Robert Novak, conservative pundit/journalist and TV personality, is retiring after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Novak and I probably don’t agree on many things, and he isn’t called “The Prince of Darkness” for nothing (nor does he seem to especially mind). But brain tumors shouldn’t happen to anyone, so perhaps this is the place to share my Novak story.
Last September I gave a talk at a somewhat unusual venue: a conference at the University of Illinois on “Plato’s Timaeus Today.” Most of the speakers and attendees, as you might expect, were philosophers or classicists interested in this particular Platonic dialogue — which, apparently, used to be one of his most popular back in the Middle Ages, although it’s fallen a bit out of favor since then. But one of the central purposes of the Timaeus (full text here) was to explain Plato’s theory of the origin of the universe. (Briefly: the demiurge did it, not from scratch, but by imposing order on chaos.) (Also! This dialogue is the origin of the myth of Atlantis. It was not, as far as anyone can tell, a pre-existing story; Plato just made it up.) So the organizers thought it would be fun to invite a physicist or two, to talk about how we think about the universe these days. Sir Tony Leggett gave a keynote address, and I gave a talk during the regular sessions.
The point of my talk was: Plato was wrong. In particular, you don’t need an external agent to create the universe, nor to impose order on the chaos. These days we are reaching toward an understanding of the entire history of the universe in which there is nothing other than the laws of physics working themselves out — a self-contained, complete, purely materialist conception of the cosmos. Not to say that we have such a theory in its full glory, obviously, but we see no obstacles and are making interesting progress. See here and here for more physics background.
And there, during my talk, sitting in the audience, was none other than Robert Novak. This was a slight surprise, although not completely so; Novak was a UIUC alumnus, and was listed as a donor to the conference. But he hadn’t attended most of the other talks, as far as I could tell. In any event, he sat there quietly in his orange and navy blue rep tie, and I gave my talk. Which people seemed to like, although by dint of unfortunate scheduling it was at the very end of the conference and I had a plane to catch so had to run away.
And there, as I was waiting at the gate in the tiny local airport, up walks Robert Novak. He introduced himself, and mentioned that he had heard my talk, and had a question that he was reluctant to ask during the conference — he didn’t want to be a disruption among the assembled academics who were trying to have a scholarly conversation. And I think he meant that sincerely, for which I give him a lot of credit. And I give him even more credit for taking time on a weekend to zip down to Urbana (from Chicago, I presume) to listen to some talks on Plato. Overall, the world would be a better place if more people went to philosophy talks in their spare time.
Novak’s question was this: had I discussed the ideas I had talked about in my presentation with any Catholic theologians? The simple answer was “not very much”; I have talked to various theologians, many of them Catholic, about all sorts of things, but not usually specifically about the possibility of an eternally-existing law-abiding materialist universe. The connection is clear, of course; one traditional role of religion has been to help explain where the world came from, and one traditional justification for the necessity of God has been the need for a Creator. (Not the only one, in either case.) So if science can handle that task all by itself, it certainly has implications for a certain strand of natural theology.
Understanding that it was not an idle question (and that Novak is a Catholic), I added my standard admonition when asked about the theological implications of cosmology by people who don’t really want to be subjected to a full-blown argument for atheism: whether you want to believe in God or not, it’s a bad idea to base your belief in God on an urge to explain features of the natural world, including its creation and existence. Because eventually, science will get there and take care of that stuff, and then where are you?
And, once again to his credit, Novak seemed to appreciate my point, whether or not he actually agreed. He nodded in comprehension, thanked me again for the talk, and settled down to wait for his flight.
> Plato was wrong. In particular, you don’t need an external agent to create the
> universe, nor to impose order on the chaos. These days we are reaching toward > an understanding of the entire history of the universe in which there is nothing
> other than the laws of physics working themselves out — a self-contained,
> complete, purely materialist conception of the cosmos. Not to say that we have
> such a theory in its full glory, obviously, but we see no obstacles and are making
> interesting progress.
Not sure who `we’ is here, or how you reach this conclusion - it follows from no scientific argument or result, and to represent it as science is to distort science, that deep, fabulous and wonderful subject, for ideological ends.
Scientific conclusions are validly published in scientific journals. If you really think this a valid scientific conclusion, it is clearly a very important result because many people and many scientists disagree with you. So why don’t you make this the abstract of a paper, write the paper, put it on hep-th and submit it to a high-profile research journal?
WMAP etc, that is good science. Atheist braggadocio trying to hijack it, that is not.
piscator
Oh piscator… you can’t see the forest for the trees, can you?
Thanks for the story, Sean.
Instead of a demiurge, blind luck plunked us down where we are in the multiverse? Is that your theory? It’s not clear to me that one theory has more explanatory power than the other.
Just to expand a bit on Hotdog Operator’s comment, this really is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Science works. The simple facts that science works, that we keep discovering new things, and that there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight to our discoveries, mean that it would indeed be foolish to believe in a god because god “explains” our universe or something in particular about it.
capitalistimperialistpig,
Oh, blind luck has infinitely more explanatory power. Every random process, after all, behaves via some probability distribution. So if a random process is a cause for our existence, then the signatures of that random process will be written into our universe. Now, it is the case that the general statement, “by accident,” has no explanatory power. But Sean’s not talking about this: he’s talking about discovering very specific models for precisely how this random process operates. And when you have a specific model, you can make specific predictions, based upon the probability distribution of the random process proposed.
“I’m a Platonist — a follower of Plato — who believes that one didn’t invent these sorts of things, that one discovers them. In a sense, all these mathematical facts are right there waiting to be discovered.”Donald (H. S. M.) Coxeter
I am certainly no spirit of Plato, although like some in science I do invoke certain attributes of the philosophy. Your talk with David Albert on Blogging heads was appreciated from the sense of searching for this clarity.
IN terms of clarity then, such a search would seem meaningful to me when you look to describe the WMAP in the way you do. Some mathematical basis of a geometry implicated in the nature of the universe in expression?
I do not think because you see part of Plato’s philosophy as wrong that one should apply an over all statement of him being wrong. There are attributes that are indeed worth of consideration.
Atlantis was just a “sceptic’s approach” to dismissing him?
A point about “blind luck”…
Roll a die; you roll a six. You have a one-in-six chance of getting that number (obviously), the same chance as rolling a 1, 2, 3 etc…
Now have someone put a gun to your head and tell you “roll a three”. If you don’t roll a three, you’ll die. You roll the die and lo and behold, a three! you live.
After this terrible ordeal, you live a long happy life (haunted by nightmares and unable to play boardgames), get married, have kids and generally do all the things that constitute a “normal existence”. But it was ALL predicated upon rolling a three, a one-in-six happenstance. But without that blind chance, you would not have done all that. Your children would not be able to envision a world where you rolled a four, for example, because they would not be there if you had.
In other words, simply because blind luck played a fundamental role in your existence (or theirs) does not mean that it was NOT blind luck. If the result had been anything else, you would not be here.
Yes, it’s a weakly anthropic argument, but still utterly valid. To my mind, anyway…
Plato:
>>I do not think because you see part of Plato’s philosophy as wrong that one should apply an over all statement of him being wrong.
I think the statement “Plato was wrong” ONLY pertains to the claim in the dialog about the demiurge imposing order upon chaos, not an evaluation of Plato’s overall philosophy.
