Even though I’ve found no reason to believe in God, I don’t claim to have any definitive knowledge on the matter. We are pretty sure that evolution happens, and that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old, but questions about “God” — starting with how one even goes about defining that term — are far subtler. That hasn’t stopped many atheists from rejecting the idea of God so fiercely, I kind of get what people mean when they say that atheism is a religion. They’re talking about bad atheism, a rigid view of the world that’s impoverished of deep curiosity. Bad atheists present current scientific theory as absolute truth, even though some scientific facts considered true now will almost certainly be revised by future theories. I think that atheism should be about humility regarding what we know (which is less than bad atheists think), and a desire to seek out what we don’t know. Unfortunately for some, atheism is just about being right.
It’s great to identify with our fellow atheists and exchange ideas. But when this identification turns into a battle and a desire to win, it becomes bad. The bad atheist seeks out believers with the goal of defeating them. (“I will destroy you!”) Bad atheists would say they are skeptics, but actually, they are pseudoskeptical. Truly skeptical persons keep their minds open but are unswayed by unconvincing arguments. Pseudoskeptics, on the other hand, fancy themselves to be open-minded, when actually they have long since settled their opinion and now their heels are dug in. More than being merely unconvinced, the pseudoskeptic spends effort disproving his chosen foes’ beliefs rather than listening to them. Complicating matters, the more unbiased a person views himself to be, the less likely he is to notice himself dismissing new ideas in a prejudiced manner.
The bad atheist has no problem exchanging one untestable proposition for another. While a Christian would say that the universe is fine-tuned for life because God created it to be that way, the bad atheist addresses this point matter-of-factly by invoking a multiverse and/or eternal inflation. (That is, if he doesn’t reject fine-tuning altogether, perhaps because
he can’t disentangle the notion of physical fine-tuning and a
supernatural fine-tuner.) The multiverse and inflation are legitimate scientific ideas, but they are merely hypothetical models, a “best guess to date.” For the bad atheist, though, who perhaps has watched too many science shows on the History Channel, they simply are the explanation. Of course, unobservable universes beyond our cosmic horizon are at present no more testable or predictive than saying “God did it.” To declare that fine-tuning is a consequence of an eternally inflating multiverse — not God — you might as well declare that leprechauns don’t steal pots of gold under rainbows, gnomes do.
To the bad atheist, philosophy and metaphysics are useless at best,
and flat-out wrong at worst. The irony of this position is that it is inescapably a metaphysical one. But this truth is lost even
on some of the world’s top thinkers. “The philosophy of science is about
as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds,” Richard Feynman
famously said — but as philosophers have since pointed out, such
knowledge would be useful to birds, if they could possess it! The fact is, physicists answer questions about how the world works, but
that’s only because the natural philosophers of the preceding
centuries (and some more recent ones) have taught us what questions we
should be asking.
For bad atheists, there is no mystery in the world. There are unknowns, such as details on the Higgs boson or quantum gravity, but these will be learned through current lines of research using familiar methodologies. “We’ve got it all under control; nothing to see here” is a common attitude toward the deeper questions. The graduate student head-down studying pi-mesons may have no interest in the measurement problem, the fascinating question of what’s really going on when we measure a particle. He might brush it off, say that there is no problem. The world in its totality consists of particles, fields, and forces, and eventually we’ll figure out everything on those hard terms and those terms alone. So deal with it.
Now, when I say “mystery,” I am not implying anything supernatural. All signs point to the world as operating under thoroughly self-consistent laws, with no external intervention whatsoever. But, in trying to understand the emergence of reality, time, and space at the deepest levels, we’re missing some key insight — most likely, because we are embedded inside of the very same world we’re trying to explain. It’s all terribly fascinating; we are truly at a “blind men and the elephant” moment in history. And we need to put the pieces together and get, at last, a coherent picture of an elephant. What we don’t need are bad atheists holding the trunk and saying, “It’s obviously a fire hose, dumbass. Go home now.”
Showing posts with label universe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label universe. Show all posts
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Friday, December 3, 2010
Light Does Not “Race” Through Space (5/14/2010)
This was originally posted on a horrible site called Myspace. When Myspace underwent a redesign in Fall 2010, hundreds of insightful reader comments that had been left over the years were lost. I have since deleted my account there.
