The Universe was not born by chance

This interview excerpt first appeared in the newspaper "Le Point", on June 10th, 1991. Jacques Duquesne queries the brothers scientists Igor and Grichka Bogdanov. Le Point ask whether the universe was born by chance...

IGB : Chance…... astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan used in this regard a very pretty image. The chance that the universe was born by chance, he wrote, is about equal to the chance for an archer to reach with his arrow a small square of one square centimetre located at 15 billion light-years.

Le Point : And couldn't life also have appeared by chance ?
IGB : Neither….

Le Point : The self-structuring of matter, which brings it to increasingly ordered and complex states, could not be carried out by chance either ?
IGB : Let us take an example: an living cell is made up of a score of amino acids forming a compact chain. The function of these amino acids depends, in its turn, of approximately 2000 specific enzymes. The biologists calculated that the probability so that a thousand of different enzymes approach in an ordered way until forming a living cell (along an evolution of several billion years) is about 10 power 1000 against 1.

Le Point : Thus it is impossible.
IGB : This is why Francis Crick, Nobel Prize of medicine for having discovered the ADN, said: an honest man, armed with all the knowledge to our range today should affirm that the origin of life currently appears to rely on miracle, so numerous are the conditions to fulfill in order to put it in motion.

Le Point : Don't scientists go further ?
IGB : They say, we cannot attest to the existence of a phenomenon of inferior order which would ineluctably lead to the birth of life.

Le Point : If such is the current state of research, aren't these answers likely to be contradicted one day by a new discovery ?
IGB : All the evolution of research since a hundred years goes in the same direction. Admittedly we know now that the universe will remain always a kind of enigma. Quantum physics showed that when one tries to come into contact with its intimacy, the phenomena that one meets are concealed there for the observation. This fact was evoked by the French physicist Bernard d' Espagnat, through this beautiful formula; "reality is veiled and there is intended to remain veiled".

Le Point : But what can one say about this reality ?
IGB : The trend of today's research is towards dematerialization. I.e. the universe is designed less like a machine than like a vast network of information. In other words, the objects which surround us are not made of material particles, but of fading out phenomena.

Le Point : You just evoked this immateriality of matter, let us return there...
IGB : It is all the direction of this new approach of reality, revolutionary by itd consequences, which we chose, Jean Guitton and ourselves, to designate under the name of "matarealism" more than a physical design, it operates as a new philosophical approach. But let us return to the most current description of matter. We know from now on that elementary particles do not have any existence in a strict sense, that they are only the provisional demonstrations of immaterial fields; There is no solid substrate, not basic rock, one could say, to matter. Thus the universe is immaterial. As Jean Guitton thinks, it is almost certain that the future generations of scientists will refine this image of a deeply ordered immaterial Universe, and as if resulting from an intention. Of a all things considered, from an intelligence.

Le Point : Aren't you going too far ?
IGB : From an intelligence. Everything happens as if the phenomena at the macroscopic and microscopic levels, in particular at the quantum scale, expressed the presence of an order which itself refers to a form of intelligence, which is not the fruit of chance. Everywhere, we meet the image of an order. Be it in the invisible one as described by the quantum theory, or in the visible one, in particular such as it is apprehended by this very new approach, the theory of deterministic chaos.