by Madeleine KandoWe often hear the term ‘the haves and the have-nots’ used in the context of economic welfare. It is less common to hear the term applied to ‘knowledge’. One area of knowledge where the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots is extremely wide is physics. I belong to the group of the have-nots.
It is not for want of trying. I have many books on ‘popular’ physics on my book shelf.
The most recent acquisition is a book called ‘The Grand Design’, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. The thing I like the most about the book is that it doesn’t contain one single mathematical equation.
In this book the authors ask three basic questions:
1) why is there something instead of nothing?
2) why do we exist?
3) why does this particular set of laws govern our universe and not some other set?
They answer the first question ‘why is there something instead of nothing’, by saying that it is possible that something comes into existence out of nothing because of quantum fluctuations.
I think a quantum fluctuation is when a particle and an anti-particle find each other and then immediately knock each other out of existence. Except, once in a while, there is no time for that process and poof, something appears instead of gets annihilated. So there you go, a new something. And because of the inflation theory, it grows into an entire universe.
It sounds pretty weird to me, but who am I to argue? The thing I find almost more puzzling than this revelation (that the universe has created itself), is the reaction to this new hypothesis.
Although Hawking’s book contains many incredibly important and fascinating chapters, 99% of the reviews of the book focus on this one particular statement. It is as if the world at large can not accept the possibility that the universe has no creator. The God debate overshadows everything related to this new masterpiece and it is easy to get sucked into it. I, for one, am totally happy with the notion that the universe created itself. It sounds a lot simpler than trying to prove the existence of a creator.
He also says that philosophy is dead, that it has been replaced by science. That I find hard to swallow. It means that only physicists are able to understand the world. Philosophers and the rest of us, whose nature it is to speculate, philosophize, ask ‘what if’ questions, we are all doomed to stupidity and ignorance.
We don’t need a God, we don’t need philosophy… all we need is gravity, according to Hawking. ‘Given the existence of gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason why the universe and humanity exist.'
‘Why DO we exist?’ Well, we just happen to live in one of an infinite number of universes where the laws of the cosmos allow the appearance of life. Not only that, but we also happen to live in the Goldilocks zone of OUR universe, a small band where the conditions are ‘just right’, so that life can develop.
There is also the possibility, according to John Gribbin, that our universe was created in a particle accelerator by a more advanced civilization in another universe. Universes are not hard to jump-start, he says, since the required mass-energy is equal to zero. So we might just be the result of an extraterrestrial’s high-school science project.
The bottom line is that no-one knows the answer to these questions. Still, we have progressed. When people thought the world was flat the question of the day was: ‘what is at the edge of the flat world?’ Then it was discovered that the world was round, so the question became irrelevant.
Now we ask the question: what was before the Big Bang? What if there was no ‘before’? Hawking says that you can compare the history of the universe to a ball, like the earth. If you go down from the equator, back in time, towards the south pole, you eventually reach a point. That’s the Big Bang. The question ‘what is south of the south pole’ becomes meaningless: there is nothing south of the south pole. leave comment here
14 comments:
So if there is nothing south of the south pole maybe a new universe could emerge from that nothing?
Juliette, you are right on about your comment. There are cosmologists that say exactly that, including Sean Carroll. In his book 'From Eternity to Here', he talks about that possibility in the context of entropy.
Anonymous: I stand corrected. The concept of nothingness is impossible for us humans to understand and maybe for the universe to contain. Unless we mean by 'nothingness' the space outside reality.
The Nothing that these authors are talking about doesn't in any way qualify as Total Nothingness. To create the latter in the imagination, you would have to take away the law of gravity and, along with that, all other laws and even the possibility that universal laws can exist, eliminate all forms of energy, and any and all kinds of substance(s) in that thought experiment. Expanding that kind of true Nothingness would be like exploding it in a Vacuum (not a vacuum cleaner, but Space with very little, if any, air or gases!). Predictably - Nothing Happens!!!!
True and Total Nothingness can never ever produce Something!!
