In contrast, Stanford physics Professor Andrei Linde briefed the audience on a more speculative version of creation. Linde has pioneered an area called inflationary cosmology, which postulates that just before the big bang the universe underwent a period of exponential inflation. During this brief interval a submicroscopic piece of space-time expanded to fill a space that is bigger than the visible universe. Looking at creation theologically, religious views of creation and scientific theories of the origin of the universe do not conflict, argued Thomas Sheehan, professor of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago. Science is about how.
Religion is about why.
When asked if theologians hadn't simply ceded the ground of creation to the scientists by taking such a view, Sheehan responded that he didn't consider surrendering a naive idea about God as a loss. Alain Aspect, professor at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, illustrated one such case, a famous thought experiment, called the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paradox, that was the subject of a lifelong debate between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, one of the champions of quantum mechanics. The experiment centers on a pair of photons emitted from a common light source that travel in opposite directions. Quantum mechanics predicts that, regardless of how far apart the photons travel, they remain linked so that the observation of one of the photons determines the state of the other. Einstein argued that the photons were separate, but behaved as if they were linked because of their common origin.