Philosophy

Philosophy and Cosmology: Slow Live-Blogging

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Greetings from Oxford, a charming little town across the Atlantic with its very own university. It’s in the United Kingdom, a small island nation recognized for its steak and kidney pie and other contributions to world cuisine. What you may not know is that the UK has also produced quite a few influential philosophers and cosmologists, making it an ideal venue for a small conference that aims to bring these two groups together.

george_ellis The proximate reason for this particular conference is George Ellis’s 70th birthday party. Ellis is of course a well-known general relativist, cosmologist, and author. Although the idea of a birthday conference for respected scientists is quite an established one, Ellis had the idea of a focused and interdisciplinary meeting that might actually be useful, rather than just bringing together all of his friends and collaborators for a big party. It’s to his credit that they invited as many multiverse-boosters as multiverse-skeptics. (I would go for the party, myself.)

George is currently very interested and concerned by the popularity of the multiverse idea in modern cosmology. He’s worried, as many others are (not me, especially), that the idea of a multiverse is intrinsically untestable, and represents a break with the standard idea of what constitutes “science.” So he and the organizing committee have asked a collection of scientists and philosophers with very different perspectives on the idea to come together and hash things out.

It appears as if there is working wireless here in the conference room, so I’ll make some attempt to blog very briefly about what the different speakers are saying. If all goes well, I’ll be updating this post over the next three days. I won’t always agree with everyone, of course, but I’ll try to fairly represent what they are saying.

Saturday night:

Like any good British undertaking, we begin in the pub. I introduce some of the philosophers to Andrei Linde, who entertains us by giving an argument for solipsism based on the Wheeler-deWitt equation. The man can command a room, that’s all I’m saying.

(If you must know the argument: the ordinary Schrodinger equation tells us that the rate of change of the wave function is given by the energy. But for a closed universe in general relativity, the energy is exactly zero — so there is no time evolution, nothing happens. But you can divide the universe into “you” and “the rest.” Your own energy is not zero, so the energy of the rest of the universe is not zero, and therefore it obeys the standard Schrodinger equation with ordinary time evolution. So the only way to make the universe real is to consider yourself separate from it.)

Sunday morning: Cosmology

9:00: Ellis gives the opening remarks. Cosmology is in a fantastic data-rich era, but it is also coming up against the limits of measurement. In the quest for ever deeper explanation, increasingly speculative proposals are being made, which are sometimes untestable even in principle. The multiverse is the most obvious example.

Question: are these proposals science? Or do they attempt to change the definition of what “science” is? Does the search for explanatory power trump testability?

The questions aren’t only relevant to the multiverse. We need to understand the dividing line between science and non-science to properly classify standard cosmology, inflation, natural selection, Intelligent Design, astrology, parapsychology. Which are science?

9:30: Joe Silk gives an introduction to the state of cosmology today. Just to remind us of where we really are, he concentrates on the data-driven parts of the field: dark matter, primordial nucleosynthesis, background radiation, large-scale structure, dark energy, etc.

Silk’s expertise is in galaxy formation, so he naturally spends a good amount of time on that. Theory and numerical simulations are gradually making progress on this tough problem. One outstanding puzzle: why are spiral galaxies so thin? Probably improved simulations will crack this before too long.

10:30: Andrei Linde talks about inflation and the multiverse. The story is laden with irony: inflation was invented to help explain why the universe looks uniform, but taking it seriously leads you to eternal inflation, in which space on extremely large (unobservable) scales is highly non-uniform — the multiverse. The mechanism underlying eternal inflation is just the same quantum fluctuations that give rise to the density fluctuations observed in large-scale structure and the microwave background. The fluctuations we see are small, but at earlier times (and therefore on larger scales) they could easily have been very large — large enough to give rise to different “pocket universes” with different local laws of physics.