Could be wrnog tohough.. I often am
>>Could be wrnog tohough.. I often am
…and, apparently, unable to type.
You can’t get a universe from nothing. So if there’s only one universe (namely, this one), and if it had a beginning, it doesn’t have the reason for its existence contained within it. Therefore, to avoid a “God did it” argument, you need to posit the existence of an eternal multiverse, from which our universe was born.
Thus, belief in God as the creator is being replaced by a belief in the multiverse. If we can show that a multiverse is a mathematical consequence of a proven fundamental theory, a theory capable of providing a mechanism for giving birth to new universes, then we are done and no belief is necessary. If the fundamental theory has a unique solution with our universe as the solution, then I have no idea how such a theory could possibly explain the origin of our universe.
Jason
But it requires an equal amount of faith.
To explain the anthropic propitious nature of our universe by ‘blind luck’ requires an ensemble of non-propitious members of the multiverse, none of which can be observed except this one.
The ensemble exists in our minds only after an act of faith.
I agree with piscator, science has its limitations and to be good science it needs to recognize its own boundaries.
Sean,
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? (Stephen Hawking.)
And what/who was responsible as author and guarantor of the laws of science?
Garth
This seems like a good opportunity for a question that’s been bugging me.
One of your central interests is obviously the arrow of time, and in particular how it can arise given that the laws of physics are time-symmetric. In particular, you seem committed to the idea that the appearance of the universe beginning in a state of minimum entropy and evolving toward a state of maximum entropy must be wrong — that if we could see the full picture there would just be fluctuations with no privileged low-entropy “beginning.”
My question is: why? How do we know that the arrow of time is just a local phenomenon, and the universe does not, in fact, have a distinct beginning?
Especially given the Bozeman’s Brain type arguments that the probability of random fluctuations producing a big bang, as you describe in your SciAm article, is infinitesimal compared with the probaility of producing our solar system directly. Right?
(By the way this question has zero theological implications — I’m an atheist too.)
Not that I believe in a personal god, but there is something “godlike” in the rules of mathematics — there is a sense in which they seem to be eternal, they seem to exist independent our material world, they seem to have power over everything (nothing can violate them), and they seem to be inevitable. I guess this isn’t apropos to the present discussion, but the thought occurred to me this morning.
reeree:
>>You can’t get a universe from nothing
Sez who?
Since we don’t know a) what a universe actually *is* (in any meaningful way), and b) how a universe might actually come to be, one cannot state “you can’t get a universe from nothing”. Perhaps that’s *precisely* how one “gets” universes. There is nothing unscientific about saying “the Universe came from nothing”, once one has actually defined “universe” and “nothing”.
There is actually the suggestion that, when considering “positive” energy and “negative” energy (i.e. gravitation) quotients, the universe turns out to be a zero-sum equation, and therefore not only *came*from nothing but, in a real thermodynamic sense, *remains* nothing.
>>…if there’s only one universe (namely, this one), and if it had a beginning, it doesn’t have the reason for its existence contained within it.
Kant dispelled this ontological argument pretty well, BTW.
lemuel — that’s a perfectly good question, and I’m always careful to stress that we don’t actually “know.” It’s absolutely possible that the universe simply had a beginning with a low entropy, and that’s a brute fact that has no further explanation. But it would seem more simple and compact if there were some dynamical explanation for this feature of the local universe, rather than just positiing it as a new law of nature. (Similarly for the cosmological constant: we could just take it as a number and move on, but it might very well be a clue to some underlying dynamics, which is a possibility well worth pursuing.)
The Boltzmann’s Brain argument is very specific. *If* you have a theory in which fluctuations in entropy occur randomly and with an exponential distribution, *then* we are overwhelmingly likely to be in a smaller fluctuation (a single galaxy, or a single brain). But we’re not, and therefore a theory like that is wrong. So either we are not a fluctuation of any sort, or the numbers have to work out differently. Many of us are pursuing the latter option, but we’ll have to see.
Who says it has a reason for its existence?
By “reason” perhaps you mean “preexisting cause”, but even if we were to accept the claim “every event is caused by something that happened before it” as true (which I’m not so sure we should), I can’t really see any basis for extending this to the whole universe, or assuming that the first event (if there were one) is no exception.
There is nothing logically contradictory in saying “Every event is caused by a prior event, except the first event”, any more than there is anything logically contradictory in saying “Every non-negative integer is greater than at least one other non-negative integer, except zero.” You don’t need negative numbers to make the non-negative integers logically self-consistent, and you don’t need God to make a universe with a beginning logically self-consistent. (At least, not for the reasons given by this “first cause” argument.)
Sean,
Thanks for the reply.
A couple follow-ups. First, what’s the basis for simple and compact — both why the dynamicly-arising big bang is more so, and why that’s the standard to begin with? To me, the statement, “the universe beings in a state of minimum entropy and evolves toward a state of maximum entropy” doesn’t seem obviously less simple than the statement “fluctuations can produce low-entropy states, which then evolve toward higher entropy.” How do you know you’re not smuggling an aesthetic preference into your science?
Second, is there any kind of evidence or argument foreseeable that would resolve the question? Would you ever conclude that there was no fluctuations-type account of the big bang and that the universe simply began with a low-entory state?
(Indicentally, part of my interest here is I studied economics at the graduate level for a while, and it seems to me that the bias toward talking about universal laws rather than historical narratives is really destructive for mainstream economics. Of course, what’s a problem in economics might be perfectly appropriate in physics.)
Rebel Dreams,
“Since we don’t know a) what a universe actually *is* (in any meaningful way), and b) how a universe might actually come to be, one cannot state “you can’t get a universe from nothing”. Perhaps that’s *precisely* how one “gets” universes. There is nothing unscientific about saying “the Universe came from nothing”, once one has actually defined “universe” and “nothing”.
“There is actually the suggestion that, when considering “positive” energy and “negative” energy (i.e. gravitation) quotients, the universe turns out to be a zero-sum equation, and therefore not only *came*from nothing but, in a real thermodynamic sense, *remains* nothing.”
Nothing = no universe (no space, no time, no fields, strings, etc.). No universe = No laws of physics. Hence, invoking negative energy and positive energy and free lunches is meaningless because there is no universe for those concepts to make sense or to apply themselves. No universe = no laws. The laws don’t exist by themselves as Plato’s forms.
So if there is nothing (i.e. no universe) then how does a universe come from that? Nothing is nothing, pure and simple. Positive and negative energy and “zero sum” means absolutely nothing if there is no universe.
Also, the statement “the Universe came from nothing” is totally UNscientific because you can’t possibly test the validity of that statement using the scientific method.
So, if our universe had a beginning, and if we want to explain the origin of the universe scientifically, then we better hope our universe came from some other universe or a multiverse or whatever.
Rebel Dreams,
“>>…if there’s only one universe (namely, this one), and if it had a beginning, it doesn’t have the reason for its existence contained within it.
Kant dispelled this ontological argument pretty well, BTW.”
