Posted by
Rob on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 5:30:35 PM
After four months of silence, why the big rush to post?
Well, it's not that I have avoided blogging, but that (a) I was trying to meet a thesis deadline for my long-delayed ThM, and (b) my original audience for this blog--my twin daughters--have been occupied with
a new baby and first-year PhD coursework. But the ThM is going to be postponed another year, and skipping meals is going to give me time to slip in a short blog now and then.
So here's a comment I sent to a friend about Lawrence Krauss' new book
A Universe from Nothing, which recieved a puff-piece in the NYT by science writer Dennis Overbye "
There's More To Nothing Than We Knew".
"Does string theory just about allow everything?" my scientist friend asked.
Here's what I wrote:
Well,
string theory is about 23 orders of magnitude smaller than the atom,
and it takes a galaxy of strings to make a proton, so you can hide an
entire universe down there. Does that allow everything?
Not
entirely. At one time there was hope that string theory would come up
with some "elementary particles" that would explain quarks and matter
and mosquitos, but unfortunately the equations were shown to have a
nearly infinite number of solutions. So the last 20 years or so has been
spent trying to find limits, reducing the number of dimensions down to
the visible 4, so that the solutions can be found and tested. It hasn't
gone very well, though it has consumed an inordinate number of
graduate-student lifetimes. Several books have been written about the
uselessness of string theory and its unproductiveness being a drag on
theoretical physics. Smolin published a book "
the trouble with physics" on that topic.
What about Larry Krauss?
From eye-witness accounts of a journalist that met him,
he's an "angry atheist" of the Dawkins' sort, pompous and
arrogant, and not a little uninformed about politics. In other words, a
run-of-the-mill physicist. Now he's published a book that attempts to
provide support to Hawking & Mlodinow's recent atheist
screed, by
propping up a hole in Hawking's argument.
If
you recall, the 20th century has been disastrous for Epicurean
/Democritean/ Lucretius atheism, who all asserted (against Aristotle and
Plato), that the universe was eternal, needing no stinkin' creator,
matter was eternal providing infinite arrangements, and that atoms were
indestructible, needing no replacement caretaker. I call these the
3
pillars of Materialism, and Augustine undermined all 3 in his peculiar
autobiography, "
The Confessions". This destroyed materialism for 1000
years, but it made a resurgance in the Enlightenment and the revival of
"atomism" now called the "atomic theory of matter". This was the
reigning paradigm by 1890. Everything changed in 1904 however.
Einstein's
1904 Special Theory of Relativity gave us E=mc2 that showed that matter
wasn't eternal nor indestructible, and his 1917 General Theory gave us
the Big Bang that showed the universe had a beginning. The first blow
was deflected by claiming that BOTH sides of the equation were
conserved, that it was "mass-energy" that was indestructible. The second
blow, as recorded by Robert Jastrow's 1979 book
God and the
Astronomers has been harder to deflect. Numerous cosmology models have
been proposed to eliminate the beginning, including bouncing Big Bangs,
promiscuous big bangs, even Darwinian big bangs. (Lee Smolin has
a paper
out this month where he argues that evolution is a metaphysical
principle that physics must obey. Truly bizarre.
A great response is the late Stanley Jaki's
God and the Cosmologists)
The general consensus in the last 10 years is that Multiverse theory
permits our universe to have a beginning as long as there are an
infinite number of (unobservable) universes that have beginnings too,
which is backed up with some string-physics mumbo jumbo. Larry Krauss
and Stephen Hawking seem to have bought into this answer as well.
But
the first problem hasn't gone away. As astronmers started comparing
notes, the mass-energy of the universe was NOT conserved, but instead the
expansion velocity of the universe seemed to be increasing, the universe
was accelerating, which is an unknown injection of energy. Where did
this extra energy come from? And if mass-energy wasn't conserved, then
did it violate Democritus' dictum "Nothing comes from nothing"?
The
answer, obviously (being presented by a physicist), is that another thing is eternal that is making energy, and since it can't be God we'll
call it something else, something mysterious, say, "dark energy". This
stuff is proportional to space, and as space expands, so does the dark
energy. It's like anti-gravity, pushing everything apart, and the
further they are apart, the more it pushes. Some physicists call it
"negative pressure". Yeah, I know, but I'm not making this up, I only
report these things.
So the original criticism
was that Democritean materialism was toast if atoms can pop out of the
ether as if they had a creator. Krauss is trying to spin this really
hard by saying "It's something from nothing! Just like God, only less
scary. Atheism is saved again, and you can send me your thankful
donations." Numerous philosophers have commented about his complete
equivocation on "nothing", just as Hawking had equivocated when saying
everything came from "gravity" (which he claims has negative energy
too.) Even
theoretical physicists think Krauss' book is unsubstantial,
being more about atheism than it is about physics. But that's the status
of Materialism in the 21st century--running on fumes.