Cosmologists have inherited the "high priest of science" mantle from High Energy Physicists when the SuperConductingSuperCollider was cancelled by President Clinton in 1993. Science and Nature are reputable journals that both carried stories about the tumult in the field. This is an email exchange about Cosmology referring to two articles that appeared in Nature ("Our Place in the Multiverse" 9/14/06) and Science ("A 'Landscape' Too Far?" 9/11/06).


It is hard to follow the logic of these guys because they are being illogical. There are two entertwined issues in this discussion, one about science (cosmology) and one about metaphysics (religion). Now let me just say from the outset, that I believe Kant is completely, utterly wrong, deceptive, and evil, when he separated the world into two domains: noumenal and phenomenal. This division has robbed religion of any experimental proof, and robbed science of any purpose. The evidence that this division is artificial and evil can be found in exactly these cosmologies that Silk wants to talk about. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants the universe to be both accidental and overdetermined so that  not a nanogram of purpose can be found in it. And he can't. So he muddies the water so you don't know which he's talking about.  The is not novel to Silk, it's been going on for 300 years or more. A very thorough book on this illogical juggling act of scientists was written by physicist-philosopher Benedictine monk, Stanley Jaki "God and the Cosmologists" and is well worth reading.

Okay let's break it down.

Point 1) A universe that blew up from the big bang, (never mind how), can have 3 outcomes: (a) the explosion was so great that the stuff never comes back together, but expands indefinately--the "open" universe; (b) the explosion was so weak that after some finite time, the whole mess collapses into a big black hole again--"closed"; or (c) a knife-edge balance between the two--"flat".

Now as you might imagine, "flatness" is a matter of perspective. If you wait another billion years or so, you can see if we are turning the corner into collapse or infinite expansion. To say it another way, "flatness" is exponentially dependent on time: Today's knife-edge balance point, was yesterday's I-beam pivot, and tomorrow's sub-atomic pivot point. So that means, and I'm indebted for this calculation to Stephen Hawking, that the "flatness" we observe today requires a balance between expansion and gravity (or matter density) at time t=0 of one part in 10^60. Since there are an estimated 10^80 protons in the observable universe (treating all matter as if it were a proton), that means a difference of 10^20 protons determined whether we see this universe, or a black hole. In other words, a grain of salt would have disrupted the big bang.

Well, why do we need a flat universe anyway? Because one that expands too fast never has a chance to form galazies and stars and carbon and oxygen and iron and people, and one that expands too slowly would be well on its way into a black hole already. Either extreme is not conducive to life.

So just from these statistics, the universe appears highly "contingent", which is what philosopher's call a free choice of a purposeful intellect. (Dembski makes this point in numerous places.) Physicists hate to use the technical language, and call all such contingencies "apparent" via something they refer to as  "The Anthropic Principle", which is supposedly an observational bias toward contingency. Philosophers  say it's a meaningless principle, since it doesn't remove ontological contingency, which would exist  whether anyone was there to observe it or not. Physicists don't get it, but they don't exactly feel  comfortable with AP either, and would rather they didn't have to invoke the mumbo-jumbo.

So to eliminate that contingency we have 2 options: (a) either the "choice" was in fact random; or (b) the "choice" was in fact pre-determined. These are the two options that Joseph Silk is so desperate to prove "scientifically".

Point 2) Silk, like many in cosmology, want to do both at the same time. I don't really understand this schizophrenia, sort of like a lemming with acrophobia. But let's humor him, and allow him to try. However, realize at the outset, that what drives this theory is a philosophical aversion to contingency, which is neither experimentally nor theoretically required. It is a metaphysical motivation. Not that this isn't science, lots of good physics discoveries were metaphysically motivated, but it illustrates why Kant is totally wrong.

Okay, lets start with the oxymoron "multiverse". By definition a "universe" is "all there is". So what then can be more unique than a universe? And are these "multi-verses" talking to each other? IF so, are they just part of a bigger universe? And if they don't talk to each other, then their existence is completely and utterly conjectural and not science! So how can one have evidence of a "multiverse"? The short answer, "one can't".

So whatever evidence Silk wants to draw on, has absolutely nothing to do with the conjecture of 10^500 multiverses. So why make the conjecture? Because any small probability, multiplied by a big enough number, will result in a probability of one. To get rid of contingency, the multiverse assumes there are a sufficiently large number of random universes such that the probabilty of ours is a certainty. That's neither science nor scientific, that's what is called "blind faith". For lack of a better word, I call blind faith in Chance the "un-God".