When it comes to the light from distant objects, most people think of the Universe as a giant cosmic shooting gallery: There’s a star over here, a star over there, maybe a galaxy that way, all spitting out tiny packets of light called “photons.” These photons careen through space at an amazing speed, we are told, and a few of them reach Earth after their lengthy travels, allowing us to see the stars and galaxies they came from. Even prominent science writers sometimes describe a photon “racing along” for billions of years, only to go splat against someone’s retina or a photographic plate on a telescope. This isn’t too surprising; things in our everyday experience go fast and go splat, so depicting bits of light like this makes intuitive sense.
But it’s just wrong. The “common sense” view of the Universe as a shooting gallery of light — while somewhat easy to grasp — has been out of date for over 100 years. It’s as incorrect as saying that life on Earth appeared fully formed from the Creator’s hand within the span of a week. Yes, creation is easier to grasp than evolution by natural selection. But just because something is easy to comprehend doesn’t mean it resembles the truth.
Photons cannot be said to “race,” “speed,” or “careen” through space like bullets, in any manner at all. They may seem to race, and we may get “splatted” by them — but they do not, themselves, race. In 1905, Albert Einstein showed that as an object’s speed through its environment goes up, its relationship with that environment changes: distances become shorter (a phenomenon known as Lorentz contraction), and durations of time also become shorter (known as time dilation). Special relativity turns the speed of light into a kind of “cosmic speed limit”: Nothing can go faster than that, because for anything that travels at that speed, the distances traveled contract to exactly zero, and the duration of travel similarly contracts to exactly zero. No time or distance is “experienced” by a photon, ever. It is therefore wrong to say that a photon races anywhere (“races” being an intransitive verb describing what it, itself, does), or that it “spent five billion years traveling” through space. Such anthropomorphisms are our own invention; they don’t reflect the photon’s reality, as defined by special relativity.
If a photon isn’t a little particle flying at a terrific speed, what is it, then? Here’s where it gets odd: A photon’s path is a line that connects all points in space and time that are equivalent as far as relativity is concerned. Starting from any point on the line, 186,000 miles away from that point, the cosmic clock is one second earlier. So, the line could connect the following equivalent points in space and time: Your eyeball right now, the Moon 1.2 seconds ago, the Sun 8 minutes ago, the star Sirius 8.6 years ago, and the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years ago. A photon “traveling through space” could cross all five of these points. Except that it isn’t traveling. It’s a dimensionless “thing” which an observer at one of the similarly correlated points in familiar space and time will encounter. Because in the bigger picture of relativistic spacetime, there’s no difference between these points at all.
Photons are objects which all observers seem to witness moving — they are seen at different places in space at different times — but which don’t, themselves, travel anywhere or experience any time. This has profound implications for the way we view the Universe as a whole, but that’s a topic for another time. Suffice it to say, we should abandon the archaic idea that particles of light race ontologically through space for billions of years. They don’t.
When it comes to the light from distant objects, most people think of the Universe as a giant cosmic shooting gallery: There’s a star over here, a star over there, maybe a galaxy that way, all spitting out tiny packets of light called “photons.” These photons careen through space at an amazing speed, we are told, and a few of them reach Earth after their lengthy travels, allowing us to see the stars and galaxies they came from. Even prominent science writers sometimes describe a photon “racing along” for billions of years, only to go splat against someone’s retina or a photographic plate on a telescope. This isn’t too surprising; things in our everyday experience go fast and go splat, so depicting bits of light like this makes intuitive sense.
But it’s just wrong. The “common sense” view of the Universe as a shooting gallery of light — while somewhat easy to grasp — has been out of date for over 100 years. It’s as incorrect as saying that life on Earth appeared fully formed from the Creator’s hand within the span of a week. Yes, creation is easier to grasp than evolution by natural selection. But just because something is easy to comprehend doesn’t mean it resembles the truth.
Photons cannot be said to “race,” “speed,” or “careen” through space like bullets, in any manner at all. They may seem to race, and we may get “splatted” by them — but they do not, themselves, race. In 1905, Albert Einstein showed that as an object’s speed through its environment goes up, its relationship with that environment changes: distances become shorter (a phenomenon known as Lorentz contraction), and durations of time also become shorter (known as time dilation). Special relativity turns the speed of light into a kind of “cosmic speed limit”: Nothing can go faster than that, because for anything that travels at that speed, the distances traveled contract to exactly zero, and the duration of travel similarly contracts to exactly zero. No time or distance is “experienced” by a photon, ever. It is therefore wrong to say that a photon races anywhere (“races” being an intransitive verb describing what it, itself, does), or that it “spent five billion years traveling” through space. Such anthropomorphisms are our own invention; they don’t reflect the photon’s reality, as defined by special relativity.
