A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: Part One

Sometime ago, I wrote in this space an Introduction to a Still Unwritten Book. For several years before and since, I have been pondering consciousness, cosmology and quantum physics in what I like to think follows in the tradition of natural philosophy. While I am not a scientist, I believe that the ultimate questions are essentially unanswerable but – following Saint Thomas’ finger – the proper subject of a reasoning intellect. It seems to me that the most fundamental question remains one that has haunted all philosophical and religious traditions: why is there anything? Science alone cannot shed light on this. Current science points to a Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. Today’s quantum physics and cosmology can say much about the first few moments after that event and the subsequent evolution of the universe and life. But we cannot say much about where the Big Bang came from and even less about why it might have occurred. Nor can we explain – without positing an infinity of less comfortable parallel universes – why our universe seems so right for us.

So the ultimate questions – why should there be anything, why should there be us – remain unanswered. It would seem that nothing is the more natural state because it would need no explanation. That there was nothing and always would be nothing would require nothing to be done or said about it. That nothing somehow gave way to something, anything, would have required a departure from the most simple state of nothing to greater complexity. The universe, in which we find ourselves a part, exists, it is something. Furthermore, it seems to have been fine-tuned insofar as it expresses a particular set of physical laws that seem designed to make life and intelligence inevitable. We live in a Goldilocks’ reality, not too cold, not too hot, but just right for us. The apparent design that gave rise to our existence must inevitably imply a designer.

But granting all this, this still leaves two fundamental questions. Where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. The possible answers to the first question appear to converge on two possibilities, that the designer always was – i.e., that something always existed and there never was nothing – or that there was an original act of creation (or self-creation) that led to the existence of the designer. Both of these “explanations” essentially define what we might call God. One of them must be true.

The second question, why did the designer enact the particular act of creation that led to us, could have a myriad of answers. It might have been from boredom – as an eternity of nothing but self might eventually wear thin – perhaps in the form of a cosmic-scale version of a computer SimUniverse. It could be the night’s sleep of a very rationally-minded dreamer. It could be an experiment of some kind, or a simulation set to explore possible design parameters. It could be an act of love. Whatever the possible reason, the act of creation implied a kind of consciousness (even of the sleeper) and some version of a conscious choice. The designer must have been a conscious entity, perhaps even consciousness in its rare form. Whether the designer always was or was somehow created, the form it had or took was consciousness. In either case, consciousness was primordial, coming before the creation of our universe, before matter, before the Big Bang. The primordial consciousness – what might be called God – was the designer.

A fascinating aside about following this chain of thought is the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the designer was or felt constrained to create a universe capable of being apprehended by scientific reason. The universe is not just some stage set on which we players play our parts but an intricate mechanism that obeys its own complex, intrinsic laws. This suggests that the designer was using – for whatever reason – a given toolbox that provided the means to form the particular set of physical parameters manifested in the Big Bang.

Still, why us? What are we and what were we made for? I lean toward the notion that the cosmic consciousness designed a reality that it could then enter, whether out of loneliness, curiosity, love or some combination of these. 

TBC... 

Why Time?

I've spent a good deal of time thinking about time.  It is a mystery.  We know it passes, the more quickly it seems as we get older.  Since Einstein, we know it is part of spacetime, baked into the fabric of the universe.  But that simply deepens the mysteries.  Why can we travel in all directions in space but only one in time?  And how can it be that there is no absolute time the same everywhere?  The "now" that  I see all around me is punctured during the day by photons from the sun that show me how that looked nine minutes ago and at night by stars showing me how they existed many thousands of years ago?  When we see those stars, we are looking into the past. Our experience of the "now" of those stars is likewise thousand of years in our future.

 

So time varies by distance in space.  The speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- connects these.  Contemplation of the speed of light leads to pondering how light can possibly have a speed.  Objects with mass, when not at rest, have speed.  (Actually, nothing is ever at rest except relatively.)  As an object with mass increases speed, time runs slower as it appears to observers not so moving.  Relative motion, in effect, eats relative time; the quicker something moves, the less time remains that seems to pass for the object moving relative to the observer at rest where "normal" time passes.  Mass-less particles, such as photons, do not experience time.  Mass-less particles are everywhere they will ever be at the same moment and are, in this sense, eternal.  Only objects with mass -- including us -- experience light as traveling in time.  A photon that left Proxima Centauri, traveled 4.25 years and just reached our eyes here on earth, took that photon no time at all. 

