Robert Novak, conservative pundit/journalist and TV personality, is retiring after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Novak and I probably don’t agree on many things, and he isn’t called “The Prince of Darkness” for nothing (nor does he seem to especially mind). But brain tumors shouldn’t happen to anyone, so perhaps this is the place to share my Novak story.
Last September I gave a talk at a somewhat unusual venue: a conference at the University of Illinois on “Plato’s Timaeus Today.” Most of the speakers and attendees, as you might expect, were philosophers or classicists interested in this particular Platonic dialogue — which, apparently, used to be one of his most popular back in the Middle Ages, although it’s fallen a bit out of favor since then. But one of the central purposes of the Timaeus (full text here) was to explain Plato’s theory of the origin of the universe. (Briefly: the demiurge did it, not from scratch, but by imposing order on chaos.) (Also! This dialogue is the origin of the myth of Atlantis. It was not, as far as anyone can tell, a pre-existing story; Plato just made it up.) So the organizers thought it would be fun to invite a physicist or two, to talk about how we think about the universe these days. Sir Tony Leggett gave a keynote address, and I gave a talk during the regular sessions.
The point of my talk was: Plato was wrong. In particular, you don’t need an external agent to create the universe, nor to impose order on the chaos. These days we are reaching toward an understanding of the entire history of the universe in which there is nothing other than the laws of physics working themselves out — a self-contained, complete, purely materialist conception of the cosmos. Not to say that we have such a theory in its full glory, obviously, but we see no obstacles and are making interesting progress. See here and here for more physics background.
And there, during my talk, sitting in the audience, was none other than Robert Novak. This was a slight surprise, although not completely so; Novak was a UIUC alumnus, and was listed as a donor to the conference. But he hadn’t attended most of the other talks, as far as I could tell. In any event, he sat there quietly in his orange and navy blue rep tie, and I gave my talk. Which people seemed to like, although by dint of unfortunate scheduling it was at the very end of the conference and I had a plane to catch so had to run away.
And there, as I was waiting at the gate in the tiny local airport, up walks Robert Novak. He introduced himself, and mentioned that he had heard my talk, and had a question that he was reluctant to ask during the conference — he didn’t want to be a disruption among the assembled academics who were trying to have a scholarly conversation. And I think he meant that sincerely, for which I give him a lot of credit. And I give him even more credit for taking time on a weekend to zip down to Urbana (from Chicago, I presume) to listen to some talks on Plato. Overall, the world would be a better place if more people went to philosophy talks in their spare time.
Novak’s question was this: had I discussed the ideas I had talked about in my presentation with any Catholic theologians? The simple answer was “not very much”; I have talked to various theologians, many of them Catholic, about all sorts of things, but not usually specifically about the possibility of an eternally-existing law-abiding materialist universe. The connection is clear, of course; one traditional role of religion has been to help explain where the world came from, and one traditional justification for the necessity of God has been the need for a Creator. (Not the only one, in either case.) So if science can handle that task all by itself, it certainly has implications for a certain strand of natural theology.
Understanding that it was not an idle question (and that Novak is a Catholic), I added my standard admonition when asked about the theological implications of cosmology by people who don’t really want to be subjected to a full-blown argument for atheism: whether you want to believe in God or not, it’s a bad idea to base your belief in God on an urge to explain features of the natural world, including its creation and existence. Because eventually, science will get there and take care of that stuff, and then where are you?
And, once again to his credit, Novak seemed to appreciate my point, whether or not he actually agreed. He nodded in comprehension, thanked me again for the talk, and settled down to wait for his flight.
Correction to #25:
“As for Kant, his basic argument revolved around the idea that “existence” is a property of a thing”
SHOULD READ:
“As for Kant, his basic argument revolved around the idea that “existence” is NOT a property of a thing”
Addendum: Another point on “something rather than nothing”.
There is a (small) school of thought that says that we’re looking at this in the wrong way; is there, in fact, something rather than nothing? Right now, yes, there is, but on a long enough timescale (and we have no idea what a relevant timescale may be in the universe) there will once mroe be nothing; even protons have a lifespan and eventually everything will decay to…well… false vacuum again.
Since we have no real working description of what the Universe, at its base, really IS (beyond a physical description) then we cannot talk about whether it is, in fact, anything at all! Weird, yes. Controversial? Almost certainly. True? Well, I dunno… get back to me in about 10^150 yrs…
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Rebel Dreams,
“The problem with the terminology you use is that it relates to “laws” that only pertain to this universe; from the perspective of this Universe there was, indeed, “nothing” as you use the term before it, but that does not preclude that the universe arose *from* nothing, just nothing that relates to *this* universe. That is one idea that is currently being investigated.”
