Here is a Q&A interview with me in the LA Times, to which I link only reluctantly, as somehow they managed to take a picture that makes me look like I’m wearing a bad toupee. And a halo! So that’s a mixed bag.
The interview was spurred by the recent Scientific American article on the arrow of time, and most of the questions are pretty straightforward queries about entropy and cosmology. But at the end we veer into matters theological:
Does God exist in a multiverse?
I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.
And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.
Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”
I’m not really surprised that people bring up God when asking about cosmology; the subjects are related, like it or not. But I really do want to separate out the science from the religion, so in the context of an interview about physics I’m reluctant to talk about the existence of God, and I haven’t really perfected an answer when the subject comes up.
Anyone who reads the blog might be surprised to hear that I don’t want to give people advice about their religious beliefs — I do it all the time! But context is crucial. This is our blog, and we write about whatever we’re interested in, and nobody is forced to read it. Likewise, if I’m invited to speak or write specifically about the subject of religion, I’m happy to be perfectly honest about my views. But in a context where the explicit subject is supposed to be science, I would rather not bring up God at all; not because I’m reluctant to say what I believe, but because it gives a false impression of how scientists actually think about science. God just doesn’t come up in the everyday activities of a working cosmologist.
This was the second recent incident when I was prodded into talking about atheism when I would have liked to have stuck with physics. At my talk in St. Louis in front of the American Astronomical Society, I was introduced by John Huchra, the incoming AAS president. He had stumbled across “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists,” and insisted that I tell everyone why. So I gave a version of the above argument, presumably in an equally clumsy fashion: whether or not you choose to be religious, it’s a bad idea to base your belief on natural theology (reasoning towards God from evidence in the physical universe), as science has a way of swooping in and explaining things that had previously been judged inexplicable by purely natural means.
And I think that’s very true, but I think something stronger as well: that claims about God can be separated into two classes — (1) those that are meaningless, and (2) those that can be judged by standard criteria for evaluating scientific claims, and come up wanting. But it’s an argument I just don’t want to force on an audience that came for some science. After all, there are plenty of claims that I think are true, but I don’t feel an urgent need to insist on every single one of them in every imaginable venue.
For example: with the acquisition of a reliable low-post presence in the form of Elton Brand, the Sixers will be challenging for the Eastern Conference title this year and for the foreseeable future. Undoubtedly true, and an important fact about the universe that everyone should really appreciate, but not something I’ll be bringing up at my next physics seminar.
[quote]”I don’t have any problem with deus sive natura, I just don’t understand how calling reality God makes any difference.”[/quote]
To me is does make a difference, but then there are some “givens” in my reasoning. My thinking is that the universe (an infinite multi-verse) has always existed. That means in my view there has always been matter and energy in some relatively fixed proportions to each other throughout the greater universe. Each multi-verse is an arena like our observable universe, ours being one of an infinite number of multi-verses all in the same dimension, all temporary and as they play out they defeat entropy (crunch-bangs that are always mixing and forming within the greater universe).
Within each arena life could abound and it could be “generative” and
“evolvative” to intelligent self-aware individuals that then contemplate the concept of God.
That is where the reality of the universe and the concept of God being reality make a difference to me. The universe yields individuals who naturally reach a decision point about the existence of God. Those who choose to believe and who act according to how their free will tells them to act will perhaps work to help others who are in need, finding a purpose that may be in accord with an intention.
That intention would be a natural part of the universe, the intention that adds meaning to the universe perhaps, and an intention that would have always existed just as the universe itself could have always existed.
Otis: Your opinion of your own philosophizing is too high.
One old definition of God is necessary being. Now if we use the interpretation of modal logic whereby something is “necessary” if it is always the case, an eternal universe is a necessary being and therefore God. I think this sort of reasoning lay behind the ancient Stoic theology. I have no objection: this version of God is like a murphy bed. It doesn’t take up any space when not in use, and it is practically never in use.
There are umpteen versions of what the word “god” means, many of which seem to be pretty much come down to “Hooray for our side!” I doubt if all these various gods have any single thing in common. Maybe what we have here is another instance of family resemblances.
I think that cosmology can broom a God out of the loop in a way analogous to the exorcism of a Maxwell demon. Of course this eliminates a certain type of God, the deistic type of God.