 

By capturing some of the particles spewing from the Big Bang and giving them mass, the Higgs Boson may in effect have also created time.  But as there is no universal and simultaneous "now," how can we think about time. As noted, under Einsteinian relativity, time is the fourth dimension and relative to location and motion in the other three.  Yet clearly there is also "now."  We live in it.  Is there not a single "now" that exists for all the photons that fill the universe in their one timeless, eternal moment?  Does that create a universal framework of now?  Perhaps each and every particle of matter exists in its own "now" tied to every other such moment within the crystalline universal now established by light?  Light seems to have a speed because it ties together the universe of separate, individual "nows."   Perhaps mass is simply the way everything is kept from happening at once?  Mass separates us from eternity, immersing us in spacetime where our consciousness has space and time to manifest.  Perhaps time exists to provide a way for the universe to experience itself.

Gravity Waves, Relativity, Quantum Physics and Consciousness

Previously, I suggested that the confirmation of gravity waves grounds general relativity theory (GR) more firmly than the Standard Model of quantum physics (SM). The latter remains incomplete in a way the former is not. Relativity accounts for gravity (as a bending of spacetime); the Standard Model is still looking to do the same, perhaps via supersymmetry or string theory. For this reason, it seemed perhaps useful to look at quantum physics in light of relativity, instead of trying to extend the SM to account for gravity. GR is complete as it is and now provides the basis of classical cosmology which traces the origin of the universe to the Big Bang. But practitioners of the SM are busy seeking to use quantum physics to get beyond the Big Bang. One important and interesting effort is contained in the unbounded-universe approach pioneered by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle (see also this SETI talk brought to attention through @GeorgeShiber). This posits the origin of the universe not with a Big Bang but with the conversion of a dimension of space into a dimension of time.

With GR, the universe originates with a Big Bang that by itself has no explanation. Where does the original singularity that explodes come from? According to what physical laws does it exist? The Hawking-Hartle approach seeks to explain this by suggesting that four dimensions of space without time – and therefore without origin – give rise to the universe through a process akin to quantum tunneling that converts one space dimension into time and thus produces spacetime. But even the Hawking-Hartle approach does not offer an explanation of where and how the four dimensions of space come from. Neither theory provides any way to get a grip on the question of first causes. Both approaches reveal in their own way a reality that apparently was given, suggesting there may be no more layers of the onion to peel back. Perhaps, mathematically based science has brought us to the edge of what we can know in this way. There may simply be nothing beyond what we presently understand; we now know the givens of the universe we exist within. Or it may be that both are useful in understanding a reality that we cannot ultimately know through a single lens. The key may lie in pondering more deeply consciousness and the role of the observer.

GR and the SM appear fundamentally incompatible. Yet the observer seems central to both approaches. For the SM, it is the act of observing – measuring – which collapses the wave function of probabilities of a quantum wave (or entangled state) into a specific value. For GR, there is no privileged place to measure the state of anything else, all is in motion and each observer will see time and space differently depending upon his position relative to everything else. The relationship between light and mass creates the framework for observation by providing a measure of time and the three dimensions of space. Light “travels” at the cosmic speed limit but takes no time to get anywhere since at its speed, time stops. A surfer riding a photon is everywhere that photon will ever be at the same moment. It is stuff with mass that experiences, bends and moves through spacetime.

Observation requires consciousness; without being heard, trees that fall in the forest make no sound. Tied in some way to mass, consciousness manifests probabilities as it moves through spacetime. Looking from the perspective of what both GR and the SM tell us, the universe is one big wave function outside of time where at one level everything happens at once while to the observers immersed in the Higgs field, time exists. Why should this be true?

The practitioners of quantum physics remain focused on considering various ways to reconcile the SM with GR. Whether these efforts will ever lead to anything that can be observed and measured is an open question. But even in the event of some unification – or a new theory that subsumes both – the problem would remain of where does that come from? This leads to the ultimate question of the origin of the universe. If it's not the Big Bang but some other beginning or even some steady state, it would then beg the question of why that?