Linde represents the strong pro-multiverse view: “An enormously large number of possible types of compactification which exist e.g. in the theory of superstrings should be considered a virtue.” He said that in 1986, and continues to believe it. String theorists were only forced to take all these compactifications seriously by the intervention of a surprising experimental result: the acceleration of the universe, which implied that there was no magic formula that set the vacuum energy exactly to zero. Combining the string theory landscape with eternal inflation gives life to the multiverse, which among other things offers an anthropic solution to the cosmological constant problem.

Still, there are issues, especially the measure problem: how do you compare different quantities when they’re all infinitely big? (E.g. number of different kinds of observers in the multiverse.) Linde doesn’t think any of the currently proposed measures are completely satisfactory, including the ones he’s invented. A big problem with Boltzmann brains.

Another problem is what we mean by “us,” when we’re trying to predict “what observers like us are likely to see.” Are we talking about carbon-based life, or information-processing computers? Help, philosophers!

Linde thinks that the multiverse shows tendencies, although not cut-or-dried predictions. It prefers a cosmological constant to quintessence, and increases the probability that axions rather than WIMPs are the dark matter. Findings to the contrary would be blows to the multiverse idea. Most strongly, without extreme fine-tuning, the multiverse would not be able to simultaneously explain large tensor modes in the CMB and low-energy supersymmetry.

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What Questions Can Science Answer?

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One frustrating aspect of our discussion about the compatibility of science and religion was the amount of effort expended arguing about definitions, rather than substance. When I use words like “God” or “religion,” I try to use them in senses that are consistent with how they have been understood (at least in the Western world) through history, by the large majority of contemporary believers, and according to definitions as you would encounter them in a dictionary. It seems clear to me that, by those standards, religious belief typically involves various claims about things that happen in the world — for example, the virgin birth or ultimate resurrection of Jesus. Those claims can be judged by science, and are found wanting.

Some people would prefer to define “religion” so that religious beliefs entail nothing whatsoever about what happens in the world. And that’s fine; definitions are not correct or incorrect, they are simply useful or useless, where usefulness is judged by the clarity of one’s attempts at communication. Personally, I think using “religion” in that way is not very clear. Most Christians would disagree with the claim that Jesus came about because Joseph and Mary had sex and his sperm fertilized her ovum and things proceeded conventionally from there, or that Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, or that God did not create the universe. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints, whose job it is to judge whether a candidate for canonization has really performed the required number of miracles and so forth, would probably not agree that miracles don’t occur. Francis Collins, recently nominated to direct the NIH, argues that some sort of God hypothesis helps explain the values of the fundamental constants of nature, just like a good Grand Unified Theory would. These views are by no means outliers, even without delving into the more extreme varieties of Biblical literalism.

Furthermore, if a religious person really did believe that nothing ever happened in the world that couldn’t be perfectly well explained by ordinary non-religious means, I would think they would expend their argument-energy engaging with the many millions of people who believe that the virgin birth and the resurrection and the promise of an eternal afterlife and the efficacy of intercessory prayer are all actually literally true, rather than with a handful of atheist bloggers with whom they agree about everything that happens in the world. But it’s a free country, and people are welcome to define words as they like, and argue with whom they wish.

But there was also a more interesting and substantive issue lurking below the surface. I focused in that post on the meaning of “religion,” but did allude to the fact that defenders of Non-Overlapping Magisteria often misrepresent “science” as well. And this, I think, is not just a matter of definitions: we can more or less agree on what “science” means, and still disagree on what questions it has the power to answer. So that’s an issue worth examining more carefully: what does science actually have the power to do?

I can think of one popular but very bad strategy for answering this question: first, attempt to distill the essence of “science” down to some punchy motto, and then ask what questions fall under the purview of that motto. At various points throughout history, popular mottos of choice might have been “the Baconian scientific method” or “logical positivism” or “Popperian falsificationism” or “methodological naturalism.” But this tactic always leads to trouble. Science is a messy human endeavor, notoriously hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures. A much better strategy, I think, is to consider specific examples, figure out what kinds of questions science can reasonably address, and compare those to the questions in which we’re interested.

