The first three installments of this round of Science in Focus, taking off from Marcus Chown's account of "Random Reality," have come from a physicist, a biologist, and a mathematician. In this concluding installment, you are hearing from an editor with no special expertise—the sort of reader Chown has in mind as his primary audience.

Let me begin by urging you to get a copy of Chown's book The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck, published in 2009. The chapter we're focusing on, "Random Reality," barely exceeds ten pages. Once you've read it, I expect you will want to read more of the book, the theme of which is announced in the subtitle: "What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe." In this particular chapter (the most important in the book, for my money), Chown explains how the extraordinary increase in information in the universe since the Big Bang is a puzzle, and how the solution points to the surprising role of randomness in the nature of things.

In "Random Reality," as explained at the outset of this series, Chown draws on the work of physicist Stephen D. H. Hsu. In the notes at the back of the book, Chown cites a technical article by Hsu for further reading. And in the chapter itself, he includes some pithy and provocative quotations from Hsu. For instance:

Einstein famously declared, "God does not play dice with the universe." But, says, Hsu, "Not only does God play dice with the universe but, if he did not, there would be no universe—at least, not one of the richness and complexity for life to have arisen."

But if you try to find quotations like this one in the article Chown references, you'll be flummoxed. Where do they come from?

They come from a piece about Hsu and his work that Chown did for the magazine New Scientist, "Universe Explained by Quantum Randomness" (October 8, 2007). I mention that in part to spare you the mild cognitive dissonance I experienced, but also to illustrate the way scientific knowledge is transmitted. Hsu's technical paper is quite austere, and requires advanced training to be evaluated. We ordinary readers—and most scientists in other fields, for that matter—would have to take the vital details on faith. Chown, who was himself a working scientist before he became a science writer, presented the gist of Hsu's work in a much more accessible form in the article for New Scientist, which in turn became the basis for a chapter in a book for general readers.

And it is in that form that we encounter the argument which culminates in Chown's concluding paragraph:

Einstein, as pointed out before, considered quantum processes—random and without cause—utterly abhorrent. However, according to Hsu, they are far from abhorrent. They are absolutely essential. We owe our existence today to quantum unpredictability. Look around you—at a rose, a newborn baby, a plane riding a vapour trail across the blue sky. We live in a world of boundless complexity. But all the complexity you see is merely the result of a long sequence of quantum coin tosses since the end of inflation. Like it or not, we live in a random reality.

It's interesting that Chown describes quantum process as "random and without cause" (italics added). In his account here, the primal "quantum processes" have an almost Pre-Socratic quality. But let's set that aside and focus on the tone of the conclusion, which recurs often in contemporary science writing. Someone in the know is going to clue you in. You may not like it, baby, but you'd better get used to it: "all the complexity you see is merely the result of a long sequence of quantum coin tosses since the end of inflation." The key word is "merely."

Merely? That's not a scientific judgment; that's a bit of noirish philosophy smuggled into the cosmology. Christian readers will find that the picture of the universe as sketched by Hsu and Chown, infinitely richer in "information" than the initial conditions of the Big Bang would predict, gives us yet another way to think of the Creator whose reality will always exceed our grasp.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

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