Both GR and the SM describe the universe we find ourselves in from different points of the observer's view. In one we experience relative time. In the other, we determine what is by looking at it. As conscious observers and living creatures, we are, in effect, at the center of everything. This would suggest that if we are to gain further, deeper understanding of reality we must understand more about consciousness and its relation to reality. Those who try to explain consciousness as a product of organic matter and processes get it exactly wrong. In some way, consciousness creates reality. Consciousness is not derivative but somehow primordial. There is a ghost in the machine.

This leaves us with two apparent options. One would be to accept that we can go no further. Science may yet produce new ways to manipulate the world – via technology – but we will be unable to penetrate further the veils of the cosmos we inhabit. The other would be to start with a more profound understanding of consciousness and perhaps by creating a science based upon qualia rather than quantity. This would require a new way of thinking more akin, perhaps, to philosophy than mathematics. And it might start with the question of why there should be anything rather than nothing.

Light Music

Been reading Light Music, a 2002 sci-fi novel by Kathleen Goonan. Like most good science fiction, it takes some central bit of science or technology and extrapolates it. Light Music contemplates a juxtaposition between string theory and consciousness. Now string theory has taken some hits recently as analysis of the Higgs field seems to rule out the simpler, more elegant, versions of supersymetry. But Goonan paints a picture of consciousness, residing somewhere in the extra tiny dimensions postulated by supersymetry, as a kind of energy acting on the universe through matter as a kind of string vibration, a kind of music, as photons of light are vibrations of electro-magnetism. Thus Light Music. Very interesting speculations.

In this space, I've suggested that consciousness is primordial, that it does not rise from matter, or any particular organization of matter, but may indeed be prior. That consciousness – our individual experience of it – may be bound up with light, which is its “speed.” So picture consciousness as vibrations in (of?) spaces too small for us to observe – at or even smaller than the Planck length – intersecting the fields and particles of matter and energy we can measure and manifesting as observation. Yes, a “ghost” in the machine, taking the form of mind when the organic substrate is complex enough to give rise to such. Collapsing the wave function and exercising choice, self-generating music out of our individual being, a lifetime symphony.

Just another rumination.

Beyond quantum physics? Needed, a new Einstein

I've been thinking about consciousness and quantum reality for some years now.  Come to a few conclusions that have flowed into these ruminations:

First, seems to me that consciousness is primordial, i.e., to originate from the same source as the material universe that is the subject of modern physics.  Or to put it differently, to be unexplainable as a mere manifestation of some complex process of matter.  Consciousness is a property of the universe just as material existence appears to be.  Indeed, it may be that consciousness is prior to matter, that the ghost in the machine came before the machine.

Second, that the universe must be understood as something both eternal - the speed of light to itself is instantaneous - and immersed in time via our individual consciousness of it.  The universe is something that exists all at once in time and space.  It is we that travel through it at a speed - the flow of time - that leads us to measure light at 186,000 miles per second.  Individual consciousness seems to be attached to material processes that result from the Higgs field having given certain particles mass, that is, that slows them down from the instantaneous propagation of light and other mass-less particles.  Connected to these "slow particles," we experience time.

And now a third thought, too preliminary to call a conclusion.  That modern quantum physics while powerful and beautiful, is somehow fundamentally wrong.  Quantum physics is essentially a quantitative, numerical understanding of reality.  It offers probabilities and predictions flowing from a mathematical model of reality.  It has been amazingly accurate, predicting particles and properties then confirmed through experiment.  But more recently it seems that reality conforms too accurately to the standard model of physics.  The Higgs mass so far is exactly as predicted and now it seems the electron is perfectly spherical rather than dipole.  Both results appear to rule out the simplest models of super-symmetry (which already proposes more dimensions than the four we experience).   Super-symmetry is the effort to extend quantum physics into a theory of everything, accounting for all particles as well as gravity, dark mass and dark energy.

