In one of his adult catechism classes,
Fr. Jackson alluded to the idea
that the universe is held in existence
by the power of God.

In "Wisdom Today" it says,
"...we have been called into existence by the
infinite power of God,
and we are maintained moment to moment by
that same power,
else we would lapse back into the nothing
from whence we emerged."

In the March 10, 2008, issue of
"Chemical and Engineering News" on page 88
there is an article bearing on this issue.

The rage these days in the world of tiny things
is nanotechnology
(chemistry of nanometer particles). But Richard Feynman
(a noble prize winning physicist, now deceased)
gave a lecture in 1959
entitled "There's plenty of room at the bottom."
The bottom being smaller and smaller. Below
nanotechnolgy in 10 to the -3 power increments, come
picotechnology, femtotechnology, attotechnology,
zeptotechnology, and yoctotechnology.

Now things get interesting. To quote the article
"Feynman, in his paper,
hints with some dark humor of a potential end-game
scenario, in which, say,
unwitting yoctotechnologists cause the vacuum of
space itself to transit
to a lower energy state. If that were to happen (by packing
several cosmic-ray-caliber packets of
energy into one spot, for example),
a spherical front would begin sweeping out at the 
speed of light from the
initiation point, changing all of the constants
of nature as it went along
its journey to the edges of the universe.
All protons, neutrons, and
electrons would pop out of existence like soap bubbles."

"One consolation is that from pole to pole on Earth,
the annihilation would take only four-hundreths of a second.
Terrible, yes, except for one
thing: There would not be enough time for regret,
Feynman pointed out with a sardonic touch."

So it appears that as Fr. Jackson seeks the truth and
Richard Feynman seeks
the truth, each in their own way, they both suggest that even the
vacuum of space is in a higher energy level and that
if a relaxation were to take place, everything would
disappear at the
speed of light including the
vacuum of space. In 18 billion years the known
universe would be gone including
the space that it occupied.

p.s. a nanometer is about one-hundreth of one-millionth
of an inch or 4 times ten to the -8th power.

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