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

you have to set aside a block of time

A good many doctrines and disciplines are governed by an underlying approach to time. The nature of God, the economy of salvation, eschatology, the exegesis of scripture, anthropology, every bit and so much more are influenced fundamentally by the answer they give to the question of time. How, for example, does one responsibly wrestle with the doctrine of the incarnation of the Son without talking of time? Or how can one talk about creation, space and time, when, at the smallest scale, size and duration mean exactly the same thing?[1] Yes, I am fascinated by this borderland between physics, philosophy, and theology (biblical or otherwise), and own several books on the subject. Unfortunately, none have been suitably digested. Their arguments are just too tedious and complicated, which is why only one blog post "Padgett versus Wood on time and eternity" even raises the issue. So thank God for Scientific American!

In a special edition entitled "A Matter of Time," the editors at Scientific American have produced over a dozen articles which explore time's many dimensions: from quantum physics to the technical and historical refinement of clocks. There is even an article ("Remembering When") which details the structures of the brain that collate our experiences into a single life of remembered events.

What emerges in this issue is a growing consensus among physicists and philosophers that time is a dimension laid out already in its entirety just like space. This consensus is called block time (also the B-theory of time, and tenseless time). A century ago British philosopher John McTaggart sought to draw a clear distinction between the description of the world in terms of events happening, which he called the A series, and the description in terms of dates correlated with states of the world, the B series. Instead of landscape, think “timescape.” You can talk about a volume of time in the same way you talk about a volume of space. Indeed, according to Lee Smolin's article "Atoms of Space and Time,"[2] space and time are constructed of infinitesimally small and discrete pieces analogous to the way water is composed of individual atoms. And time is distorted just as space is distorted, bending and flexing, contracting and expanding as matter and energy pass through it. Still, there is no flow, no movement from past to future, in block time, and certainly no special, temporal point called "now."

The theoretical basis of block time comes from Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. This theory ”denies any absolute, universal significance to the present moment. Two events that occur at the same moment if observed from one reference frame may occur at different moments if viewed from another.”[3] Objectivity dissolves into the perspective of each and every viewer. “Such mismatches make a mockery of any attempt to confer special status on the present moment, for whose "now" does that moment refer to?"[4] Einstein called this the relativity of simultaneity, and it comes out of a founding principle of relativity called general covariance.

All general covariance says is that the laws of physics are the same for all observers.

Two observers will perceive spacetime to have two different shapes, corresponding to their views of who is moving and what forces are acting. Each shape is a smoothly warped version of the other, in the way that a coffee cup is a reshaped doughnut. General covariance says that the difference cannot be meaningful. Therefore, any two such shapes are physically equivalent.[5]

Translated, this means that though time seems to change or flow, the overall shape of time itself does not, ergo block time. More important, it means that the flow from past to future which seems so natural to us is, in actuality, a completely subjective phenomenon. We observe the passage of time. It is phenomenological.

This is, of course, quite hard to understand when measured against everyday experience. We grow older, as do our children, and, hopefully, we grow wiser, too. The sun moves in the sky. Fruit left in the bowl rots. Our elders die. Given the ubiquity of such evidence, how can we understand the change we see around us? How can we question this ever-flowing conduit of “what was” to “what will be?” And what are the ramifications of doing so? Is a denial of time, a denial of the meaning we give and take from history and memory? Can hope survive without time? The questions pile up like seconds on a clock, and, according to Paul Davies, author and theoretical physicist at Macquarie University's Australian Center for Astrobiology in Sydney, “Modern science has barely begun to consider the question of how we perceive the passage of time."[6]

Still, we must begin somewhere, and Scientific American begins with geography. Instead of measuring time as a continuous flow from one state or one position to the next, we could just as easily describe each change as a discrete point or stage. A vase shatters on the floor. We habitually focus on its physical motion, observing its descent from table to floor as a passage through time. But we could just as easily describe the various states of the vase without a reference to time. Here is the vase when it is a meter from the floor. Here it is only a few hundred centimeters. Lets have another example. Take a bunch of cards of a type and number we would normally call a deck. Each card is a slice of a larger block of time, which is the deck. Now this relationship, the deck, does not exist by necessity just because one card follows another. It is more accurate to describe each card independently. The deck is made by their adjacency, not by any sort of relationship they have to each other.

