A negative image of the cat’s eye nebula, 3,000 light-years away
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The
opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound
truth may well be another profound truth.
Niels
Bohr, Danish physicist (1885-1962)
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Cosmology
has led us back to the very first second of the universe’s existence, yet the more
science reveals, the more it leaves unanswered
Is science on the verge
of explaining the mystery of existence, once and for all? Some prominent scientists
are suggesting as much. They claim that unified theories of physics such as superstring
theory, when combined with refined versions of the big bang model, will soon bequeath
us a so-called “theory of everything.” As described by physicists such as Stephen
Hawking, a theory of everything will be a kind of mystical revelation, which permanently
transforms the “Huh?” of wonder evoked in us by our contemplation of nature into
a great “Aha!”
Those who find this vision of a wonderless world chilling rather than exhilarating
should be assured that it will never be fulfilled. One of the great paradoxes of
modern science is that the more it tells about about existence, the more mysterious
existence becomes.
The
conundrum of reality
Take
the simplest question of all: Why is there something rather than nothing? The big
bang theory, for all its power, cannot tell us why and how the big bang happened
in the first place. Some physicists note that according to quantum mechanics, empty
space is seething with so-called virtual particles, which spring into existence for
an instant before vanishing; perhaps, these physicists speculate, the entire universe
began as a kind of virtual particle. Honest physicists will nevertheless admit that
they have absolutely no idea why there is something rather than nothing. After all,
what produced the laws of quantum mechanics, which supposedly allowed quantum creation
to occur?
The next question is: Why does the universe look the way it does rather than some
other way? Why does it adhere to these laws of nature rather than some other laws?
Altering any of those laws would have radically altered reality. If gravity had been
infinitesimally stronger, the universe would have stopped expanding almost immediately
after the big bang and collapsed into a black hole; a bit weaker, and the universe
would have flown apart so rapidly that stars, galaxies and planets would never have
formed. The physicist Lawrence Krauss compares the odds against gravity having precisely
the value necessary for the cosmos to exist to the odds against someone guessing
precisely how many atoms are in the sun.
Then there is the enigma of life. The biologist Richard Dawkins once declared that
life “is a mystery no longer” because it had been solved by Darwin’s theory of evolution
by natural selection. Actually, life is still a complete conundrum, in spite of all
the insights provided by evolutionary theory and more modern biological paradigms,
such as genetics and molecular biology. None of these fields can tell us why life
appeared on earth in the first place, and whether it was a probable event or a once-in-eternity
fluke.
Dawkins and others proclaim that life is a robust phenomenon that occurs throughout
the universe, but there is no scientific evidence to support this belief. After decades
of searching, we have found no signs of life elsewhere in the universe. As far as
we know, life emerged here on earth only once, approximately 3.5 billion years ago.
Moreover, attempts to replicate the origin of life in the laboratory have left researchers
more baffled than ever at how it occurred. The Nobel prize winner Francis Crick once
complained that “the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the
conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going.” Crick, it should be
noted, is an agnostic leaning toward atheism.
Scanning
the heavens for signals
Many scientists have contended that once life started evolving on the earth, it was
only a matter of time before it produced a species as complex as we are. But the
history of life on earth does not support such a view. For roughly 80 percent of
life’s 3.5-billion-year span, it consisted entirely of single-celled organisms, such
as bacteria and algae. Then something happened–biologists will probably never know
exactly what–and the era of trilobites, triceratops, taxi-drivers and other multi-cellular
creatures commenced.
The palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out that contingency–just plain
luck–has played an enormous role in the emergence of Homo sapiens. If life on earth
started from scratch a million times over, Gould contends, chances are it would never
again produce mammals, let alone anything resembling Homo sapiens. Similarly, the
biologist Ernst Mayr suspects that we may be the only life forms in the galaxy and
possibly the entire universe capable of inventing radios and other communications
technologies. For that reason, Mayr believes that SETI–the search for extra-terrestrial
intelligence, which scans the heavens for extra-terrestrial radio transmissions–is
doomed to fail.
The particle physicist Steven Weinberg once wrote: “The more the universe seems comprehensible,
the more it seems pointless.” My analysis of science suggests a corollary aphorism:
the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems improbable. The most
wildly improbable feature of the universe is the lump of matter that can fret over
its improbability. |
