Chris Knight, the finest fictional physicist of our time, once said
“All science. No Philosophy. Wrong.” It’s true that an understanding
of existence outside of equations is vital for scientists, both in
terms of enjoying life and avoiding things like Agent Orange, but
beware careless combination of the two. A science/philosophy mixture
can lead to metaphysical claims that the laws of physics are nothing
but local zoning ordinances, as demonstrated by Lee Smolin.
Smolin is author of “the fecund universes theory” of cosmology which
suggests that the rules of biology apply on the grandest scales, and is
often referred to as “cosmological natural selection”. Smolin
summarized the idea in his book, The Life of the Cosmos.
The
theory surmises that a collapsing black hole causes the emergence of a
new universe on the “other side”, whose fundamental constant parameters
(speed of light, Planck length and so forth) may differ slightly from
those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe
therefore gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes.
The
Perimeter Institute theoretical physicist got together with philosopher
Roberto Unger and arrived at three radically new conclusions. The first
is that there is only one universe - the idea of a multiverse might be
awesome science fiction, and essential to the slightly less credible
string theory, but there’s no reason to base your worldview on worlds
where the Nazis won or the universal constant of gravitation has a
different value.
The second idea is that time is real. Remember
when you read that first sentence? Okay, you agree with us - this is
one of those discussions that takes place at a level regular humans
don’t argue at. Some say that all of existence is a crystal of reality
that we happen to move through, Dr Manhattan style, which is
wonderfully imaginative but displays incredible cognitive
disconnection. Even speaking the words aloud demonstrates the passage
of time, and most arguments beyond that depend on bringing the debate
to an extremely specific linguistic field of hyper-definitions that the
opponent hasn’t wasted their life learning, and will therefore “lose”
at. Luckily for us, Lee agrees that time actually exists and we can
move on to the real problem: the idea of physics as local rules.
His
argument that physics can change over time and space is apparently
based on an extremely specific strawman argument which depends on
separating experimental procedure into initial conditions and laws. He
says you can only arrive at laws by examining a large “configuration
space” of possible setups. In the lab you can set up a large number of
tests, in cosmology you can look at a wide variety of situations, so in
both you can arrive at laws. His argument is that since you can’t
actually rearrange the stars themselves to set up different initial
conditions in each place, you can’t make conclusions about the physical
laws there. He uses many, many more words to describe this idea.
It’s
all very intellectually stimulating, but mainly demonstrates the
difference between metaphysics and useful physics. If you’re going to
claim that general relativity stops working beyond some sort of
interstate-of-existence line, the burden of proof is on you to show
that’s the case - and strawman arguments on the nature of
experimentation aren’t going to cut it. You can say that the plank
constant is a variable over time and space, but when we want to build
an bridge or a fusion reactor we’re going to stick with our silly,
provincial, non-new-book-publishing “actual physics.” And that’s the
difference.
Posted by Luke McKinney
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