Omniology is not for the faint-hearted

Douglas Adams has made this subject a cliche in thhgttu. The answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. Well I don't think 42 is a special number, (though it does divide by seven, six times to be precise), but he realised it had to be simple. Why? If we stick to our linear (flat earth) model of time the starting point had to be vanishingly simple. We are trying to get away from linear time, but the answer still has to be glaringly obvious once we have worked out the true shape of time.

Just as the flat earth (the one "we could see") involved some impossible structures (giant elephants and turtles), the way lies beget more lies, until we realised that the earth was in fact spherical like an orange. Or the knots the early philosopher-astronomers tied themselves in with the geocentric solar system, solved in a trice by placing the sun at its centre.

Could the laws of physics, and the perfectly-tuned physical constants (eg Boltzmann, Planck, mass of electron, permittivity and permeability of free space etc) have evolved, ie every set of laws and constants that didn't "work" disappeared, and left us with this perfect one? (I realise that a whole range of these ideas have been rehearsed by clever and learned people, but this is just a layman trying to get his head around it.)

We need a few ground rules otherwise a wide-ranging discussion like this can get out of control. They are my rules, others may disagree, but if their rules involve the term "energy" in a form that can't be measured in ergs, joules or kWH, they are no use to me.

So I am not saying black is white, or everything is nothing, or God is the creator of everything by definition, therefore God is the answer. I make it a premise that we are real, hence our origin is real, hence it must be explicable. (As a reminder, it is the God-given gift of free will that I am exercising here . .) So I rule out astrology, an example of illogical claims that particular heavenly bodies exerting a negligible effect can influence our behaviour or fortune. The moon is different, it is big and close and is exerting a significant effect on the development of life on earth. As of course is the sun, a primary factory and our primary power station. Maybe we are influenced by what time of year we were born or conceived, in the annual cycle of climate, or the education system, but not Mars in Uranus.

I don't rule out spirituality. In my early 2os I had a near out-of-body experience. I knew what it was, having read the subject some years previously, but the event was so spontaneous that it could not have been suggested, and it was real. I have no proof, but am prepared to accept there is another world not bounded by our physical constraints. And it can be detected (apparently) by temperature changes or images on photo paper. The existence of the spiritual world is an intriguing connection between the everyday physical, life and humanity, and God.

But another bogey is UFOs. Serious scifi writers like Clarke and Azimov have argued the statistical likelihood of life elsewhere, along with the great likelihood that we are ordinary, ie not the most advanced but somewhere on the scale of advancement. However, I don't accept that some are so advanced that they have cracked the speed of light barrier, are constantly watching, occasionally visiting and sometimes crashing into us. Of course we love mysteries and conspiracies, but the idea that all these extra-terrestrials are toying with us in a game of "now you see me, now you don't", or "wait till they develop an organic supercomputer, then we'll pop in and introduce ourselves" is to me ridiculous. Wouldn't at least one of these visitors have broken ranks and let us know for sure we are not alone. There is probably life elsewhere but time and space are real communications and transport barriers, and we will probably have to sort things out for ourselves.

In short, I think the basic shape of the universe is simple, and complex models involving faster than light, or space-time shunts, or string theory for that matter, are equivalent to our philosopher ancestors digging in their minds through our plate-shaped earth and gazing down on huge elephants standing on the back of that poor giant turtle.

Omniology is going to need some more closely defined rules and methods, based on the science of statistics, a subject I know little about but (you've guessed it), have plenty to say about. If I can get my snaggled ideas together.