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Opinions
(Interviews
by Ivan Briscoe)
Steven
Weinberg*: Towards a final theory
“I’m reasonably
sure that we will have a final theory from which all the regularities in nature can
be deduced, but I am also reasonably sure that the final theory will leave us with
a mystery: why isn’t the theory something else, such as a theory with nothing at
all, or a theory with just two particles endlessly in orbit around each other. The
best we can hope to do is discover a theory that is logically fragile, in the sense
that any small change in the theory would lead to logical contradictions.
On a more mundane level, there are limits to science that are not so fundamental
but as a practical matter we will probably not be able to transcend. For example,
the final theory may very well be something like string theory, but I cannot conceive
of how we will ever directly produce structures that are 17 powers of ten smaller
than those probed in the laboratory today. Likewise there’s a wide class of cosmological
theories in which our big bang is one of many that go off all over the universe,
though in principle we will never observe the others. In both cases the theory will
be successful or not depending on whether its predictions for things we can observe
are correct.
As for religion, whatever reasons it provides still raise the question of why: why
should there be deities with certain characteristics? In fact the more you learn
of physics, the less you see of what may be regarded as purpose.”
* Professor
of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, Nobel Prize for Physics (1979)
John
Leslie*: Inside the divine mind
“Cosmology
can give us speculative stories that are very much worth taking seriously. But at
the moment science cannot give us any confidence that these stories are correct.
The stories are all about how this universe came into existence against the background
of the laws of physics, and there’s a question of why there are any laws of physics,
and why they should apply to anything.
Let’s suppose you had a completely empty situation. What would there be in that situation
which could create a universe? Well, first note that the situation couldn’t be entirely
empty because it would be full of all sorts of facts–for example, the fact that 2+2=4.
I don’t think you can get rid of facts like that just by banishing the universe from
existence, because these are facts about possibilities and hold no matter what. There
would also be ethical facts: for example, it would be a fact that the emptiness was
in one respect bad because you could have a really good situation instead, a wonderful
cosmos.
If Plato was right in thinking that Value itself acts creatively, then the cosmos
must be the very best possible cosmos. It then consists of an infinite number of
minds, each knowing everything worth knowing: minds we might want to call divine.
The structure of the universe is just one of the things worth knowing, and all of
us exist inside one of those divine minds. This is a pantheistic view–that the structure
of the cosmos is simply the structure of divine thinking.”
* University Professor Emeritus
of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Canada, and author of Universes (Routledge,
1996)
Michael
Heller*:The limits of scientific understanding
“There is
a great temptation for the scientist to identify the limits of rationality with the
limits of scientific method–or, to put it in a more picturesque way, to identify
the limits of the method with the limits of the universe. This temptation is so powerful
because the scientific method is the easiest kind of rationality and can efficiently
distinguish what is scientifically valuable information from what is not.
The nature of the big bang is a purely scientific problem. To “explain” it as a result
of God’s action is like ascribing thunder to the bad temper of Zeus. I think the
really important question lies elsewhere: namely, where do the laws of physics come
from?
There are currently two ways of answering this. One is to show that on a fundamental
level there reigns complete anarchy and the laws of physics are just effects of purely
random averaging processes. The other is to imagine a set of all possible universes,
each of them with different physical laws. We then happen to be living in a highly
ordered universe because in all other universes the life of beings like ourselves
is excluded. But can such probabilities be an ultimate explanation? Why does the
universe–or the set of all universes–have this property of probability? Here, I think,
we are touching the real limits of our understanding of the universe.
The only way to get rid of such questions is not to ask them. But that would go against
a criterion of critical rationality: one should not cease to look for further arguments
as long as something remains to be argued for.”
* Professor
at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Pontifical Academy of Theology, Cracow, Poland
Tsevi
Mazeh*: The beauty of the world
“Science cannot
tell us why and what for, and in a sense science is limited to the technical details
of how the world works. I think there is no problem with saying God was in the beginning,
that God set the world rolling and decided upon its rules. But as for the question
of God interfering during the history of the universe–that is something I believe,
but which I do not fully understand.
My religion [Orthodox Judaism] does not influence my work as an astronomer, but it
does make me appreciate God and the beauty of the world. I have been teaching a course
on binary stars, in which there is a mathematical formula describing perfectly the
stars’ motion. In my eyes it is a miracle that the human mind can find such beautiful
mathematical tools to explain the motion of the world–I see that as one of the miracles
of the world that God created.
As for Chapter 1 of Genesis, you have to realize that it has a core and it has details.
The core is the theological message: there is one unified God. When the Bible was
written, this was a complete revolution and actually doesn’t make sense when you
look upon the world and see its forces fighting each other. The writer of Genesis
had to convey this message in some cosmological terms, so he chose the cosmology
of his day. He could not mention the big bang, the speed of light or atoms. Instead,
he spoke in terms understandable to the people of that time.”
* Professor
of Astronomy at Tel Aviv University
Lee
Smolin*: Cosmological evolution
“A key issue
is understanding the fine-tuning of the universe: how did it come to be that the
parameters that govern elementary particles and their interactions are tuned and
balanced in such a way that a universe of such variety and complexity arises? The
probability that a universe created by randomly choosing the parameters will contain
stars is one chance in 10229.
The universe is improbable, and it is improbable in the sense that it has a structure
which is much more complex than it would be if its laws and initial conditions were
chosen more randomly. Thus we seek a kind of explanation which is checkable, which
is falsifiable, and which is based on some hypothesis of natural phenomena. Broadly
speaking, biology and natural selection are the most successful examples of a theory
that addresses such questions.
In the case of the universe, this leads to the hypothesis of cosmological natural
selection: in other words, that our elementary particles are the way we find them
because they make the production of black holes, and thus the production of new “universes,”
much more likely.
If it is true that the big bang was not the beginning of the universe but an event
that came from another part of the universe, whether a black hole or something else
with a prior structure, then it’s very possible that observations over the next few
decades will help us–just as by studying the ripples in water, you can measure the
shape of the rock that caused them.”
* Professor
of Physics at Pennsylvania State University, author of The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford
University Press, 1997)
Seyyed
Hossein Nasr*: Be, and there is
“Science by
its very nature can deal only with one level of existence, physical existence. Science
also relies on the study of events in time and space. The scientist therefore pushes
towards the beginning, but find its impossible to get to the beginning itself since
it is beyond material existence and beyond the spatial or temporal. In contrast,
most religions–with exceptions, such as Confucianism–have spoken about the origin
of the universe.
Those who accept the religious point of view, such as myself, can say a great deal
about the origins of the universe. We believe that the reality which brought the
universe into being has also sent us a revelation in knowledge of the origin of that
universe. In the case of Islam, this revelation comes first of all from the Koran,
which describes the creation of the universe as coming from the word of God, recounted
in the very famous verse of Chapter 36 in which God says “Be, and there is.”
Until the 17th century, science from East to West was aimed at studying the traces
of God’s wisdom in his creation. But the Cartesian philosophy that undergirds the
scientific revolution created a division between the knowing subject and the known
object: modern science considered its goal to be the study of pure quantity, and
tore away all qualitative aspects of nature–all its spiritual elements.
Every ten years there are new cosmological theories and views. But I do not really
take these to be steps towards understanding the ultimate structure of the universe
since we are dealing with so many unknowns. It’s as if you knew one inch of a line
and extrapolated it straight to the moon.”
* Professor
of Islamic Studies at George Washington University
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