My argument against such silliness, is the Star Trek "borg" argument. "Okay," I say, "suppose that we have all these random universes. In one of them, the speed of light is blindingly fast, say a billion times our universe, and consequently Silicon computers have evolved that are billions of times faster than ours, and in fact, intelligent. While solving the QCD problem, the "borg" has figured out a way to communicate between multi-verses, and is now intent on uniting the combined intellect of the intelligent universes. So far they have succeeded, oh say, a few quadrillion times (leaving only 10^488 universes without intelligence), and are now interested in taking over our Universe. Wouldn't our perception of such interference make the "borg" look like god? So all you have done in multiplying universes is to make the existence of "god" not just likely, but inevitable. In that case, contingency is necessary, and your initial assumption which drives you to 10^500 is disproven."

Point 3) So delete the title and the references to "multiverse" from Silk's article, it has nothing to do with the rest of his arguments, and in fact, detracts from them. That leaves the arguments that the contingency is removed if the universe is, in fact, open.

Here the argument is that an open universe is not terribly contingent, since roughly half of all random big bangs will result in an open universe. OF course, that doesn't negate Hawking's calculation that at this stage of the expansion, some 13.7 billion years along, the probabilities are still 1:10^60, but that's a detail Silk ignores.

Why doesn't Silk get excited about closed universes, after all, the other half of all random big bangs should give closed universes? Well, a closed universe isn't eternal. And despite a spate of poorly argued reasons for big bangs leading to big crunches and back to big bangs, there's not a lot of hope that such cycling will occur without violating the Laws of Thermodynamics (think of it as the Flubber theory of Big Bangs). Eternality is the other way that unprobable things can be made probable, such as the spontaneous generation of life. So Silk is willing to put his entire bet on "open universes". This is an experimentally verifiable thing, one just has to calculate the General Relativity "curvature" of space-time. Closed universes are curved "inwards", open ones are curved "outwards". Several experimental techniques have been used to evaluate this, including density of galaxies further back in time (red shifted), or brightness of Type I Supernovae as a function of red-shift (they look dimmer than they should) and so forth.

Just to make a mess of such calculations, Einstein briefly used a "Cosmological Constant" which was sort of  the compressibility of the vacuum. Einstein wanted an eternal, static universe, and didn't know how to offset the gravitational attraction. So he invoked this repulsion of the vacuum, that has since been called "Dark Energy". When others convinced him that an explosion could negate gravity nicely, he abandonned this term, calling it the "biggest mistake of my life". Now it's back in vogue, because big bang modellers can't get agreement between galactic density clustering and gravity to work. They've even got time-variable "dark energy" which might make the universe speed up or slow down its expansion, hence things like "the inflationary universe". Using all the adjustable parameters in their models, fitting the distribution of galaxies, gives a ratio of 75% dark energy, 25% gravitational matter, flat universe, with visible matter only accounting for some 10% of the needed 25%. In other words, more question marks than answers, and no one has a clue what "dark energy" means.

Still, Silk is ready to measure the curvature of space, fit it to some parameterized model, and claim that because his model fits the data, "it had to be that way", and the contigency is removed. I remain unmoved. In fact, I'd rather spend the money on more pressing scientific goals, like whether the Earth's magnetosphere is reconnecting or not. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out a way to prove the existence of Un-God, so I don't get the press of Dr. Silk.



> 1) I'm with you on Kant.

I just read a marvelous, I mean marvellous speech that the Pope gave yesterday,  He's on the same page with me, and I'm not even a philosopher! Sometimes don't you wish you had been born Irish? The Pope makes the same point about Kant.

> 2) Isn't the idea of "the multiverse" a projection of stuff the string-theory guys ...

Okay, string theory.

