Three Big Bangs Read online

  All the mathematics underlying the discussions to which we soon turn regarding the “theory of everything” or the “fine-tuned” character of the pivotal processes in the formation of the stars, elements, and planets underscores this order. Einstein concluded, famously, that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility” (Einstein 1970:61). Eugene P. Wigner, a physicist and mathematician, contends “that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it…. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve” (Wigner 1960:2, 14).

  John A. Wheeler exclaims, “This is a world of pure mathematics and when we penetrate to the bottom of it, that’s all it will be” (Wheeler, interviewed in Helitzer 1973:27). Is there nothing but order, captured by mathematical precision, a “matheomorphic” universe, as though the big bang was actually a mathematical explosion? Something is needed beyond the pure mathematics to compel it to exist in an actual world. There are worlds imaginable in pure mathematics that are never realized. Though Stephen Hawking delights in searching for a theory of everything, he goes on to ask:

  Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. (Hawking 1998:190)

  The theoretical, matheomorphic universe exploded in an actual fireball, and the fire still burns after thirteen billion years.

  The mathematical character of high-level physics, even after we can no longer picture what is going on, does suggest that the ordered intelligibility of this exploding, expanding universe vastly outruns our sensory capacities for perception and our local capacities for experience. The mathematics still seems to contact and correspond to physical nature. As far as our capacities for thought reach, whether in words or in mathematics, the universe seems unreasonably “reasonable,” intelligible, despite the fact that we can no longer visually represent, verbally model, or perceptively sense it. The math still works even in realms where sense and intuition do not easily serve. The explosive big bang produces a realm of exquisite, supersensory rationality that transcends but supports sense, space, and time. We are not yet prepared to consider the third big bang: mind. But perhaps there is already an intimation. Mathematics is, above all, mental; it is the logical creation of the human mind, and the fact that mathematics repeatedly helps us to understand the structure of the physical world corroborates the belief that the world we inhabit is the creation of mind. We might even need that encouragement when we plunge into the chaos of biology.

  The big bang launched natural history. In the ongoing explosion, mathematics remains powerless to appreciate a world until it adds a narrative of events. Perhaps in advanced physics, there are only equations, with no pictures, but mathematics is useless without a text, without words—no matter how much it is also true that mathematics accomplishes what words cannot. The spacetime diagrams must have a caption, the equations an interpretation. Past this, complex nature is never fully described by mathematical models. To the contrary, very much is left out, and mathematics is to that extent stylized and crude as a description of rich natural processes. Its precision is bought with its incompleteness. Neither mathematics nor other forms of physics anywhere know the categories of life and death, nor mind and conscious experience, which, with the second and third big bangs, became the phenomena that most cry out to be explained. Even within physical cosmology, there are factual claims such as those involving the anthropic principle—observations about values of fundamental constants, forces, conditions that are prerequisites for the complex chemistries of life. These may be mathematical, based on values in equations, but the cosmological interpretation of these facts is not. The interpretation is historical, metaphysical, theological.

  Nature has mathematical dimensions at every structural level. But we do not from this conclude that all the world’s cleverness and beauty lie in its mathematics. Even if we were to lay aside the upper levels that metricize less well, at the quantum levels our metricizing capacities, profound as they are, run to an end zone. We cannot completely metricize the individual quantum event; it defies mathematical specification in its concreteness. At this point, curiously, one of the most impressive of our mathematical theories tells us that nature permits no further mathematical specifiability.

  Certainly the order is impressive, nowhere more so than in the mathematics that maps the big bang. But mathematics is not the only mode of thought competent for judging multidimensional nature. Physics and chemistry are the most abstractive of the sciences. To some extent they are abstracted out of a more messy real world: physical laws are not so much ultimate and absolute as they are approximations over statistical averages with margins of error. Impressive as such laws are in physics and chemistry, they leave out all the emergent eventfulness with which the other sciences and the humanities will want to deal. Physics and chemistry take no special subset of natural entities for their subject matter, while biology takes organisms, psychology takes behavior and mind, sociology takes societies, and even the special physical sciences—geomorphology or meteorology—have their restrictions. We need to stay alert to the paradox that these universal physical sciences, which seem so powerful in interpreting what has resulted from the primordial explosion, also drastically oversimplify (Ellis 2005).

  There is yet another side to this emphasis on order unfolding from the primordial big bang, especially when we anticipate what kind and levels of order make possible the second and third big bangs. We do not find physically, nor do we want philosophically, any law that says: order, more order, more and more order. Logically and empirically, beyond mathematical order and predictability, there must be an interplay of order and disorder, certainty and openness if there is to be autonomy, freedom, adventure, success, achievement, emergents, surprise, and idiographic particularity.