So, then, how do we account for change? As above, our normal way of going about things is incorrigibly tensed. By this I mean that we inhabit a "tensed" notion of time, a description which refers to grammatical tense--past, present, and future, which are themselves derived from our experience of time. And because of this, we treat the past and the future quite differently. Though we can observe the past, it is not available to us. We cannot expect it, or live into it. Only the future is available to us like that. We, and everything around us, goes into the future (at least from our point of view), and this unidirectional pointing of everything we call "the arrow of time." But is this wrong? Does block time mean we should erase this arrow from our thinking? No, it doesn’t.

According to physicists, to embrace block time is not to deny the reality of the arrow of time. The arrow of time is real; there really is a unidirectional sequence of cards. "To deny that time flows is not to claim that the designations "past" and "future" are without physical basis. Events in the world undeniably form a unidirectional sequence."[7]. That is why we do not experience the past. Time's block isn't uniform. The deck of cards--the geography of block time--is not symmetrical. It is asymmetrical. The arrow points in one and only one direction, but seeing the future doesn’t make it necessary that we are moving into the future. "Past" and "Future" should describe something more like geography than motion. "Time's asymmetry is a property of states of the world, not a property of time as such."[8] This means that you can talk about change but not flow. Think, for example, of one of those giant, stone heads on Easter Island. Erected who knows how long ago, they stare forever in a single direction in which they will never go. Again from Brian Davies:

We do not really observe the passage of time. What we actually observe is that later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember. The fact that we remember the past, rather than the future, is an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time. Nothing other than a conscious observer registers the flow of time.[9]

Emily Adlam, a philosopher of physics at the Rotman Institute of philosophy at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, agrees: "I personally am very much on the side that says time does not flow,” she explains. “This is kind of an illusion that comes from the way in which we happen to be embedded in the world”. Her hunch is that, on the most fundamental level, everything happens all at once – even if it doesn’t appear that way to us.

Physicists and philosophers of science are working to uncover explanations for our perception of time’s flow, and they have uncovered some contributors to the illusion. None the least of these is entropy.

The second law of thermodynamics, the rule that describes entropy, "plays a key role in imprinting on the world a conspicuous asymmetry between past and future directions along the time axis." Indeed, entropy bears directly on "the information content of a system. for this reason, the formation of memory is a unidirectional process--new memories add information and raise the entropy of the brain."[10] This of course assumes a pattern to disorder. “The basic idea is that there are more ways for a system to be disordered than to be ordered. If the system is fairly ordered now, it will probably be more disordered a moment from now.”[11] But why is this so? No one knows. Perhaps the big bang provides the low value of entropy needed to begin an ever-increasing cycle, but if that is the case, then the second law depends not on architectonic laws but on a historical event. A steady-state universe cannot explain entropy.

The brain, too, is a contributor. Kids are fond of spinning, whirling around and around, arms stretched out, until they are hopelessly dizzy. I used to do this for hours while I waited for my parents in our church's common-room basement. Laughing and stumbling, I would lurch about until the world continued to spin even when I stopped. Now I knew that the world wasn't really spinning. It only looked that way, a trick of the inner ear. "Perhaps," says Davies, "tem.poral flux is similar."[12] Perhaps the perception of time’s flow is just a habit, to be described as David Hume did causation in his Enquiry?