If a photon isn’t a little particle flying at a terrific speed, what is it, then? Here’s where it gets odd: A photon’s path is a line that connects all points in space and time that are equivalent as far as relativity is concerned. Starting from any point on the line, 186,000 miles away from that point, the cosmic clock is one second earlier. So, the line could connect the following equivalent points in space and time: Your eyeball right now, the Moon 1.2 seconds ago, the Sun 8 minutes ago, the star Sirius 8.6 years ago, and the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years ago. A photon “traveling through space” could cross all five of these points. Except that it isn’t traveling. It’s a dimensionless “thing” which an observer at one of the similarly correlated points in familiar space and time will encounter. Because in the bigger picture of relativistic spacetime, there’s no difference between these points at all.
Photons are objects which all observers seem to witness moving — they are seen at different places in space at different times — but which don’t, themselves, travel anywhere or experience any time. This has profound implications for the way we view the Universe as a whole, but that’s a topic for another time. Suffice it to say, we should abandon the archaic idea that particles of light race ontologically through space for billions of years. They don’t.
The "Multiverse" & Occam's Razor (12/27/2009)
This was originally posted on a horrible site called Myspace. When Myspace underwent a redesign in Fall 2010, hundreds of insightful reader comments that had been left over the years were lost. I have since deleted my account there.
Everyone is talking about the "multiverse" these days — the idea that our Universe is just one of many, that there may be billions of "pocket universes" as real as our own Universe but extremely far away, or in the form of isolated "bubbles," such that we may never be able to contact them. The cover story of the January 2010 issue of Scientific American is "Life in the Multiverse," and the illustrations depict universes connected to each other like grapes on a vine. Once pure speculation and a science-fiction device, this concept of multiple alternate universes is now front-and-center in mainstream physics as well as pop culture.
In part, the motivation has been to explain the "fine tuning" of our Universe: the handful of physical constants which, if any were different by a tiny amount, would disallow the existence of matter and therefore us. Some of these amounts are so minuscule, our Universe seems to balance on a knife-edge between various prohibitions to our existence. While theists consider this proof of an intelligent designer, the prevailing approach among physicists is to invoke the anthropic principle: We must find ourselves in a universe with conditions suitable for life, because if we weren't in such a universe, we wouldn't be around to notice.
This raises a couple of questions. Do we find ourselves in a life-allowing universe because ours ended up this way by accident? Or, is it because there must be many different universes, and we are here because, by sheer numbers, at least one of them must support life? The second has become the conventional explanation.
I wish to challenge this conclusion. It reminds me of a moment in Carl Sagan's Cosmos, during a discussion of past theories about life on Venus. "Observation: Can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs!" In this case, it's, "Observation: One universe and one universe only. Conclusion: Billions of universes!"
Imagine you are watching TV through a cable box that's broken (unbeknownst to you) and gets only one channel. You then learn that the cable company is providing hundreds of other channels, and that the signals are getting into your home, even though you've never seen any of them. So, you go searching for the hundreds of other cable wires passing through the wall, and finding none, you conclude that the cables must be there, and must be perfectly real, but they are coming in where you can't find them. Now, is that the only conclusion, or the best conclusion, that could be drawn from what you know? A more elegant solution is that the other channels are coming through the same one cable — the one that you know exists — but for whatever reason, you can see only the one channel.
Similarly, I believe a more elegant solution to the "multiverse" question is that all potential universes are interlaced with the one that we observe, but for whatever reason, we observe only our familiar Universe. In other words, the alternate universes are not real to us in the way that our own Universe is real, but rather, they coexist with ours in a state of potential.
This issue seems to be a good candidate for the conceptual tool known as Occam's Razor. It says that if one solution to a problem requires multiple things with special conditions and assumptions, and another solution has fewer of these requirements, then the simpler solution is preferred. If there is another explanation, why must billions of perfectly real universes "out there somewhere" be required to exist just for ours to be able to exist?
Physicists have no problem describing a light wave as a probability function, a summation of all potential locations for a photon. I don't see why our Universe cannot be viewed the same way as the photon in this example: one possible universe "filtered out" or "made real" among all potential universes, all of which make up one giant probability function. This just seems to be a far more elegant solution than an insane web of billions of individual, discrete "pocket universes." Stop the madness!