The latest news on the Higgs seems quite revealing.  Its mass (125 GeV) seems to be exactly where it should be for the universe as we know it to exist.  If it was much stronger, nothing much would form beyond hydrogen and helium because the particles that make them up would be so tightly bound that heavier elements - and us - couldn't form.  If it was much weaker, nothing could hang together and yet again, nothing much - including us - would form.  The Higgs - like Goldilock's porridge - is just right for us.  This is enough of a conundrum, why should it be just right for us?  But there also seems no reason - absent a super-symmetry explanation - for the exact value that the Higgs does have.  It seems to be a "given."

Quantum physicists still have hope.  There are more elaborate models for super-symmetry, less simple, less beautiful, more dimensions.  And some suggest that the Higgs has different values in the many multi-verses of which our universe may just be one.  So we happen to live in one with just the right value because in most of the others we could not exist.

Quantum physics is already a bit Rube-Goldberg.  The multi-verse proposal is more so.  Occam's Razor suggests there must be a simpler way.  It might be useful to again consider Einstein's dictum that "God does not play dice."  His theory of relativity did not flow from math but from a profound insight into how time and space relate.  Yes, math flows from it but relativity is an understanding of time and space as one thing and gravity as resulting from its curvature.  Quantum physics and relativity remain trains running on different tracks.  We may need a new Einstein to put everything on one.  Someone who can provide a deeper insight into why the universe is the way it is rather than look to mathematics to explain everything.

The Higgs and Time

It's coming up on a year now since the confirmation of the Higgs particle and field. This was an exciting reaffirmation of the Standard Model of modern particle physics. But after a year of refining measurements, it seems the version of the Higgs found fits too well with the current model and offers no hint of any unexpected strangeness that could lead physicists to further insights and discoveries. The Higgs mass has been determined to be 125.7 GeV (gigaelectronvolts). Quite remarkable measurement but one that agrees so perfectly with the Standard Model that it leaves little room for current theories that tried to go beyond it to a more unified physics. Most varieties of supersymmetry and string theory – the simpler, more beautiful ones that physicists prefer – cannot meet the constraints imposed by the Higgs value. The current model cannot account for gravity or relativity and can't explain dark matter or dark energy. This means that while it can explain very well 5% of the universe, it cannot say a thing about the remaining 95%.

But it may be even more interesting to ponder the fact that the particle that gives other particles mass also has a mass. The Higgs field interacts with some particles (the quarks) and gives them mass while others (neutrinos and photons) are lightly or un-affected and have little or no mass. But if the Higgs interaction gives mass, what gives mass to the Higgs? This is another of the strange places that our modern science leads us. (Are you watching St. Thomas?)

Mass may also be at the root of time. Things with mass cannot travel at the speed of light and therefore exist immersed in time. Things without mass do travel at light speed and therefore are not subject to time. It's as if mass is really a measurement of the degree to which stuff is trapped in time, separated out of what would otherwise be an eternal now. Or to put it another way, introducing mass is a way to throw things out of heaven and down to earth?

Maybe Reality Is Not An Infinitely Peelable Onion?

Science is the search for rational understanding of nature and the universe achieved through replicable observation.  2012 has seen a fundamental advance in the effort to achieve an ultimate understanding of physical reality and the cosmos with the discovery of the Higgs boson.  In July, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN found direct evidence of the Higgs.  Since then, further LHC data appears to place the Higgs more firmly in the Standard Theory that unifies three of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong and gravity).  Perhaps equally significant, however, is what LHC seems not to be finding - evidence supporting Supersymmetry, the only candidate theory physics has to unify all four forces and explain the dark matter that seems key to holding galaxies together.

Supersymmetry posits an unseen partner particle for every particle now known to science.  Supersymmetry is a basis for string theory, which directly seeks to account for quantum gravity.  With evidence for supersymmetry and string theory, we would have a unified theory of forces and particles, uniting the big and the small and explaining "everything."

Trouble is that those particles that LHC could be finding if the simplest versions of supersymmetry were predictive don't seem to be there.  This does not rule out more complex versions of the approach but modern physics has generally been guided by the notion that the simple is most beautiful and the beautiful is more likely to be true.