Here is my favorite example question. Alpha Centauri A is a G-type star a little over four light years away. Now pick some very particular moment one billion years ago, and zoom in to the precise center of the star. Protons and electrons are colliding with each other all the time. Consider the collision of two electrons nearest to that exact time and that precise point in space. Now let’s ask: was momentum conserved in that collision? Or, to make it slightly more empirical, was the magnitude of the total momentum after the collision within one percent of the magnitude of the total momentum before the collision?

This isn’t supposed to be a trick question; I don’t have any special knowledge or theories about the interior of Alpha Centauri that you don’t have. The scientific answer to this question is: of course, the momentum was conserved. Conservation of momentum is a principle of science that has been tested to very high accuracy by all sorts of experiments, we have every reason to believe it held true in that particular collision, and absolutely no reason to doubt it; therefore, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that momentum was conserved.

A stickler might argue, well, you shouldn’t be so sure. You didn’t observe that particular event, after all, and more importantly there’s no conceivable way that you could collect data at the present time that would answer the question one way or the other. Science is an empirical endeavor, and should remain silent about things for which no empirical adjudication is possible.

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Does Philosophy Make You a Better Scientist?

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Steve Hsu pulls out a provocative quote from philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend:

The withdrawal of philosophy into a “professional” shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth — and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending.

It’s probably true that the post-WWII generations of leading physicists were less broadly educated than their pre-war counterparts (although there are certainly counterexamples such as Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg). The simplest explanation for this phenomenon would be that the center of gravity of scientific research switched from Europe to America after the war, and the value of a broad-based education (and philosophy in particular) has always been less in America. Interestingly, Feyerabend seems to be blaming philosophers themselves — “the withdrawal of philosophy into a `professional’ shell” — rather than physicists or any wider geosocial trends.

But aside from whether modern physicists (and maybe scientists in other fields, I don’t know) pay less attention to philosophy these days, and aside from why that might be the case, there is still the question: does it matter? Would knowing more philosophy have made any of the post-WWII giants better physicists? There are certainly historical counterexamples one could conjure up: the acceptance of atomic theory in the German-speaking world in the late nineteenth century was held back considerably by Ernst Mach‘s philosophical arguments. On the other hand, Einstein and Bohr and their contemporaries did manage to do some revolutionary things; relativity and quantum mechanics were more earth-shattering than anything that has come since in physics.

The usual explanation is that the revolutionary breakthroughs simply haven’t been there to be made — that Feynman and Schwinger and friends missed the glory days when quantum mechanics was being invented, so it was left to them to move the existing paradigm forward, not to come up with something revolutionary and new. Maybe, had these folks been more conversant with their Hume and Kant and Wittgenstein, we would have quantum gravity figured out by now.

Probably not. Philosophical presuppositions certainly play an important role in how scientists work, and it’s possible that a slightly more sophisticated set of presuppositions could give the working physicist a helping hand here and there. But based on thinking about the actual history, I don’t see how such sophistication could really have moved things forward. (And please don’t say, “If only scientists were more philosophically sophisticated, they would see that my point of view has been right all along!”) I tend to think that knowing something about philosophy — or for that matter literature or music or history — will make someone a more interesting person, but not necessarily a better physicist.

This might not be right, though. Maybe, had they been more broad and less technical, some of the great physicists of the last few decades would have made dramatic breakthroughs in a field like quantum information or complexity theory, rather than pushing harder at the narrow concerns of particle physics or condensed matter. Easy to speculate, hard to provide much compelling evidence either way.

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Abortion and the Architecture of Reality

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George Tiller, a doctor and abortion provider in Kansas, was shot and killed outside his church on Sunday. The large majority of people on either side of the abortion debate are understandably horrified by an event like this. But it sets up a rhetorical dilemma for anyone who takes seriously the claim that abortion is murder. If George Tiller really was a “baby killer” comparable to Hitler and Stalin, it’s difficult to express unmitigated sadness at his murder. So we get Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, admitting regret — but only that Tiller was a mass murderer who “did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.”