I’m sorry, but I am unfamiliar with this. Would you like to elaborate for me? I don’t understand what’s wrong with the statement I made. If a universe has a beginning, it can’t come from nothing, as I argued in #18, nor can it come from itself if it has a beginning. What’s the problem?
ree ree,
Here’s the simple truth of the matter:
The universe may have had a beginning. It may not have. We don’t yet know. But not knowing in no way, shape, or form indicates that theists are right when they claim that god did it. That would be the intellectual equivalent of claiming that because we don’t yet know whether quantum loop gravity or string theory (or both, or neither) are correct, quantum loop gravity must be correct. It’s nonsense.
Garth A. Barber,
Nonsense. This could be verified in a few different ways. If we had such a multiverse theory that gave very specific predictions about what we should see in our own universe independent of any others, then we could use that to test the theory.
Another way of looking at it is that if we tested and verified a theory about how physics behaves in our own universe that makes clear, unambiguous predictions as to the properties of the multiverse, then again we’d have strong evidence of a multiverse.
In other words, the inability to observe the entirety of the universe in no way, shape, or form means that multiverse ideas are on their face unscientific. You also have the situation completely reversed: people didn’t make up the multiverse ideas to fit in with their anthropic arguments. The multiverse ideas stemmed out of pursuits in high-energy physics, the implication of which was an anthropic argument for the nature of certain properties of our own region of the universe.
Why do you think that either of these are necessary? The existence of the equations themselves might well be enough for a universe described by them to exist.
Novak’s question was this: had I discussed the ideas I had talked about in my presentation with any Catholic theologians?
Was there any indication from the context as to whether Novak thought the theologians might be able to help you out with the cosmology, or whether the cosmology would be of use to them in evaluating their theology?
Jason,
“Here’s the simple truth of the matter:
The universe may have had a beginning. It may not have. We don’t yet know. But not knowing in no way, shape, or form indicates that theists are right when they claim that god did it.”
I agree with you. I wasn’t arguing for the contrary.
“This could be verified in a few different ways. If we had such a multiverse theory that gave very specific predictions about what we should see in our own universe independent of any others, then we could use that to test the theory.
Another way of looking at it is that if we tested and verified a theory about how physics behaves in our own universe that makes clear, unambiguous predictions as to the properties of the multiverse, then again we’d have strong evidence of a multiverse.”
Sure, if we formulated a theory which gave the correct answers to all the experiments we have performed and to experiments which we can conduct at the present moment, and if such a theory mathematically implied a multiverse, then that’s evidence for its existence. However, that doesn’t mean someone won’t come along and formulate a different theory, one without a multiverse, but which also agrees with the experiments. We just don’t know. (Of course, that’s the nature of scientific models — they are models and it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that someone might come along and come with a better model.) By their very nature, these other universes can’t be detected, not even indirectly. The only evidence they can have in their favour is evidence based on mathematical consistency of a theory which agrees with experiments we can perform in OUR universe. I’m not sure if, therefore, the concept of a multiverse is a scientific one. We can’t detect them in any way. How do we know they exist? How do we know if something’s wrong with our theory and a better theory lies just around the corner? How do we even know if our limited minds are even capable of finding this fundamental theory of nature?
Anyway, there’s a huge gap in energy scale between the electroweak scale and the Planck scale, so it’s very possible that once we have a theory that we know describes the physics governing that huge range of energies, the multiverse idea will be completely unnecessary. I don’t know.
“Why do you think that either of these are necessary? The existence of the equations themselves might well be enough for a universe described by them to exist.”
Hmmm…I can come up with a theory of general relativity that’s good for a 120 dimensional spacetime. That doesn’t mean that a universe like that exists. I don’t see how the existence of a mathematical theory implies the existence of a universe. I see how it can be the other way around, but just because you have a mathematical theory describing some universe, doesn’t mean that universe exists. How do “the laws of physics” produce a universe if no universe exists? If there is no universe, no multiverse, nothing, then how can mathematics produce one? You need SOMETHING to exist (described by a set of laws and a mechanism for producing other regions of spacetime) in order for a universe to “be born”. How do equations (with no universe) for ANYTHING?
lemuel– the preference for simple and compact is just a recognition that seeking such a thing has historically been very successful. In science, we try to explain the most with the least, as far as we can. Positing a low-entropy boundary condition is not really very simple or compact: it’s a separate law of nature, you have to specify exactly which kind of “low entropy” state you mean (there are a huge number of possibilities), and you have to posit that the ordinary laws of quantum mechanics, which do not include a boundary in time, somehow fail in this case.
Reginald– there was not much indication. I think he was just curious about what the response of a theologian would have been.
Why is there something instead of nothing? To sum up an answer to that it appears that nothingness is just unstable. To the extent we can talk about a “nothingness” it appears to be some sort of instanton (tunnelling state) for the universe which exists on a false vacuum. The ball on the Mexican hat peak will under the smallest perturbation or fluctuation begin to fall off the peak, roll into the trough and the universe tunnels out of the vacuum or nothing to become a “something.”
The upshot here is that a real question about the origin of something probably can be answered scientifically. At least so far there is a very good track record for this. We don’t as yet understand completely how the universe quantum tunnelled out of the vacuum (nothing or void), but that we are able to at least discuss this and work with putative models does illustrate that an anwer is certainly possible. Much the same holds for the pre-biotic origin of life. Possible organic and geological chemical models can be debated and proposed. Which does again suggest that an answer to life’s origin is possible. I would say that given sufficient time in the future answers to these questions are not just possible but highly probable.
Clearly the theological type might ask where this false vacuum comes from, but that is in a way a timeless aspect of reality. Also we might not get it perfectly figured out, but we can do a damned good job anyways. To hang a God on what is not understood is a way of closing minds off to asking questions or using imagination.
Lawrence B. Crowell
ree ree:
The problem with the terminology you use is that it relates to “laws” that only pertain to this universe; from the perspective of this Universe there was, indeed, “nothing” as you use the term before it, but that does not preclude that the universe arose *from* nothing, just nothing that relates to *this* universe. That is one idea that is currently being investigated.
Secondly; I still stand by my point about the “zero sum equation”; if the zero-sum game is shown to be true (and nothing has so far ruled it out, then the universe not only *could* come from nothing, but indeed it *had* to. Basic quantum physics says that if anything is thermodynamically possible, then it must happen (Feinman’s “Sum over histories” approach uses this as its basic tenet) and so if the Universe truly is zero-sum, then physics essentially demands that a universe will occur.
Of course, this says nothing of the *mechanics* of how this universe arose, but it removes the need for an ontological “first-cause” in general. The mechanics of how it occurred can be investigaed without needing a “prime mover”, because, the argument goes, a zero-sum universe is bound to happen eventually.
As for Kant, his basic argument revolved around the idea that “existence” is a property of a thing. That the universe exists may or may not be undeniable, but it is not a property of it. Therefore any claims regarding its existence that relate to some other property (i.e. in this case that the “reason” for its existence cannot be contained within it”) are meaningless, because it presupposes that existence is a property conferred upon the object in question.
This does not say that the Universe does or does NOT contain the reason for its existence within it, merely that the fact that the unverse exists cannot demand a priori that the cause (if any) for its existence cannot be held within it. The statement that the Unverse does not contain its cause within itself cannot be proven, and is therefore an invalid supposition.
Correction to #25:
“As for Kant, his basic argument revolved around the idea that “existence” is a property of a thing”
SHOULD READ:
“As for Kant, his basic argument revolved around the idea that “existence” is NOT a property of a thing”
Addendum: Another point on “something rather than nothing”.
