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.
Maybe you didn’t intend it this way, but this sounds like one of the ad-miz attacks on science by various denialist groups.
Let me introduce the hymn to creation from the Rig Veda (composed sometime between 1500 BCE and 1000 BCE):
CREATION HYMN from the RIG VEDA
Translation by V. V. Raman, University of Rochester
Not even nothing existed then
No air yet, nor a heaven.
Who encased and kept it where?
Was water in the darkness there?
Neither deathlessness nor decay
No, nor the rhythm of night and day:
The self-existent, with breath sans air:
That, and that alone was there.
Darkness was in darkness found
Like light-less water all around.
One emerged, with nothing on
It was from heat that this was born.
Into it, Desire, its way did find:
The primordial seed born of mind.
Sages know deep in the heart:
What exists is kin to what does not.
Across the void the cord was thrown,
The place of every thing was known.
Seed-sowers and powers now came by,
Impulse below and force on high.
Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation’s day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
Did He do it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or perhaps, not even He.
—-
I particularly like the expression of agnosticism and skepticism in the last lines. Others have translated those as: “He who surveys it from the highest regions; Perhaps He knows it; or perhaps even He knows not.”
The hymn also suggests the possibility that the gods (the sum total of the laws that govern the universe) came after the creation of the universe.
Here’s another translation of the last two verses of the creation hymn from the Rig Veda.
Who really knows? Who can presume to tell it?
Whence was it born? Whence issued this creation?
Even the Gods came after its emergence.
Then who can tell from whence it came to be?
That out of which creation has arisen,
whether it held it firm or it did not,
He who surveys it in the highest heaven,
He surely knows – or maybe He does not!
[Source.]
Atanu, that may be the most beautiful poem I’ve ever read.
It perfectly states the connection between physics and philosophy that I’ve never had the words to express.
ree ree,
Jason,
What upcoming work on examining inflation do you mean?
Back to the lumping in of theology alongside of Atlantis. Rebel dreams, it is hard to remove one’s colour once they work from a certain premise. Atheistic, or not.
Seeking such clarity would be the attempt for me, with which to approach a point of limitation in our knowledge, as we may try to explain the process of the current state of the universe, and it’s shape. Such warnings are indeed appropriate to me about what we are offering for views from a theoretical standpoint.
The basis presented here is from a layman standpoint while in context of Plato’s work, brings some perspective to Raphael’s painting, “The School of Athens.” It is a central theme for me about what the basis of Inductive and deductive processes reveals about the “infinite regress of mathematics to the point of proof.”
Such clarity seeking would in my mind contrast a theoretical technician with a philosopher who had such a background. Raises the philosophical question about where such information is derived from. If ,from a Platonic standpoint, then all knowledge already exists. We just have to become aware of this knowledge? How so?
Lawrence Crowell:
Whether I attach a indication of God to this knowledge does not in any way relegate the process to such a contention of theological significance. The question remains a inductive/deductive process?
I would think philosophers should weight in on the point of inductive/deductive processes as it relates to the search for new mathematics?
Plato:
Interesting points… I would argue that “all knowledge” does not exist prior to investigation. It may be a fine point (even too fine a parsing, I don’t know) but I would differentiate between “facts” and “knowledge of facts”. If we posit that all facts exist, and that mathematics can describe all facts phenomenologically, then it can be deducecd that all mathematics already exists, and we simply need to discover it. In that I do not remotely disagree with Plato. I do agree with Sean, however, in his disagreement with Plato’s vision of how the unverse came to be, which is essentially the thrust of this post, if I understand it correctly.
I look at the ongoing attempts to unify mathematics (e.g. the Langlands Program) as a possible proof of this; namely the fact that previously undiscovered links exist between unrelated (or seemingly unrelated) areas of math suggest that math is discovered rather than invented.
To your first point, I agree it is hard to remove one’s ‘prejudices’ in whatever endeavor one undertakes. For the record, I am Catholic, but my appreciation of astronomy, cosmology etc is not impacted by my beliefs. Not that I claim any superiority in this, you understand; I simply believe what I believe, and appreciate what I appreciate.
Rebel Dreams:For the record, I am Catholic, but my appreciation of astronomy, cosmology etc is not impacted by my beliefs. Not that I claim any superiority in this, you understand; I simply believe what I believe, and appreciate what I appreciate.
You could be a atheist and it should not matter. You would be correct on this in my view.
Rebel Dreams:I do agree with Sean, however, in his disagreement with Plato
The origin of mathematics and its relationship to the physical world are likely questions we may never solve. There are the platonists and the constructivists view of mathematics. One can well enough see either side of this metaphysical or metamathematical debate. Mathematical objects and their relationships have a “beingness,” or at least a sense of such, such as with proof that involve certain types of spaces. The mathematician often has some mental image of the space, or relationships between certain elements of that space with each other. At the same time the mathematician has experience with a physical world, and at the nuts and bolts level there are billions of neurons in a brain sending action potentials to each other.