To contemplate the eternality and the beginniglessness of an uncreated "a priori Intelligence" is every bit as easy or difficult as pondering on the eternality and the beginninglessness of the Law of Gravity!! Why? Because we can't wrap our minds around either concept - and neither can Stephen Hawking!!
When you ask yourself the question: what is in front of the person in front of the person in front of the person in front of you? You can also ask the question: what is behind the person behind the behind the person etc. But time doesn't work that way. We know a lot about the past but nothing about the future. Time is not symmetrical, like space.
If we could step out of time we could see all of the past, the present and the future at once, which would be like looking at space: left, right, up, down, front, back.. it would all be one. Depending on the shape of the universe, it is possible that there is no beginning, because the beginning merges with the future, just like on a globe: if you go south far enough you eventually end up going north.
So maybe it IS all a matter of gravity, like Hawking says.
On the subject of God and the Universe:
God has often been referred to/defined as "the first cause," or that which has NO cause. To posit the necessary existence of God as the first cause is not helpful, because one then has to ask the next question, which is: And what caused the first cause? This is an "infinite regress” dilemma.
The problem remains the same if you argue that God created/designed the laws of nature (gravity, the second law of thermodynamics, relativity, the speed of light as a maximum, etc.): Religious people have a need to say that God invented/designed these laws. He is the ultimate engineer. But who or what created/invented God-the-engineer?
In fact, if time and space are infinite, there IS NO first cause.
Western thought and science are causal, linear, Aristotelian. They claim that whatever exists, must have a prior cause. But maybe the Universe was not caused. It simply IS. Doesn't Eastern thought (Hindu, Zen, Buddhism, etc.) see things more that way? Even westerners might agree that - although it may seem reasonable to ask what caused the emergence of matter - it doesn't make sense to ask "what caused time." Time simply IS.
A phenomenological comment on “the Possibility of Nothingness”
Like Madeleine, I have always been fascinated by Cosmology (not to be confused with Cosmetology, haha). And like she, I am a have-not when it comes to knowledge of Physics.
Instead, I have some knowledge of Phenomenology, which deals with the subject-object relationship. It says basically that the observer-observed distinction is NOT fundamental. That subject and object are NOT fundamentally separate. This may remind you of famous Physicists such as Heisenberg and Schrodinger. I wouldn’t dare comment on them. I only understand SOCIOLOGICAL phenomenologists such as Husserl and Schutz.
That said, what about “ the Possibility of Nothingness?”
You, and commentators Leyerzapf and Juliette, wrote intriguing things about it. Here is my take, based on phenomenology:
Nothingness is the total absence of consciousness. Death.
To Ron Krumpos: Your e-book on comparative mysticism promises to be a good read. I can not respond sensibly until I have read it. Therefore a simple thank you for your contribution is all I can give for now.
Madeleine, Tom and I have been friends for a long time, sharing a lot of anti-PC opinions. I have to agree with Rudy that Hawkings is really talking about mathematical nothingness, not genuine absence of all being. It is quite incoherent to posit not just great power, but highly ordered power to nothingness. You might like to see my paper at http://www.standundon.com/theory-and-god/existence-of-god/ or at least the note on Hawking/Mlodinow. The gist of my paper is that most physical theories (My Ph.D. is in the philosophy of Physics)have some kind of particles/strings at their base, and from the mathematically precise properties of those particles the rest of the cosmos unfolds.Some authors posit cosmic laws to govern the unfolding. I have always sided with Newton, Cotes or Clarke in finding such universal laws "governing" the particles without being themselves expressions of the design of the particles when in some great mass a bit puzzling. Leibniz seemed to hold to such laws. Newton and company ridiculed this as a subterfuge for relying on the mind and will of God. But when the design of the fundamental particles is made the source of what physicists discover and these particles have identical blueprints, or several families of blueprints (up to six now) then Hawking has a question to answer. How can particles which did not create each other have the same bluprints, identical twins with no common father? We need an intelligent designer capable of imposing design without itself being dependent on well ordered material particles, and Undesigned Designer.