But its not the details of the current state of physics that I want to talk about here but the very quest for an ultimate understanding, one that explains everything we can see and know by some set of fundamental scientific laws and equations.  The notion that everything has an ultimate explanation, according to a laws-based structure that puts everything in its place, cannot logically be true.  Any explanation of what is by another set of what-ises begs the question of what explains those.  Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem puts this nicely:  “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle – something you have to assume but cannot prove.”

The menagerie of particles now known by science includes all sorts of particles with mass (fermions) and those without (bosons).  The smallest fermions include quarks and leptons.  Supersymmetry and string theory seek to explain all these particles by placing them within a frame with many other particles and dimensions that we cannot observe and for which we so far have no evidence.  Meanwhile, an extension of string theory - superstring theory - seeks to explain the Big Bang and space-time by positing other things we cannot observe:  colliding branes.

Let's suppose that we find evidence of some form of the supersymmetry and superstring theories, i.e., that they are "true."  What will explain them?  What will account for whatever laws and equations that seem to predict everything else we can observe?  Where do the laws that govern lawful action come from?  As Gödel proved, nothing can explain itself.

Perhaps, Plato was right.  The cosmos is made up of Forms.  What if the basic building blocks of existence - the bosons and fermions we observe, the structure of space-time, the Higgs field that creates mass, the gravity that pulls mass so tightly that it releases the energy of life in the middle of our sun - all these, just are? 

The explanation of everything is either infinitely recursive - each peel of the onion of explanation simply uncovers the next layer to be explained - or the ground of everything is/was simply there.  Either way, it makes science no less important and useful but not necessarily the answer to all questions and especially to those most human of all questions - why are we here, where do we come from and for what ends?

The Higgs and Creation

The "discovery" of the Higgs boson in July was hailed by many - finally, the "God" particle - and understood, assimilated into our understanding of the universe and creation by who?  To the community of physicists, it seemed to "explain" the universe, why it is here, why it is something rather than just eternally careening photons of energy.

In an excellent piece in ScienceNews, Tom Siegfried offers one of the most lucid explanations of what the Higgs is all about.  It's not so much the particle as the Higgs field itself.  In the first trillionth second or so after the Big Bang, everything was the same non-thing, speeding around at the speed of light.  Then the expanding universe cooled enough for the Higgs field to manifest itself.  When it did, it caught some of those careening non-things in its net.  The Higgs field slowed these down, subjected them to resistance, made them move as if they were plowing through a field of thick molasses.  They experienced inertia - thereby gaining mass - and became things, the elemental particles of which matter is made.  The others that were not affected by the Higgs field continued on their way as photons traveling at the speed of light.  The Higgs field, in other words, called forth from light the material universe.  Pretty cool, eh?

And there's more to it.  When the Higgs manifested itself with the (relative) cooling of the universe, there sprang up not just one kind of particle but a whole menagerie of them.  Each kind affected by the Higgs field to a different degree, therefore having differing masses.  Without this differentiation, there would be no real physics or chemistry.  Therefore no suns, planets or life.  In other words, from the moment of the Big Bang whatever was in the expanding blob of energy that was the universe was already imprinted with that which would be manifested as all the kinds of particles and forces of which we know (and probably some we don't know as yet).  The moment the Higgs field grabbed them, they became what they were to be.

This is quite a lot to consider.  But still there is more.  None of this so far explains gravity, dark matter or dark energy.  What about particles with mass also leads to gravity being able to warp time and space?  Where are the particles with mass - though apparently very little individually, as if barely caught by Higgs - that make up dark matter?  And what is that energy that seems to operate on large scales counter to gravity?  What is that dark energy all about anyway?

One can say that we are like dogs in relation to the works of man when we try to grasp what it all means.  Dogs just don't have the capacity to understand man or how we create the world they live in.  And we can't really understand why something exists rather than nothing.  Chalk it up to ramdoness, just fluctuations in the vacuum.

But this bears further thought.  What can we say about creation?  1. It happened. 2. It apparently happened according to laws written into the act - or moment, if you're shy - that would determine what manifested and when. 3. It produced a universe that allowed the development of life and manifestation of consciousness.

My Dad was a truck driver and never graduated grammar school.  He'd look up at the night sky and ask me how I could believe it's just accidental.

A lawful act of creation would imply what? Or as God said to Job:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding....
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone?