Page 150 - The Creation Of The Universe

148 THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE

This is why the human body was so created that the capillaries form a
network that pervades it completely. A normal human body has about 5
billion capillaries whose total length, if stretched out, is about 950 kilome-
ters. In some mammals, there are as many as 3,000 capillaries in a single
square centimeter of muscle tissue. If you were to gather ten thousand of
the tiniest capillaries in the human body together, the resulting bundle
might be as thick as the lead of a pencil. The diameters of these capillaries
varies between 3-5 microns: that's three to five thousandths of a millimeter.
If blood is going to penetrate passages that narrow without blocking
them or slowing down, it certainly needs to be fluid and, as a result of wa-
ter's low viscosity, it is. According to Michael Denton, if water's viscosity
were just a bit more than what it is, the blood circulatory system would be
completely useless:
A capillary system will work only if the fluid being pumped through its
constituent tubes has a very low viscosity. A low viscosity is essential be-
cause flow is inversely proportional to the viscosity... From this it is easy
to see that if the viscosity of water had a value only a few times
greater than it is, pumping blood through a capillary bed would re-
quire enormous pressure and almost any sort of circulatory system
would be unworkable... If the viscosity of water had been slightly
greater and the smallest functional capillaries had been 10 microns in
diameter instead of 3, then the capillaries would have to occupy virtu-
ally all of the muscle tissue to provide an effective supply of oxygen and
glucose. Obviously the design of macroscopic life forms would be im-
possible or enormously constrained... It seems, then, the viscosity of wa-
ter must be very close to what it is if water is to be a fit medium for life. 83
In other words, like all its other properties, the viscosity of water is al-
so "tailor-made" for life. Looking at the viscosities of different liquids, we
see that they differ by factors of many billions. Among all those billions
there is one liquid whose viscosity has been created to be exactly what it
needs to be: water.