How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence. Christopher Potter
For many scientists, philosophy is a step too close to theology. Scientists eschew philosophy for logic or even for just plain common sense.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
It is generally thought that common sense is practical. It is practical only in a short-term view. Common sense declares that it is foolish to bite the hand that feeds you. But it is foolish only up to the moment when you realize that you might be fed very much better.
John Berger, writer and art critic
7 | If, as philosophers have concluded, there is nothing that the universe can be made out of, scientists have wondered what that nothing might be.
8 | Science, philosophy and religion have this in common: that they all must account for how nothing became something. Philosophers have worried for centuries about the nature of substance and of nothingness. Religions have their various creation myths. Science too tells its own creation story. The triumph of particle physics is that it so nearly explains how nothing became everything.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), philosopher and mathematician
All things are born of nothing and are borne onwards to infinity.
Blaise Pascal (1623–62), philosopher and mathematician
9 | If only we knew exactly how the story began. If only we could say, ‘Once upon a time’ and know what follows.
10 | An ancient Greek cosmology has the world created out of a pre-existing condition called chaos. Kaos is not emptiness but formlessness. It was the world before there were things in it. The word nothing, like some fossil of ancient thought, still retains that original concept of no thing. The universe emerged when Logos, meaning variously form, knowledge and word, came into contact with Kaos. Out of their union comes Cosmos (beauty or order, as in cosmetics, which bring order to the face). The opening words of St John’s gospel repeat this ancient prescription: In the beginning was the Word. In the original Greek the word translated as ‘word’ is Logos. And in Genesis we find God creating nature by separating out from chaos what then become things with names. Naming is a process of separating out, and the first step in any scientific investigation of the world. Before explanation must come the naming of parts. The idea of nothing as emptiness came later. That the universe was created out of emptiness, ex nihilo, is a radical departure from how creation was envisaged by certain ancient Greek philosophers, and was an interpretation imposed on the Biblical story by medieval scholars.
11 | Our current best modern-day creation stories are variants of the Big Bang theory, a mathematical description of the universe coaxed out of the equations of general relativity. Even though they were his equations, Einstein at first denied the Big Bang. Later he changed his mind.
The most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.
Einstein, of an exposition of the Big Bang given by its inventor (discoverer?) Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), priest and physicist
12 | All matter can ultimately be reduced to constituent particles – bosons and fermions – that are the excitations of various types of energetic field. At the Big Bang there may have been a single kind of energetic field which, in an expanding universe, evolved into other kinds of energetic field.
Within a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe is a cascade of particles decaying into other particles. Whole eras of the universe passed before it was even a second old.
13 | We know what happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, but what happened in the beginning?
14 | In the beginning everything was in the same place at the same time. In the beginning the physical world is pure energy, whatever that is. In the beginning the universe is some condition of form, number and energy held in perfect symmetry. It cannot last. The symmetry breaks and becomes a world of asymmetries, imperfections and accidents. The world falls into existence.
The positive energy within matter can be counterbalanced by the negative sink of the all-pervading gravitational field such that the total energy of the universe is potentially nothing; when combined with quantum3 uncertainty,4 this allows the possibility that everything is … some quantum fluctuation living on borrowed time. Everything may thus be a quantum fluctuation of nothing.
Frank Close, particle physicist
Zero exists now, it has always existed, and it will always exist. It is the native state of existence. It is what the physicist David Bohm called implicate order. It is the timeless quantum superposition of all universes and all life in an infinite universe. As the most brilliant physicists have long held, a perfect zero is the most ordered state of all, it just isn’t found in the past where time begins. It exists in the future where time ends.
Gevin Giorbran, science writer
15 | Energy leaks out of the vacuum for no reason at all except randomness and the pressure exerted by a sink of infinite negative energy. Overall the universe is nothing at all.
16 | Take matter out of the universe and reality becomes unstable, liable to give birth randomly to new universes. The vacuum is the birthing ground of universes; like the silence of the mystics, a roiling place of visions and madness, of annihilating forces.
17 | In the outer reaches of the universe, as far away from here as it is possible to be, beyond time and space and meaning and matter, nothing was happening. And the nothing was without form, pure potential for becoming, an evanescent yet heaving sea of energy coming into and out of existence. For reasons not yet understood, a bubble of energy that should have burst back into non-existence breaks free with the rage of Achilles from the conditions of the quantum world and sweeps out a universe.
18 | The universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time. Everything that is exists only by happenstance, randomly, out of nothing.
19 | If less is more, is nothing too much?
20 | For now the most widely-agreed-on model that describes how the universe got going is the theory of eternal inflation. An infinite number of ‘bubbles’ arose in an eternally inflating quantum landscape. One of these bubbles became the island universe we call home. An infinite number of other island universes exist in all the possible forms determined by some constraining mathematical model, most popularly string theory.5 The landscape out of which these island universes emerged is called the multiverse.
21 | Inflation is happening eternally, elsewhere. Our ‘island’ universe inflated briefly. It doubled in size every 10–34 seconds. After about a hundred such doublings it had grown to about the size of a grapefruit, at which point the period of inflation came to an end.6 Why inflation came to an end locally is not yet known.
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space.
Shakespeare (1564–1616), Hamlet
22 | i You do not need God in order to create a universe, says Stephen Hawking. All you need is gravity, quantum electrodynamics, special and general relativity, M-theory and a few other bits and pieces of physics. But where these ingredients come from remains, for the moment at least, an unanswered question.
ii M-theory (no one can remember what the M stands for) is a formulation of string theory, and a quantum theory of gravity – an abstract and mathematical theory, as yet without physical proof. M-theory describes a multiverse of eleven dimensions in which there may be many island universes like ours, adrift in four dimensions of time and space; and many other kinds of universes adrift in different numbers of dimensions of space, some perhaps with several dimensions of time (whatever that might look like). M-theory describes 10500 different universes.
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