Three ways physicists understand the physical universe

"Ten years after Einstein completed his theories, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger invented quantum mechanics, describing the behavior of atoms and light-quanta in a radically different way. Experiments confirmed that quantum mechanics gives a true picture of atomic processes that Einstein’s theories could not explain. Niels Bohr worked out a philosophy, generally known as the Copenhagen interpretation, to explain quantum mechanics. I prefer to call it the dualistic philosophy, since it describes the universe as consisting of two layers. The first layer is the classical world of Einstein, with objects that are directly observable but no longer predictable. They have become unpredictable because they are driven by events in the second layer that we cannot see. The second layer is the quantum world, with states that are not directly observable but obey simple laws. For example, the laws of the second layer decree that every particle travels along every possible path with a probability that depends in a simple way on the path.

"The two layers are connected by probabilistic rules, so that the quantum state of an object tells us only the probabilities that it will do various things. The dualistic philosophy allows us to divide our knowledge of nature into facts and probabilities. Observation of the first layer gives us facts about what happened in the past, but only gives us probabilities about what may happen in the future. The future is uncertain because the processes in the second layer are unobservable. The power and the beauty of quantum mechanics arise from the fact that the physical laws in the second layer are precisely linear.

"All points in a linear theory are equal, and a linear space has perfect symmetry about any of its points. As a result of the linearity of the laws, the second layer possesses a wealth of marvelous symmetries that are only partially visible in the first layer. For example, in the first layer, symmetries between space and time are only partly visible. In daily life, we do not mix up inches with seconds or miles with days. In the second layer, as the result of Paul Dirac’s elegant equation describing the quantum behavior of the electron, the mixing of space with time in the electron’s movements would be clearly visible. But we do not live in the second layer, and so the mixing is hidden from us.

"The dualistic philosophy gives a natural frame for the new sciences of particle physics and relativistic cosmology that emerged in the twentieth century after Einstein and Bohr were dead. The new sciences are dominated by mathematical symmetries that are exact in the second layer and approximate in the first layer. The dualistic philosophy seems to me to represent accurately our present state of knowledge. It says that the classical world and the quantum world are both real, but the way they fit together is not yet completely understood. The dualistic philosophy is flexible enough to accept unexpected discoveries and conceptual revolutions.

"Now, eighty years after the dualistic philosophy was invented by Bohr, it is generally regarded by the younger generation of physicists as obsolete. The younger generation mostly rejects duality and accepts what I call the quantum-only philosophy. The quantum-only philosophy says that the classical world is an illusion and only the quantum world exists. The concept of a classical world arose because the effects of quantum mechanics are rapidly erased by a phenomenon known as decoherence. Decoherence hides the quantum world by destroying rapidly the waves arising from quantum effects. After the waves have disappeared, whatever is left obeys classical laws and looks like a classical world. According to the quantum-only philosophy, the marvelous harmony of Einstein’s classical universe is only an approximation, valid when quantum waves happen to be small enough to be neglected.

"To summarize the present situation, there are three ways to understand philosophically our observations of the physical universe. The classical philosophy of Einstein has everything in a single layer obeying classical laws, with quantum processes unexplained. The quantum-only philosophy has included everything in a single layer obeying quantum laws, with the astonishing solidity and uniqueness of the classical illusion unexplained. The dualistic philosophy gives reality impartially to the classical vision of Einstein and to the quantum vision of Bohr, with the details of the connection between the two layers unexplained. All three philosophies are tenable, and all three are incomplete. I prefer the dualistic philosophy because I give equal weight to the insights of Einstein and Bohr. I do not believe that the celestial harmonies discovered by Einstein are an accidental illusion."

Excerpt from Freeman Dyson, "Einstein as a Jew and a Philosopher" NYRB May 7, 2015. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/may/07/albert-einstein-jew-and-philosopher/ Accessed May 17, 2015.

Alan Lightman sounds the alarm

Sound the alarm! Science’s priestly reign over the public square may soon be overthrown! The fortress of doubt could be breached. Already, the foundations of theoretical physics are straining and cracking. The barbarians are at the gates. They will torch the manicured gardens of reason. Who then will keep order? What of the state? How will the West survive?