Darwinian evolution does indicate that the relatedness between species is not due to any design, but natural selection. This does not tell us anything about how life emerged during the early Earth. So there is a barrier of ignorance we face there. Maybe continued explorations of Mars might find chemical “fossil” evidence for prebiotic processes that were leading to the emergence of life there, before the planet aborted that path. Maybe with some of these hypotheses about submerged oceans on Europa and other moons similar evidence might be found. Maybe these oceans harbor similar evidence of pre-biotic chemistry. But as yet we really don’t have all the answers.
My main point is that of PR. Public relations is a regrettable aspect of life. Even if we remove the need for a God in cosmology we will still be faced with ignorance that is in need of research. It is also best not to offend lots of people out there. This is particularly since our knowledge will always be of a contingent nature. It might seem a bit unfair, but who said the world was fair? Religious voices will boldly trumpet the most outlandish nonsense possible with hardly a stir, but an atheistic claim with a tenth the assertiveness gets lots of people’s feathers bristling.
I have had a couple of encounters with fundy types where they were steaming mad and ready for a fight.
I give little quarter to these theological ideas imposed on science. Yet with the Kitzmiller V. Dover case it must be noted that the trial did not focus at all on whether God existed. It stuck to the basic facts and how the met with the known science and failed to match with ID.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Totally OT, this is an interesting discriminant. Just like most koans.
The hyper-literal do what that guy does. Totally misses the point, of course. It’s like tossing a treat and pointing to it and having the dog stare at your finger instead of following it.
The half-awake people see how words can trip them. Goedel-Escher-Bach covered this extensively with ‘mu’ in response to any true/false question which didn’t make sense, at least to that observer at that time. Will ‘4’ be a willing lotto number this weekend? After the drawing that question will have a real answer, but for now all I can say is ‘mu’.
There’s another level that sees the question as entirely meaningless in another way. I know it exists, but I don’t understand it. That’s who the koan really targets.
As individuals, swatting the various memes around our brains, we are the one hand clapping.
I think cosmologists are more at risk than most scientists of being dragged into religious questions, due to the scale and apparently all encompassing nature of what they study.
Perhaps a good reply for a scientist, whether religious or not, being interviewed as Sean was is to say they study the cosmos with the same dispassionate attitude of enquiry as a biologist studying a flea under a microscope.
Whether or not they are religious – and some cosmologists and some biologists are – each is concerned as scientists only with practicalities, just as a watch mender working on a fine gold pocket watch puts aside any aesthetic thoughts (which they may well have) while fiddling about with the springs and cogs inside.
the sound of one hand clapping is a false koan
“The sound of one hand clapping” is sometimes euphemistically referred to as “the sin of Onan.”
Photons expand into an ever increasing three-dimensional space. The energy and matter density of the Universe approaches zero over time. If there is an End to the Universe can there not be a Beginning? If there is a Beginning then who other than a suitably defined God could arrange matter in such a configuration? What do atheist’s actually believe in? A Universe without a Creator? Is not the Creator of the Universe no more than a absentee landlord? Something from Nothing? And Something into Nothing again?
The Laws of Physics determine our evolution and fate. But the Laws of Physics cannot create a Beginning to the Universe.
I would have just said “no.” They probably wouldn’t have bothered to print the question.
[quote]If there is an End to the Universe can there not be a Beginning? If there is a Beginning then who other than a suitably defined God could arrange matter in such a configuration?[/quote]
Our expanding arena, if that was all there was to the universe, would act like you describe, i.e. energy density would approach zero over time.
On the other hand there might very well be “preconditions” that existed in a greater universe that caused our finite arena (we call the observable universe) to emerge from a big crunch/burst that initiated our expansion. Our arena might be just a run of the mill occupant of an infinite multi-verse where each arean will simply expand out into the greater universe to mix and merge with similar remnants of other arenas to form new crunch/burst arenas. Entropy defeated.
In that case there is no need for a beginning since matter and energy might have always existed. And it follows that there would be no need for a creator.
That is not to say there would or would not be a God, but it does say that creation does not need to be in God’s repertoire.