Okay, so you’re saying that if there are “multiple universes” out there, “our universe” can come from them. I agree. Then that whole zero sum game can apply because there’s something (namely, another universe) for the game to apply itself, and create our universe. But how do we know if there are other universes around? All we can do is get a theory that works for our universe, which mathematically implies that there are other universes around. But then again, how do we know that someone won’t come along and formulate a theory which is just as good, but which doesn’t have other universes? Thus, perhaps a little faith is still required with regards to the existence of these other universes?
Again, faith is irrelevant to the idea of multiple universes’ they are either there (in which case they will be proven to be there) or they are not (in which case they won’t).
I gave the multiple universes example as one idea; there are also others that can “create something from nothing” as ably outlined by others here, that do NOT require multiple universes. And the zero-sum game described is one of those.
Science does not seek the infinite regress that multiple universes might ultimately create (“ah, but what created THEM, and what created the ones BEFORE them, etc…”) It seeks the ontology of the universe using understandable physical laws, without appeals to the unknown.
Science does not even have “faith” in its own established “laws”, and seeks to refine, redefine or even abandon them if they turn out to be inadequate descriptions of what is going on. Faith has no place in science as a whole. To be sure, individual researchers examining one point of a theory or another may “have faith” that the overall theoretical underpinning of a subject pertains, but tacitly acknowledge that if that theory is proven false, then their work will be imperilled by it. A true scientist secretly dreams (and sometimes not so secretly!) of overturning a long-held scientific theorem or law with some astounding discovery. That’s the fun of the game!
Another addendum! (sorry!) 😀
As Lawrence B. Crowell pointed out, the “nothing” before the big bang may indeed have been “nothing” in the sense that there was no universe, but it may also have been “something” in the sense of being a false vacuum, without limit but able to produce the universe “something”.
“Again, faith is irrelevant to the idea of multiple universes
Rebel
To the first point; we would prove the existence of multiple universes in much the same way as we prove the existece of quarks, or the Higgs boson, or dark matter; a theory that describes and necessitates multiple universes would as a consequence have to include points that describe phenomena in this universe adequately too. One tack currently being investigated is the “gravity problem”; the gravitational force is so weak that some theorists suggest that gravitons actually operate in another universe, and their effect is only weakly felt in our own. If that theory made some radical prediction, upon completion, that was then borne out by observation (perhaps even at the LHC) then that would be good evidence that the theory was correct.
This feeds in to the other point about “faith”… even is demonstrated to be probably true, and taken up and utilized by other theories, the putative multiple universe theory could and should still be open to falsification – the very basis of all science.
The zero sum game makes perfect sense in the absence of other universes; if the universe is, as a whole, a zero-sum equation, then it is bound to occur, according to QM. I find the best image is to visualize it as a virtual particle; feinman suggested that a virtual particle can be imagined as a particle-antiparticle pair, leaping into existence and annihilating each other instantaneously, thus leaving no relic of their existence in the vacuum from which they sprang. If the universe is a zero-sum equation then when looked at over the totality of its existence, it took no energy to “create”, beacuse the total “amount” of energy expended over the lifetime of the universe is zero.
This had two important implications; firstly, if it took no energy to create, then it required no “prime mover” to do the creating in the first place. It simply *happened* because it took no “effort” to happen.
Secondly, not only did it just happen, but it was *bound* to happen; according to QM, the probability of an event is related to the energy required to produce that event; a Higgs boson is not just going to drop out of the sky, but it *might* appear with a sufficiently energetic reaction. If an event requires no energy at all, then it has a probability to 100% of occurring.
Your assertion that energy is just some system invented by humans to track change, I think you should refine your definition of energy; energy is a real thing, independent of “stuff” – be it fields, particles, instantons or events. The concepts of positive and negative energy are well defined in physics, and energy certainly does exist independently of systems, fields and particles. The false vacuum has an energy potential independent of any pre-existing or acting field, for example. If false vacuum existed ‘before’ the universe, then, as LBC pointed out, quantum tunneling could lead to a perfectly rational, zero-sum universe.
Garth; good questions. The universes may well be “lost” behind their event horizons, but Hawking and Susskind have both in their way demonstrated that event horizons are not necessarily a barrier or impediment to information; any theory that deomnstrates the existence of multiple universe must necessarily have consequences for our own universe, otherwise it is just a wish-list. What I spoke of as a working theory that dmeands multiple universes means just that; a theory that makes some meaningful prediction or declaration of our own universe as a consequence of the existence of multiple universes.
One could imagine multiple universes being falsified in many ways, depending upon how they were demonstrated in the first place. For example, take the idea of the graviton operating “elsewhere”; if it oculd be domeonstrated that the observers made an error, or misunderstood the behavior of the gravtion, and it turned out to operate not in another universe, but rather in the higher dimensions of this universes’ brane, and its effects only marginally impinged on the 4-space we inhabit, that could falsify the multiple universe theory.
