Everything Gets Digital?

This article in Scientific American (it's behind the paywall but you can read a preview at the link) describes an experiment by Fermilab director and University of Chicago physicist Craig Hogan, who hopes to test out something about the way the universe is put together.

Most standard views of the universe hold that space, objects and random protoplasm like you and me are at their most basic level "smooth" or continuous. But Hogan's experiment will see if that is actually true. If he is right, at the smallest possible scale, we are made up of discrete particles and the universe is actually "fuzzy" -- the same way that a smooth curve on a digital picture becomes a clunky series of squares if you zoom in close enough. These are not atoms, like we may remember from school science courses, but much much smaller on a scale called the "Planck length."

If he is right, we do not actually move smoothly through space, either, but rather we kind of jitter along by occupying first one set of the Planck-sized doodads (real physicists say "quanta" instead of "doodads," by the way) and then actually jumping to another set of them a Planck-distance away. Planck distances are also so small that they can't be detected by any usual measuring instrument, but Hogan's experiment will show certain results if the lasers it uses are affected by this jitteriness.

The Holographic Principle is another idea that may go along with the universe's "jittery" nature. It's kind of fuzzy to me its own self, but the upshot is that each of these little Plancks is actually encoded information, like the bits in a computer that store its information. I will be a good boy at this point and deliberately not say "mind of God, anyone?" although I am sore tempted. Not that I believe Hogan's experiment would prove that the universe is somehow contained within God's thoughts. But it points out that folks who suggest that scientific views of the universe crowd God from the picture just aren't conversant with how weird the universe might really be.

I was asked once why I like this weirdo scientific physics stuff, considering that I make a point of describing myself as a pretty orthodox Christian theist. Aren't we the ones that deny evolution and insist the universe is 6,000 years old and stuff? Some of us do. But I personally believe that if I worship a God who is among other things, the source of all truth, then nothing that moves me closer to the truth can move me away from God. So neither side -- atheists or "young-earthers" -- has it right when they insist that the scientifically discovered or theorized view of the universe pushes God aside.

You might say that both views have a flaw -- and if Hogan is right, the flaw is that they are pointing out the mote in their opponents' eyes while ignoring the Planck in their own (Oh, c'mon, you knew I'd do it sooner or later).