To understand how we have reached this precipice, one need only look at developments in theoretical physics over the last few decades. Theoretical physics is the purest expression of science. Exploring the universe with sophisticated and occult mathematics, it searches for the deepest and most explanatory properties of nature. In the name of Isaac Newton, its faithful hunt natural laws as unapologetic Platonists. Their holy grail is a master principle that will explain everything.

According to cosmologist Alan Gurth, “Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the feeling was that we were so smart; we had everything figured out.” It was true, theoretical physicists had come an amazing distance. They had accurately modeled three of the fundamental forces of nature: the strong and weak forces and electromagnetism. No one doubted that the remaining fourth force, gravity, would soon be wedded to quantum physics, with the result that a final theory--a theory of everything--would emerge. In the light of the theory of everything, the universe would no longer be a mystery, but a necessity. Enter the multiverse.

So much has been made of the multiverse on television and in the movies that it seems silly to explain it. Nevertheless, the multiverse is a cosmos fecund with an infinitude of universes, each with an unpredictable and unique set of physical properties. Most would be stillborn wastes of dead rock or awash in the violent spray of hyper radiation. But the tiniest fraction of a fraction of these might contain complex organisms or, rarest of all, intelligent life.

What makes the multiverse idea so necessary to cosmologists is a characteristic of the one universe we do know about--our own. As it turns out, our universe is stunningly, amazingly, fantastically, and completely fine tuned to support life. This characteristic has only grown more miraculous as physicists have better understood how delicate and complex it all is. I imagine that somewhere in the first quarter of the twentieth century this fine tuning was ignored in public and rarely discussed in private. Back then, Einstein’s general relativity was upsetting the comfortable givenness of the solid-state model of the universe. But as our models have become more complex, the evidence of fine tuning has grown to an acuity that no one can ignore.

Such fine tuning forced working physicists into a conundrum. They could roll away the stone and resurrect the argument from design, much to the smug satisfaction of the Intelligent Design community. Indeed, many theists and polytheists argue that the fine-tuning of the universe suggests a transcendent designer. Francis Collins, for example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability. . . . [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator.” But religion is not an option for science, even though many scientists hold religious beliefs. Science as science cannot embrace unqualified and unrepeatable hypotheses. If it should do this, it instantly becomes another propagandist in a thoroughly political universe, opening the way to the naked power of fascism, the hive mind of socialism, or the cultic and bloody mysteries of theocracy. Here be barbarians.

As it stands, physicists have two options: string theory and the multiverse. String theory has been around for decades. It suggests that the smallest bits of stuff that exist are vibrating, tiny, one-dimensional loops or strings of energy. The differences in their vibrations give rise to the fundamental forces and particles familiar to physics. Many hoped string theory would be able to unify gravity with quantum physics. And if string theorists could pull off this correlation, they would realize the Platonic ideal of a fully explicable cosmos. But, there remains a problem.

At its inception, string theory required a number of extra dimensions: seven at the beginning, with each dimensional fold corresponding to a different universe. Now, however, that number has grown to 10 to the 500th possible universes. It may as well be an infinity, explaining everything and so explaining nothing. Never mind that, as of this writing, string theory has not been supported by a single experimental result, nor has it suggested demonstrable areas of further investigation. It's failure leaves only the multiverse.

Lightman tries his best to assert that a multiverse is at least suggested by modern physics. He points out that eternal inflation suggests it, and cites Alan Guth’s original inflation theory, which was developed by Andrei Linde, Paul Steinhardt, and Alex Vilenkin some twenty years ago. But eternal inflation says that the universe is expanding upon a field of dark energy that has different properties at different points in space--the same energy of which he admits “no one knows what it is.” He goes on to admit that physicists “give a fantastically large range for the theoretically possible amounts of dark energy” (emphasis his). He then abandons eternal inflation and resorts to a pathetic argument from authority, writing, “Some of the world’s leading physicists have devoted their careers to the study of these two theories.” Eventually, however, he has to admit that “neither eternal inflation nor string theory has anywhere near the experimental support of many previous theories in physics, such as special relativity or quantum electrodynamics.” By this he means that the latter two have been independently verified by a number of experiments over the last half of the previous century and have suggested further avenues of research whereas the former are nifty math gymnastics for the initiated. In other words, the multiverse is not the elegant explanation physicists expected. They went looking for a universe of light and form, but wound up with something dark and formless.