There is a (small) school of thought that says that we’re looking at this in the wrong way; is there, in fact, something rather than nothing? Right now, yes, there is, but on a long enough timescale (and we have no idea what a relevant timescale may be in the universe) there will once mroe be nothing; even protons have a lifespan and eventually everything will decay to…well… false vacuum again.
Since we have no real working description of what the Universe, at its base, really IS (beyond a physical description) then we cannot talk about whether it is, in fact, anything at all! Weird, yes. Controversial? Almost certainly. True? Well, I dunno… get back to me in about 10^150 yrs…
[...] And he seems to have all kinds of interesting acquaintances! [...]
Rebel Dreams,
“The problem with the terminology you use is that it relates to “laws” that only pertain to this universe; from the perspective of this Universe there was, indeed, “nothing” as you use the term before it, but that does not preclude that the universe arose *from* nothing, just nothing that relates to *this* universe. That is one idea that is currently being investigated.”
Okay, so you’re saying that if there are “multiple universes” out there, “our universe” can come from them. I agree. Then that whole zero sum game can apply because there’s something (namely, another universe) for the game to apply itself, and create our universe. But how do we know if there are other universes around? All we can do is get a theory that works for our universe, which mathematically implies that there are other universes around. But then again, how do we know that someone won’t come along and formulate a theory which is just as good, but which doesn’t have other universes? Thus, perhaps a little faith is still required with regards to the existence of these other universes?
Again, faith is irrelevant to the idea of multiple universes’ they are either there (in which case they will be proven to be there) or they are not (in which case they won’t).
I gave the multiple universes example as one idea; there are also others that can “create something from nothing” as ably outlined by others here, that do NOT require multiple universes. And the zero-sum game described is one of those.
Science does not seek the infinite regress that multiple universes might ultimately create (”ah, but what created THEM, and what created the ones BEFORE them, etc…”) It seeks the ontology of the universe using understandable physical laws, without appeals to the unknown.
Science does not even have “faith” in its own established “laws”, and seeks to refine, redefine or even abandon them if they turn out to be inadequate descriptions of what is going on. Faith has no place in science as a whole. To be sure, individual researchers examining one point of a theory or another may “have faith” that the overall theoretical underpinning of a subject pertains, but tacitly acknowledge that if that theory is proven false, then their work will be imperilled by it. A true scientist secretly dreams (and sometimes not so secretly!) of overturning a long-held scientific theorem or law with some astounding discovery. That’s the fun of the game!
Another addendum! (sorry!)
As Lawrence B. Crowell pointed out, the “nothing” before the big bang may indeed have been “nothing” in the sense that there was no universe, but it may also have been “something” in the sense of being a false vacuum, without limit but able to produce the universe “something”.
“Again, faith is irrelevant to the idea of multiple universes’ they are either there (in which case they will be proven to be there) or they are not (in which case they won’t).”
And how do you prove that they are there? I highly doubt you could even in principle. All you can do is say that they “must” exist according to mathematical reasons within the context of a theory constructed to explain the phenomena within OUR universe. A theory or model which can or cannot be improved so as to not contain these other universes. Of course, we don’t know that either. So that’s why I think that a proponent of a multiverse idea relies, to a certain extent, on faith.
Also, I think that fundamental physics requires a certain amount of faith in our ability to even understand what’s going on. Our brains evolved to survive on our planet, not to understand the fundamental laws of the universe, after all. It is perfectly conceivable that some day, we’ll be confronted with a wealth of data from a particle accelerator 1000 times more energetic than the LHC, and our brains just won’t be able to extract the patterns or laws explaining all this data. That’s a real possibility. That our minds are intrinsically limited and that we don’t even have the ability to find out what is going on. Of course we have no way of knowing this.
“I gave the multiple universes example as one idea; there are also others that can “create something from nothing” as ably outlined by others here, that do NOT require multiple universes. And the zero-sum game described is one of those.”
I still don’t see how a zero-sum game can be applied if there are no other universes aside from our own. If there is no universe, the concept of energy is meaningless. Energy is a number invented by humans which allows us to explain various phenomena. We associate “energy” to physical systems. If there are no systems, no fields, no particles, no spacetime, then “energy” is a meaningless concept, so you can’t invoke such a zeri-sum idea in that case.
Rebel
You haven’t considered the case that they may well be there, but they will never be proven to be there because they are lost forever behind the event horizon of our universe ……
How do you envisage the concept of the other universes of a multiverse ensemble be falsified?
Garth
To the first point; we would prove the existence of multiple universes in much the same way as we prove the existece of quarks, or the Higgs boson, or dark matter; a theory that describes and necessitates multiple universes would as a consequence have to include points that describe phenomena in this universe adequately too. One tack currently being investigated is the “gravity problem”; the gravitational force is so weak that some theorists suggest that gravitons actually operate in another universe, and their effect is only weakly felt in our own. If that theory made some radical prediction, upon completion, that was then borne out by observation (perhaps even at the LHC) then that would be good evidence that the theory was correct.
This feeds in to the other point about “faith”… even is demonstrated to be probably true, and taken up and utilized by other theories, the putative multiple universe theory could and should still be open to falsification - the very basis of all science.
The zero sum game makes perfect sense in the absence of other universes; if the universe is, as a whole, a zero-sum equation, then it is bound to occur, according to QM. I find the best image is to visualize it as a virtual particle; feinman suggested that a virtual particle can be imagined as a particle-antiparticle pair, leaping into existence and annihilating each other instantaneously, thus leaving no relic of their existence in the vacuum from which they sprang. If the universe is a zero-sum equation then when looked at over the totality of its existence, it took no energy to “create”, beacuse the total “amount” of energy expended over the lifetime of the universe is zero.
This had two important implications; firstly, if it took no energy to create, then it required no “prime mover” to do the creating in the first place. It simply *happened* because it took no “effort” to happen.
Secondly, not only did it just happen, but it was *bound* to happen; according to QM, the probability of an event is related to the energy required to produce that event; a Higgs boson is not just going to drop out of the sky, but it *might* appear with a sufficiently energetic reaction. If an event requires no energy at all, then it has a probability to 100% of occurring.
Your assertion that energy is just some system invented by humans to track change, I think you should refine your definition of energy; energy is a real thing, independent of “stuff” - be it fields, particles, instantons or events. The concepts of positive and negative energy are well defined in physics, and energy certainly does exist independently of systems, fields and particles. The false vacuum has an energy potential independent of any pre-existing or acting field, for example. If false vacuum existed ‘before’ the universe, then, as LBC pointed out, quantum tunneling could lead to a perfectly rational, zero-sum universe.
Garth; good questions. The universes may well be “lost” behind their event horizons, but Hawking and Susskind have both in their way demonstrated that event horizons are not necessarily a barrier or impediment to information; any theory that deomnstrates the existence of multiple universe must necessarily have consequences for our own universe, otherwise it is just a wish-list. What I spoke of as a working theory that dmeands multiple universes means just that; a theory that makes some meaningful prediction or declaration of our own universe as a consequence of the existence of multiple universes.
