THE HANDWRITING OF GOD NOTES
words and music (c) 1992 Nancy Ellen Abrams

About 15 billion years ago the universe seems to have spilled out of another state of being, and it has been expanding ever since. Spacetime was never smooth and perfect – it was created slightly wrinkled and uneven from the creation event itself. The wrinkles in spacetime have gravitational attraction, and matter everywhere in the universe has been inexorably moving toward these ancient wrinkles, now vastly enlarged by the expansion of the universe and deepened by the effects of gravity. When we look with modern telescopes past the hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and far out into the universe, we see great chains and superclusters of galaxies that illuminate the wrinkles in spacetime like glitter thrown onto lines of invisible glue.

The leftover heat of the Big Bang, called the cosmic background radiation, fills all of spacetime. The minute differences in its temperature from one direction in the sky to another are fossil relics of unevennesses in spacetime that existed when the radiation was emitted, only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. Scientists are learning how to read the cosmic background radiation and see in it baby pictures of the universe. The wrinkles in spacetime are encoded in the cosmic background radiation, and they are the blueprint according to which the universe on the galactic scale is still unfolding. To decipher them is to read the handwriting of God.

I was invited to perform at an astrophysical conference outside Paris in 1992 on the then newly discovered fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. My husband had predicted these fluctuations in 1984, and the discovery was a great vindication for his theory. He was one of the speakers. I sang a very early version of The Handwriting of God with a guitar. I have no idea how I played this song on a guitar.