Keep in mind that the multiverse idea is no friend to theoretical physics. Lightman admits that “if the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles--to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are--is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true.” If the multiverse idea is true, he continues, then "there is no hope of ever explaining our universe's features in terms of fundamental causes and principles."

Therefore because of our universe’s demonstrable fine tuning for life, theoretical physicists have oh so quietly abandoned empirical science for faith. “Some [physicists] feel relieved,” Lightman says. “Some feel like their lifelong ruminations have been pointless. And some remain deeply concerned, because there is no way they can prove [the multiverse]."

Appealing evangelistically to his scientific peers, Lightman says, "Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. . . . We must believe in what we cannot prove.” And so the multiverse, though a perennial boon to science fiction, is as whimsical a figure as the flying spaghetti monster.

What a horrible state of affairs! For without the despotic threat of militant empiricism, the barbarians will most surely come. They will burn libraries in an inferno of anti-intellectualism. They will invoke and totemize the fine tuning of the universe to summon legions of theosophic spiritualisms. Eros will seduce reason, and governments will descend into a night of long knives. Heaven help us! The priesthood is forfeit. The public square lies open. Oh, Alan Lightman, how will they let you live?

Epilogue

Who would have expected it, but the so-called war between religion and science has been but a cordial tete-a-tete all this time. Kept under the watchful eye of white-cloaked science, the churches could relax. All those threats about secularism did but thin the ranks of the Elmer Gantry, allowing ecclesial powers to pay more attention to the faithful. Who needs the hard and divisive labor of doctrine, discipline, and exegetical homiletics when one can employ the far more friendly and quantitative techniques of psychology and business management? Church discipline, private rebuke, and public apologetics are not necessary when only the faithful attend. Science too has benefited. In public, religion has been a noteworthy and engaging sparring partner: good for putting scientists on best-seller lists and magazine covers; good for TED talks, speaker's fees, innumerable conference sessions, and humorous anecdotes (and the benefits flow both ways). In private, scientists haunted by the specter of Oppenheimer have been glad to have an ethical stopgap to keep the whole thing human.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.” ~ Pope John Paul II

Read part one of this article, Science's Crisis of Faith, or read the whole thing as a document.

Science's crisis of faith

MIT physicist and novelist Alan P. Lightman has said too much for the priestly class to let him live. It is too bad, because Lightman can do the math and the metaphor at the same time. We need people like him. We need watchmen who are wide awake. Because if he is correct, the epistemological authority of our sciences could be eroding. Should it give way, public discourse and reason may well collapse, and civilization will be at the mercy of lawlessness.

Some may doubt the existence of a priestly class. First-world nations especially pride themselves in their technological ubiquity, public and private secondary and post-secondary educational opportunities, and free and democratic values. Nevertheless, someone has to commune with gods and communicate their demands to mortals. Someone has to decide what truth is and how it can be known. Someone has to demarcate what fundamental ideas will be allowed to shape the legal and political discourse of a culture.

The question is not whether a priestly class exists--every culture has to decide what it is and what it is not. The question is who makes the decision? Who is in control of the public square? French historian Georges Duby divides medieval society into those that prayed, those that fought, and those that worked. It doesn’t take long to sort out who is in the latter two classes. So who, then s in the former? Who are the priests? Here are a few characteristics that may help answer the question.

One trait that characterizes a priestly class is jargon. Priestly classes always have their own languages. Everyone is familiar with the monastics of the middle ages, chanting the psalms for hours at a time and saying mass at lip-lynching abracadabra speeds because it was in Latin. Medieval Latin was the JavaScript, C++, Python, XML, and Ruby on Rails of its time, invented by and for the priestly class. Today priestly discourse is in abstract mathematics. Consider the following comment by author and social philosopher George Steiner:

Science is becoming inaccessible to us. Who can understand the latest innovations in genetics, astrophysics and biology? Who can explain them to the profane? Knowledge no longer communicates; writers and philosophers in our day are incapable of enabling us to understand science. At the same time, the scope of imagination in science is dazzling. . . . I am concerned by what it means to be literate today. Is it possible to be literate if you do not understand non-linear equations?

