God, Man, and Physics
BERLINSKI, DAVID
God Man and Physics Does the universe aim at human life? BY DAVID BERLINSKI God's existence is not required by the premises of quantum mechanics or general relativity, the great theories of...
...It is hardly a posture calculated to set the blood racing...
...Mathematical physics currently trades in four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces governing the nucleus and radioactive decay...
...The astronomer Fred Hoyle is a case in point, his atheism in the end corrected by his pleased astonishment at his own existence...
...instead of being chuckled over and dismissed by a handful of specialists, the paper that he wrote in 1974 was widely read, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson, Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, Steven Weinberg, Robert Jas-trow, and John Gribbin all contributing to the general chatter...
...If nothing else, natural theology would seem to be a trickier business than physicists may have imagined...
...There is a God, a figure at once omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, and necessary...
...The revival of natural theology in the past twenty-five years has enabled that pendulum to achieve an unexpected amplitude, its tip moving beyond atheism and the agnostic straddle to something like religious awe, if not religious faith...
...When biologists speculate on the origins of life, they have in mind a scenario in which various chemicals slosh around randomly in some clearly defined physical medium...
...The wheel is spun...
...Let us leave the details to those who cherish them...
...The Greeks, on the other hand, could prove what the Egyptians could only calculate...
...It is also entirely unpersuasive...
...And Corey is certain, moreover, that he quite knows His motives...
...Were God to exist, Thomas Nagel remarked, he would not only be surprised, but disappointed...
...But if arbitrary, they are also crucial...
...His message is simple...
...The evidence is all around us...
...The cumulative effect of this fine tuning," Corey argues, "is that, against all the odds, carbon was able to be manufactured in sufficient quantities inside stellar interiors to make our lives possible...
...The agnostic straddle...
...What brings about the happy circumstance that the laws making this possible are precisely the laws making it real...
...And thereafter a speculative story became a credible secular myth...
...Even the most ardent village atheist became uneasily aware that Big Bang cosmology and the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis shared a family resemblance too obvious profitably to be denied...
...when Robert Dicke confirmed the significance of their observation, competing steady-state theories of creation descended at once into desuetude...
...The laws of a final theory determine its parameters...
...its logical structure determines its laws...
...Newton's law of gravitational attraction provides an account of this tendency in terms of mass and distance (or heft and separation...
...It is their argument that does not inspire confidence...
...He thus assigned to what he called a "Supercalculating Intellect" powers that resembled his own...
...Thereafter, their excitement diminished, if only because the idea that the universe was expanding suggested inexorably that it was expanding from an origin of some sort, a big bang, as the astronomer Fred Hoyle sniffed contemptuously...
...The fact remains that the intellectual's pendulum has swung along rather a tight little arc for much of the twentieth century: atheism, the agnostic straddle, atheism, the agnostic straddle...
...or too gaseous or otherwise too flaccid to sustain life...
...When the metaphors are squeezed dry, what more is at issue beyond the observation that life is a contingent affair...
...They both suppose that something like an imaginary lottery (or roulette wheel) governs the distribution of values to the nuclear resonance levels of beryllium or helium...
...Whatever the model, it corresponds to no plausible physical mechanism...
...The number appears as a free parameter in their theories, something given by experience and experiment...
...The constants of mathematical physics may make possible the existence of life, but the laws of mathematical physics make possible the existence of matter...
...What does the sloshing with respect to nuclear resonance...
...For all we know, the Deity's concern may have lain with the pleasurable intricacies of nucleosynthesis, the emergence of life proving, like so many other things, an inadvertent consequence of his tinkering...
...The theory of nucleosynthesis is, indeed, partly his creation...
...Falling from a great height, an astrophysicist no less than an airplane accelerates toward the center of the earth...
...And these are circumstances that, if true, plainly require an explanation...
...What then is left of the anthropic claim that the fundamental constants have the value that they do despite "all odds...
...Questions once asked about the fundamental constants of mathematical physics are bound to reappear as questions about the nature of its laws...
...They have, those laws, an overwhelmingly specific character...
...The process is unstable because beryllium intermediates are short-lived...
...It is entirely less clear that they are necessary as well...
...Hoyle had himself discovered the scenario that made carbon synthesis possible...
...If possible, unification of these forces and theories is desirable...
...Structural features...
...This is a declaration, to be sure, that suggests far more than it asserts...
...But perhaps that is where we should be left: in the dark, tortured by confusing hints, intimations of immortality, and a sense that, dear God, we really do not yet understand...