On those rare occasions when they attempt to actually talk to each other, people on opposite sides of the abortion debate usually end up talking past each other. Supporters of abortion rights speak in the language of the autonomy of the mother, and her right to control her own body: “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.” Opponents of abortion speak in terms of the personhood of the fetus. (Yes, Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! — “A person’s a person, no matter how small” — is used to teach this point to Catholic children, over Theodor Geisel’s objections.) Opposition to abortion rights can also be a manifestation of the desire to control women’s sexuality, but let’s concentrate on those whose opposition is grounded in a sincere moral belief that abortion is murder.

If someone believes that abortion really is murder, talk of the reproductive freedom of the mother isn’t going to carry much weight — nobody has the right to murder another person. Supporters of abortion rights don’t say “No, this is one case where murder is completely justified.” Rather, they say “No, the fetus is not a person, so abortion is not murder.” The crucial question (I know, this is not exactly an astonishing new insight) is whether a fetus is really a person.

I have nothing original to add to the debate over when “personhood” begins. But there is something to say about how we decide questions like that. And it takes us directly back to the previous discussion about marriage and fundamental physics. The upshot of which is: how you think about the universe, how you conceptualize the natural world around us, obviously is going to have an enormous impact on how you decide questions like “When does personhood begin?”

In a pre-scientific world, life was — quite understandably — thought of as something intrinsically different from non-life. This view could be taken to different extremes; Plato gave voice to one popular tradition, by claiming that the human soul was a distinct, incorporeal entity that actually occupied a human body. These days we know a lot more than they did back then. Science has taught us that living beings and non-living objects are the same kind of things, deep down; we’re all made of the same chemical elements, and all of our constituents obey the same laws of Nature. Life is complicated, and rich, and fascinating, and not very well understood — but it doesn’t obey separate rules apart from those of the non-living world. Living organisms are just very complicated chemical reactions, not vessels that rely on supernatural essences or mystical élan vital to keep them chugging along. Except “just” is a terribly misleading adverb in this context — living organisms are truly amazing very complicated chemical reactions. Knowing that we are made of the same stuff and obey the same rules as the rest of the universe doesn’t diminish the value or meaning of human life in any way.

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Epistemological Honesty on the Bench

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Barack Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor to fill David Souter’s seat on the Supreme Court. I don’t know much about her on the merits; I was idiosyncratically rooting for Kathleen Sullivan, who I had met while I was a grad student and impressed me as uncommonly brilliant. One thing that immediately strikes you about Sotomayor is her personal history — raised in housing projects in the Bronx by a single Mom, she fought her way up to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton, and then to law school at Yale where she edited the Law Review. Doesn’t mean she’ll be a great Justice, but it’s an impressive record.

The opposition research has been out for a while, of course, because that’s how politics works. One of the things brought up by Sotomayor’s critics is this clip, where she talks about the difference in emphasis between a district court and an appellate court. (Appellate courts need to look beyond the facts of the case to consider implications of setting precedent for future decisions.)

This clip drives people crazy, because she says that the courts of appeals are “where policy is made.” You’re not supposed to say that! (As Sotomayor immediately jokes.) The legislatures make the laws, and the courts are merely referees, interpreting the words of the statutes by lights of their objective and unchanging meanings.

In reality, of course, Sotomayor is simply telling the truth — a cardinal sin in law as well as politics. In law and politics, and for that matter theology, we are presented with a sacred text of one form or another. And we are supposed to pretend that the text has a One True Meaning — we may, of course, argue at great length about the proper procedure for divining what that meaning actually is, but admitting that the text is inherently ambiguous (or even contradictory) is not allowed. We need to act as if the authors of Leviticus and the Framers of the Constitution were trying to say something very clear about contemporary debates, if only we had the interpretational acumen to figure out what it was.