Another demonstrable trait of a priestly class is a penchant for isolation and pageantry. Priests live ensconced in their temples and institutions. But when they emerge, they spin myths of fantastic speculation and drama. Priests use the most sophisticated technologies of the day to awe the public and further cement their offices as mouthpieces of the gods and the arbiters of all wisdom. It is the priestly class that brings fire from heaven to earth. (One best not forget that because they've been known to burn, torture, imprison, and silence men, women, children, nations, and peoples to maintain their power.)

There are others traits as well. For example, a priestly class demands sacrifice. It attracts members from and nurtures the future of the political bourgeois, whereas it needs and fears the military. It has an identifiable costume that sets it apart from others. And given enough time, it will undermine its own foundations.

Given these few characteristics, the argument can be made that the West’s priestly class is made up of practicing scientists. Take for example the half-a-lifetime of painful and expensive mathematical hazing it takes to even come abreast of what is current in the field, thus barring we plebians from real understanding. (We understand at the level of myth.) Or consider the role, and cost, of universities. Undergraduate education is a court of the gentiles; masters degrees the court of the women. Gown and mortarboard mark the initiates. And who can argue but the university system of our day, bloated and fat on the blood of the middle-class, regulates status, income, and mate-selection using impenetrable matrices to separate the sheep from the goats.

So then, having identified our priests, we return to our watchman, Dr. Alan P. Lightman. “The history of science,” he says, “can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.” Humanity has measured the heavens with the span of its calculus and dispelled the old gods of nature and chaos before the daylight of scientific certainty. Reason reigned--until now. Now “this long and appealing trend may be coming to an end.”

Read the second part of this article, Alan Lightman Sounds the Alarm, or read the whole thing as a document.

three scientists

Science, too, stumbles toward religion. The horizon of human imagination and aspiration is just too large and too curious to submit to the narrow confines of a method, measure, rule.

So far I have pointed out the misunderstandings and mischaracterizations that have largely shaped the attitude of religion as it addresses science. Now I would like to survey three voices that come from the other direction; science addressing religion—well, not properly religion, more like faith or ethics. Two of these come from interviews broadcast in 2008 on American Public Media’s radio program “Speaking of Faith.”

The first is "Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth" with author Janna Levin, assistant professor of astrophysics at Columbia University and author of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, among other books.

The second is "Science and Hope" with Templeton Prize winner Dr. George Ellis, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town and a Quaker.

The third is an interview between host Dr. Moira Gunn and biologist and author Stewart Kauffman broadcast 6 June, 2008, on the podcast IT Conversations. The context of their discussion is Kauffman's book Reinventing the Sacred, but the subject is really emergence.

The Conversations

The conversation with Janna Levin centers largely around the following points. (1) Truth goes beyond what mathematics can demonstrate; Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. (2) How do we know what is real, when our perception is a point along a phenomenological continuum? We don't see the quantum. Our intuition is based on the neurons that have evolved in this world for our purposes. There are no true things that are unambiguously true, save things like 1+1=2. The rest of it is always something we approach without arriving, glimpsing truth out of the corner of the eye. “Every judgment is by its form one-sided and, to that extent, false” (Hegel). (3) How is it that mathematics not only exists, but we can perceive and understand it? (4) Time, determinism, and freedom [16:00], including the existence of free will. I especially like her reminder that we have come through radical changes in worldview since, say, pre-Copernican societies [33:15]. Same for her commitment that existential meaning must be based on truth. Levin is a reductionist, seeing, for example, many of our behaviors as an outgrowth of animal instincts encoded through evolutionary processes. At the same time, she is uncomfortable with this, only too glad to argue for free will in a world of lawful inevitability and subconscious instinct.