It might be that the universe is a map which takes one form of nothing into another form of nothing. The initial form of nothing is maybe some form of instanton for a cosmology which transitions into a Lorentzian metric with unitarily inequivalent vacua. This might then lead to particle production, inflation and the rest. The final state is the AdS conformal infinity as a Minkowski spacetime — a complete void. This might all be contained in a grand path integral, a set of quantum fields defined from one state to another.
There is no real need for matter having contant existence. The whole system may just be a path integral which is best though of “outside” of time.
Lawrence B. Crowell
#62…Lawrence noted that the universe is a map, and there is every indication, from what is known about it, that it is, indeed a kind of map.
However the universe works, it has a place for everything, and everything is in its place. The universe, as vast as it is “knows” where we are.
“Star Trek; The Next Generation” is one of my favorites, and on that series, I especially appreciate stories of the “Holodeck”. In a sense, the universe is a void, but a productive void, out of which everything which is, has been and is to come emerges.
The point of the universe is that it is meant to be experienced, observed and measured. If it isn’t, it does not exist.
Sean, in his interview, hedged…”don’t bet on it” (that God would be shown not to exist). The way he worded his answer about the existence of God indicates he is open on the question, and I think there is real wisdom in the way he reacted. The real question, I think is not so much the existence of God but what kind of God exists. Whether we create God or God creates us is pretty much a question like: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
Religious people say that the chief end of man is to love God and enjoy him forever. Whether God exists in our minds, or we exist in his, God exists only as we are here to consider the possibility of his existence. David in the Old Testament asks: “Can the grave praise You?” Obviously the grave cannot, does not and will not consider the question of the existence of diety.
The question as to the existence of diety is brought about by the concurrent existence of a certain kind ot information and high complexity in the universe.
To me, the fact that the universe has brought about my being and the experiences of my life is evidence enough that whatever it is, and regardless of its origin, I owe it a certain awe and respect. In fact, the universe demands awe and respect. If I don’t respect the universe, that lack of respect will inevitably and adversely affect my existence.
Science as a process and technology as the product of that process are the result of mans determination to seek the truth about the universe and the way it operates. Our determination to be open and objective about the universe has given us a measure of control over ourselves and our environment. Yet, in the end, we are, in an important sense at the mercy of the universe, at least dependent on it…as the universe depends on us.
The universe is mysterious and in a sense, it is every bit as mysterious at the start of the 21st century as it was 100,000 years ago. Back in January, the Doctor informed me my cancer is terminal. I laughed and reflected that life is terminal. From the day we are born, we are destined to die. There are perhaps 20 million healthy people in the country who will have probably perished before I pass on. In a sense, it is downright courteous of the universe to “serve notice”, in my case, plenty of notice regarding my impending demise…especially considering that I have had a very interesting life, have a large family, 18 grandchildren…etc.
However, I have been near, very near death before…so close I lost my vision and bowel control. In the islands of the Pacific, I have heard people cry for weeks as they died of stomach cancer. I have made plywood boxes for dead babies, and kissed the cold, clammy faces of young people who hung or shot themselves. Life truly is (or can be) quite an experience, and I have been privileged to have an interesting program of this holodeck “map”.
We may not be people of faith as we live, but when we die, ALL of us die in faith, because we do not, and really cannot fully understand the universe- or even our own destiny. A little humility never hurt anybody, I guess!
Errata: (That God would NOT be shown not to exist)
Sam,
Sorry to hear about the cancer. I can appreciate your perspective on death though. One of the few quotations that my lousy memory retains is from Plato’s The Trial of Socrates; “The fear of death is a pretense of wisdom and false wisdom at that. For who knows what men in their fear believe the greatest evil, may not in fact be the greatest good.”
My thoughts on death are that life is like a bubble and when it pops, we just get smeared out across the universe. Our lives are a sentence in the larger story that ties what came before with what comes next, while hopefully adding a little and not screwing up the flow of the story too much, but maybe just a little to keep it from being too flat. The end is punctuation, not destination.
I’m sure you’ve been through enough doors to know it’s just one more.
I like to think I’ve examined whats out there enough that when the network that holds this particular node together comes apart, what pieces of me it takes with it, as it snaps back into the dark recesses, won’t be too afraid of the dark.