One could imagine multiple universes being falsified in many ways, depending upon how they were demonstrated in the first place. For example, take the idea of the graviton operating “elsewhere”; if it oculd be domeonstrated that the observers made an error, or misunderstood the behavior of the gravtion, and it turned out to operate not in another universe, but rather in the higher dimensions of this universes’ brane, and its effects only marginally impinged on the 4-space we inhabit, that could falsify the multiple universe theory.
Or the theory might make some grandiose prediction regarding black holes that turned out to be false… basically I cannot make any meaningful statement regarding the falsification of a theorem that does not yet exist, but I could write some entertaining SF stories about them in the meantime.
The Timaeus proposes that at the basis of reality we’ll find mathematics and mathematical objects, which determine how reality unfolds. Not so very different.
Disclaimer:
“I could write some entertaining SF stories about them in the meantime” in no way implies that I am a good writer, or even able to do anything mroe than tap keys in a pseudo-random manner to reply to blogs.
For the record, I use a stochastic Monte-Carlo function to generate all these replies.
Rebel Dreams,
“The zero sum game makes perfect sense in the absence of other universes; if the universe is, as a whole, a zero-sum equation, then it is bound to occur, according to QM.”
That makes absolutely no sense to me. What does it mean for the universe to “be a zero-sum equation”? If we are talking about the origin of our universe, and in the absence of other universes, the terms in the “zero sum” correspond to NOTHING because there is no universe. Bound to occur how? Does QM exist in the absence of a universe? If there is no universe, the “zero sum equation” does absolutely nothing. QM is a theory cooked up by humans to explain stuff happening in the universe. If there is no universe, there is nothing to obey the rules of QM.
“Your assertion that energy is just some system invented by humans to track change, I think you should refine your definition of energy; energy is a real thing, independent of “stuff” - be it fields, particles, instantons or events. The concepts of positive and negative energy are well defined in physics, and energy certainly does exist independently of systems, fields and particles.”
Give me an example.
Things HAVE energy. Energy doesn’t just float around. It’s a property. If energy exists independently of things, then why is it that kinetic energy depends on your frame of reference? Did the KE disappear if start from rest and travel at the same velocity as the thing whose energy I am trying to measure? Things have energy. If there is no things, no spacetime, there is no energy. IF you look in any physics textbook you’ll see that energy is just a label we assign things. It helps us explain the world around us. It’s just a handy concept.
You speak of false vacuum. What is it a vacuum of? Do you even know what a false vacuum is?
From Sean: “whether you want to believe in God or not, it’s a bad idea to base your belief in God on an urge to explain features of the natural world, including its creation and existence. Because eventually, science will get there and take care of that stuff, and then where are you?”
That is a proper caution for advocates of natural theology but it poses a problem for advocates of materialistic atheism.
Ironically, Sean (and similarly talented scientists and mathematicians) inadvertently provide support to natural theology (and a Creator God) by their amazingly effective explanations of the natural world.
Why is physical reality mathematical and why are humans able to do the math? Where did the laws come from and why can humans comprehend them? With each new rational explanation of the incredibly tiny or large, scientists undercut a strictly materialistic view of reality. There is a non-material reality “out there” that scientists depend on and that also provides a rational basis for natural theology.
(Paul Davies wrote an article on the “faith” of scientists, got harsh feedback, but he is essentially correct. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/davies07/davies07_index.html)
Why should everything in the natural world be understandable by the mind of a recently evolved primate species on a tiny pale blue dot in an infinite universe? But isn’t that what Sean’s advice to theists assumes?
From Sean’s recent article in Scientific American: “we seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us.” If the universe just IS, why should it all make sense to Sean? How does materialistic atheism support this expectation?
Finally, I must point out that Sean has committed a logical fallacy called “argument to the future.” He says, “eventually, science will get there and take care of that stuff.” His logical error is when he appeals to the future; to future research, evidence or discoveries. The logical fault here is that no one knows the future. It may turn out that future research will provide additional support to natural theology.
By the way, I thank Sean and the other contributors for this wonderfully informative blog.
I think you’re missing the point of the “zero-sum game”. It refers to the idea (if proven true) that the Universe requires no “external” impetus to create it. If the total sum of the universe over time is zero, then it required nothing to create it, the same way as virtual particles can be envisoned as pairs of particles and antiparticles instantaneously annihilating one another are “zero sum” unless some external impetus changes the equilibrium. It remains to be seen if the Universe is zero sum or not; I raised it as an objection to the idea that the universe had to have a cause.
“Zero sum” makes no assertions regarding the existence of the universe, and thus your objection on the grounds that QM cannot exist if there is no universe absurd; the universe may well exist temporally, but that in no way means it is not a zero-sum universe. The zero-sum does not relate to the amount of energy in the system at any given moment, but rather overall.
Also your assertion that QM does not exist beyond or in the absence of the universe does not necessarily make sense either; it remains to be seen if that is the case, and if QM can provide a framework to describe the creation of this niverse, then that would demonstrate that QM pertains independently of it.
The false vacuum is a theoretical construct, being a stable space whose forces are in pure equilibrium. One idea of the creation of the universe suggests that before the universe a false vacuum existed (possibly, but not necessarily infinite in size) which our universe essentially ‘tunneled’ into as an instanton effect. See False Vacuum for a much more ocmplete discussion.
Energy is a property of things, and I admit with full mea culpa that I overstated that it existed independently, except inasmuch as it exists in potentia in the vacuum as demonstrated by the phenomenon of virtual particles. However I maintain that your assertion that it is a purely human construct as a means to ‘keep score’ of transactions in space is false.
thank you for the tipping of the hat to philosophy, it is a dis-respected profession these days. I am sure that an individual that takes education as seriously as you has come into contact with the works of Bergson (Henri-Louis) and I would suggest that you take another look at what he has to say on the nature of causality and its shortfalls, it is worth your time (see creative evolution, time and free-will). Science is an amazing project, but one that does not and can not fully explain to us some of the most important aspects of life, just a thought.
This discussion took off a bit! :-))
When it comes to matters of false vacua, a void and zero sum games, we should keep in mind that conservation of energy is something which holds locally, and only holds for spacetimes where there is a time Killing vector K_t where
which for a Schwarschild solution is the g_{tt} = (1 - 2M/r) metric term. The Killing vector in this case insures a timelike momentum vector in a certain frame has a constant projection along K_t
which conserves energy. For cosmology we have time dependent metric components. This means one can’t establish a global energy conservation!
So we can think of how a vacuum state |0) can be unstable and give rise to a universe. While this has not been solved in completeness, we can at least think about this. So the universe might start out from some false vacuum |0) with a terminal point at AdS conformal infinity — a Minkowski space or void. This “map” might reshuffle information or quantum bits, even violate some of our cherished conservation laws on a global level.
Of course theologians can be smart, and they are clever at finding places where a God can be squeezed in. Is a false vacuum really a nothing? It is about as close to a nothing as we can think of which ties into physics. So from that perspective it is good enough. Where do the physical laws come from? There really are no physical laws! There are only patterns that repeat themselves in nature which we interpret in mathematical models. There was no imposition of physical laws onto the universe. We are the ones who if anything might impose physical laws.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Rebel Dreams,
“If the total sum of the universe over time is zero, then it required nothing to create it, the same way as virtual particles can be envisoned as pairs of particles and antiparticles instantaneously annihilating one another are “zero sum” unless some external impetus changes the equilibrium. It remains to be seen if the Universe is zero sum or not; I raised it as an objection to the idea that the universe had to have a cause.”