George Ellis is a cosmologist and an activist. And in his experience there exists what he calls “deep ethics,”an ethics emerging from the mathematical fabric of the universe. It is there, and no one knows why. As Ellis says, “We haven't got a clue in what way mathematics is embedded there, but it is there in some platonic space waiting to be discovered. We actually haven't got a clue how the laws of physics are embedded in the universe. We know they're there. We know they're effective. We don't know how they are embedded.” This deep ethic emerges whether one wants it to or not. And it is kenotic in nature: it is selfless, it is humble, it serves others. The proof of its existence is “self-authenticating. There is actually no other way of saying it. It is just something you either see or you don't see. There is no proof. It's something you recognize or you don't recognize.”

Ellis says that science has limits. “Science sees nothing about aesthetics or meaning or metaphysics.” Of course, this language evokes the God of the gaps problem. Ellis says, “It’s not the God of the gaps, it’s the God of the boundaries.”

The point about this is that there are boundaries to what science can handle, boundaries science cannot cross. (Not will not [which is the god of the gaps] but cannot.) And one of these important boundaries is ethics. So let's go back to the ethics. There's a whole lot of people out there trying to say, 'Well, ethics is understood by science through sociobiology.' There's another lot of social scientists saying ethics is understood through sociology and psychology and anthropology, and so on. And they are just profoundly mistaken when they say that, for a whole host of reasons. And perhaps we don't want to get technical about this, but the simple way to see how mistaken they are is to ask the following question to a scientist who says 'Look, science can comprehend ethics.' We can use science as a basis for ethics. 'So fine,' we say. 'Tell us what science says we should do in Iraq today.' Then you get this deafening silence because science is totally unable to say anything about that. The reason is there are no experiments in science to do with what is good and what is bad. There are no scientific units for good and bad. There's no experiment. It's just outside the scope of science, not only now, but forever, never ever will be within the bound of science.

And as for the origin of the universe:

My colleagues are producing theories of what they call creation of the universe out of nothing. But when you probe them, you find they're not producing theories of the creation of the universe out of nothing. They are assuming a huge machinery of quantum field theory and fields and particles and interactions, which generates the universe, not the creation of the universe out of nothing.

And, yet, it had to come from somewhere. “In the end, we run into a metaphysical blank, whether you pursue it scientifically or religiously, and you simply have to give up in wonder and awe and say, ‘I don't know the answer, and it's just marvelous the way things are.’”

Biologist and author Stewart Kauffman studies self-organizing systems, pursuing a cosmological position called emergence, which is growing in scientific popularity. What has to be overcome, Kauffman says, is reductionism, of which he outlines three features: (1) Everything that happens is describeable by natural laws. This means that the universe is (2) fundamentally deterministic. Like a computer, once you know the relevant information, then you can predict everything. And finally (3) reductionism is analytic. It says that knowledge is the product of reducing things to their elemental parts. Reductionism has been very successful, it is true, but not without ethical and existential costs. For the reductionist, the universe is made up of unrelated happenings from which no meaning can be abstracted; bare juxtaposition without explanation or narrative.

For this and other reasons, the adequacy of reducationism is being questioned by some within the scientific community. In its place is a platform called "emergence," which asks questions about the nature of the universe from the perspective of pure and infinite complexity. The result: a universe which cannot be completely explained, now or ever, by the fundamental laws of physics. Two nobel laureates in physics are notable enthusiasts: Phil Anderson, who wrote an article in Science in 1972 entitled "More is Different," and Robert Laughlin, whose latest book is entitled, A Different Universe. Like Anderson and Laufman, Kauffman believes that emergence is not only real and demonstrable, but it is a better platform than reductionism for doing science.

Reductionism doesn't work, he says, because complex things cannot be deduced. Reality is so unplottably chaotic, so infinitely complex, that trying to say "this comes from that" is a fool's errand. You can't simulate the development of complex things. In biology, for example, a physicists cannot explain the coming into existence of the heart. Emergence allows for cause and effect, but it throws its boundaries much larger to encompass the unexplainably complex.

