I just finished my book on Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin. And I loved it! He started his book off by stating the principle that "there is nothing outside the universe" all of his points throughout the book support that running statement. His last chapter however is relative to my running statement (see title summary of this blog) that "Truth is truth, in Science AND in understanding God...anything false will fail and these truths will merge into one truth." That being said I'll summarize the points he made in the last chapter that inspire this post.
He is telling us that String Theory did not turn out to be unique. There are too many different string theories for it to be THE answer. "So most people who work with string theory now believe the M theory conjecture" (a theory unifying the collective string theories). He asks the question: "What or Who chose which consistent theory applies to our world?" (I think he is playing devils advocate when he suggests that needing one 'right' string theory that seems 'unfindable' points us 'outside' the universe)
"There seems to be only one possible answer to this question. Something external to the universe made the choice. If thats the way things turn out, then this is the exact point at which science will become religion. Or to put it better it will then be rational to use science as an argument for RELIGION." (since religion can be so diverse.. I am going to correct him if I may be so bold.. and exchange his last word with 'understanding the nature of God')
"For a universe to exist for billions of years and contain the ingredients for life, certain special conditions must be satisfied: the masses of the elementary particles and the strengths of the fundamental forces must be tuned to values very close to the ones actually we observe. If these parameters are outside certain narrow limits, the universe will be inhospitable to life. This raises a legitimate scientific question: given that there seem to be more than one possible consistent set of laws, why is it that the laws of nature are such that the parameters fall within the narrow ranges needed for life? We may call this the anthropic question.
If there are different possible consistent laws of nature, but no framework which unifies them, then there are only two possible answers to the anthropic question. The first is that we are very lucky indeed. The second is that whatever entity specified the laws did so in order that there would be life. In this version of an argument which is well know to theologians the God of the Gaps argument. If science raises a question like the anthropic question that cannot be answered in terms of processes that obey the laws of nature, it becomes rational to invoke an outside agency such as God. The scientific version of this argument is called the strong anthropic principle.
Notice this argument is valid only if there is no way to explain how the laws of nature might have been chosen except by invoking the action of some entity outside our universe. You may recall the principle with which I started this book: that there is nothing outside the universe."
Now he expains the possibility if M theory is the answer. He says it is 'like' the other possibility with an important difference. If the different string theories describe different phases of a single theory, then it is possible that under the right circumstances there could be a transition from one phase to another. Just as ice melts to water, the universe could 'melt' from one phase, in which it is described by one sthory, to another phase in which it is described by another...." (okay I get that it makes sense, and yet as it takes energy to melt ice to water it may take God, or God's 'invoked energy' to melt us from one phase to another.) " ...in this picture the universe is allowed to have changed phase as it evolved in time. There is also the possibility that different regions of the universe exist in different phases.....there are at least two alternatives to the God of Gaps argument. The first is that there is some process that creates many universes....The big bang is then not the origin of all that exists, but only a kind of phase transition by which a new region of space and time was created, in a phase different than the one from which it came, and then cooled and expanced. In such a scenario there could be many big bangs, leading to many universes." (again...consider the possibility that God himself invokes these phase changes.. then you can imagine a premortal life as a phase... the creation of the 'world/universe' another... and 'life' entering it, like seeds scattered upon a landscape... each particle/seed producing within that sphere in wich it was created and then evolving as far as it can within that sphere.. in harmony with the fact that many particles attract and combine with other particles to make new particles, again within it's sphere to do so. also ....any universes helps us to imagine a God of Worlds without number) *that sphere talk may only make sense to Ar as we have discuss'd it before and I am suspicious that he is the only one who reads this particular blog ;-)
"The only problem with this kind of explanation is that it is difficult to see how it could be refuted... a theory that cannot be refuted cannot really be part of science.
Is it possible to have a theory which gives a scientific answer to the anthropic quesiton? Such a theory may be framed around the possibility that the universe can make a physical transition from one phase to another. If we could look back inot the history of the universe to before the big bang, it may be that we would see one or a whole succession of different phases in which the universe had different dimensions and appeared to satisfy different laws. The big bang would then be just the most recent of a series of transitions the universe has passed through. And even though each phase may be governed by a different string theory, the whole history of the universe would be governed by a different single law -M theory. We then need an explanation in physical terms for why the universe 'chose' to exist in a phase such as the one in which we find ourselves, which exists for billions of years and is hospitable for life.......
one idea is that new universes could form inside black holes. This also means that the laws in the universe from which ours was formed were not very different from those of our own.....We can then ask whether this prediction is stisfied by our universe. To cut a long story short, up to the present time it seems that it is. The reason is that carbon chemistry is not only good for life, it plays an important role in the processes that make the massive stars that end up as black holes."
He lists the estimated monumental improbabilites that everything would emerge the way it has, and then states: "Whichever way we make the estimate, we conclude that if space really has a discrete atomic structure, then it is extraordinarily improbable that it would have the completely smooth and regular arrangement we observe it to have. If the explanation is not to be that some outside agency chose the state of the universe, there must have been some mechanism of self-organization that , acting in our past drove the world into this incredibly improbable state... One solution which has been proposed is called inflation.. This is a mechanism by which the universe can blow itself up exponentially fast until it becomes the flat almost euclidean universe we observe today. ...inflation may be part of the answer, but it cannot be the complete answer..... if we are to avoid an appeal to religion, then this is a question that must have an answer......" (I believe it needs an answer so we can better understand God, and of course the world we live in.)
"So in the end, the most improbable and hence the most puzzling aspect of space is it's very existence....The great triumph of the quantum theory of gravity may be that it will explain to us why this is so. If it does not, then the mystic who said God is all around us will turn out to have been right." (and comments like this may very well be what has religious people believing that Science tries to explain AWAY God...or that they find us silly and/or 'mystical'... Just as Science is rediscovering and better understanding the Aether that exsists in empty space.... I am hopeful that some of us will rediscover,