Which is why, as much as I enjoy the rest of the world of human endeavor, science will always be my true home. Our job is to interpret the natural world, which really is unambiguous and non-contradictory, if only we can make sense of its behavior. Other fields have a professional obligation to pretend that there are right and wrong answers, but we actually have them. Yet another way in which being a scientist is so much easier than other jobs.

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Nietzsche: Long Live Physics!

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Henri Poincaré proved his “recurrence theorem” in 1890: in a mechanical system with bound orbits (particles can’t just run off to infinity), any state through which the system passes will be approached (to arbitrary accuracy) an infinite number of times in the future. That was eight years after Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, asked us to imagine exactly such a scenario, in his notion of eternal return:

What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!”

This is the kind of thing you come across when you’re writing a book about time. Nietzsche wanted to suggest that a well-lived life was one you wouldn’t mind knowing would recur throughout eternity, while the prospect would cause gnashing of teeth for most of us. Poincaré’s concerns were somewhat different.

While looking up this passage, I stumbled across one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes, just a few aphorisms prior:

Yes, my friends, regarding all the moral chatter of some about others it is time to feel nauseous! Sitting in moral judgment should offend our taste! Let us leave such chatter and such bad taste to those who have nothing else to do but drag the past a few steps further through time and who never live in the present,—which is to say the many, the great majority! We, however, want to become who we are,—the new, unique, incomparable ones, who give themselves their own laws, who create themselves! And to that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense,—while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics,—our honesty!

A quote which engenders, as you might imagine, swift elaborations on the part of Nietzsche scholars that he certainly wasn’t talking about what we ordinarily mean by “physics.” But I’m not so sure. The substance of physics (experimental results, theoretical understandings) is of no help whatsoever in leading a moral life. But the method of physics — open-minded hypothesis testing and scrupulous honesty in confronting what Nature has to tell us — is a pretty good model for other aspects of our lives.

Not that physicists are, as a matter of empirical fact, any better at being good human beings on average than anyone else. Even we physicists could learn to be better physicists.

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Philosophy in the Streets

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I want to see this for scientists! Via Crooked Timber, a new film by Astra Taylor: Examined Life, featuring interviews with various philosophers in everyday surroundings.

Žižek says “Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes.” I think he meant “the blogosphere,” not “Nature.”

Do I really want to see this for scientists? They might not make the same impression on film — scientists aren’t trained to connect what they do to the concerns of the wider world (although the connections are there).

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Sufficient Reason

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Dana McCourt at The Edge of the American West has a short series of posts on Leibniz and Spinoza, based partly on The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart. This is great stuff, the kind of thing blogs do better than anything — bite-sized interesting pieces that stand by themselves, just because. (And the cheap chronological hook that November 18 was the day in 1676 when the two met in the Hague.)

All noble things are as difficult as they are rare.

The best of all possible worlds.

Why should we be loyal to reason if it pushes us into the abyss?

Scientists think of Leibniz as Newton’s rival in inventing calculus, and barely think of Spinoza at all. But they were both among the most influential philosophers of all time.

Leibniz published books and treatises, but much of what we know of his philosophy comes in the form of letters. I’ve joked that he invented the calculus on the back of a cocktail napkin in the corporate lounge while his flight from Paris to Hanover was delayed, and that of course was an exaggeration for comic effect.

It wasn’t the calculus, but a dialogue on theology, and it was on a yacht from London to Rotterdam that was held fast in port by headwinds.

The two men came started from different launching points, but ended up arriving at very similar philosophies.

Spinoza’s naturalism lead him to atheism, but Leibniz came to Spinoza via his theism. That is, Leibniz found himself desperately trying to come up with an argument that showed that his own philosophy was not threatened by the spectre of Spinozism, but his philosophical commitments, especially those concerning the nature of God, meant his options were limited.

Foremost among those commitments was the Principle of Sufficient Reason: the idea that nothing is “just because,” there is always an intelligible reason for everything feature of the world. It sounds innocent enough, but takes you to dangerous places if you buy into it with all your heart.