This is the basis for Kauffman's critique of darwinian preadaptation. He asks, "Do you think you could say beforehand all the possible darwinian preadaptations of all the organisms now, or just for humans? Can we know all the adjacent possibles?" The answer is, of course, no. "There just isn't a mathematical framework to even try and do this. How would we know we plotted all the adjacent possibles?" Predictability is impossible. There are just too many variables. The future is just too odd.

So, then, Kauffman outlines four implications from emergence.

1. We cannot do what Newton said we should do. We can't specify the laws and then calculate what is going to happen, because we can't know all the adjacent possibles.

2. We can't make probability statements. We don't know all the adjacent possibles, and so we can't plot a sample that would allow us to come up with a probability statement. Nobel laureate Marie Gilmont says that a law is a compact description of the regularities of a process, but can we really do this? The evolution of the biosphere is beyond prediction and beyond the reach of natural law. What we're left with in the biosphere and up through economics is ceaseless creativity. You don't need a creator for this. Every advance through an adjacent possible reshapes the next adjacent possible. The entire matrix of adjacent possibles changes with every step in a way that cannot be predicted.

3. Reason is an insufficient guide for living our life. We have to reunite narrative, allegory, intuition, emotion, and reason. We have to rethink and understand our integrated humanity, throwing aside the split between the two cultures: science and the arts. Science is no longer the only way to get to the truth. History, art, law--lots of things tell us the truth now, not just the scientific method. We need more than just reductionism to help explain things. We live our lives forward, in the face of mystery, not knowing what is going to happen. What does it mean to be fully human in such a world? Kauffman goes on to talk about religion. He takes to task his reductionist friends, such as Richard Dawkins--Enlightenment atheists. What if you take "god" out of the equation and leave creativity, poses Kauffman, hypostasizing creativity. We have lived with creativity and have invented gods to explain it. Indeed, how many gods have we worshipped in human history? God is our most powerful symbol, but it is rife with abuse. "We can choose to use the word "God" if we want to," he says. But it isn't necessary. Instead, we can use "god," not to mean a creator, but to refer to the creativity that itself characterizes and shapes the universe.

4. We need a global ethic. We are connected to everything, emerging along with the rest of the universe. We are caught up in the natural creativity of the universe: which means, to use a religious word, we are all sacred. We need a shared ethic, a global ethic, an ethic that includes all of life and the planet. The secular West is reduced to fairness for friends, love of family, democracy, and free markets, but this is not a global ethic. We are reduced to consumers. We are commoditized. We need an ethic that will help guide the hetero- or homogeneous civilization that is developing. We need to be reconciled to nature. The notion that nature is there to be used by man, the whole purpose of knowledge from a Baconian view, needs to be thrown off. Instead, we need to embrace nature. So can we use this sense of god, and find meaning in it to orient our lives today? Kauffman thinks we can, and that it is as good as any other model of god, and perhaps better, since there is no theodicy issue.

Grammar

So what to do with the above three examples? I hope they serve to show that not only theologians, but scientists are struggling to make sense of the no man's land that exists between too-tidy reductionism and the Wild West of pure fideism. There seems to be a complete lack of any grammatical rules for passing between one side or the other, any schema that allows statements made by one side to be properly heard and evaluated on the other. No one seems to be able to define what governing power a scientific theory should have in the development of doctrine and vise versa (though things have gone unidirectional for a good while.) Can you just equate the big bang, with all its supporting mathematics etc., and Genesis 1.1? (As, for example, William Lane Craig tries to do in this debate with Peter Atkins.) What happens when they turn the Hadron Collider on early next year in Switzerland and discover the whole brane thing is correct and that the big bang is just a temporal phenomenon in a much larger and more complicated universe? Theology risks too much when it latches such and such a doctrine to today's scientific post--but, for all that, it can't just ignore it. And, if the above three physicists say anything about science, it says that scientists, too, cannot avoid the ethical and, yes, religious implications of their work.

Janna Levin; George Ellis; cosmology; religion and science; ethics; Stuart Kauffman; emergence; complexity; evolution; philosophy of science; probability; freedom; kenosis

Integrating Davies and Weinberger

I found two interviews on Salon today that really got my brain going. Unfortunately, I can only post the chunks that inspired me. Over time I'll whittle them away so I'm not participating in copyright infringement and begin to add my own thoughts. Anyway, here are the two interviews:

Steve Paulson “We are Meant to Be Here” Salon July 3, 2007. Interview with physicist Paul Davies.