  Order is related to information, and we will in the next chapter be analyzing this in biology, where it is a central theme in genetics, after the second big bang. Today, with the exploding that has resulted in the third big bang and our ever-advancing human cognitive capacities, we may think we have entered the information age. Information theory began in electronics and computing, and physicists sometimes ask about the information content of the physical world. Hans Christian von Baeyer, a physicist, anticipates: “If we can understand the nature of information, and incorporate it into our model of the physical world… then physics will truly enter the information age” (von Baeyer 2003:17).

  John Wheeler, following from his claims that the world is pure mathematics, has made a further famous claim, enigmatically epitomized in his aphorism “it from bit.” The world of objects, “its,” is rooted fundamentally in “bits,” information units, a term borrowed from computer memories. “It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation… in short that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe” (Wheeler 1994:296). “‘Getting its from bits’… refers to a vision of a world derived from pure logic and mathematics” (Wilczek 1999:303).

  Wheeler speculates that order penetrates the universe as a sort of network or circuit loop, even involving backward causation, in which there is a Platonic demand for intelligibility. The physical world gives rise to the possibilities of communication; intelligent agents evolve, who analyze nature and find it rational, mathematical. But these agents, though coming later in time, are determinants of the physical characteristics of the universe. “The whole show is wired up together.” “Will we someday understand time and space and all the other features that disting
uish physics—and existence itself—as… a self-synthesized information system?” (Wheeler 1999:316, 321). At this point, however, Wheeler goes beyond his “pure mathematics.” He does need, in his metaphor, to get existing “its” (actual physical objects) from his “bits” (mathematical forms). The “its” of the real world are interparticipatory with “bits” of significance, meaning.

  In another metaphor, continuing the idea of a self-synthesized information system, the universe is sometimes described as a computer. In various cultures, nature has been described with diverse metaphors: the creation of God, the Great Chain of Being, a clockwork machine, chaos, an evolutionary ecosystem, Mother Nature, Gaia, a cosmic egg, maya (appearance, illusion) spun over Brahman, or samsara (a flow, a turning) which is also sunyata, the great Emptiness, or yang and yin ever recomposing the Tao. Our culture lives in the computer age, and so perhaps “computer” is just the latest in such shifting models.

  Still, the model might give some insight. The “computational universe” is programmed, as it were, to start simple and generate complexity, in the course of which it generates intelligent output, including life and mind (Lloyd 2006). Some scientists are impressed with the capacities of simple systems with a few basic rules (algorithms) to generate complex patterns (Wolfram 2002; Weinberg 2002). Such a process is more cybernetic (in the language of information theory) than it is mechanical (in classical Newtonian language). If the universe is a machine, it is still more fundamentally an information-processing system, a system tending toward generating information. The physical world at first appears to be nothing but causation, A causes B causes C, the mechanical world. But more is going on. That becomes so obvious in the second and third big bangs, biology and mind, that we need to detect it already ticking in the first big bang, physics. Molecules in space are mostly inorganic, for instance, but some of them are already prebiotic—such as carbon molecules and even amino acids (especially in the 1969 Murchison meteorite; Kvenvolden et al. 1970). That suggests that mechanical atoms have some possibility of self-assembly into biological molecules.

  But the computer metaphor may equally have its limits, parallel to those we worried about when thinking of the world as pure mathematics. The limits are in two directions. The analogy may be too strong. The physical universe, so far as it is lawlike and predictable, may be only a realm of causation, not one of computing. Or, astronomical natural history may have locations that are too random, too indeterminate, too piecemeal for the whole to form a computer.

  The analogy may be too weak. Even more revealingly, comprehensive natural history may be too emergent, too surprising, too narrative to be computable. Perhaps one can compute from big bang to galaxies to stars to planets. But can one compute across singularities, especially across the three big bangs? One cannot compute from trilobites to elephants to self-conscious humans, even if the DNA sequences that make this evolution possible are digital. There is too much story, history; computers are not good at generating or detecting plots. “Information” is a richer category than “computing.”

  The term “information” is complex and has been used variously in differing sciences. There is information on the surface of the moon, in the sense that a geologist can read some of the history of the moon from the overlay of meteoric impacts there. There is information in the cosmic background radiation, in the sense that cosmologists can backtrack from radiation data and draw conclusions about the early history of the universe. Mathematical information in communication theory, Shannon information, deals with reliable signal transmission, without regard to the significance, the semantic content, of the signal transmitted. Relevant information in addition has both signal reliability and signal significance. Any science, physics included, is a question of information gained.

