my daughters have some of all of that, although they haven't had the opportunities their brothers have had so far. Charlotte isn't the only writer in the family - big brother Hamilton has written some amazing pieces on some deep topics. (I should share his piece about his late brother with you some day soon.)

But when they choose their paths, whether or not it's one you've followed or one you've never heard of, you support them to the best of your ability. God is their guide, I pray, and every day I ask Him to place His Guiding Hand upon each of my children (and on Dana and her children as well), to keep them all from evil, and to grant them each His Blessing. I pray that what I've done as a father will keep the Lord in their lives from now on - but their relationship with God is theirs alone, no matter what I do. They are not automatically Christians just because I am, and you are not a Christian because your parents went to church. 

Our relationship with God is ours alone.

An excerpt - why God is so accurate with prophecy

This is an excerpt from a book I'm writing, The Universe In Twelve Dimensions, the express purpose of which is to demonstrate that everything science is learning about the universe matches up with what God tells us in Scripture is the case. The protagonist of the story is the Bible study teacher in this sequence, and this is a Sunday morning class of his. Enjoy!

Church services on Sunday were uneventful. We spent more time on Daniel nine this week, focusing on the purpose of the prophecy contained in the final four verses therein.

“I got to thinking,” I began, “that we spent so much time last week talking about what prophecy was, and its purpose being in the Bible at all is. So, right here IN the book of Daniel, in fact immediately before the chapter that we were reading. Flip back over to Daniel 9, to the segment right before Daniel 10 that we’ve been looking at these last two sessions, and let’s read verses 24 thought 27. These,” I add partly in buildup and partly to give them time to find the passage, “are perhaps the most important prophecies about the End Times in the Old Testament:

 “Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place. Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.”

“Oh, what does all of that even mean?”

“Well, Doris, let’s try to break it down. There’s a lot about readin’ text that’s 2600 years old that we can still relate to today, but there are other places that it helps to understand the customs or such of the place and time so we can put it in our 21^st century minds a little better.

“The seventy ‘weeks’ are actually seventy ‘weeks of years’, not of days, or in other words seventy seven-year segments. So ‘seventy sevens to finish the transgression’ and all of that means 490 years before the Messiah comes to finish up the human race’s crimes against God by those six methods there in verse 24. Then he splits them up. There’s going to be a set of seven ‘weeks’, or 49 years, that they ‘restore and build Jerusalem’ – that’s the length of time from his writing until the second group of returning prisoners from Babylon finish doing exactly that, precisely 49 years later. Another prophecy fulfilled.  The next set is sixty-two sevens, or 434 years, until ‘an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing’. So that’s sixty-nine of the seventy weeks, 483 years, and that number gets us to Christ’s first coming. Amazingly, He arrives for the Triumphant Entry exactly on the DAY of that prediction, exactly 483 years later, the Anointed One presenting Himself to be ‘cut off’ on that day.”

“No. That’s not possible.”

“Oh, I know what you mean, Hank. I know. I didn’t believe it until I did the math myself while I was an undergrad here at SAGU. Every one of those multi-year prediction things comes true precisely, no matter what the prophecy was. That’s one of the most tangible proofs we have of God.”

The awed silence in the room was SO satisfying as a teacher.

"I wish I could tell you the next part was as clean as that one; there's no definition of the break between the first sixty-nine sevens and the beginning of the seventieth. But there's definitely a break, because he talks about...ah, yes, here in verse 26:

And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war.

And THEN comes the covenant for the last week. Of course, what actually happens is that very soon the "people of the prince" - the Jews - fight back, and Rome utterly destroys Jerusalem. Just as Jesus had predicted at the start of Matthew 24, leading into HIS version of the End of Days, no two stones will remain atop each other. Something like that."

            Priscilla stared at her Bible like she was going to see through to the cover.

“See, that wouldn’t have even made sense to the people Isaiah was saying it to! ‘They’ll come destroy the city!! And then you’ll have the sacrifices going when the next problem hits!’ That wouldn’t have even made sense to them, would it?”

I had to smile at this. She couldn’t have set me up any better had I given her the question before class!

“Priscilla, THAT is one of the very best proofs for God’s validity through the Scripture. When WE write stories, or statements, with a political or historical bent – or for ANY reason, I suppose! – we do so aiming at what audience? Our CURRENT clients, the people who will read it right away.

“If the Bible were faked, by ordinary people of the time, it would have had signs of being written to satisfy the people it was most directly trying to fake. However, most of the time, it was NOT good news for them. One of my favorite Bible jokes isn’t really a joke at all: A kid asks his dad how he knows the Bible’s real. Without missing a beat, Dad replies, ‘Mark 11, verses 13 and 14’, and drops the subject. Kid goes and looks it up. Wait a sec, gotta find it. OK, here it is:

And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, He went to see if He could find anything on it. When He came to it, He found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And His disciples heard it.

“The kid brings the verses back to Dad, and Dad replies, ‘Yep, that’s it,’ and the kid says, ‘I don’t get it.’

“Dad’s reply is priceless, and I think it’s essentially right: ‘Son, if you or I were writing about Jesus, we’d want to make sure He looked as good as He could, so everyone would worship Him, right?’ Son agrees. ‘But these guys didn’t DO that. They included a story like this, that kinda makes the Son of God look like a bit of a jerk, y’know? So, if stuff like that made it into the Gospels, I’m going to believe the rest of it’s true, too.’

“My point is, there’s a ton of stuff like Mark 11 here that isn’t what you’d include if ALL you’re worried about is making points with the audience of the time.

“But GOD writes with an Eye towards the audience He needs to read it LATER. Revelation chapters two and three do this. Sometimes, He even writes out predictions that come true TWICE, in two different eras, under two completely different sets of people and circumstances. Daniel 11 will be a great example of that later on in our studies, Priscilla, probably two or three weeks from now.

“This goes back to something that I left you with a terrible answer to last week, Doris. When you asked how God could see all of time at once, I basically shoved the question aside by saying something like, ‘Because He’s God, that’s why!’, and that’s not really an answer at all. So let me try to give you something better.

“We don’t know HOW He does it. But I think it’s a matter of dimensions. We can only experience one dimension of time – we can only go in one direction, forward, at one speed, 60 minutes per hour. But just like we can look at an entire field at once, because we can see in three dimensions of space at once, God sees in more than one time dimension at once, So he sees us, I think, as if he sees ALL of our lives at once, and in fact the whole of creation at once, too.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t change things as we go – but God sees the changes, just like we’d see the changes in a chess board. I don’t know if this is a perfect analogy; well, I’m pretty sure it isn’t, I guess. But is it a little better than what I gave you last week, Doris?”

“It is, thank you. That does make more sense to me.”

“Me too,” chimed her husband Stanley. “I was frustrated more by the question than your answer, but that answer helps a ton, kid. Thanks.”

             Good deed for the day accomplished. Achievement unlocked.