There are some obvious questions about the big bang. Can we really talk about it coming out of nothing? Don't we have to ask, wasn't there something that caused the big bang?

Many people fall into that trap. But Augustine, in the fifth century, pointed out that the world was made with time, not in time. I think he got this exactly right. Of course, most people think that there must have been a previous event that caused whatever event we're talking about. But this is simply not the case. We now know that time itself is part of the physical universe. And when we talk about the big bang in a simplified model, then we're talking about not only matter and energy coming into being, but space and time as well. So there was no time before the big bang. The big bang was the origin of time.

People want to ask, what happened before the big bang, or what caused the big bang? But in a simple picture where there's just one universe, the big bang can be the ultimate origin of space and time as well as matter and energy. So unless the universe has always existed, you're faced with the problem that time itself comes into existence. And any attempt to talk about causation has to be couched in terms of something that comes after the beginning and not before the beginning ... because there was no before.

There are some obvious religious implications to all of this. My sense is that a lot of Jews and Christians are actually quite delighted with the big bang -- the idea that the universe was created out of nothing. It seems to correspond to the story of creation in Genesis.

I think there's a misunderstanding by religious people if they think that creation ex nihilo is anything like the big bang. People misunderstand what creation ex nihilo is about. It's not that there existed a God within time who was there for all eternity and then at some particular moment, on a whim, decided, "I'm going to make a universe" and then pressed a button that made the big bang. That raises exactly the objection that Augustine was addressing: What was God doing before making the universe? If the universe was a good idea, why wasn't it made an infinite time ago?

I might also say that it's always a bad idea for people to decide what to believe on religious grounds and then to cherry-pick the scientific facts to fit, because these facts are likely to change. And we may find that the big-bang theory goes out of favor at some point in the future. And then what? Religious people will have backed the wrong horse. So it's fraught with danger to seize on these cosmological ideas. But I personally think we can draw the conclusion that we live in a universe that's deeply imbued with meaning and purpose.

You want to stay away from God.

I want to stay away from a pre-existing cosmic magician who is there within time, for all eternity, and then brings the universe into being as part of a preconceived plan. I think that's just a naive, silly idea that doesn't fit the leanings of most theologians these days and doesn't fit the scientific facts. I don't want that. That's a horrible idea. But I see no reason why there can't be a teleological component in the evolution of the universe, which includes things like meaning and purpose. So instead of appealing to something outside the universe -- a completely unexplained being -- I'm talking about something that emerges within the universe. It's a more natural view. We're trying to construct a picture of the universe which is based thoroughly on science but where there is still room for something like meaning and purpose. So people can see their own individual lives as part of a grand cosmic scheme that has some meaning to it. We're not just, as Steven Weinberg would say, pointless accidents in a universe that has no meaning or purpose. I think we can do better than that.

Do you think one reason the multiverse theory has become so popular in recent years is to keep the whole idea of God at bay?

Yes.

Because a lot of physicists seem to be at a loss for how to explain this cosmic fine-tuning. But with the multiverse, you can say there are an infinite number of universes and we just happen to be lucky to live in one that supports life.

There's no doubt that the popularity of the multiverse is due to the fact that it superficially gives a ready explanation for why the universe is bio-friendly. Twenty years ago, people didn't want to talk about this fine-tuning because they were embarrassed. It looked like the hand of a creator. Then along came the possibility of a multiverse, and suddenly they're happy to talk about it because it looks like there's a ready explanation. Only those universes in which there can be life get observed, and all the rest go unobserved. Notice, however, that it's far from a complete explanation of existence. You still have to make a huge number of assumptions. You need a universe-generating mechanism to give you all these universes. You need a set of laws that can be scattered across these universes, distributed in some way, according to some algorithm. You're no better off than saying there is an unexplained God.