It really isn't a theory, and it has sort of gotten away from strings, but here goes. Newton's mechanistic materialism assumes that a point is the simplest fundamental building  block, so atoms look point-like, time (in brief nanoseconds) is point-like, photons are point-like etc.  It really wasn't Newton, but goes back at least to Democritus and Epicurus who, in typical Greek fashion, decided 0-dimensional points were undifferentiatable, indivisible, fundamental units of reality. This is the message we physicis teachers (and high school teachers) have been trying to evangelize for the past 200 years. You should note several things about it though:
 a) it goes back to 500BC
 b) Aristotle and Plato were unconvinced
 c) Augustine trashed it
 d) It didn't get resurrected until about the 16th century by a semi-atheist scholars who hated Jesuits
 e) It slowly gained credibility through 18th & 19th century as a result of chemistry (rising wraith-like out of a much richer alchemy)
 f) It was people like Maxwell and Boltzmann who used it so effectively in what became known as Statistical Mechanics (which re-derived Thermodynamics from atom-theory) around 1870-1890 that finally turned us all into Democritean materialists.
 g) A mere 40 years after this triumph came the deconstruction of Quantum Mechanics in the 1930's that denied most of the fundamental assumptions of atomism and materialism.  *All* the weirdo mysteries about QM are all a result of un-point-like behavior. And it hasn't been integrated into our "physics metaphysics". They always teach QM *after* young pupils are indoctrinated in atomism, and it is taught "as if it were not really true".

So back in the 1980's, some bright kid comes up with the idea that maybe the fundamental thing at the heart of the Universe is not the 0-D point, but the 1-D, string. Then all the heavier mass building blocks of mesons and baryons and quarks are just vibrations on the string. Since energy = mass, you'd just have to vibrate it a bit harder to get to the next higher mass.

There's a very similar ansatz that Niels Bohr made in his Nobel Prize description of the hydrogen atom (in the ten years leading up to the full blown QM theory), where he has the electron being a wave on a string around the atom. Since the wavelength is proportional to the mass of the electron, only certain integer numbers of wavelengths will allow "standing waves" around the nucleus, and lo-and-behold, those are the experimentally determined, quantized energy levels of the hydrogen atom.

So I'm trying to give you the metaphysical flavor of string theory. It's sort of radical for scientists, in that it departs from Democritean atomism (don't ever let scientists tell you they are progressive and open-minded, they're some of the most stick-in-the-mud conservatives around!), but it's palatable because, well, 1-D strings are a bit like 0-D points especially when they're really really small, and the deviation isn't so far from materialism that it would get you crucified as an Aristotelean or creationist or something. (Read the attached file, especially the meaning of the "Can I have your desk?" quip.) But there is one drawback, and that is, the math is frighteningly messy.

So for 30 years these guys have been slogging through this horrible math of vibrating modes on n-dimensional strings. Like Niels Bohr, they're hoping that the calculation will result in a sequence of masses that just happens to match what physicists observe. And it hasn't. At first they needed some 23 degrees of freedom (or 23-dimensional space) to get the masses right (think of that as 23 adjustable parameters). After ten years of hard work, they got it down to 11 degrees of freedom, and came up with kooky reasons why 7 or 8 of those dimensions are "rolled up" and invisible to mortal men. After 15 years of work, one of the leading mathematician/physicists wins the Fields Prize (which is the Mathematician's equivalent of the Nobel Prize), which tells you that string theory impresses more mathematicians than physicists.

There has been no experimental prediction or verification from 30 years of work by 100's of our brightest physicists to date.  The only vaguely physical result to come out of all this effort, was a "proof" that Black Holes have entropy as Stephen Hawking wanted, since one can model the boundary of a black hole (event horizon) as an n-dimensional string (known as a D-brane, not to be confused withM-branes).

So why are people blathering that string theory leads to Multiverses? We're back to this invisible "rolled up dimensions" that supposedly link string theory to physics. If at some QM level, say 10^-24 meters, where a string is to an atom what an atom is to you, this is the scalesize where all those "rolled up dimensions live" in the "quantum foam" of "virtual particles", then time and space become a bit fuzzy (sort of like this entire discussion), and maybe "Voila!" another Big Bang materializes out of the vacuum fluctuations by a string hiccupping, and an entire universe is born in one of those "rolled up" dimensions, which we can't see, of course. Since this might be happening in every inch of that 10^-25 space in our 10^25m -sized universe, why we would could have 10^150 universes (taking the cube) and those could be happening, why every 10^-34second (that's the Planck time) in our 10^17s-old universe, and we're up to 10^200 big bangs since our own went off! But wait, each of those universes can have its own Big Bang too, so its a series (10^51 in the first atto-atto-second, 10^50 ten atto-atto seconds later... combine the series with the above calculation, and Whoa! that's 10^500 minimum, assuming of course we're the first Big Bang on the block with nutty cosmologists.