As far as I can tell, the PSR is not especially popular in respectable philosophical circles these days, but it is still hanging in there. It’s basically the foundation for Paul Davies’s claim that any respectable laws of physics must have a good reason for being the way they are. I don’t agree, myself; it might be true, but I’m very open to the possibility that the final product of our investigation into the ultimate workings of nature will be a set of rules that could easily have been different, but they simply are they way they are. At the very least, I would strongly defend the proposition that we should be open to this possibility; whether or not there is a small set of brute facts about the universe that lack any underlying justification, there is certainly no good reason to deny that scenario on the basis of pure thought, before we know what the ultimate rules actually are.

At a more casual level, the PSR shows up in the common belief that everything happens for a reason. That’s where the pernicious side of this purportedly sunny philosophy rears its head: if everything has a purpose, even the most terrible random events require an explanation, and from there it’s a short road to the urge to put the blame on someone. Or, on the flip side, to kill ’em all and let God sort them out. One day, when human beings have universally adopted an enlightened materialist view of the cosmos and have developed a corresponding system of ethics and morality, an important piece of the puzzle will be an acceptance of randomness and contingency. All is not for the best, in the best of all possible worlds, and that leaves it up to us to try to make things better.

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Marriage and Fundamental Physics

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Among other important elections, on November 4 Californians will be voting on Proposition 8, a measure to amend the state Constitution in order to ban same-sex marriages. The polling has been very close, with a possible late break toward a “Yes” vote; this would effectively overturn a California Supreme Court decision from this May that held that same-sex couples had a right to marry under the equal protection clause of the California Constitution. Eventually, of course, gay marriage will be accepted throughout the country, and we will look back on today as the bad old days of discrimination. But that’s cold comfort to the couples who would like to celebrate their love for each other right now. You can donate and learn more about the measure at No On 8.

We are occasionally asked why a Physics Blog spends time talking about religion and politics and all that nonsense. A perfectly correct answer is that this is not a Physics Blog, it’s a blog by some people who happen to be physicists, and we talk about things that interest us, blah blah blah. But there is another, somewhat deeper, answer. Physics is not just a technical pastime played with numerical simulations and Feynman diagrams; nor is it a purely instrumental technique for unlocking Nature’s secrets so as to build better TV sets. Physics, as it is currently practiced, is a paradigm for a naturalistic way of understanding the world. And that’s a worldview that has consequences stretching far beyond the search for the Higgs boson.

Charles Taylor makes an admirable stab at a very difficult task: understanding the premodern mindset from our modern vantage point. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.) There are many ways in which our perspective differs from that of someone living five hundred years ago in a pre-scientific age, but Taylor emphasizes one important one:

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.

Our ancestors lived in an enchanted world, where the boundary between the physical and the moral and the spiritual was not very clearly drawn. It made perfect sense, at the time, to attribute to the external world the same kinds of meanings and impulses that one found in the human world — purposes, consciousnesses, moral judgments. One of the great accomplishments of modernity was to construct a new way of understanding the world — one based on understandable, formal rules. These days we understand that the world is not magic.

This change in perspective has led to extraordinary changes in how we live, including the technology on which we are sharing these words. But the consequences go enormously deeper than that, and it is no exaggeration to say that our society has still not come fully to grips with the ramifications of understanding the world around us as fundamentally natural and rules-based. That’s the point at which the worldview suggested by science has had a profound effect on moral reasoning.

For our present purposes, the most important consequence is this: notions of “right” and “wrong” are not located out there in the world, waiting to be discovered, in the same sense that a new kind of elementary particle (or even a new law of physics) is located out there in the world. Right and wrong aren’t parts of the fundamental description of reality. That description has to do with wave functions and Hamiltonian dynamics, not with ethical principles. That is what the world is made of, at a deep level. Everything else — morality, love, aesthetics — is up to us.

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Chatting Theology with Robert Novak

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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.

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