A Conclusion to a Still Unwritten Book: The End?

I previously have suggested that the universe seems to have been designed and that this therefore implies a designer. Following this supposition further leads to two fundamental questions: where did the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit. Subsidiary questions might include what materials and tools did the designer use and what can be said of the designer? We might also wonder if the designer watches or cares for us or has any of the other attributes humans have often associated with their gods such as being infinitely powerful, wise, kind, all knowing, loving, good etc?

Before taking a stab at these questions, it is worth noting that physicists and cosmologists are also trying to peer behind the curtain of creation. String theorists are still seeking – despite a lack of any experimental evidence offered by current high energy physics – to reconcile relativity and quantum physics and thereby explain the menagerie of observed elementary particles and forces. Recently, they have found a set of one quadrillion possible solutions to string equations within a ten-dimensional spacetime that have “the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe.” But there remains no experimental evidence or process for deciding which of these quadrillion, if any, may be applicable to the observed reality.

Also, for the past decade or so, cosmologists have been looking at alternatives to the inflationary scenario of the post-Big Bang universe. Inflation explains features of the cosmic background radiation. However, it does not explain from where the Big Bang itself arose beyond the suggestion that it came from some quantum fluctuation within a primordial singularity. An attractive alternative to having to explain any sort of a beginning is to assume that the Big Bang was simply our side of a “bounce” or “collision” between universes.

All these efforts to explain what might otherwise appear to be an amazing Goldilocks universe – in which all the elemental particles and forces seem to lead to the evolution of complexity and the seeming inevitability of life – must in the end still suppose something unexplained and just given: a multidimensional universe beyond ours, a singularity just sitting there at the beginning of time or a series of bouncing universes just following one another. (This latter leaves aside the issue of dark energy’s apparent speeding up of the expansion of our universe so that it never reverses into a big crunch. Instead, it seems that eventually – in some enormous 10 to the 100th years – matter will have broken down and even black holes will be warmer than space and radiate away with a final pop.)

It might also be worth pausing to wonder why the universe would have to be designed rather than simply “wished” into being as befitting an all-powerful “god.” Put another way, why would a creator need to design a universe using materials and processes that we would find understandable as laws of physics? Was the designer constrained in some way – perhaps by some preexisting Platonic Forms – to act through means such as singularities and Higgs fields?

Occam’s Razor suggests to me that we simply acknowledge that our universe seems to have a design discoverable by science and wonder about the designer. Following this line of inquiry, I return to considering where might have the designer come from and why might it have designed and launched the universe we inhabit?

It seems to me that there is no way to answer the where question. One must either posit that there never was an original moment of creation or accept that there was such a moment and recognize it as an uncaused first cause. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Either the designer was caused – by what, from where? – or was itself the First Cause. This seems to me the unanswerable question behind all others and thus the essential mystery at the bottom of all science, religion and philosophy.

The why question may be somewhat more amenable. Consider that the universe does appear to have been designed and put into action according to the physical laws thereby built into it. Could it be a grand simulation to test theories of good and evil, a complex and especially vivid dream or simply a work of art? Might it be a majestic theater on which a countless number of actors play our parts and then disappear off stage thus making the designer a cosmic Shakespeare? Or might it have been set in motion for the consciousness behind the design to dump itself into to avoid an endless eternity of loneliness and thereby undergo an almost endless series of experiences acted through everyone and everything? I myself drift toward the last suggestion and to the possibility of a universe in which consciousness is primordial and attaches to everything with mass (a kind of panpsychism). Life would offer the most interesting existence. So perhaps the designer looks out through the being of everything, in a sense making us all “children of god?”

One last question, does love come into it at all. Does the designer love its creation or any part of it, such as us? If the cosmic consciousness is in everything, then it may be essentially a matter of self-love, even when we “love” one another. I believe we exist as individuals and we love as such. Our capability – indeed need – to love suggests it is somehow built into the design.

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.

Another Interlude: What do Gravity Waves Mean?

Just read the typically excellent articles in Science News on the recent confirmation of gravity waves. The merger of two black holes that triggered the waves that reached earth some 1.3 billion years later converted three solar masses into sufficient energy to send a tiny but measurable ripple to the two LIGO detectors. The total energy released “exceeded that of all the stars in the universe combined.” But as SN notes, the gravity waves did not travel through space – as does light – but as a wave in the fabric of spacetime itself traveling at the speed of light.

It is worth pondering the fact that gravity and light – both seemingly very different types of elementary vectors – both travel at the same finite speed. What is it about the universe that is revealed by the cosmic speed limit of 186,000 miles per second that even gravity obeys?