Meanwhile work beckons.
No cosmologist should be afraid of being dragged into religious questions, because the cosmologist is out to resolve the ultimate riddle of reality: the common crux of religion, philosophy and cosmology.-Aiya-Oba.
Sean:
One Q&A was the following:
Q: Can you give me a simple explanation of entropy?
A: One way of explaining entropy is to say it’s the number of ways you can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don’t notice the change macroscopically.
I have been puzzled by the definition of macroscopic states. Suppose we have a hydrogen gas at some temperature below ionization (average energy). If the temperature is raised the hydrogen atoms will become more and more excited to higher energy states, correct? Now according to QM each hydrogen atom can exist in a countable infinite number of states. If this is true and one can not tell which state a particular atom is in would not the entropy approach countable infinite? Obviously I am missing something fundemental about the states of the hydrogen atom as regards entropy. Can you help? Thanks alot.
Sam Cox, sorry to hear about the cancer. The wife of a friend of mine, the two got married a couple of years ago, has been diagnosed with nonHodgkins lymphoma.
The holographic analogue is close. The holographic principle and the related AdS/CFT duality do suggest that the entire universe is a sort of hologram. This “image” might be induced by a map from one form of void to another.
In some metaphorical sense our lives are a bit similar as well — dust to dust I suppose.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Lawrence and John,
When I came back from the islands in 03 my PSA was 20.5. They found a small Gleason 9 cancer about the size of a fingernail on the left lobe of my prostate. Dr Strong down in Naples said he thought the tumor was no longer organ confined but we did our best anyway.
I had 3D conformal radiation in Tampa plus a Paladium 103 seeding. For 3 years the PSA stayed down below 1, and then started to take off again. I had another biopsy series, CT scan with contrast and Bone Scan last fall and all were negative, but the negative results in this case were bad, not good news.
The source of the increasing PSA had to be outside the prostate. An early bone scan cannot show cancer in the groin…the whole area is too bright even on a normal scan. Mine has jumped to the pubic arch, and we expect it to proceed from there. Androgen deprivation will hold it a couple of years.
We will try intermittant androgen deprivation to try to extend things, and maybe I’ll get a GVAC vaccination…then Taxotere. After the first couple of years, the bone pain gets pretty uncomfortable, and there is always the potential for bone fractures and more spinal problems. My dad lasted 7 years on Estrogen, we may try that too, somewhere down the road.
In our family (thank goodness) prostate cancer goes to the bones, not the rectum. However, in the final stages it migrates to the brain. The doctor says I have 4-8 years. The main hedge is the fact that Gleason 9 cancers are very aggressive.
Make sure you check your PSA’s at least annually! I had a biopsy when I was 50 because of the situation with my father, but paid no attention to my health while I was overseas for 8 years…glad I came back and got attention when I did, or I would be in much more immediate trouble!
Lawrence, appreciated your comments. I’ve been out there researching and found some of the same stuff (I’m sure) with which you are familiar!
Since they are all well field verified, the connections between SR/GR and QM are very important to our conceptual understanding of the nature of reality. We know that QM operates within a manifold, an obvious GR connection. We know that both GR and QM are conceptually deterministic, and that the wave function of the universe, quantum entanglement and such principles tie in with many of the characterisitics of the GR geometry- with its invariant frames and space time curvature. The SR tranforms are impprtant too. The equivalence principle is the starting point for our study of instantons, monopoles and related phenomena, and indicates that momentum is the basis for our perception of mass in the universe…which brings us once again to holography.
Talk about impressive virtual reality! This universe obviously developed naturally…it is far too “wild” to be in and of itself the construct of deity. However, we definitely have a lot in common with other information and complexity in the universe, and in that sense we are not alone. Information and complexity developed in all its awesome beauty within the constaints of the universe, and has obviously taken advantage of every aspect of those constraints to assure and insure its continued collective existence.
A great thread!
Sam,
Old Mother Nature gives us our day in the sun and it can be fun, but thinking there is something to hold on to is the one hand clapping.
Cancer doesn’t seem to be a big issue in my family. Seems like we die of other things first. My mother almost made it to 80 though. I’d lost 5 cousins by the time I was thirty. Here’s a memorial to one of them. He’d have been someone you would have liked;
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.html?topic_id=481027&tn=0&mr=0
I still think the universe makes more sense as a field, than a singularity, though.