Even the scientific explanations for the universe are rooted in a particular type of theological thinking. They're trying to explain the world by appealing to something outside of it. And I think the time has come to move beyond that. We can -- if we try hard enough -- come up with a complete explanation of existence from within the universe, without appealing to something mystical or magical lying beyond it. I think the scientists who are anti-God but appeal to unexplained sets of laws or an unexplained multiverse are just as much at fault as a naive theist who says there's a mysterious, unexplained God.

You say in your book that there's another explanation for how the universe is structured. You suggest we may actually live in a fake universe. We could be part of an "ingeniously contrived virtual reality show," as in the "Matrix" movies. Do you really think that's a possibility?

Clearly, it's a logical possibility that this entire universe could be a simulation, if we imagine that in a hundred or a thousand years we'd be able to make computers that are sufficiently powerful to simulate consciousness. You need only to believe that consciousness is ultimately a physical process, which in principle we can mimic. Then we clearly have the possibility of building a machine and feeding in electrical impulses to produce this or that sensation. So this raises the obvious question, is there a real world out there? And how do I know that it's not all a gigantic virtual reality show, with my own mental experiences being created by some super-duper computer, so that I'm just living inside this machine? Now, there are a number of philosophers who are enamored of this idea. How would we know from within the simulation that it is a simulation and not the reality? If it's a good simulation, we couldn't know. So we must be open to the possibility that this whole world is in fact a gigantic simulation.

Near the end of "The Cosmic Jackpot," you say that all these explanations about the universe are probably wrong, and "Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limits of the human intellect." Do you think future scientists will ever resolve these questions?

If future scientists are human beings, they may be stuck with the same problems that we have. The way we think, the way we like to analyze problems, the categories that we define -- like cause and effect, space-time and matter, meaning and purpose -- are really human categories that cannot be separated from our evolutionary heritage. We have to face up to the fact that there may be fundamental limitations just from the way our brains have been put together. So we could have reached our own human limits.

Scott Rosenberg, “Delight in disorder” Salon May 23, 2007. Interview with David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous.

You've described your book as an "argument with Aristotle." Here you are, it's a book about "the new digital disorder," and we're arguing with the ancients. How did that happen?

Our culture's been arguing with him for a long time. The argument is, whether there is a right order of the universe -- one right order. Aristotle didn't come up with the idea, but he was the person who articulated it so forcefully that for 2,000 years he was simply believed. This is an order in which everything has a place, and to know what something is is to know that place, and in knowing it you're seeing what makes it what it is. That's why it can't be in two places on the chart, on the diagram -- because then it's two things, and that's chaos.

You also need to know within a category, things are different from the other things in that category -- this is the genus/species idea. It's a deep and fascinating notion -- that to be something is to both be like something else and be unlike it. And it works really well -- it allows you to construct a universe. And it allows you to keep some things implicit. We know this is a bird without also having to think, oh, bird, that's a type of animal, oh, and animal therefore is a type of thing, and things all have these properties. That's one of the mysteries of knowing -- that we don't know everything simultaneously all the time.

So we have this definition, and it's clear and it's precise. The entire system is beautiful and balanced and harmonious. And this is the vision that we carried with us for a long, long time. But we've been shaking it off for generations now -- it's not like, the Web came along and suddenly we were free of Aristotle.

Multiculturalism, relativism, postmodernism -- all these things are disputing the notion of a single order. The Web just slaps us in the face with the fact that there's lots and lots of ways of slicing up the world.

But how we slice it up, how we cluster it, how things connect, depends on what we're trying to do. It's an amazing tool for consciousness to have, to be able to see the world according to the relevant attributes based upon a project -- that's what lets us survive, and do more. But that places the clustering of the universe, to some large degree, on our interests and our cares. Which is, from the Aristotelian point of view, to put it in the realm of whim and madness.

This is also why it seems to me so important that we're doing this socially. One of the mistakes that we've made in our history is to think that if there isn't a single order that's right, then it's up to every person to make it up for herself. And that's what we call madness.


Paul Davies; Steve Paulson; David Weinberger; Scott Rosenberg; cosmology; creation; Augustine; the Big Bang; Aristotle; ontology; taxonomy; the Great Chain of Being; networks; duality; mind/body problem; science; Genesis.