I've previously suggested that the speed of light measures “our awareness of the distance traveled within spacetime” and that “the speed of light may actually be the speed of consciousness.” At the speed of light, time stops. Someone surfing a photon would be everywhere that photon would ever be at the same moment. We experience the universe as spacetime. We move through it while, in a sense, the universe itself must exist all at once outside space and time. Lots of scientists are looking at ways to use string theory or supersymmetry, positing extra dimensions and multiple universes, to try to explain our universe through what might seem an updated version of efforts to find how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (Regrets to St Thomas, whom I follow in the thought that when you reach the end of reason, it's a finger pointing to god.) But these efforts beg a question: whatever theory they come up with, why would the cosmos be that way? Reality may not be an infinitely peel-able onion. The fact remains that we live in a universe where even gravity takes time to travel as perceived by us. (I suppose a surfer riding that gravity wave would also be everywhere that four-dimension wave would be at the very same moment.)

Why ask what all this means? The notion of deriving meaning from the fact that we exist and in a world that seems perfect for us is basic to humanity. But beyond this, facing up to these questions may be the way forward to a new science. This would not mean abandoning quantum physics and relativity but thinking our way through them without trying to find dancing angels.

Gravity Waves, Relativity and Quantum Physics: Part I

The recent finding of gravity waves produced by the merger of two distant black holes has been taken as yet another confirmation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. There have been various such confirming measurements, including the gravitational redshift and lensing of light and non-Newtonian, changes in the orbit of Mercury. But the deeper significance of this latest discovery lies in what it may say about the rival grand theory, quantum physics. The Standard Model of modern physics has proven remarkably good at accounting for the known elementary particles (fermions, hadrons and bosons). The measurement of the Higgs boson in 2012 was an astounding confirmation of our most basic understanding of the origin of mass. Despite the “spookiness” of some of the predictions of quantum physics – such as quantum entanglement – many of its strangest have been verified.

Indeed, the Standard Model is rather too perfect. It seems to account for most of the basic parameters of matter and energy including three of the four fundamental forces: —electromagnetic and the weak nuclear (unified as electro-weak) and the strong nuclear interaction (which holds together the atomic nucleus). But it cannot explain gravity, dark matter or dark energy (thus leaveing out 95% of what we believe to be the universe). In trying to extend its reach – to achieve a grand unified theory to include gravity –- physicists have so far failed to find the new phenomenon that would hint at new physics in the form of supersymmetry or string theory. The Standard Model explains what it does so perfectly that those seeking to take it further cannot seem to find any of the discrepancies that might point the way to a Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

General Relativity, on the other hand, has been confirmed in every case. It provides a coherent theory of the universe as framed by spacetime and the speed of light. It does not explain the Big Bang or the menagerie of fundamental particles. Rather, General Relativity describes how mass interacts with space and across time. Mass deforms spacetime and matter and energy – including gravity waves – travel in straight lines along the bends. Einstein's famous equation – the E=MC² of Special Relativity – does not explain why mass and energy are interchangeable but provides a way to measure the transformation of one into the other within the limitation imposed by the speed of light (which cannot be exceeded).

Relativity is in essence a top-down theory. It begins with Einstein's grand view of the very nature of spacetime, the basic fabric of the universe. Quantum physics is more bottoms-up, seeking to discover the basic pieces of reality. Relativity is a complete and verified theory within its defined area. The Standard Model of quantum physics is incomplete within its domain. It may be that relativity is somehow the more fruitful way to think about the universe. For Einstein, gravity is not a force, as it was for Newton, but an artifact of mass bending spacetime. Quantum physics again treats gravity as a force and seeks to find its particle, the “graviton.” But what considerations may be drawn from looking at quantum physics in light of relativity, instead of trying to extend it to account for gravity? The key may lie in pondering more deeply mass, light and the role of the observer.

Krypton Discovered?

Science News reports the discovery of a second mega earth. This is an apparently rocky planet many times more massive than our own. Could this then be a Krypton-type planet with greater gravity where if two-legged folk evolved, and they could somehow get to earth, they could jump further than mere earth people and travel faster than a speeding bullet?

Sixteen times as heavy as earth, massive BD+20594b should be a gas giant like Neptune or Uranus. But instead it's 100% rock. The planet orbits its star in 42 days. A little online research indicates the star itself is very slightly smaller and cooler than the sun and also about one billion years younger. This makes it a yellow star as is our sun, i.e., not red.

Judging from the planet's orbital period, it is even closer to its sun than is Mercury to ours. This probably means it's too hot for life as we know it. It also seems too massive for plate tectonics to exist. Scientists suggest that plate tectonics is key to the circulation of carbon which is the basis for life on earth. Without moving continents and circulation between core, mantle and crust, everything remains locked in place.

Now, if the planet might be tidally locked to its star – one side always facing toward and the other away – there might be a transitional zone between -- in perpetual twilight -- where the temperature might be more conducive to life. And in twilight, at sunset, that sun might appear red. Tidal forces might also create enough internal tension to stimulate circulation within the rocky layers. So, perhaps the possibility of finding Superman's home planet cannot be completely discounted.

What is clear is that recent discoveries of exoplanets make a strong case for the existence of a wide range of planet types including ones that might support life. We also should not limit our consideration to forms of life based on carbon or water such as ours.  Might someone be sailing methane seas on Titan?  Is anyone out there?