Hi John,
I’m inclined to believe that the universe is both field and quantum/singularity, (if SR/GR/QM are all correct anyway) and that the way singularity and field are proportioned and observed depends on the manifold coordinates from which we select to observe them. Energy density is related to momentum-and influences space-tme curvature in a definite and predictable way.
I’m 67 and the longest lived guy in my whole family just barely made it- he was an amputee diabetic- to age 77! I’m keeping that in mind in my planning.
John, I appreciated your link, and yes I have tried to live my life in much the same spirit as your cousin. Now that I’m older and tired, on reflection I’m just relieved to realize I made it this far, and have some time to look back and reflect! I would be a liar though to assert I’m really happy to have my “wings clipped”.
One very positive thing…I travelled and worked when I had the chance. As I look back, there are few regrets. One of the attitudes of the Pacific Islanders I knew, which gave me solace was their utter contempt for death (Mala). Death was something we faced evey day, in a hundred different ways, and if it happened, we mourned, had a big feast in the memory of the departed and got on with our lives.
I cherish my large family and relish the memory of my experiences. However, learning (in a special way) the meaning of love, loyalty, respect, interdependence, forgiveness, courage and the importance of being a “kind” person…these lessons have given meaning to my life.
Sam,
Sam,
Keep in mind that we’re still just little flowers that pop up out of the dirt, scatter a few seeds and fade away. And lucky to do that. It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to death, but I find that like much of everything else, the more we sensitize ourselves to it, the more sensitive we are to it. So I just try sensitizing my self to what matters and be as objective as possible about the rest. Which isn’t to deny the reality of pain, but the price we pay for feeling is that lots of it is pain.
As the old Animals song, ‘When I was Young’ said, “I was much older then.” The older we get, the more we appreciate the overwhelming nature of change and how the world we are born into dies off, to be replaced by what was growing up in the cracks as we focused on those solid parts in between.
One of the main reasons physics interests me and yet I disagree with its fundamental assumptions is because of this intent focus on those hard parts we think of as the physical, yet, even the most basic insights of physics suggests they are illusionary and a function of process, not the cause of it. It’s the same basic assumption of Ideal Form, as monotheism. We focus on the point at the top, not what creates and defines it. It’s like looking for meaning in the perfect pearl and not appreciating oysters. So far as physics has been able to show, reality would simply disappear if motion were to stop, yet we can only look for what must be doing the moving. There are religions and philosophies from throughout history and around the world that have figured this out, that it’s really about the verb, not the noun, yet we still insist on breaking rocks into ever smaller pieces, trying to find the smallest possible unit.
So I find the more I live in terms of context and process, the more I find I’m connected to and part of the world around me. Then the temporal and spatial limitations that set the parameters of personal reality become part and parcel of the process in which definition and limitation are two sides of the same coin. If we were not mortal, we couldn’t exist.
As for family… hmmm. You might say the parents viewed large families as a necessary right of passage and while they devoted their lives to raising us, survival of the fittest was never far from the surface. Being younger and introspective, I’ve kind of spent my life burrowing down into things to see what makes them tick, not climbing to the top, like most, so there is a bit of head scratching when it comes to relations.
Sam,
Seems our last two posts were lost. I backed up mine and sent it to your email, but it was a Micronesia address, so you may not get it.
Sean, I was very intrigued by your article on “Time’s Arrow” in SciAm. Some questions:
Q1. How can you define another “baby universe”? I thought by definition, the universe was infinite, and so this is an inherent contradiction. Where would the physical “boundary” between our universe and this “baby universe” occur?
Q2. Is the presence of these other universes verifiable by science? If not, this is just as much believable as a psychic, probably less so (since some of what a psychic predicts is verifiable).
Q3. You would implicitly assume that the laws of physics etc. are exactly the same as in our universe — what is the probability of that occurring?
It seems like many of the explanations being proposed by scientists point to what I would term as “the Supernatural” — things we cannot observe in out universe (which by definition is infinite and therefore includes everything).
Would appreciate your thoughts.
Regards, Larry