Physics, Biology, and the Multiverse
By Ashutosh Jogalekar, originally published at Field of Science.
Physics, unlike biology or geology, was not considered to be a historical science until now. Physicists have prided themselves on being able to derive the vast bulk of phenomena in the universe from first principles. Biology – and chemistry, as a matter of fact – are different. Chance and contingency play an important role in the evolution of chemical and biological phenomena, so beyond a point scientists in these disciplines have realized that it’s pointless to ask questions about origins and first principles.
The overriding “fundamental law” in biology is that of evolution by natural selection. But while the law is fundamental on a macro scale, its details at a micro level don’t lend themselves to real explanation in terms of origins. For instance the bacterial flagellum is a product of accident and time, a key structure involved in locomotion, feeding and flight that resulted from gene sharing, recombination and selective survival of certain species spread over billions of years. While one can speculate, it is impossible to know for certain all the details that led to the evolution of this marvelous molecular motor. Thus biologists have accepted history and accident as integral parts of their fundamental laws.
Physics was different until now. Almost everything in the universe could be explained in terms of fundamental laws like Einstein’s theory of general relativity or the laws of quantum mechanics. If you wanted to explain the shape and structure of a galaxy you could seek the explanation in the precise motion of the various particles governed by the laws of gravity. If you wanted to explain why water is H20 and not H30 you could seek the explanation in the principles of quantum mechanics that in turn dictate the laws of chemical bonding.
But beyond this wildly successful level of explanation seems to lie an impasse. The problem arises when you try to explain one of the most profound facts of nature, the fact that the fundamental constants of nature are fine-tuned to a fault, that the universe as we know it would not exist if these constants had even slightly different values. For instance, it is impossible to imagine life existing had the strength of the strong force binding nuclei together been even a few percent smaller or larger. Scientists have struggled for decades to explain why other numbers like the value of Planck’s constant or the electron’s mass are what they are. In fact this is one of the biggest gaps in the Standard Model of physics, an otherwise spectacularly successful paradigm that nonetheless contains arbitrary constants that defy an origin story. It seems now that physicists are giving up trying to explain conundrums like these, or at least giving up trying to do it the way they always have.
Two books that I read recently drove the point home to me. One was Max Tegmark’s “The Mathematical Universe”. In the book Tegmark takes us on a dizzying journey through modern physics that ends in the fanciful realm of multiple universes. It’s hardly the first book to do so. Multiple universes have been invoked to explain many problems in physics, but their most common use is try to explain (or explain away, as some seem to rightly think) the problem of the fundamental constants. The purported “solution” sounds simple; we can stop wondering why the fundamental constants have the precise values that they do if we assume the existence of a potentially infinite number of universes, each of which has a different set of values for the constants. Our universe just happens to have the right combination that allows sentient life to arise and ask such questions in the first place.
Leaving aside the fact that multiple universes still belong to speculation and science fiction rather than science, what is really striking about them to me is that they have finally transported physics into the realm of biology. What physicists are essentially saying is that there have been several universes in the past and there are likely several universes in the present, and our unique universe with its specific combination of fundamental constants is an accident. The multiple universe argument is very much similar to the argument establishing evolution by natural selection as the centerpiece of biology: there have been several species with several genotypic and phenotypic features, and our own human species is a result of contingency and historical accident. This is not so much an explanation as an admission of incomplete knowledge, but biologists are fine with this since it does not obviate any natural law and is still part of a satisfying overarching theory.
It looks like with the postulation of multiple universes physicists too have stepped over from the land of fundamental explanatory laws into the land of historical accident and contingency. This is a radical shift in the way physics has been done until now and a rather painful blow to the physicist’s view of nature. One might also say that biology is having the last laugh. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century when biology was still doing the messy job of cataloging data and trying to make sense of the mess, physics was marching on, discovering precise regularities and generalities in nature’s offerings. Since then several sciences including biology and economics have suffered from “physics envy”. But now it ironically looks like physics’ successful run at predicting everything from first principles might have become a victim of its own success. It may be the case that physicists’ spectacular findings themselves have illuminated their own limitations. In his book “The Accidental Universe”, physicist and writer Alan Lightman puts it thus:
“Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes, with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are mere accidents – random throws of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining these features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.”
Lightman also quotes the doyen of physicists, Steven Weinberg, who recognizes this watershed in the history of his discipline:
“We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.”
This article was originally published at Field of Science, and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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One argument against God was the Occam’s razor, if we can use a simpler law to explain the universe why choose a complex one (the one involving God).
But now to explain our universe we have to choose between an infinitely complex universe (because of the unlimited multiverses) and an infinitely powerful being who created the universe we live in. Thus both the propositions are equally complex (infinitely complex). Thus the proposition that God made the universe should be as ‘scientific’ as the multiverse proposition.
Note that the “unlimited multiverses” scenario does not preclude the “being of unlimited power” scenario. When Mahavishnu exhales, who knows how many dimensions and universes are involved?
This problem of the fundamental constants is used by the Fine Tuning Argument to argue for the existence of God. But the more general problem of assuming contingent matter will be susceptible of description in terms of first principles has been highlighted by many of the world’s religions in the form of cosmological arguments.
Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz (and more) have all given some form of this argument which is deduced from observing the contingent nature of matter. Bhagavada Gita gives the same sort of argument in verse 2.16 –
“That which is subject to change is not eternal or ultimately real. That which is real is neither temporary nor subject to change. It cannot be destroyed. This is the conclusion the seers of truth reached after deliberating on both.”
The theologian David Bentley Hart gives a nice explanation of this in his book The Experience of God – Being, Consciousness, Bliss:-
“The physical order confronts us at every moment not simply with its ontological fortuity but also with the intrinsic ontological poverty of all things physical – their necessary and total reliance for their existence, in every instant, upon realities outside themselves. Everything available to the senses or representable to the mind is entirely subject to annicha (to use the Buddhist term): impermanence, mutability, transience. All physical things are composite, which is to say reducible to an every greater variety of distinct parts, and so are essentially inconstant and prone to dissolution.
All things are subject to time, moreover: they possess no complete identity in themselves, but are always in the process of becoming something else, and hence also in the process of becoming nothing at all. There is pure fragility and necessary incompleteness to any finite thing; nothing has its actuality entirely in itself, fully enjoyed in some impregnable instant, but always must receive itself from beyond itself, and then only by losing itself at the same time. Nothing within the cosmos contains the ground of its own being.
Herein lies the annoyingly persistent logical error of those physicists (like Alexander Vilenkin, Victor Stenger, or Lawrence Krauss) who claim that physics has now discovered how the universe can have spontaneously arise from “nothingness”, without divine assistance. It does not really matter whether the theoretical models they propose may one day prove to be correct. Without exception, what they are actually talking about is merely the formation of our universe by way of a transition from one physical state to another, one manner of existence to another, but certainly not the spontaneous arising of existence from non-existence (which is logically impossible).”