“Why is there Something rather than Nothing, Grandpa?”

            That there is Something rather than Nothing, is possibly Necessary, if only in a philosophically rather trivial or anyhow tricky sense: If there were nothing, we wouldn’t be here to observe the nada (this is the Weak Anthropic Principle). But that there is This Something, rather than Some Other Something,  is quite possibly contingent (though the Strong Anthropic Principle would deny that).

            Take for instance the puzzling asymmetry of matter & anti-matter. It would be nice to have a principled explanation of this -- certainly we have heard special-pleading unprincipled ones --  but maybe there isn’t any.  Maybe God just got a little careless with the safety scissors that day, when he was cutting the cosmic cardboard.  He’d meant to slice it straight down the middle but --- oh well… And on to other projects. 

            (Physicists dignify this phenomenon with a poignant designator: “broken symmetry”.  Sounds so sad.  In layman’s terms, that means:  a coin-flip.)

            The concrete, particular cosmos in which we temporarily find ourselves, need no more directly or insightfully reflect the creative, ontological ultimate ground thereof, than the particular grit and consistency of the wafer, gives a hint of the Real Presence.  C.S. Lewis [and others before him? Aquinas?  References please!] compares our worm’s-eye view here below  to looking at a woven carpet from the wrong side.  There is some correlation (in all the wretched hernia-like loops and stitches) with the true pattern, but not much, and you’ll never figure out which bits give a hint and which are noise.  The force of the metaphor only grows, when you consider that reality’s carpet is not flat, but fills all of Hilbert space (at the very least; we are ignoring gravity), and with patterns not specifically tailored to the cerebral convolutions or lack thereof, of this species or that:  the human, the simian, the humble woodchuck.

            Indeed, we ourselves (for all our pathetic stupidity)  may perchance be one of the more Necessary things about it.  With so much Mind on the loose in the multiverse, it may be but natural that some of it would, so to speak, condense out here and there, into rational creatures.  We are like droplets on God’s windowpane.

            There is a popular industry of spewing out books for the general reader, focusing on black holes, or big bang, or the ill-named Theory of Everything, and deducing – well, not actually deducing anything, but sort of gasping in front of the black backdrop, then putting in a plug for God.  As though He cared more for black holes than for blackheads.  We may call this “physics porn”.

            Lately, the situation in physics has got even worse, with the dreadful possibility (and it is a possibility) of a ‘multiverse’ in any of several senses.   There has been some loose talk about “the Landscape”, as though that  were a neat discovery rather than the reduction of the reductionist program to near nullity -- and recent loose talk from Stephen Hawking to the effect that the new Phlabby Physics, as we shall call it (anything can happen anywhere, the basic constants set randomly differently in each separate universe) shows that “science makes God unnecessary”.   The danger is rather that Landscape physics will make physics unnecessary, or pointless.   As physicist Burton Richter said recently, the  Landscape approach means that physicists have “given up.  Since that is what they believe, I can’t understand why they don’t take up something else -- macramé, for example.” 

-- This just in, a useful corrective:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/01/06/world/europe/news-us-pope-bigbang.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

On this Landscape question, Hawking notwithstanding, I’ll go with the Pope.

What is particularly irksome is that these New Nihilists are attempting to dress up what is essentially an impasse in physics (see our post below, “Truth Decay”), into some new advance, that solves the old problems of Being and God.   Let us satirize the situation with a parable:

            It was observed that a certain bird, known as the Woodpecker, pecks wood.  No-one knew why this was so.  Perhaps it needs to keep its bill from getting too long, the way pet rodents will gnaw and gnaw for dental hygiene.  Perhaps it likes the sound this makes, and is attempting to stake out territory or attract a mate.  Or maybe it just hates trees.

            Scientists took two different routes to a solution.

            (1) The Naturalist, by patient observation over many years, discovered that tiny creatures live hidden beneath the bark.  By pecking, the bird can reach these and eat them.

            (2)  The Landscape Biologist, with a grand wave of the hand, explains that while, locally, Woodpeckers peck, in the next forest over, he imagines they do not, but rather roller-skate; and in the next, they play the ukele.  Problem solved.   Oh and plus -- bonus result -- there is no Creator, because who would create anything so stupid.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Addendum:

Re broken symmetry:

Such, in effect, is Hume's fantasy, in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).

[continued here]

[Update]  A rather mournful meditation on the multiverse (by Alan Lightman)  here.

[Update 7 April 2012]  For the views on the subject, by physicist Lawrence Krauss, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/too-much-of-nothing-updated.html

[Update April 2014]  Jim Holt has written a whole book upon the subject.  We examine it here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/minimalism-vs-nihilism.html

Truth Decay

The empirical character of a very successful theory  always grows stale, after a time.  We may then feel (as Poincaré did with respect to Newton’s theory) that the theory is nothing but a set of implicit definitions or conventions …

-- Karl Popper, “Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Knowledge”, repr. in Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1962; page refs. to the Harper paperback reprint), p. 240

I’m currently reading The Shape of Inner Space, by Shing-Tung Yau -- the Yau of Calabi-Yau, which lies at the heart of string theory.    Unlike Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics, let alone Woit's Not Even Wrong, the author is not out to debunk the theory in any way, especially as he was one of its mathematical progenitors:  nor to puff it, like Brian Greene, since  unlike those contentious authors, Yau is not a physicist by trade, but a pure geometer.  But towards the end of the book, he is led to exclaim: 

Given that much of string theory now hinges on compactifications of Calabi-Yau manifolds, which have these moduli with their associated massless scalar fields  and particles that don’t appear to exist, is string theory itself doomed?

