Page 160 - The Creation Of The Universe

158 THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE

pounds will start to burn.
In other words, if carbon atoms are to enter into covalent bonds with
other atoms and if the resulting compounds are to remain stable, the am-
bient temperature must not go over 100°C. The lower boundary on the oth-
er hand is around 0°C: if the temperature drops too much below that, or-
ganic biochemistry becomes impossible.
In the case of other compounds, this is generally not the situation. Most
inorganic compounds are not metastable; that is, their stability is not great-
ly affected by changes in temperature. To see this let's do an experiment.
Stick a piece of meat on the end of a long, thin piece of metal such as iron
and heat the two together over a fire. As the temperature grows hotter, the
meat will darken and eventually burn long before much of anything hap-
pens to the metal. The same thing would be true if you substituted stone
or glass for metal. You would have to increase the heat by many hundreds
of degrees before the structures of such materials began to change.
By now you certainly will have spotted the similarity between the tem-
perature range that is necessary for carbon compounds' covalent bonds to
be established and remain stable and the range of temperatures that pre-
vails on our planet. As we have said elsewhere, in the whole universe, tem-
peratures range from the millions of degrees in the hearts of stars to ab-
solute zero (-273.15°C). But Earth, having been created for humanity to live
in, possesses the narrow temperature range essential for the formation of
the carbon compounds that are the building-blocks of life.
But the curious "coincidences" do not end here. The same temperature
interval is the only one in which water remains liquid. As we saw in the
earlier chapter, liquid water is one of the basic requirements of life and, in
order to remain liquid, it requires precisely the same temperatures that car-
bon compounds need to form and be stable. There is no physical or nat-
ural "law" dictating that this should be so and under the circumstances, this
situation is evidence that the physical properties of water and carbon and
the conditions of the planet Earth were created so as to be in harmony with
one another.