Or the theory might make some grandiose prediction regarding black holes that turned out to be false… basically I cannot make any meaningful statement regarding the falsification of a theorem that does not yet exist, but I could write some entertaining SF stories about them in the meantime.
The Timaeus proposes that at the basis of reality we’ll find mathematics and mathematical objects, which determine how reality unfolds. Not so very different.
Disclaimer:
“I could write some entertaining SF stories about them in the meantime” in no way implies that I am a good writer, or even able to do anything mroe than tap keys in a pseudo-random manner to reply to blogs.
For the record, I use a stochastic Monte-Carlo function to generate all these replies.
😀
Rebel Dreams,
“The zero sum game makes perfect sense in the absence of other universes; if the universe is, as a whole, a zero-sum equation, then it is bound to occur, according to QM.”
That makes absolutely no sense to me. What does it mean for the universe to “be a zero-sum equation”? If we are talking about the origin of our universe, and in the absence of other universes, the terms in the “zero sum” correspond to NOTHING because there is no universe. Bound to occur how? Does QM exist in the absence of a universe? If there is no universe, the “zero sum equation” does absolutely nothing. QM is a theory cooked up by humans to explain stuff happening in the universe. If there is no universe, there is nothing to obey the rules of QM.
“Your assertion that energy is just some system invented by humans to track change, I think you should refine your definition of energy; energy is a real thing, independent of “stuff” – be it fields, particles, instantons or events. The concepts of positive and negative energy are well defined in physics, and energy certainly does exist independently of systems, fields and particles.”
Give me an example.
Things HAVE energy. Energy doesn’t just float around. It’s a property. If energy exists independently of things, then why is it that kinetic energy depends on your frame of reference? Did the KE disappear if start from rest and travel at the same velocity as the thing whose energy I am trying to measure? Things have energy. If there is no things, no spacetime, there is no energy. IF you look in any physics textbook you’ll see that energy is just a label we assign things. It helps us explain the world around us. It’s just a handy concept.
You speak of false vacuum. What is it a vacuum of? Do you even know what a false vacuum is?
From Sean: “whether you want to believe in God or not, it
I think you’re missing the point of the “zero-sum game”. It refers to the idea (if proven true) that the Universe requires no “external” impetus to create it. If the total sum of the universe over time is zero, then it required nothing to create it, the same way as virtual particles can be envisoned as pairs of particles and antiparticles instantaneously annihilating one another are “zero sum” unless some external impetus changes the equilibrium. It remains to be seen if the Universe is zero sum or not; I raised it as an objection to the idea that the universe had to have a cause.
“Zero sum” makes no assertions regarding the existence of the universe, and thus your objection on the grounds that QM cannot exist if there is no universe absurd; the universe may well exist temporally, but that in no way means it is not a zero-sum universe. The zero-sum does not relate to the amount of energy in the system at any given moment, but rather overall.
Also your assertion that QM does not exist beyond or in the absence of the universe does not necessarily make sense either; it remains to be seen if that is the case, and if QM can provide a framework to describe the creation of this niverse, then that would demonstrate that QM pertains independently of it.
The false vacuum is a theoretical construct, being a stable space whose forces are in pure equilibrium. One idea of the creation of the universe suggests that before the universe a false vacuum existed (possibly, but not necessarily infinite in size) which our universe essentially ‘tunneled’ into as an instanton effect. See False Vacuum for a much more ocmplete discussion.
Energy is a property of things, and I admit with full mea culpa that I overstated that it existed independently, except inasmuch as it exists in potentia in the vacuum as demonstrated by the phenomenon of virtual particles. However I maintain that your assertion that it is a purely human construct as a means to ‘keep score’ of transactions in space is false.
thank you for the tipping of the hat to philosophy, it is a dis-respected profession these days. I am sure that an individual that takes education as seriously as you has come into contact with the works of Bergson (Henri-Louis) and I would suggest that you take another look at what he has to say on the nature of causality and its shortfalls, it is worth your time (see creative evolution, time and free-will). Science is an amazing project, but one that does not and can not fully explain to us some of the most important aspects of life, just a thought.
This discussion took off a bit! :-))
When it comes to matters of false vacua, a void and zero sum games, we should keep in mind that conservation of energy is something which holds locally, and only holds for spacetimes where there is a time Killing vector K_t where
$latex
K_t cdot K_t~=~g_{tt},
$
which for a Schwarschild solution is the g_{tt} = (1 – 2M/r) metric term. The Killing vector in this case insures a timelike momentum vector in a certain frame has a constant projection along K_t
$latex
K_tcdot P~=~K_tE~=~constant,
$
which conserves energy. For cosmology we have time dependent metric components. This means one can’t establish a global energy conservation!
So we can think of how a vacuum state |0) can be unstable and give rise to a universe. While this has not been solved in completeness, we can at least think about this. So the universe might start out from some false vacuum |0) with a terminal point at AdS conformal infinity — a Minkowski space or void. This “map” might reshuffle information or quantum bits, even violate some of our cherished conservation laws on a global level.