The Perleman proof of the Poincare conjecture is an interesting case in point. I read that Perelman himself said that a part of the idea comes from recognizing that clothes on a rack or worn by a person will assume their minimal configuration. So there is a connection of sorts with a physical object. The proof stems from Hamilton’s work on Ricci flows. This is a dynamical equation for the fluid-like flow of a three dimensional space according to
$latex
{{dg_{ab}}over{dt}}~=~-2(R_{ab}~+~nabla_anabla_bphi)
$
which tells us that how the metric evolves is given by the Ricci curvature plus the second term involving the conformal gauge term (eg a dilaton). So the metric can be of the form
$latex
g_{ab}~=~e^{2phi}g^0_{ab},~g^{1/2}R~=~g_0^{1/2}(R_0~-~2nabla^2phi)
$
where this system is involved with the conformal structure of string world sheets! This tells us that a space that is deformed or twisted up will evolve towards a minimal energy configuration. A balloon when twisted up (not tied to other balloons) will when released pop back to its spherical shape. There is also heat kernel theory which enters into this picture, and so this connects up with some physics of thermodynamics.
So where does this really come from? These is some visual imagery, some connections with the physical world and connections between objects that have a logical structure. This is an interesting mathematical system to consider for the boundaries between physics and pure math, between abstract structures and construction are so wonderfully blurred. No GH Hardy pretention of perfectly pure math. It would appear that disentangling math from physics is nearly impossible, and further there does not appear to be any way to discern what the existential status (platonic v construction) of this system is.
Lawrence B. Crowell
ree ree,
The upcoming work on inflation is related to detection of the B-mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background. B-mode polarization is expected to be a means of measuring the energy level at which inflation occurred, which will significantly narrow the range of possible theories of inflation.
It is, however, a very difficult thing to measure, requiring fantastic signal-to-noise ratios. Even Planck won’t be capable of getting a strong detection of the B-mode polarization. There are, however, ground and balloon-based experiments that measure much smaller sections of the sky that are designed to do precisely this, such as EBEX. There are significant technical difficulties in separating out the B-mode polarization from various systematics, however, so it will probably be some 5-10 years before we can be confident on what the measurements mean.
Plato and Lawrence; your points are elegant and I agree wholeheartedly with them! I think what you are touching on (and forgive me if I misrepresent your views in any way) is the inspiration or the path,/i> to a mathematical idea.
I agree that certain mathematical ideas can only be happened upon in a specific order; Newton and Leibniz did not create the calculus from whole cloth, but building upon a body of mathematical ideas pre-existing in the body of mathematical thought. Lawrence’s illustration of Perleman’s inspiration for the Poincare solution from seeing clothes on a rack is another aspect of this; the ability of mathematics to be improved by intuitive leap; in this sense, mathematics is more closely related to the arts, perhaps, than the sciences.
My own view is that math pre-exists, and we discover it; the intermix between math and physics is a beautiful illustration in my view of this idea, namely that mathematics is the language one must learn to describe nature, and thus is self-consistent even when explored on its own (that is in areas that have, thus far, no practical applications).
Of course, this creates a marvellous dichotomy; a mathematical proof, when proven true, is true for all time, even if it does not apply to a physical reality. I think it’s a lovely idea that all those wonderful, mathematically consistent physical theorems are still true, even if they do not apply to the phenomenon they attempted to prove in our universe.
BRB (49)– in our theory we imagine that the visible universe came to life by pinching off from a specific pre-existing spacetime, empty de Sitter space. One could, in principle, calculate the rates of different kinds of fluctuations that could ultimately lead to brains, or galaxies, or what have you. In practice you can’t, in any believable way, because our understanding isn’t nearly there yet. I wouldn’t even call our ideas a “theory,” more like a schematic framework that it might be worthwhile trying to fill in.
As for Vilenkin and other tunneling-from-nothing approaches, I think this is a good question. How do you calculate a rate or a likelihood if the universe, by hypothesis, doesn’t exist yet? You certainly have to say that conventional quantum mechanics breaks down, as the time parameter in the Schrodinger equation doesn’t come with some initial value, it goes forever.
ree ree,
I think that question of “why these laws” is exactly what can be addressed in a setting in which you have an enseble of all possible universes on which you define a measure that gives a larger weight to those universes that can be specified with less information.
