Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

magnetic monopoles would have been massive compared
to other particles, so big that they would have hampered the
process of creating the sorts of particles we have around us
now that make up planets and people.
In short, the formation of magnetic monopoles should follow
from the big bang, and they should have wreaked havoc
on the formation of stable matter. Magnetic monopoles
should be plentiful today, but they are at best rare and,
possibly, nonexistent.
The second problem has to do with the cosmological principle,
according to which the universe is homogenous and isotropic. That
means that there are no privileged points in the universe, and from
every vantage point, the universe looks pretty much the same in
large-scale structure in every direction. Deviations occur locally in
small neighborhoods, but in the large, the universe looks the same
in any direction.
The same is true of the Earth, although it would not be true if,
say, the Earth was shaped like a crescent. On a crescent, there
would be certain points that were unique, and the curvature
would be variable. But this is not so on a sphere from the
larger perspective and not so with regard to space in the
larger perspective.
The problem is that with space, this shape is determined by the
density of mass and energy. This is what Einstein said in the
general theory of relativity: that gravitation is the curvature of
space-time by mass and energy. Constant curvature over all of
space-time means that there is equilibrium, that some sectors
are not more energetic than others. But why should this be?
Such equilibrium makes sense in small regions, but there are
parts of the universe that are so far away from each other that
there could not have been a process that brought them into
equilibrium. According to the theory of relativity, the speed of
light is the fastest possible speed, and the regions of space are
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