Of course theologians can be smart, and they are clever at finding places where a God can be squeezed in. Is a false vacuum really a nothing? It is about as close to a nothing as we can think of which ties into physics. So from that perspective it is good enough. Where do the physical laws come from? There really are no physical laws! There are only patterns that repeat themselves in nature which we interpret in mathematical models. There was no imposition of physical laws onto the universe. We are the ones who if anything might impose physical laws.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Rebel Dreams,
“If the total sum of the universe over time is zero, then it required nothing to create it, the same way as virtual particles can be envisoned as pairs of particles and antiparticles instantaneously annihilating one another are “zero sum” unless some external impetus changes the equilibrium. It remains to be seen if the Universe is zero sum or not; I raised it as an objection to the idea that the universe had to have a cause.”
What the heck does “if the total sum of the universe over time is zero” mean? Virtual particles exist in a Minkowskian background spacetime. They pop in and out of an already existing universe. If there is no universe, there is nothing literally NOWHERE to apply this analogue, and QM cannot be used because there is NOWHERE to use it. Now, if our universe, by a quantum fluctuation, came from a parent universe, that’s a different story. But you can’t apply any laws or any zero sum equations to a universe that doesn’t exist. Therefore, the universe HAS to have a cause. Presumably this cause can be explained by fundamental laws, right? Well, if that’s true, those fundamental laws have to be associated with SOMETHING (i.e. another universe). These laws don’t just exist on their own, you know. From nothing, comes nothing. The equation 0 = 0 doesn’t cause ANYTHING.
“Also your assertion that QM does not exist beyond or in the absence of the universe does not necessarily make sense either; it remains to be seen if that is the case, and if QM can provide a framework to describe the creation of this niverse, then that would demonstrate that QM pertains independently of it.”
Well, QM does provide a framework, as long as there’s a “parent” universe from which our universe can be produced. Presumably QM applies there too. QM doesn’t exist on its own like some sort of spirit. Any law of nature, or mathematical theory is really a set of rules we cooked up to explain the phenomena that we observe. Without the universe, there is nothing to which the laws of QM can be applied. Why is this so hard to understand?
I strongly second what reeree says above. There is little reason to suppose there are externally imposed rules which guide the universe. I will for the time avoid the issue of whether mathematics is Platonic or constructed, but when it comes to physics we are simply putting together rules which logically follow each other, and where these rules reference things we observe.
Lawrence B. Crowell
ree ree,
Well, I’m pretty sure that what really exists are mathematical structures and that what we perceive as a physical world is not something separate from a mathematical world. This is pretty much the picture proposed by Tegmark. I.m.o., this should be the default hypothesis in physics, but for some strange reason it isn’t.
The difficulty in assuming a “physical world” which is different from the mathematical model that exactly describes it, is that it raises questions that cannot be answered from within the model (like where did the universe came from). So, it is exactly like postulating a God (in that case you cannot answer who created God).
Postulating that the set of all formally describable mathematical models is all that exists is sort of a “minimal assumption”, even though it implies the existence of all posible universes. The question “how did the unverse came into existence?” is then trivially answered by saying that the universe is the model that describes it and as such it is timeless.
To do physics in such a setting, one needs to assume some measure over the set of all models. Also, one needs to define an observer (which is a mathematical model in its own right, of course). Then one can try to compute the probability of the observer experiencing some history. So, physics becomes an (perhaps intractable) exercise in pure mathematics this way.
The measure must be some exponentially fast decreasing function of the Kolmogorov complexity of the model for this to be well defined (Kolmogorov complexity is the least number of bits one needs to specify the model).
If we then take an observer, defined as some very complex model as input, then the problem amounts to finding a model with the lowest Kolmogorov complexity that generates the observer. Such a model will, of course, generate a lot of junk besides the observer, which is the rest of the universe the observer finds him/herself in.
It may well be the case that quantum mechancs, which we think of describing “our universe”, actually is a meta-law approximately describing the probabiblites over a set of “nearby models”.
Jason,
“Ah, yes, but what if the specific features of the theory that lead to the unambiguous prediction of the multiverse are verified?”
Good point. I guess for the time being this is a philosophical thing because we don’t yet have a satisfactory and complete theory, nor the experimental capabilities to test it. For example, if string theorists discovered a mechanism by which other universes may be generated, and they were able to show what the laws and constants in that universe should be (given a set of initial conditions), that that would obviously be great evidence for a multiverse. Of course, to be absolutely sure, we need to be to understand physics at all energy scales.
Count Iblis,
“Well, I
Otis @ #39:
Sean said:
“Positing a low-entropy boundary condition is not really very simple or compact: it
“…whether you want to believe in God or not, it