Finding the laws of physics can be seen as an exercise in data compression. Given all the experimental data, what are the simplest rules that describes the data? The fact that such compression is possible at all and that it is a good guide to find the laws of physics suggests that we can consider ourselves to be sampled from an ensemble of universes using a measure that favors low complexity.
So, all this is consistent with the way we usually do physics. G
To JimV @ #48
Your response has the makings of an atheistic creation myth. Appeals to randomness, chance and indeterminately long periods of time are characteristics of atheistic materialism. Then there are unobservable universes. When all else fails, those arguments are always available. You appeal to the “power of random algorithms” to explain human exceptionalism, yet you have a sample size of one.
Finally, you attribute our species success in understanding the universe to “trial and error.” That point can hardly be taken seriously since I doubt that mathematicians and mathematical physicists consider their work to be trial and error.
The most remarkable occurrence in the natural world is that humans have a seemingly unique and exhaustible capacity to comprehend that natural world. That situation fits nicely within the confines of theism. I have yet to come across a compelling explanation from atheistic materialism. Perhaps someone could point me to one.
Thanks,
Otis
“Oh piscator… you can
We wouldn’t be able to have this conversation if we weren’t this species. So why do you think you have a right to be surprised at this? And what are you surprised at, anyway, that any intelligent being exists, or that we’re the only one?
[I wonder how come my towardsanageofcertainty blog link has been bugged from this site? It doesn’t happen with other links from here.]
To Jason @ #68
That humans are intelligent, have conversations or even that intelligence exists is not necessarily surprising. What is surprising is that the universe is mathematical and that our species can do the math. (Refer to my response #39) Max Tegmark tells us that coherent mathematical structures constitute an independent reality. In his book “Road to Reality” chapter 1, Roger Penrose makes the case for an objective mathematical reality that was in existence long before humans arrived on the scene. There is an immaterial and external (to our minds) reality that humans can decipher and use to determine the age and evolution of our universe (among many other mathematical and scientific achievements). That humans can do all that is very surprising in light of their supposedly contingent evolutionary origin.
In his famous essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences“, Eugene Wigner writes, “it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.”
What is additionally surprising is that many materialistic atheists seem not to be surprised by any of this at all.
Regards,
Otis
Otis,
I don’t see why it’s in any way surprising that the universe is mathematical. Mathematics is nothing more and nothing less than a fully self-consistent symbolic system. The only way for the universe to be anything but mathematical is for it to be inconsistent with itself. But the claim that this is even conceivable just doesn’t make any sense. If you want to claim that the universe is not mathematical, you’re going to claim that some specific statements about the universe can be both true and false…it makes no sense!
It is perhaps interesting that at least some portions of the mathematics of the universe appear so approachable, but without any expectation of which sorts of mathematical universes are likely, there’s just no way to know whether our situation is special or normal. So I don’t see that there’s any point in worrying about it. Better to focus on things that are genuinely surprising, such as the value of the cosmological constant.
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Otis @ #66:
We have vastly different world views, so I have difficulty even understanding what you are trying to say. You talk about an atheistic creation myth involving long times and random events. From my point of view, there is so much evidence that the unverse has been around for a long time and contains randomness that it seems pointless to debate it.
You talk about human exceptionalism. I see human intelligence as one end of a spectrum within the animal kingdom, which includes apes which can do simple arithmetic and understand sign language, parrots which can speak and understand some English, dogs which can understand dozens of commands, et cetera. Giraffes have longer necks, elephants have larger size – these are just different evolutionary niches or contingencies. The most success living organisms are still bacteria, which outweigh all other species combined in mass, on this planet.
Look around you. After some 200,000 years of our species’ existence, do you see a great utopia that our exceptionalism has produced? I don’t.
I didn’t say trial and error accounted for all human progress, but yes it has ocurred in both math and physics and other sciences. Aristole’s physics was a trial form which contained many errors. Galileo’s was better, but still flawed. Ditto for Newton, and so on. As for math, I myself discovered this minor theorem while looking for something else: (p-1)! + 1 is divisible by the integer p if and only if p is prime. I suspect that many mathematical discoveries happened similarly. Andrew Wiles’ first attempt at proving Fermat’s Last Theorem contained an error, so he had to go back and try something else.
The random search algorithm has this great advantage over more clever methods: give it enough time and it will find a good result, regardless of the landscape it is searching over. Understanding this goes a long way towards understanding where we are in the universe, IMHO.
In summary, I see humans as a natural part of this universe, not somehow apart from it or of supreme importance within it. You seem to have a different worldview which you somehow justify with different evidence. (Perhaps you have not ridden in as many city buses as I have.)
In hopes that I have at least explained my point of view, if not convinced anyone, I promise not to submit any more off-topic comments on this thread.
Hi to anyone still reading this thread..!
Anyone see this paper?