What the heck does “if the total sum of the universe over time is zero” mean? Virtual particles exist in a Minkowskian background spacetime. They pop in and out of an already existing universe. If there is no universe, there is nothing literally NOWHERE to apply this analogue, and QM cannot be used because there is NOWHERE to use it. Now, if our universe, by a quantum fluctuation, came from a parent universe, that’s a different story. But you can’t apply any laws or any zero sum equations to a universe that doesn’t exist. Therefore, the universe HAS to have a cause. Presumably this cause can be explained by fundamental laws, right? Well, if that’s true, those fundamental laws have to be associated with SOMETHING (i.e. another universe). These laws don’t just exist on their own, you know. From nothing, comes nothing. The equation 0 = 0 doesn’t cause ANYTHING.
“Also your assertion that QM does not exist beyond or in the absence of the universe does not necessarily make sense either; it remains to be seen if that is the case, and if QM can provide a framework to describe the creation of this niverse, then that would demonstrate that QM pertains independently of it.”
Well, QM does provide a framework, as long as there’s a “parent” universe from which our universe can be produced. Presumably QM applies there too. QM doesn’t exist on its own like some sort of spirit. Any law of nature, or mathematical theory is really a set of rules we cooked up to explain the phenomena that we observe. Without the universe, there is nothing to which the laws of QM can be applied. Why is this so hard to understand?
I strongly second what reeree says above. There is little reason to suppose there are externally imposed rules which guide the universe. I will for the time avoid the issue of whether mathematics is Platonic or constructed, but when it comes to physics we are simply putting together rules which logically follow each other, and where these rules reference things we observe.
Lawrence B. Crowell
ree ree,
Ah, yes, but what if the specific features of the theory that lead to the unambiguous prediction of the multiverse are verified?
To see how something like this might happen, think about, say, dark matter. Now, we’re never going to re-start a big bang to test and see how dark matter is produced. So how can we be sure that it happened at all? Well, that comes down to the properties of dark matter, and demonstrating that it has particular features which necessarily lead to its production in the early stages of our region of the universe.
For example, let’s imagine that dark matter is directly detected at the LHC. By using measurements from the LHC, we are able to place strong constraints on its mass and how it interacts with various particles. Knowing its mass and interactions, we then will be capable of directly calculating just how much of this stuff would be generated as the very hot early universe cools. We won’t be able to go back and reproduce those temperatures to show that it actually does happen, but as long as we know how it interacts that isn’t necessary: we can simply calculate it. The same would be the case for a multiverse idea.
Now, consider what is required for the multiverse to be accurate. What you need is for different low-energy laws of physics to be active in different regions. You need, in short, two things:
1. The universe must be big enough that it is larger than the average size of these regions.
2. The low-energy laws of physics must depend upon random events in the past of these regions.
These two things can, in principle, be confirmed, through a greater understanding of inflation and of how physics behaves at higher energies. Confirming these two statements would be proof positive of a multiverse.
Well, I’m pretty sure that what really exists are mathematical structures and that what we perceive as a physical world is not something separate from a mathematical world. This is pretty much the picture proposed by Tegmark. I.m.o., this should be the default hypothesis in physics, but for some strange reason it isn’t.
The difficulty in assuming a “physical world” which is different from the mathematical model that exactly describes it, is that it raises questions that cannot be answered from within the model (like where did the universe came from). So, it is exactly like postulating a God (in that case you cannot answer who created God).
Postulating that the set of all formally describable mathematical models is all that exists is sort of a “minimal assumption”, even though it implies the existence of all posible universes. The question “how did the unverse came into existence?” is then trivially answered by saying that the universe is the model that describes it and as such it is timeless.
To do physics in such a setting, one needs to assume some measure over the set of all models. Also, one needs to define an observer (which is a mathematical model in its own right, of course). Then one can try to compute the probability of the observer experiencing some history. So, physics becomes an (perhaps intractable) exercise in pure mathematics this way.
The measure must be some exponentially fast decreasing function of the Kolmogorov complexity of the model for this to be well defined (Kolmogorov complexity is the least number of bits one needs to specify the model).
If we then take an observer, defined as some very complex model as input, then the problem amounts to finding a model with the lowest Kolmogorov complexity that generates the observer. Such a model will, of course, generate a lot of junk besides the observer, which is the rest of the universe the observer finds him/herself in.
It may well be the case that quantum mechancs, which we think of describing “our universe”, actually is a meta-law approximately describing the probabiblites over a set of “nearby models”.
Jason,
“Ah, yes, but what if the specific features of the theory that lead to the unambiguous prediction of the multiverse are verified?”
Good point. I guess for the time being this is a philosophical thing because we don’t yet have a satisfactory and complete theory, nor the experimental capabilities to test it. For example, if string theorists discovered a mechanism by which other universes may be generated, and they were able to show what the laws and constants in that universe should be (given a set of initial conditions), that that would obviously be great evidence for a multiverse. Of course, to be absolutely sure, we need to be to understand physics at all energy scales.
Count Iblis,
“Well, I’m pretty sure that what really exists are mathematical structures and that what we perceive as a physical world is not something separate from a mathematical world. This is pretty much the picture proposed by Tegmark. I.m.o., this should be the default hypothesis in physics, but for some strange reason it isn’t.”
I think this is a mistake. The laws of physics are structured according to these mathematical structures. If what really exists are mathematical structures, then why are the mathematical structures which particle physicists use are the ones which are relevant to our universe, and not some other structure? Why the preference for one structure or another. The universe is described according to these structures. The universe is not these structures. The thing-a-ma-bogs in the universe behave according to these structures. Operationally, the observations and data us scientists collect can be organized according to these structures. The structures don’t exist. From our point of view, what exists is the data we obtain (through our senses, through the data we obtain).
Since the universe is ordered (i.e. things aren’t totally and hopelessly random), and since we can associate numbers to things (distance, force, mass, etc.) these things musts evolve mathematically, because what we are dealing with are numbers and the only way a number can evolve in an orderly fashion is according to a mathematical structure. ‘Orderedness’ implies a mathematical structure. So the things in the universe (which carry a set of numbers) evolve according to this mathematical structure, because the universe is not chaotic, but ordered.
“The difficulty in assuming a “physical world” which is different from the mathematical model that exactly describes it, is that it raises questions that cannot be answered from within the model (like where did the universe came from). So, it is exactly like postulating a God (in that case you cannot answer who created God).”
What’s wrong with that?
Well, to avoid that, perhaps the “multiverse” is actually eternal and that the “fundamental theory” will explain why the “multiverse” is eternal (i.e. timeless). There, no God to invoke. And we keep our “physical world”. Of course, we don’t have a satisfactory formulation of such a “fundamental theory”. What does it mean for the mathematical structures to be the things which really exists? Pardon me, but it kind of doesn’t make sense.
It’s kind of difficult to imagine a universe which is completely chaotic. It makes sense that it’s an ordered thing. If the states of systems in the universe can be described by numbers (which is what physics does) then those numbers must evolve according to mathematical formulae, because the universe is ordered.
Anyway, another curious thing I find about your argument is what effect does Godel’s incompleteness theorem have if what exists are really mathematical structures? BOOOOM! I don’t know.
