Meaning in the Material Universe
When a book club I participate in discussed Christopher Potter’s book (You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe, Harper, 2009), one of our members, a retired teacher, related an anecdote about a group of school children who went on a field trip. They encountered one of those maps with an arrow pointing to a spot labeled, “You Are Here”. One of the students asked the teacher, How do they know that?, a question with enough levels of profundity to fill a book, which is essentially what Potter has done here.
Potter begins his book with an assertion that science, when done properly, should be an extension of the kinds of questions we all asked as children. Most humans if asked, “Would you rather pursue a meaningful or meaningless life?”, would likely choose meaningful. Unfortunately, the way science is often described, it becomes reduced to something more like a set of index cards with facts: hydrogen has one neutron and one proton, mammals have a placenta, etc. What could science possibly tell us about meaningfulness? Well, actually, quite a bit, Potter argues.
Contained within the narrative of this book, the reader will encounter lots of fascinating little-known scientific facts. Here are four examples that I include simply to try to whet your appetite to peruse this remarkable little book:
· Aristotle, the founder of empiricism, asserted that men and women have different numbers of teeth, an assertion easily refuted by simply looking in the mouths of men and women.
· Bacteria have been found in rocks 1,000 meters underground that divide only once every thousand years or so.
· There are some distances and times that are so small they do not exist as such.
· Modern scientific inflation models allow our current universe to have emerged from only about 20 pounds of quantum stuff at the beginning. This opens the possibility that it might be possible for a scientist to create a brand-new universe working with a few pounds of matter in a laboratory.
Embedded within this narrative of scientific facts and theories one also encounters some pretty sophisticated philosophical ideas pertaining to Ontology, Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science. And the book courageously pushes through the traditional boundaries separating science from religion.
For more than 300 years, since at least the time Descartes proposed his ideas about dualism, Western Civilization has divided the world up into physical and non-physical. Science got the physical, and the rest were allocated to philosophy and religion. Individual scientists as well as the rest of us, though, have to live in the full-fledged universe, and thus have to come to grips with how to relate to both worlds.
Potter proposes a modern scientific/theological approach that differs subtly from dualism. He calls it materialism. Like atheism, materialism rejects the major premise of dualism, that the universe is made up of two kinds of things, physical and non-physical. However, atheism arrives at this point by denying the existence of the non-physical entities. Materialism, on the other hand arrives at this monism position by expanding the idea of what is meant by the material universe such that it encompasses both what was traditionally meant by the term physical universe and much of what was traditionally considered to be part of the non-physical universe. Materialism is allowed to address questions such as, “Where did we come from?, Where are we going?, What is the meaning of our existence?”
Potter argues that creation stories told from the perspectives of various religious traditions can have a surprisingly close kinship with cosmology stories told by contemporary scientific theories. This claim is not new. It has frequently been put forth by authors writing from religious traditions, particularly from contemporary writers espousing a New Age theological perspective. However, it is rare to see these ideas discussed in a substantial manner from a sophisticated scientific perspective.
Modern scientific theories are similar to many religious theologies in that they describe a creation story for the universe that has a beginning (the big bang) and an ultimate fate (the big freeze). This was not always the case. Newton saw the universe as being eternal in space and time with universal laws that applied to all parts of the universe and at all times. Similarly, up until the 1920s most scientists believed that the world is eternal, infinite, and uncaused, in need neither of an act of creation nor a creation story. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1915, did not describe a stable universe, but he was so troubled by this that he added a cosmological constant to his theory that had only one purpose, to make the universe stable.
Other theoretical physicists in examining the implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity realized that the theory actually described an expanding universe. But if the universe is expanding, expanding from what? Mathematicians discovered that if one uses the equations to simulate the universe running backwards in time, it contracts towards a point. Modern science now accepts a world view much different from what was accepted prior to Einstein. Our universe had a starting point out of which the current state was created, and it has a future.
The big bang scientific theory has itself gone through some revisions. Originally, it was not assumed that the universe originated out of nothing. It was simply that the universe was compressed into a very small size. Then at some particular moment (perhaps this statement is meaningless since time did not exist at that moment), an explosion occurred and this small point of unimaginable high intensity started to expand, and continued to do so ever since, governed by the laws of physics.