And he quotes physicist Burton Richter against those quasi-nihilistic latitudinarians who have (as a recourse of despair) embraced “the landscape” (short version:  Anything Goes):

To them the reductionist voyage that has taken physics so far has come to an end.  Since that is what they believe, I can’t understand why they don’t take up something else -- macramé, for example.

There have, throughout history, been repeated instances of premature prophecying of “the End of Physics”:  but  there   the idea was that we were close to having solved everything;  never, that physics might one day become permanently stuck.

*

It was with these passages ringing in my mind, that I picked up Jonah Lehrer’s essay in the current issue of The New Yorker:  “The Truth Wears Off”.   I won’t summarize it -- it is brilliantly written, go read it -- but merely comment that the widespread scientific predicament there depicted -- in physics and biology and psychology and beyond -- seems even worse that the slightly softened interpretation that the author tries to present as a possible explanation or compromise.   Neither “happenstance” nor unconscious bias  can explain the range of what is supposedly going on.  E.g. the researcher who repeatedly failed to replicate his own results, not for want of trying, should  if anyone  have been prey to such bias.

[Cultural comment, to be developed if anyone’s interested:  the scientific standing of Rhine’s experiments in ESP.
-- Indeed, this just in:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print  ]

*

As Pauli wrote to Kronig in 1925:
"At the moment, physics is again terribly confused.  In any case, it is difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort, and had never heard of physics."
Or cosmologist Edward Harrison in 1975, saying that endless expansion "would make the whole universe meaningless.  If that were true, I would quit, and spend my life raising roses." 

*

There is a thread, a thought, that links these observations;  but  once again -- Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

*

The Shape of Inner Space is something of an intellectual autobiography, in addition to an overview of Calabi-Yau.  And quite an engagingly modest one, as these things go.   By the end of it, you have a comfortable familiarity with the author, and are full of friendly feelings.

Immediately after finishing it, I happened to re-skim George Szpiro’s equally well-written volume, Poincaré’s Prize , and was startled to see that the sinister puppet-master depicted in the chapter “The Gang of Four, Plus Two”, is none other than Shing-Tung Yau.  When I originally read the book, the name meant nothing to me; but now… it was like rounding the corner, and encountering your own cousin brandishing a knife.

Now… in the grander scheme of things, so what;  we all have our faults.  But this account of academic rivalries  gibed with my surprise at searching Shape’s index for the name of Woit or Smolin, and not finding them.  Whatever their merits or demerits, these are popular recent book-length treatments of string-theory, and one might expect that Yau would reply to them, if only to rake them over the coals.  But only towards the end of his book  does he mention theirs, in briefest passing:  and then, without uttering their names (as one might be forced to allude to Mein Kampf, but draw the line at penning the name of its author).

Yau does, however, offer a kind of reply, as he demonstrates, pretty convincingly, that String Theory, the beneficiary of much math, has in turn created, and inspired, solid math in its own right, which will survive independently of whether the particular universe of our own sojourn  happens to embody the physics.   Indeed, the fact that Ed Witten received a Fields Medal, rather than a Nobel Prize for Physics, pretty much demonstrates that.

*

Addendum:

Pauli was not alone in his lament.   Schrödinger to Bohr, 1926:

If we are going to stick to this damn quantum-jumping, then I regret that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory.

And Einstein in 1924, re the idea of renouncing strict causality:

I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gambling house, than a physicist.

This is rather a rarified kind of job-dissatisfaction.  It is as though a carpenter, towards the end of a long and successful career, were to cry out, “Had I known that wood is mere cellulose, rather than a habitation for dryads,  I would have preferred to have been anything -- a plumber or a physicist -- rather than this!”

But the phenomenon does exist.  The author in which I found those two quotes -- J. C. Polkinghorne, The Quantum World (1984), p. 53 -- after a distinguished career as a particle physicist, resigned his chair, and became a vicar in a country parish in Kent.  It was from this Father-Brown-like living that he published his popular little volume with Princeton University Press.

Similar instances could be cited, notably Alexander Grothendieck.  (Motif: “Goodbye to All That.”)

 

[Update Feb 2014]  A statistical reason for “truth decay”, with examples:

Most scientists would look at a P value of 0.01 and “say that there was just a 1% chance” of the result being a false alarm. “But they would be wrong.”

Rather than being convenient shorthand for significance, the P value is a specific measure developed to test whether results touted as evidence for an effect are likely to be observed if the effect is not real. It says nothing about the likelihood of the effect in the first place.

http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-errors-1.14700