  But “information” in such use does not refer to any objective knowledge in physical systems, absent human scientists, nor to any analogue or predecessor of “information” of the kind that does evolve later in biological systems. In genetic coding in DNA, the significance or semantic content of such information is critical, as it was not in the minimal, mathematical, physical sense of information. Hubert P. Yokey insists: “Life is guided by information and inorganic processes are not.” “The sequence hypothesis in the genome and in the proteome is a new axiom in molecular biology… unique to biology for there is no trace of a sequence determining the structure of a chemical or of a code between such sequences in the physical and chemical world” (Yokey 2005:8, 183). If we find no trace in the physical and chemical world of that which is the dominant form of order in the biological world, we will be forced to think of the second big bang as a serendipitous singularity—except insofar as the phenomena described in the anthropic principle lead us to wonder about a readiness for life already present in the physical and chemical materials. We are left puzzling about the extent and origins of order.

  Logical Explosion: A Theory of Everything?

  Cosmologists hope to arrive at what, with a mixture of hope and jest, they have since the mid-1980s called “a Theory of Everything” (Barrow 2007; Tegmark 1998). R. B. Laughlin and David Pines explain: “The Theory of Everything is a term for the ultimate theory of the universe—a set of equations capable of describing all phenomena that have been observed, or that ever will be observed” (Laughlin and Pines 2000). Physicists speak of a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that would unify in a single model the various theories of the fundamental interactions and laws in physical nature. This continues their conviction, following Einstein and Wheeler, that the universe is mathematically (if also mysteriously) reasonable, that with mathematics scientists might get to the bottom of things.

  No such theory exists today; but if such a world formula comes, it might explain the explosive big bang. A final theory of this scope would specify our particular universe, accounting for its fundamental characteristics in a detailed and inclusive way. Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, a French mathematician and astronomer, once famously claimed that a sufficiently powerful intellect, well positioned in the early universe, knowing the laws of nature and the positions and velocities of all particles, would know the future, predicting it from the past.

  There are two fundamental theories of physics: quantum field theory and general relativity. Quantum field theory takes quantum mechanics and special relativity into account, a theory of all the particles and forces, but it ignores gravity, which is, of course, a principal force in holding the world together. General relativity is a theory of gravity, but it ignores quantum mechanics. No one knows at present how to reconcile the two; but, if discovered, a theory of everything might do it. The most popular version currently is some form of superstring theory. If physicists find such a theory, then we might be able to claim that the universe is such that it must have produced not only these remarkable results of the first big bang, but equally those of the second and third big bangs—similarly to what is sometimes called a strong anthropic principle.

  However, despite our search for some theory of everything, the big bang itself resulted from no known laws in physics; it too is a singularity. Even if there are multiple universes (see below), there is nothing in physics that predicts this particular exploding universe with its laws, constants, instant inflation, initial conditions, and particular arrow of time. “The simple and absolutely undeniable fact is that the universe did not have to have the particular laws it does have by any logical or mathematical necessity” (Barr 2003:148).

  A first consideration is to keep any such claims about a theory of everything under some logical and empirical control. Four fundamental forces hold the world together: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravitation. What is mainly sought is a theory that would unify these four fundamental forces and would also explain the existence and transformations of different kinds of particles, perhaps also the values of the fundamental constants. Nothing in such a nomothetic (lawlike) theory would explain the idiographic (particular) details of the actual world
in its ongoing dynamism over the last thirteen billion years—why in our solar system Saturn has rings, Jupiter a great Red Spot, and Earth an ocean and tectonic plates. A unifying theory of elemental fundamentals would be too low-level, too basic to explain anything at all about the behavior of complex systems, such as genetic coding in organisms, species in ecosystems, economic forces in capitalist society, or voting patterns in a national election. So Laughlin and Pines, after giving the definition above, back off: “The Theory of Everything is not even remotely a theory of everything,” since it cannot begin to deal with biologically emergent behaviors and complex adaptive systems (Laughlin and Pines 2000). Any physical theory of everything is a thousand orders of magnitude away from a philosophical theory of everything. Any theory of everything only explains fundamental processes in the primordial big bang but does not begin to reach the second or third big bangs.

  Philosophically, even if physics did produce a “theory of everything” that made developments from the big bang to human culture inevitable (singularities included), that would be even more remarkable and further support the argument that mind is built in, with, and under the process.

  In a pivotal early paper investigating the anthropic principle, Bernard J. Carr and Martin J. Rees concluded:

  The possibility of life as we know it evolving in the universe depends on the value of a few basic physical phenomena—and is in some respects remarkably sensitive to their numerical values…. One day, we may have a more physical explanation for some of the relationships discussed here that now seem genuine coincidences…. However, even if all apparently anthropic coincidences could be explained in this way, it would still be remarkable that the relationships dictated by physical theory happened also to be those propitious for life. (Carr and Rees 1979:612)