Three (or four?) imperfect theories

"The great theories of 20th century physics -- relativity, quantum theory, and the Standard Model [of subatomic particles] -- represent the highest achievements of physical science. They have beautiful mathematical expressions that result in precise predictions for experiments, which have been confirmed in many cases to great accuracy. And yet I have just argued that nothing along the lines of these theories can serve as a fundamental theory. This is an audacious claim in the light of their success."

Another quote from the Lee Smolin book. I like the audacity.

In fact, if I understand him at all, Smolin has delivered me from an intellectual cul de sac in which I have been stuck. I've been unable to accept the Big Bang as an absolute cosmic beginning, given the huge something-from-nothing stumbling block. So I have said -- in this blog and elsewhere -- that I believe some patching up of the old Steady State theory will again have its innings. But the advocates of a Quasi Steady State with credentials are so few and far between I felt I was isolating myself from important developments.

The Big Bang theory is not one of the "big three" listed in the Smolin quote above. Still, it is critical to his discussion of them all. And relativity illuminates the idea of a "singularity" at the heart of the Big Bang theory, an infinitesimal point out of which everything may have come.

One venerable way of getting around the something-from-nothing quandary is to imagine the Big Bang as just half of a cyclical picture, matched by a Big Bounce on the other side of things. Then we get a cycle that itself can be considered "steady" over time. Unfortunately, that picture too has long been out of fashion with physicists at Smolin's level.

His own cosmological picture though is this: a black hole is a womb. At the center of every black hole is a singularity, and on the other temporal side of that singularity - another universe. This universe might in fact die the sort of death often imagined for it, of unlimited expansion into nothingness, but the meta-universe into which it was born will go on, and always has.

Nothing comes from nothing, though everything passes through the condition described as a singularity, both entering (as a Black Hole) and exiting again as a Big Bang.

This idea fits into an even broader notion: Cosmological Natural Selection. (CNS) Each universe has its own set of laws. Some very different from those with which we are familiar, others only slightly different, Some universes will expand or collapse too quickly and fail either way. Perhaps, we might imagine, only a few will last long enough to generate black holes and thus other universes. But wait ... can we consistently imagine that?

Consider, only those universes with laws that allow them to last long enough to create new black holes will create new universes. This is CNS -- because it seems to follow that most universes in the meta-universe must have a genetic package, a set of laws and initial conditions, that allows for the creation of black holes.

In contrast to the 'anthropic' theorists, Smolin isn't explaining laws we find on the hypothesis that they were the set that made possible the development of observers such as ourselves. They were and are the set that make possible the generation of more black holes and more universes -- a set of laws that has the side effect of making possible observers such as us.

This notion of CNS is the fundamental view that will in time, Smolin is confident, be seen as providing a founding for the successes of each of the three with which he started, and a correction to the difficulties he sees in each.

I have no real business having an opinion but I like this theory.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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