...As it happens, the gravamen of Corey's argument lies less with what the Deity may have had in mind and more with the obstacles He presumably needed to overcome...
...It is their argument that does not inspire confidence...
...The odds now reflect the pattern familiar in any probabilistic process—one specified outcome weighed against all the rest...
...Any number of philosophers have embraced their platform, often clambering onto it by brute force...
...Two helium atoms fuse to form a beryllium intermediate, which then fuses again with another helium atom to form carbon...
...Hoyle then discovered a second nuclear resonance, this one acting between beryllium and helium, and finely tuned as well...
...The eruption of Mount Vesuvius took place in space and time...
...And the obvious question that follows: Just how do we know this...
...In 1953 Edwin Salpeter discovered that the resonance between helium and intermediate beryllium atoms, like the relation between an opera singer and the glass she shatters, is precisely tuned to facilitate beryllium production...
...agnosticism dispiriting—evidence, perhaps, of their remarkable capacity for intellectual ingratitude...
...The point is familiar...
...Without carbon, no life...
...No further transcendental inference is required, if only because that final theory explains itself...
...Permit...
...The world in which we find ourselves is one in which galaxies wink and matter fills the cup of creation...
...Corey and Hoyle make the argument that they are necessary because, if changed slightly, nucleosynthesis would stop...
...In the early 1970s Jacques Monod and Steven Weinberg thus declared themselves in favor of atheism, each man eager to communicate his discovery that the universe is without plan or purpose...
...How very embarrassing that this should have been overlooked...
...God Man and Physics Does the universe aim at human life...
...This is not a thesis in dispute...
...In order to gain traction on the real world, the law requires a fixed constant, a number that remains unchanged as mass and distance vary...
...Or with respect to anything else...
...We do not know the answers, but what is worse, we have no clear idea—no idea whatso-ever—of how they might be answered...
...His most recent book is Newton's Gift (Free Press...
...For that matter, what sense does it make to invoke the Deity's long term goals, when it is His existence that is at issue...
...If this proves so, the anthropic coincidences will lose their power to vex and confound...
...That is the heart of the matter: against all the odds...
...Current dogma suggests that many of the constants of mathematical physics were fixed from the first, and so constitute a part of the initial conditions of the Big Bang...
...The Standard Model of particle physics contains a great many numerical slots that must be filled in by hand...
...Other theories may be possible, some governing imaginary worlds in which light alone exists, others worlds in which there is nothing whatsoever...
...Corey is, on the other hand, quite certain that Hoyle's Supercalculating Intellect is, in fact, a transcendental deity—the Deity, to afford Him a promotion in punctuation...
...There is nothing amiss in this...
...And without specific nuclear resonance levels, no carbon...
...The universe, cosmolo-gists affirmed, erupted into existence fifteen billion years ago...
...Details were available, some going back to the first three minutes of creation...
...Nonetheless, the creation of a complete and consistent physical theory will not put an end to revived natural theology...
...It is, in fact, the answer Hoyle provides as well...
...No one would today think to ask why the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle sum to precisely one hundred and eighty degrees...
...All this leaves us where we so often find ourselves...
...Edwin Hub-ble's discovery that the universe seemed to be expanding in every direction electrified the community of cosmologists in the late 1920s, and cos-mologists were again electrified when it became clear that these facts followed from Einstein's general theory of relativity...
...Such is Newton's universal gravitational constant...
...They are what they are...
...And this is precisely what we do not know...
...The grand hope of modern mathematical physicists is that something similar will happen in modern mathematical physics...
...In The God Hypothesis: Discovering Design in our "Just Right" Goldilocks Universe, Michael A. Corey is concerned to convey their news without worrying overmuch about the details...
...Nature, he said in a remark widely quoted, seems to be "a put-up job...
...It follows that the universe came into existence from nothing whatsoever, and for no good reason that anyone could discern, least of all cosmologists...
...If nuclear resonance levels are, in fact, unique, their emergence on the scene would have the satisfying aspect of a miracle...
...Still, it often happens that commonplace observations, when sharpened, prompt questions that they had long concealed...
...Corey does not address the question specifically, but he offers an answer nonetheless...
...Such a theory, thoughtful physicists imagine, might serve to show that the anthropic coincidences are an illusion in that they are not coincidences at all...
...The model to which they appeal may be an imaginary lottery, roulette wheel, or even a flipped coin, but imaginary is the governing word...
