Author Description

Introduction Thank you for opening this little book. It took me twenty years to write and should take you about two hours to read. It’s inspired by a very old idea, which has now been proven by science, at least in part, that the Universe is one river, and that galaxies, stars, planets and people are all whirls and eddies in the universal flow, that arise in the universe as naturally as whirls and eddies arise in a fast flowing river. It arose once upon a time in a place which created time and space. It spread in darkness like an exploding black hole until there was light. It was pure energy in pure symmetry, almost. The imperfections weighed down upon space, gathering energy and mass into vortices, which turned into galaxies, which created stars, which created planets, which created us. I started this book as an atheist, but half-way through, I discovered that the universe is my God, or that God is the face of the Universe, which is the same thing because we understand the unfamiliar through the familiar, and God is the personification of the Universe. I also realized that religion is a part of human nature, and that without religion, there is a hole in human nature that needs to be filled with one strong belief or another. But the belief does not need to be wrong and religion does not need to be in conflict with science. My book is an attempt to unite religion and science by a very simple idea- We can disagree about whether or not the Universe had a Creator, but we can all agree that the Universe is our Creator. It is also an attempt to bridge the gulf between art and science, by showing that science is a rich vein of poetry for artists to mine. It’s not easy to do. It took me twenty years. It will take more talented poets less. It’s not easy to transform the complex and precise language of science into the simple and vivid language of art. Days of inspiration were followed by months of nothing. Fortunately the book itself was an escape from my real li