Otis @ #39:
It does seem a little strange to me that the same species which has gotten as far in cosmology as Sean and others have could have elected GW Bush to its highest leadership position - twice. But given what I know of the power of random algorithms, it does not seem strange to me that the universe could have evolved such a species at least once in 15 billion years (give or take), or that such a species could have pieced together our current understanding of the universe with a lot of trial and error over 200,000 years (give or take).
So materialistic atheism seems quite consistent with our progress so far, IMHO. I myself doubt that it will ever “all” make sense to us (even if we don’t destroy our civilization first), but that does not mean it wouldn’t make sense to some other smarter species. A group of chimpanzees around a smoldering log in a forest will never figure out combustion, but that does not mean it doesn’t make sense.
Sean said:
“Positing a low-entropy boundary condition is not really very simple or compact: it’s a separate law of nature,”
Well, if there is anywhere where a new law of nature is to be expected, it is here surely? The problem would be how to fit this new law into what we already have……
“you have to specify exactly which kind of “low entropy” state you mean (there are a huge number of possibilities), ”
How does your theory do that?
“and you have to posit that the ordinary laws of quantum mechanics, which do not include a boundary in time, somehow fail in this case.”
How does Vilenkin’s “creation from nothing” handle that?
Interesting post by the way. He seems to be quite an enigmatic figure. I can never get my head around how someone of that obviously high level of intelligence can believe that Catholic hocus-pocus [= hic est corpus]. But I have to accept that it is possible.
“…whether you want to believe in God or not, it’s a bad idea to base your belief in God on an urge to explain features of the natural world, including its creation and existence.” Fantastic point.
When I was a grad student in physics, my wife was getting her Ph.D. in experimental psychology. We took a summer multivariate statistics class together from a venerable professor in her department.
I’ll never forget him saying: “There is empirical knowledge, gained from observation and experimentation, there is logical knowlege derived from the rules of math, and then there is ‘values’ knowlege, based on what we choose to believe. Only a fool confuses them.” To paraphrase him, only a fool would use God to explain the natural world. Believe in God if you want, but don’t use him as an an explanation of nature.
Maybe you didn’t intend it this way, but this sounds like one of the ad-miz attacks on science by various denialist groups.
Let me introduce the hymn to creation from the Rig Veda (composed sometime between 1500 BCE and 1000 BCE):
CREATION HYMN from the RIG VEDA
Translation by V. V. Raman, University of Rochester
Not even nothing existed then
No air yet, nor a heaven.
Who encased and kept it where?
Was water in the darkness there?
Neither deathlessness nor decay
No, nor the rhythm of night and day:
The self-existent, with breath sans air:
That, and that alone was there.
Darkness was in darkness found
Like light-less water all around.
One emerged, with nothing on
It was from heat that this was born.
Into it, Desire, its way did find:
The primordial seed born of mind.
Sages know deep in the heart:
What exists is kin to what does not.
Across the void the cord was thrown,
The place of every thing was known.
Seed-sowers and powers now came by,
Impulse below and force on high.
Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation’s day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
Did He do it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or perhaps, not even He.
—-
I particularly like the expression of agnosticism and skepticism in the last lines. Others have translated those as: “He who surveys it from the highest regions; Perhaps He knows it; or perhaps even He knows not.”
The hymn also suggests the possibility that the gods (the sum total of the laws that govern the universe) came after the creation of the universe.
Here’s another translation of the last two verses of the creation hymn from the Rig Veda.
Who really knows? Who can presume to tell it?
Whence was it born? Whence issued this creation?
Even the Gods came after its emergence.
Then who can tell from whence it came to be?
That out of which creation has arisen,
whether it held it firm or it did not,
He who surveys it in the highest heaven,
He surely knows - or maybe He does not!
[Source.]
Atanu, that may be the most beautiful poem I’ve ever read.
It perfectly states the connection between physics and philosophy that I’ve never had the words to express.
I’m curious about this too. I mean, the only real criterion that is necessary for something to be a mathematical model is that the model be fully self-consistent. Thus as long as the universe abides by the law of non-contradiction (that is, any sufficiently-specific statement about the universe cannot ever be both true and false), it will necessarily be isomorphic to some mathematical structure. The question, then, is why this structure? Do other structures exist? I think Tegmark takes the right tack in claiming the most natural setup is that [i]all[/i] such structures exist.
ree ree,
Well, we don’t necessarily need string theory, and we don’t necessarily need to understand physics at all energy scales. Of course, if we only probe to a relatively small energy, we aren’t going to get a full picture of the variations possible. But it seems that with the discovery of supersymmetry, and with the upcoming work on examining inflation, we may well be able to put constraints on just how different at least the nearby regions of the universe are (those not too far from what we can directly observe).
Jason,
What upcoming work on examining inflation do you mean?
Back to the lumping in of theology alongside of Atlantis. Rebel dreams, it is hard to remove one’s colour once they work from a certain premise. Atheistic, or not.
Seeking such clarity would be the attempt for me, with which to approach a point of limitation in our knowledge, as we may try to explain the process of the current state of the universe, and it’s shape. Such warnings are indeed appropriate to me about what we are offering for views from a theoretical standpoint.
The basis presented here is from a layman standpoint while in context of Plato’s work, brings some perspective to Raphael’s painting, “The School of Athens.” It is a central theme for me about what the basis of Inductive and deductive processes reveals about the “infinite regress of mathematics to the point of proof.”
Such clarity seeking would in my mind contrast a theoretical technician with a philosopher who had such a background. Raises the philosophical question about where such information is derived from. If ,from a Platonic standpoint, then all knowledge already exists. We just have to become aware of this knowledge? How so?
Lawrence Crowell:
Whether I attach a indication of God to this knowledge does not in any way relegate the process to such a contention of theological significance. The question remains a inductive/deductive process?
I would think philosophers should weight in on the point of inductive/deductive processes as it relates to the search for new mathematics?
Plato:
Interesting points… I would argue that “all knowledge” does not exist prior to investigation. It may be a fine point (even too fine a parsing, I don’t know) but I would differentiate between “facts” and “knowledge of facts”. If we posit that all facts exist, and that mathematics can describe all facts phenomenologically, then it can be deducecd that all mathematics already exists, and we simply need to discover it. In that I do not remotely disagree with Plato. I do agree with Sean, however, in his disagreement with Plato’s vision of how the unverse came to be, which is essentially the thrust of this post, if I understand it correctly.
I look at the ongoing attempts to unify mathematics (e.g. the Langlands Program) as a possible proof of this; namely the fact that previously undiscovered links exist between unrelated (or seemingly unrelated) areas of math suggest that math is discovered rather than invented.
To your first point, I agree it is hard to remove one’s ‘prejudices’ in whatever endeavor one undertakes. For the record, I am Catholic, but my appreciation of astronomy, cosmology etc is not impacted by my beliefs. Not that I claim any superiority in this, you understand; I simply believe what I believe, and appreciate what I appreciate.
Rebel Dreams:For the record, I am Catholic, but my appreciation of astronomy, cosmology etc is not impacted by my beliefs. Not that I claim any superiority in this, you understand; I simply believe what I believe, and appreciate what I appreciate.
You could be a atheist and it should not matter. You would be correct on this in my view.
Rebel Dreams:I do agree with Sean, however, in his disagreement with Plato’s vision of how the universe came to be, which is essentially the thrust of this post, if I understand it correctly.