The stories of the big bang being told by more recent scientific theories are somewhat different. Some scientific theories have the universe being formed out of nothing, a bubble forming out of primordial quantum foam, at the moment of the big bang, perhaps only one of a number of universes that have, or will, be created.
The transitions from the original idea of a stable, unchanging universe; to that of a universe that has always contained the same amount of stuff, but is changing in size as that stuff expands starting with the big bang; to current notions that our universe might have formed out of “nothing”, came gradually as scientists and mathematicians explored the implications of the theories of relativity and of quantum theories. Potter tells a story of a meeting between Goerge Gamow and Einstein. As they were walking Gamov revealed to Einstein an insight he had derived from Einstein’s own theories, that the universe could have come into existence out of nothing. Einstein was so struck as the implications of this insight began to sink in that he stopped in the street where they were walking, causing several cars to have to come to a halt.
So, Potter argues, our universe may have, paradoxically, sprung into existence out of “nothing”. The primordial quantum foam that gave rise to our universe is physical material, but it is not made of physical particles that exist in the dimensions of time and space. This assertion is based on some mysterious numbers that crop up in theories of physics. One is Plank distance, the smallest measure of length that can be said to exist. Another is Plank time, the smallest unit of time that can be said to exist. Times or distances less than these amounts have no existence, at least no existence that our current understanding of the physical universe can define. Physical materials whose properties are smaller than these numbers are nothing (“no thing”). The elements of the primordial quantum foam fall within this category. They are material that exists outside of time and space.
The essence of the theory is that occasionally bubbles can form out of this quantum foam. Usually these bubbles get pulled back into the foam before they get very far. But occasionally one gets away, and when that happens, a physical universe is formed, a universe with separate particles that can exist in space and time. That is how our own universe got formed, and possibly many others. This is a Many Worlds theory, an intellectual cousin, distinct from but sharing some of the same implications, of the concept of a Multiverse proposed by some quantum physicists.
The laws that govern our own universe as well as any others that might have formed, are incorporated within the primordial quantum foam. These laws are mysterious and eternal, i.e., outside the realm of time.
What name should we give to these immutable eternal laws that govern our universe? It is easy to get hung up on the names of things, especially when the names have been associated historically with movements or policies with which one does not want to be associated. This is one of the reasons many scientists profess to be atheists — They simply do not want to be associated with much of what has been done historically “in God’s name.” However, many scientists, even those who profess atheism, might accept a statement along the lines, “The events that happen in our universe are not random but instead follow rules, laws of nature, that have been present (at least) since the big bang event that created our universe”. That position is only a step or two away from the one Potter proposes, that our universe might have formed from spontaneous eruptions out of nothingness, but a nothingness that has rules/laws/order, and has the capacity to create physical universes governed by that order.
Potter states that a materialism that is consistent with current theories of physics probably needs a poet to do it justice, and the poetry is most likely written in the language of mathematics. Mathematical equations are pure (non-physical) ideas. Mathematicians, working in isolation from the physical world, simply sitting and thinking about mathematical ideas, come up with solutions to certain equations, sometimes solutions whose properties appear too bizarre to apply to the physical world, but mysteriously, as Potter points out with several examples, sometimes these equations have made predictions about properties of the physical universe that turned out later to be true.
Where did the mathematical equations that happen to describe our physical universe come from? Some traditional religions would attribute them to the mind of God; a materialist to the Order that is eternally present in the primordial quantum foam.
Potter ends his book with a metaphor attributed to the physicist Robert Jastrow. I will paraphrase the essence of the metaphor. A group of theologians are climbing a mountain of truths. Each step as they ascend the mountain they are getting closer to the ultimate truth of the universe and think they will have attained this ultimate truth once they reach the summit. During the climb they make disparaging comments about the narrow mindedness of atheist scientists who refuse to participate in their ascent. Nearby, a group of scientists are also climbing a mountain, this one a mountain of scientific truths. During their climb the scientists make snarky and sarcastic comments about the ignorance of religious believers. When the two groups each cross the threshold of the summit, they meet up with each other and realize they have been climbing the same mountain the entire time, just coming up from opposite sides. Suddenly, Potter would say, they both realize that there is only one mountain, and it is made of material.
Ron Boothe