First of all, you should give yourself a great deal of credit for pursuing knowledge in physics, Madeleine. Unfortunately, most people seem to regard physics as either too difficult to learn, too unrelated to their own life, or simply as a sort of magic. Consequently, as a physicist and former professor of physics, I have encountered quite a few misconceptions concerning the "knowledge" of physics. Hawking himself--despite his genius-level grasp of the mathematical details of physics--does not always seem to convey his understanding clearly to others.(Hence the story was that his first popular book became a fixture on coffee tables that no one actually read.)Of course he was advised to not include any mathematics in his current book in response to this. The basic questions he asks are in fact philosophical ones, even though the answers he proposes are based on physical theories. But most of the theories he proposes are as yet unproven--they are simply clever and mathematically consistent hypotheses.Thus he is oversimplifying the case when he claims that "philosophy is dead." (To further clarify, Einstein's Relativity Theory was merely a hypothesis until its predicted bending of starlight by the sun was actually observed, along with many other experimental confirmations.) Hawking seems to equate "philosophy" with the systematic philosophers such as Kant, Hume, Berkeley, etc. that he probably had to learn about at Cambridge. These philosophies were based on reasoning and experience--just like science, but with one very important difference. They were not subject to universal experimental verification. Because of that difference, Hawking refers to his own hypotheses as "science" rather than as "philosophy." My own preference would be to call his hypotheses as "mathematical philosophies" until they are verified. Even then, they would not be "absolute truth," but simply the best representation of our perceptions. As these matters seem to have been lost by most scientists (and most philosophers as well)I have written a book about this entitled "What Then Is Truth?" (Your brother and co-blogger Tom--who was a former colleague of mine--has a copy that he will likely share with you.) Others can buy the book through Amazon,etc.
Stanislaus
I read your paper. I do not presume to understand it all, but it does make a strong argument for an undesigned first designer. Why ARE the laws that govern particles the way they are? Why did the early universe have low entropy and not high entropy? Why is there such a thing as quantum entanglement? I am much too much of a ‘have-not’ to speculate sensibly on those questions.
I like the analogy of the astronauts finding a Honda on Mars and explaining its presence by the machinery they find, ignoring the possibility of Japanese space travelers. I also like what you say about physicists’ responsibility to be humble. They do speak for all of us, in a way.
Maybe, in the end, the concept of a ‘designer’ will turn out to be so abstract, timeless, spaceless and materialless that our human understanding of it will have to be reframed.
I am just grateful for living in a time in human history where a ‘have-not’ like me can partake in a little of the genius of people like Stephen Hawking.Stanislaus
Gene:
What a wonderful comment on this post. Yes, you are absolutely right: Hawking's book addresses and tries to answer philosophical questions, which is lucky for me, because I wouldn't understand a purely scientific text.
It is very stimulating to think about big ideas, and your book sounds intriguing. The truth is present on two levels, isn't it? On a daily level: it is true that I woke up at 7 this morning, and on a more abstract level: it is true that I am going to die.
The daily truth seems 'truer', even though the long-term, historical truth might give our lives the meaning that we all search for.
You are definitely on the right track here, Madeleine. As human beings we are unable to attain absolute truth. We can only learn conditional forms of truth from our own personal experience, from the collective historical experience of others, and from abstract (often mathematical) reasoning. Therefore, truth can only emerge from an extended dialogue between people with many different viewpoints. The notion that a single religion or philosophy can be the source of all truth may be comforting to some--but it is simply wrong!
Hi madeleine, I see your problem, it sounds recognisable. But don't forget there is no 'the truth' or if it is it is incomprehensible to us dwellers of the earth. Contemplation can be nourishing, but it usually makes my perception of "the truth" more complicated, so it distances myself from it.
Groeten, johnny
Gene:
So I guess there is no absolute sense of right and wrong either. Although facts go a long way to prove that something is true, (the world is round), when it comes to values it is harder to argue for the truth. I just hope that we eventually will PROVE some ‘absolute truths’, even in the domain of values, that will discourage us from hurting each other and other living creatures.
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