It could be my mistake. I thought it more about where we place the discovery of mathematics and this association “in terms of colours” should not equate the discovery process itself, only that theologically such attempts have been made before from such monks of habit before.
Refuting Euclid’s postulates sets recognition of limitation, as does Clay’s mathematical millennium’s issues. Solving Poincaré Conjecture produces new thought processes on the development and role of the mathematics and how we see the universe. This is a natural progression from “infinite regress.” “First principles” then arise?
While such bends to believe as we do, and the thought that such abstractions could herald from the “idea of Plato’s allegory of the cave,” is the attempt to me to draw “dimensional issues to the relevance of how we see the universe”? The development of those mathematics? Laplace’s( he’s dead) description of the WMAP?
Because these ideas and thoughts experienced, are ancient, does not remove the process of this induction/deduction from the elements of how the mathematics progresses?
How can mathematics arise from nothing?
We might recognize that such a cognitive function arises from the pursuance, while we set the stage and recognize these limitations. Some can appreciate the “quiet surrounding and bubbling streams” and appreciate how this “induces reflection.” Of course, they all come back to the real world.
The origin of mathematics and its relationship to the physical world are likely questions we may never solve. There are the platonists and the constructivists view of mathematics. One can well enough see either side of this metaphysical or metamathematical debate. Mathematical objects and their relationships have a “beingness,” or at least a sense of such, such as with proof that involve certain types of spaces. The mathematician often has some mental image of the space, or relationships between certain elements of that space with each other. At the same time the mathematician has experience with a physical world, and at the nuts and bolts level there are billions of neurons in a brain sending action potentials to each other.
The Perleman proof of the Poincare conjecture is an interesting case in point. I read that Perelman himself said that a part of the idea comes from recognizing that clothes on a rack or worn by a person will assume their minimal configuration. So there is a connection of sorts with a physical object. The proof stems from Hamilton’s work on Ricci flows. This is a dynamical equation for the fluid-like flow of a three dimensional space according to
which tells us that how the metric evolves is given by the Ricci curvature plus the second term involving the conformal gauge term (eg a dilaton). So the metric can be of the form
where this system is involved with the conformal structure of string world sheets! This tells us that a space that is deformed or twisted up will evolve towards a minimal energy configuration. A balloon when twisted up (not tied to other balloons) will when released pop back to its spherical shape. There is also heat kernel theory which enters into this picture, and so this connects up with some physics of thermodynamics.
So where does this really come from? These is some visual imagery, some connections with the physical world and connections between objects that have a logical structure. This is an interesting mathematical system to consider for the boundaries between physics and pure math, between abstract structures and construction are so wonderfully blurred. No GH Hardy pretention of perfectly pure math. It would appear that disentangling math from physics is nearly impossible, and further there does not appear to be any way to discern what the existential status (platonic v construction) of this system is.
Lawrence B. Crowell
ree ree,
The upcoming work on inflation is related to detection of the B-mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background. B-mode polarization is expected to be a means of measuring the energy level at which inflation occurred, which will significantly narrow the range of possible theories of inflation.
It is, however, a very difficult thing to measure, requiring fantastic signal-to-noise ratios. Even Planck won’t be capable of getting a strong detection of the B-mode polarization. There are, however, ground and balloon-based experiments that measure much smaller sections of the sky that are designed to do precisely this, such as EBEX. There are significant technical difficulties in separating out the B-mode polarization from various systematics, however, so it will probably be some 5-10 years before we can be confident on what the measurements mean.
Plato and Lawrence; your points are elegant and I agree wholeheartedly with them! I think what you are touching on (and forgive me if I misrepresent your views in any way) is the inspiration or the path,/i> to a mathematical idea.
I agree that certain mathematical ideas can only be happened upon in a specific order; Newton and Leibniz did not create the calculus from whole cloth, but building upon a body of mathematical ideas pre-existing in the body of mathematical thought. Lawrence’s illustration of Perleman’s inspiration for the Poincare solution from seeing clothes on a rack is another aspect of this; the ability of mathematics to be improved by intuitive leap; in this sense, mathematics is more closely related to the arts, perhaps, than the sciences.
My own view is that math pre-exists, and we discover it; the intermix between math and physics is a beautiful illustration in my view of this idea, namely that mathematics is the language one must learn to describe nature, and thus is self-consistent even when explored on its own (that is in areas that have, thus far, no practical applications).
Of course, this creates a marvellous dichotomy; a mathematical proof, when proven true, is true for all time, even if it does not apply to a physical reality. I think it’s a lovely idea that all those wonderful, mathematically consistent physical theorems are still true, even if they do not apply to the phenomenon they attempted to prove in our universe.
BRB (49)– in our theory we imagine that the visible universe came to life by pinching off from a specific pre-existing spacetime, empty de Sitter space. One could, in principle, calculate the rates of different kinds of fluctuations that could ultimately lead to brains, or galaxies, or what have you. In practice you can’t, in any believable way, because our understanding isn’t nearly there yet. I wouldn’t even call our ideas a “theory,” more like a schematic framework that it might be worthwhile trying to fill in.
As for Vilenkin and other tunneling-from-nothing approaches, I think this is a good question. How do you calculate a rate or a likelihood if the universe, by hypothesis, doesn’t exist yet? You certainly have to say that conventional quantum mechanics breaks down, as the time parameter in the Schrodinger equation doesn’t come with some initial value, it goes forever.
ree ree,
I think that question of “why these laws” is exactly what can be addressed in a setting in which you have an enseble of all possible universes on which you define a measure that gives a larger weight to those universes that can be specified with less information.
Finding the laws of physics can be seen as an exercise in data compression. Given all the experimental data, what are the simplest rules that describes the data? The fact that such compression is possible at all and that it is a good guide to find the laws of physics suggests that we can consider ourselves to be sampled from an ensemble of universes using a measure that favors low complexity.
So, all this is consistent with the way we usually do physics. Gödel’s theorem could be a potential problem anyway. In terms of data compression, Gödel’s theorem is actually a rather trivial statement as has been pointed out by Chaitin. He explains that here:
To JimV @ #48
Your response has the makings of an atheistic creation myth. Appeals to randomness, chance and indeterminately long periods of time are characteristics of atheistic materialism. Then there are unobservable universes. When all else fails, those arguments are always available. You appeal to the “power of random algorithms” to explain human exceptionalism, yet you have a sample size of one.
Finally, you attribute our species success in understanding the universe to “trial and error.” That point can hardly be taken seriously since I doubt that mathematicians and mathematical physicists consider their work to be trial and error.
The most remarkable occurrence in the natural world is that humans have a seemingly unique and exhaustible capacity to comprehend that natural world. That situation fits nicely within the confines of theism. I have yet to come across a compelling explanation from atheistic materialism. Perhaps someone could point me to one.
Thanks,
Otis
“Oh piscator… you can’t see the forest for the trees, can you?”
It’s the “standard model” particle physicists who can’t see the wood for the trees, while it’s the theologists and their like who can’t see the trees for the wood.
In biology there is now the science of ecology which relates living organisms to their larger environment. So that, in effect, you can see both the wood and the trees in an integrated context.
While you can ask where is or has there ever been a genuine “quantum ecologist”?
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