If all of this holds true, the acceptance of block time would require some radical rethinking of a good many religious positions. That is certainly more work than I can do here. Some of the most serious questions asked above remained unanswered. For, as Gary Stix writes, "Recalling where we fit in the order of things determines who we are. So ultimately, it doesn't mater whether time, in cosmological terms, retains an underlying physical truth."[13] Still, referring back to the aforementioned blogpost about the debate between Wood and Padgett, acceptance of a block theory of time means that Wood’s theory of God’s relative timelessness, in which God both transcends time and is temporal in some sense, can work as long as God’s timeliness is understood as an insertion from without into discrete points rather than as a catching up of the divine substance into an irresistible and entropic flow. Wood claims, by the way, that his view is simply a restatement of Boethius--a point worthy of further investigation. And I wonder, too, if this doesn't resurrect the old arguments around occasionalism.

And then, finally, a caveat. As best I can tell, though block time does represent a consensus, it does not approach the status of law. The problem is that block time presupposes the correctness of turning the general theory of relativity into quantum theory, a procedure called canonical quantization. “The procedure worked brilliantly when applied to the theory of electromagnetism,” writes Musser, “but in the case of relativity, it produces an equation—the Wheller-DeWitt equation—without a time variable. Taken literally, the equation indicates that the universe should be frozen in time, never changing.”[14]

Musser goes on to describe how a single question works with canonical quantization to produce absolutely disparate effects. If one believes that space-time exists independently of stars and galaxies—that it is whether or not matter is present—then one is a substantivalist. Or if one believes that space-time is merely a description of how material objects are related, one is a relationist. In the former case, general relativity becomes indeterministic, describing a world which contains a certain amount of randomness. In the latter, the theory becomes deterministic.[15] It is a dilemma which leads physicists to very different understandings of quantum gravity, and suggests that the jury is still far from unanimous when it comes to block time.

__________

[1] Paul Davies, “That Mysterious Flow,” Scientific American 16.1 (2006): 8. "The distinction between space and time underpins the key notion of causality, stopping cause and effect from being hopelessly jumbled. On the other hand, many physicists believe that on the very smallest scale of size and duration, space and time might lose their seperate identities."

[2] Lee Smolin, “Atoms of Space and Time,” Scientific American 16.1 (2006): 82-92.

[3] Davies, 7.

[4] Ibid.

[5] George Musser, "A Hole At The Heart Of Physics," Scientific American 16.1 (2006): 12.

[6] Davies, ll.

[7] Ibid., 8.

[8] Ibid., 9.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 11.

[11] Musser, 13.

[12] Davies, 11.

[13] Gary Stix, "Real Time," Scientific American 16.1 (2006): 5.

[14] Musser, 12.

[15] Ibid., 13.

Suggested Bibliography

Angrilli, Alessandro, Paolo Cherubini, et. al., “The Influence of Affective Factors on Time Perception,” Perception and Psychophysics 59 no. 6 (Aug. 1997): 972-982.

Davies, Paul. The Physics of Time Asymmetry. University of California Press, 1974.

—. About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Dennet, Daniel C. and Marcel Kinsbourne. “Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 no 2. (1992): 183-247.

Gardner, Martin. “Can Time Go Backward?” Scientific American 216 no. 1 (Jan. 1967): 98-108.

Gleick, James. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. Vintage Books, 1999.

Grondin, Simon. “From Physical Time to the First and Second Moments of Psychological Time,” Psychological Bulletin 127 no. 1 (Jan. 2001): 22-44.

Johnson, Alan, Shin’ya Nishida, “Time Perception: Brain Time or Event Time?” Current Biology 11 no. 11 (2001): R427-R430.

Landes, David S. Revolution in Time. Rev ed. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.

Levine, Robert V. A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist. Basic Books, 1998.

Lippincott, Kristen, ed. The Story of Time. Merrell Holberton, 1999.
McCready, Stuart, ed. The Discovery of Time. Sourcebooks, 2001.

McTaggart, John Ellis. “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17 (1908): 456-473.
Smart, J. J. C. “Times as Becoming,” in Time and Cause. ed. Peter van Inwagen. Reader Publishing, 1980.

Thorne, Kip S. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. W. W. Norton, 1994.
Webb, J. “Are the Laws of Nature Changing with Time?” Physics World 16 pt. 4 (April 2003): 33-38.

Whitrow, G. J. What is Time? Thams & Hudson, 1972.