Everyone is talking about the "multiverse" these days — the idea that our Universe is just one of many, that there may be billions of "pocket universes" as real as our own Universe but extremely far away, or in the form of isolated "bubbles," such that we may never be able to contact them. The cover story of the January 2010 issue of Scientific American is "Life in the Multiverse," and the illustrations depict universes connected to each other like grapes on a vine. Once pure speculation and a science-fiction device, this concept of multiple alternate universes is now front-and-center in mainstream physics as well as pop culture.
In part, the motivation has been to explain the "fine tuning" of our Universe: the handful of physical constants which, if any were different by a tiny amount, would disallow the existence of matter and therefore us. Some of these amounts are so minuscule, our Universe seems to balance on a knife-edge between various prohibitions to our existence. While theists consider this proof of an intelligent designer, the prevailing approach among physicists is to invoke the anthropic principle: We must find ourselves in a universe with conditions suitable for life, because if we weren't in such a universe, we wouldn't be around to notice.
This raises a couple of questions. Do we find ourselves in a life-allowing universe because ours ended up this way by accident? Or, is it because there must be many different universes, and we are here because, by sheer numbers, at least one of them must support life? The second has become the conventional explanation.
I wish to challenge this conclusion. It reminds me of a moment in Carl Sagan's Cosmos, during a discussion of past theories about life on Venus. "Observation: Can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs!" In this case, it's, "Observation: One universe and one universe only. Conclusion: Billions of universes!"
Imagine you are watching TV through a cable box that's broken (unbeknownst to you) and gets only one channel. You then learn that the cable company is providing hundreds of other channels, and that the signals are getting into your home, even though you've never seen any of them. So, you go searching for the hundreds of other cable wires passing through the wall, and finding none, you conclude that the cables must be there, and must be perfectly real, but they are coming in where you can't find them. Now, is that the only conclusion, or the best conclusion, that could be drawn from what you know? A more elegant solution is that the other channels are coming through the same one cable — the one that you know exists — but for whatever reason, you can see only the one channel.
Similarly, I believe a more elegant solution to the "multiverse" question is that all potential universes are interlaced with the one that we observe, but for whatever reason, we observe only our familiar Universe. In other words, the alternate universes are not real to us in the way that our own Universe is real, but rather, they coexist with ours in a state of potential.
This issue seems to be a good candidate for the conceptual tool known as Occam's Razor. It says that if one solution to a problem requires multiple things with special conditions and assumptions, and another solution has fewer of these requirements, then the simpler solution is preferred. If there is another explanation, why must billions of perfectly real universes "out there somewhere" be required to exist just for ours to be able to exist?
Physicists have no problem describing a light wave as a probability function, a summation of all potential locations for a photon. I don't see why our Universe cannot be viewed the same way as the photon in this example: one possible universe "filtered out" or "made real" among all potential universes, all of which make up one giant probability function. This just seems to be a far more elegant solution than an insane web of billions of individual, discrete "pocket universes." Stop the madness!
God & the Fallacy of Astonishment (11/03/2009)
This was originally posted on a horrible site called Myspace. When Myspace underwent a redesign in Fall 2010, hundreds of insightful reader comments that had been left over the years were lost. I have since deleted my account there.
One of the questions we nonbelievers often get is, "So, did the universe just pop into existence out of nothing?" Let's ignore for a moment the point that if God didn't need to be created (and always existed), then perhaps the universe or multiverse didn't need to be created, either. The question of whether the universe was designed by an intelligent being or "popped out of nothing" encapsulates why faith in God, even in the 21st century, still exists: total human astonishment. Most of us assume that since many beautiful, complex things have been created by intelligent human beings, then complex or beautiful things in nature must have been created by an intelligence, too. After all, how could all of this pop out of nothing?
I can't answer that question. But the fact that I can't answer it doesn't prove or disprove anything. We human beings are astonished by the wonders of the universe — but our mere astonishment doesn't prove anything, either.
Here's an example of what I call the "fallacy of astonishment." Imagine that it's the 1970s and some anthropologists in Borneo come across a tribe that's never had contact with Western civilization. The explorers make friends and bring out a Polaroid camera. Someone takes a picture of the tribe's chief and hands it to him. As the chief sees his image develop before his eyes — he's never seen any kind of photograph before — he becomes astonished and concludes that the explorers must be gods, drops to his knees, and begins to worship them.