...Mindful, perhaps, of the ancient wisdom that God alone knows who God is, he did not go further...
...Thereafter, natural theology, long thought dead of inanition, began appearing at any number of colloquia in mathematical physics, often welcomed by the same physicists who had recently been heard reading its funeral obsequies aloud...
...In 1963 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson inadvertently noticed the background microwave radiation predicted by Big Bang cosmology...
...Were they to vary from the values that they have, this happy universe—such is the claim—would be too small or too large Corey and Hoyle may well be right in their conclusions about the universe...
...Egyptian engineers working under the pharaohs knew that the angles of a triangle sum to more or less one hundred and eighty degrees...
...Like the rest of us, physicists calculate the odds when they cannot calculate anything better...
...But if credible, the myth was also incomplete...
...Corey and Hoyle may well be right in their conclusions...
...This is true, but inconclusive...
...what is notable is that any of them took the trail at all...
...In general relativity and quantum mechanics, it contains two great but incompatible theories...
...It is by no means obvious...
...Science has established his existence...
...Revived natural theology has staked its claims on probability...
...Other laws, under which not much exists, are at least imaginable...
...There are many comparable constants throughout mathematical physics, and they appear to have no very obvious mathematical properties...
...This is very elegant...
...The trouble is not merely a matter of the logical niceties...
...In the beginning there was no time, no place, no lottery at all...
...Inferences now have a tendency to go off like a string of firecrackers, some of them wet...
...A theory that is logically isolated is not necessarily a theory that is logically unique...
...And not only unification, but unification in the form of a complete and consistent theoretical structure...
...Corey does not demur...
...It has been largely the consolidation of theoretical cosmology that has powered the upward swing...
...What explanation can mathematical physics itself provide for the fact that the laws of nature are arranged as they are and that they have the form that they do...
...Living systems are based on carbon, he observed, and carbon is formed within stars by a process of nucleosynthesis...
...This is clearly an embarrassment of riches...
...The old familiar circle...
...Overall, it is safe to say"—Corey is speaking, Hoyle nodding—"that given the utter precision displayed by these nuclear resonances with respect to the synthesis of carbon, not even one of them could have been slightly different without destroying their precious carbon yield...
...Well and good...
...And yet there he was, Hoyle affirmed, carbon based to the core...
...The laws of physics draw a connection between the nature of certain material objects and their behavior...
...it is a conclusion that he endorses...
...This is never counted as a satisfaction, but a more powerful physical theory might show how those numerical slots are naturally filled, their particular values determined ultimately by the theory's fundamental principles...
...BY DAVID BERLINSKI God's existence is not required by the premises of quantum mechanics or general relativity, the great theories of twentieth-century physics —but then again, it is not contravened by their conclusions either...
...Steven Weinberg has suggested that a final theory must be logically isolated in the sense that any perturbation of its essential features would destroy the theory's coherence...
...We are confronted with certain open questions...
...The tactic is clear enough...
...Carter was a capable physicist...
...A great many ordinary men and women have found both atheism and A writer in Paris, David Berlinski is the author of A Tour of the Calculus and The Advent of the Algorithm...
...The Deity, in setting nuclear resonance levels, undertook his affairs "in order to create carbon based life forms...
...Mountain peaks are isolated but not unique...
...It is hardly an unreasonable question...
...The nuclear resonance levels specified by Hoyle are sufficient for the production of carbon...
...And thereafter the right resonance levels appear...
...It is a miracle, of course, whose luster is apt to dim considerably if other nuclear resonance levels might have done the job and thus won the lottery...
...At the very heart of revived natural theology are what the physicist Brandon Carter called "anthropic coincidences...
...Certain structural features of the universe, Carter argued, seemed finally tuned to permit the emergence of life...
...Finely tuned...
...The question is closed because the answer is necessary...
...What else can we do but watch and wait...
...Very few physicists took the inferential trail to its conclusion in faith...
...the Big Bang marks the spot at which time and space taper to a singularity and then vanish altogether...
...Did He indeed...
...The situation is very different in molecular biology, which is one reason criticism of neo-Darwinism very often has biting power...
...Logical isolation is by no means a clear concept, and it is one of the ironies of modern mathematical physics that the logical properties of the great physical theories are no less mysterious than the physical properties of the universe they are meant to explain...
...But the metaphoric assimilation of the Big Bang to the general run of eruptions conveyed an entirely misleading sense of similarity...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 22