So what do I make of the breathless Science article about religious dissent among the high-priesthood of physicists? The issue that I discussed in my last post were the two ways to eliminate contingency a.k.a. "anthropic principle".  One was to introduce chance (hence the 10^500 multiverses), and the other was making it necessary, say, by having a theory of everything (TOE) that in 11 dimensions one must have this particular universe. The string guys are saying (in this article) that even with string theory, they have too much freedom to pick any dark energy they want. Remember, "dark energy" is one of those adjustable parameters cosmologists invoke to fit their model to the observations. And the string guys are saying, "sorry, we can't predict that either, it's still contingent". In other words, EVEN 10^500 UNIVERSES DONT REMOVE CONTINGENCY!

And my answer is "Yawn".

You think your ability to handle exponential arithmetic proves how intelligent you are, and how impossible it is to imagine that the contingent universe was created? You think that like Voltaire if you shout loudly enough , "Can God make a rock bigger than He can lift?" you've disproved God'e existence?  You irritate me, boy.

The real question you should ask is "Can God make an arrogance He cannot correct?"

> 3) I like the idea of the blind faith in chance as the "un-God".

I stole it from Fr Edwards, the APCK priest down in Montevallo. He referred to PECUSA (now TEC) as the "Un-Church", basing it on CS Lewis' Perelandra where the antagonist is the "Un-Man".

> 4) The Borg thing is wacky, but no wackier than the "argument" it's parodying, I suppose.

Hah. Philosophers love wacky counter-arguments. You only need one, you know, so make it memorable.

> 5) Didn't people discover, relatively recently, that the expansion of the universe ...

That was this Type Ib Supernovae argument. The idea is that every Type Ib is exactly the same size as every other one. It relates to something called the Chandresakahr limit, where if a star has more mass than 1.4 solar masses it collapses into a black hole. Then a white dwarf in a binary pair of stars is sucking matter from the other star, and when it hits the magic number it goes Boom!. Therefore, astronomers argue, every Type Ib Supernovae has exactly the same brightness, and if we map brightness versus red shift, we can calculate how far away they were when they blew up some billion years ago. If that doesn't come out a straight line, then the Universe has been accelerating. (An alternative explanation is that dust between us and the supernovae is making it dimmer, but the astronomers say that they are really, really sure that nothing that simple could be taking place. My prediction: in 3 years they're going to do a recalibration, but by then it won't matter, the theorists will all be solidly working on warp drive big bangs.)

> 6) What are the implications of the magnetosphere thingy that you mentioned...

Van Allen was truly a grandfather of my field, discovering the magnetosphere and more importantly, teaching his students the joy of discovery. Although Van Allen never got the Nobel Prize (since geophysicists aren't really part of the club), he ranks up there with my all time Nobel Prize hero, John Bardeen, who not only got 2 Nobel Prizes, but put his graduate students on the papers that won the two Nobel Prizes, thereby sharing them with (gasp) his own graduate students. (BCS-theory stands for Bardeen, the prof, Cooper, the post-doc, and Schrieffer, the grad student. All 3 were awarded.) Van Allen was that kind of a guy.

Are there any implications for metaphysics in my subfield of space physics? None that I'm aware of. Reconnection is the fancy name for saying that magnetic fields sort of move around and aren't "frozen-in" the flow, as Alvfen's MHD theory of "Magneto-Hydro-Dynamics" would suggest. Hannes Alfven is the only geophysicist I know that got a Nobel Prize, perhaps because he was also Swedish.

> 7) I just read that they've found the two most distant galaxies from us...

Hmm. I'm not aware of that news report. They determine the distance to distant galaxies by their red-shift, which are also very faint. Perhaps they are saying that they are surprised there aren't more.  The density of galaxies at different stages of the Big Bang, of course, is precisely what all those cosmology types are supposed to predict with their "dark energy" theories. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if their predictions don't work out, given their aversion for contingency and their penchant for silly ideas, like "dark energy" for example.


Well, actually I did. Though I thought recalibration of the standard candle supernovae would come about by dimming of light, this one suggests that it is the inherent brightness that was greater. So be it.
 
The fact of the matter is that few Type Ia's get this careful scrutiny. So look for a whole lot of new analyses on old data, some backpedalling on Cosmological constants, and yet another theory of "how it all happened by accident. Really, it was just an accident. (tears begin to well up). Don't you believe me?"