One can imagine such a scenario actually playing out (if it didn't in reality at some time). The tribal chief witnesses something that is so beyond his personal experience, seemingly the only logical explanation is a supernatural one. After all, from his perspective, there's no other way a two-dimensional image of him magically appeared on a little gray square. So, does this mean the explorers actually are gods? Of course not. The chief merely doesn't have enough information to make an informed opinion on the matter.
I believe that we "civilized" humans of the 21st century are like the tribal chief when it comes to questions of the origin of life and the universe. Really, we have very little information in these areas. We know that the visible universe is a certain age and size, but we know nothing at all about what's beyond the visible universe. (I've even suggested that the age of the universe is a biocentric extrapolation, and that the Big Bang never actually "happened" as a real, physical event at all.) We know how long life has been around on Earth, but we don't know how or even where it got started. We are that tribal chief, watching things apparently develop out of nothing, and then falling to worship that which must be responsible for making them happen.
The really religious people talk about the absurdity of explosions in outer space, and point out that tornadoes passing over junkyards don't create 747 jets. They speak of something coming out of nothing and life jumping out of "goo." But when I hear these cliché arguments, all I can think is, You have no idea what you're talking about. But none of us does — and that's the whole point.
I understand why so many people believe in God. It isn't easy to imagine things that lie far beyond our human-scale, human-experience personal world, and unless one can conjure up such a vision — or at least acknowledge that our origins are currently far beyond our understanding — it's quite natural to give in to our astonishment and assume that a personal supernatural being created it all.
But that doesn't make it the truth.
One of the questions we nonbelievers often get is, "So, did the universe just pop into existence out of nothing?" Let's ignore for a moment the point that if God didn't need to be created (and always existed), then perhaps the universe or multiverse didn't need to be created, either. The question of whether the universe was designed by an intelligent being or "popped out of nothing" encapsulates why faith in God, even in the 21st century, still exists: total human astonishment. Most of us assume that since many beautiful, complex things have been created by intelligent human beings, then complex or beautiful things in nature must have been created by an intelligence, too. After all, how could all of this pop out of nothing?
I can't answer that question. But the fact that I can't answer it doesn't prove or disprove anything. We human beings are astonished by the wonders of the universe — but our mere astonishment doesn't prove anything, either.
Here's an example of what I call the "fallacy of astonishment." Imagine that it's the 1970s and some anthropologists in Borneo come across a tribe that's never had contact with Western civilization. The explorers make friends and bring out a Polaroid camera. Someone takes a picture of the tribe's chief and hands it to him. As the chief sees his image develop before his eyes — he's never seen any kind of photograph before — he becomes astonished and concludes that the explorers must be gods, drops to his knees, and begins to worship them.
One can imagine such a scenario actually playing out (if it didn't in reality at some time). The tribal chief witnesses something that is so beyond his personal experience, seemingly the only logical explanation is a supernatural one. After all, from his perspective, there's no other way a two-dimensional image of him magically appeared on a little gray square. So, does this mean the explorers actually are gods? Of course not. The chief merely doesn't have enough information to make an informed opinion on the matter.
I believe that we "civilized" humans of the 21st century are like the tribal chief when it comes to questions of the origin of life and the universe. Really, we have very little information in these areas. We know that the visible universe is a certain age and size, but we know nothing at all about what's beyond the visible universe. (I've even suggested that the age of the universe is a biocentric extrapolation, and that the Big Bang never actually "happened" as a real, physical event at all.) We know how long life has been around on Earth, but we don't know how or even where it got started. We are that tribal chief, watching things apparently develop out of nothing, and then falling to worship that which must be responsible for making them happen.
The really religious people talk about the absurdity of explosions in outer space, and point out that tornadoes passing over junkyards don't create 747 jets. They speak of something coming out of nothing and life jumping out of "goo." But when I hear these cliché arguments, all I can think is, You have no idea what you're talking about. But none of us does — and that's the whole point.
I understand why so many people believe in God. It isn't easy to imagine things that lie far beyond our human-scale, human-experience personal world, and unless one can conjure up such a vision — or at least acknowledge that our origins are currently far beyond our understanding — it's quite natural to give in to our astonishment and assume that a personal supernatural being created it all.
But that doesn't make it the truth.
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