.--Jill Neimark & Stacey E. Ake
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Subject: A Talk With Lee Smolin On The Nature and Future of The Universe
From: Lee Smolin via Jill Neimark
Email: <Lee@Qgravity.org>
Q: Why do you think so many physicists are interested in the anthropic
principle of the universe right now-the idea that the universe is ideally
suited to life?
A: There's a good reason and two bad reasons. The good reason is that
there are puzzles about why the universe is the way it is, and why the
initial conditions and choices and laws of physics are very special. And
it's good that people are interested in those puzzles. The anthropic
principle promises to answer those puzzles. The two bad reasons are that,
one: it doesn't really answer those puzzles, it just gives people the
impression they've been answered.
Q: How does it give that false impression?
A: There are different versions, and they do so in different ways. One
form assumes there is an intelligent creator who is displaced or hidden.
And the other version suggests there are an enormous number of universes,
maybe infinite, each created with different initial conditions and different
laws and then somewhere in there by probability there is a universe that
looks like ours, simply because it's possible. That's not an explanation.
That's like explaining biology by saying there is a soup of DNA and every
possible combination of DNA came together and one of them caused a living
being. That's not how biology works, and I don't believe that's how the
universe works either.
Q: What's the other reason you feel the anthropic principle is flawed?
A: People are still looking for a role for God as creator of universe, and
these people were forced to beat a tactical retreat from God as the direct
creator of human beings because of Darwin. So they're happy to believe
there's a big bang which gives a role for a creator. If the big bang is
true, the universe was created at a finite time, and that idea allows a
return to the kind of mythology in which the universe was created by an
intelligent creator.
Q: You're not a fan of the big bang theory.
A: I personally think the big bang is a crazy idea. What we know is that
around 14 billion years ago the universe was much denser and hotter, at
least as much as the center of a star. What happened before that? One
possibility is that the universe simply expanded from a state of infinite
density and temperature, however it may also be that the expansion was the
result of some event that took place, and therefore the Big Bang is not the
beginning of time.
Q: What about a bunch of bangs?
A: People have proposed that the Big Bang followed the collapse of a
previous universe. Another idea is that the Big Bang is the result of the
collapse of a small region of another universe, which would have led to the
formation of a black hole.
Q: Which idea do you prefer?
A: I personally think it's very unlikely that the Big Bang was the first
moment of time. I'm very interested in the question, therefore, of what was
before the Big Bang.
Q: So there aren't many universes with different properties?
A: I don't deeply believe that.
Q: What do you deeply believe?
A: I deeply believe that the world is a network of relationships, I deeply
believe in causality, that the past causes the future, the past has already
happened and the future has not, I deeply believe that time and causality
are real. I believe that there is a universe which exists apart from
people's perceptions of it, but I think that a description of that universe
from the stance of outside observer is impossible. Therefore our description
has to somehow incorporate all possible views from all possible observers.
Q: How do we do that?
A: There's been a development in mathematics and theoretical physics which
shows us how to do that. In math it's called topos theory, it's been
applied to physics to give this kind of surrealistic or multi-observer
formulation of quantum theory. A few people who are working on that are
Chris Isham and Jeremy Butterfield and Fotini Markopoulou.
Q: What do you think of recent work in physics showing that certain
properties of the universe may be evolving?
A: Evolving is the wrong word to use. It may be that some things we think
of as constants in physics, like the fine structure constant, might be
changing slowly on a cosmological time scale. The fine structure constant is
a ratio formed out of three things: the electric charge of an electron,
Planck's constant, and the speed of light. Evidence was recently published
that was not very strong, but nonetheless was not trivial, showing that the
fine structure might be slowly changing.
Q: What would that mean for our concept of the universe?
A: If its true its fantastically important, because in standard physical
theory these numbers are fixed. The idea that constants of nature might
actually not be constant is an old idea, I believe Dirac proposed it in
1930s. And this work was preceded by other work by Joao Maguejo and Andy
Albrecht proposing that the speed of light might have been much larger at
very early times of universe when it was very hot. If that were true, it
would account for the same things that the inflation theory of the universe
does.
If the speed of light or other fundamental constants can change a lot during
the extreme conditions at very early times, it might be that there would be
small changes during the present universe. What people have observed is
evidence for such small changes. But it's still the early days. In a few
years we'll know whether it was just an artifact of pushing the experiment
to the edge, or whether it's a real effect.
Q: So there are any constants? Any fixed, platonic properties?
A: I'm very attracted by the idea that there are many fewer than we think,
that's not the same as saying there are none.
Q: Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg recently wrote an essay
for the New York Review of Books called "The Future of Science, and the
Universe." In it he talks about how eventually the universe will either
freeze or burn up. Do you agree?
Q: Some cosmologists are interested in what they call the far future of the
universe. I was at conference sponsored by the Templeton organization at
the Vatican about that. My sense is that it's a sort of interesting game
but we don't know enough to play it reliably yet. We don't know what 95% of
the universe is made of, we don't know about dark matter, or the
cosmological constant. And the constitution of the dark matter and dark
energy strongly effect the far future of universe. As Brian Eno once said:
"Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future."
Q: Weinberg also suggests we'll discover a few fundamental principles, and
they will be fragile-such that, were they to shift only a little, they
wouldn't function. Do you agree with that?
A: He means brittle rather than fragile: if it changes a little, it breaks.
I think it would be nice if there were a few fundamental principles. Some of
us are working on a so-called M theory, where all the versions of string
theory are tied together in a single theory. I think that's a very
interesting conjecture, but it's hard to tell if it's true or not. A great
many people believe in the existence of M theory but very few people are
actually working on its ultimate formulation.
Q: Is it too hard?
A: No, but it requires a change of mindset, from thinking in terms of
objects moving against fixed backgrounds of space and time, to a relational
picture of the universe.
Q: The relational nature of the universe has been your passion for a long
time.
A: Not just my passion. The debate about whether space and time are
absolute or relational goes back to the Greeks. Leibniz in particular
advocated the relational view. Leibniz and a follower of Newton called
Clark debated whether it made sense to ask the question, "Would the universe
be any different if it were three feet to the left?" Clark said God
perceives in an absolute sense where everything is and the location of
everything has absolute meaning with respect to this fixed, absolute space
so it does make sense to say the universe is here rather than 3 feet to the
left. Leibniz argued that space is nothing but an aspect of relationships
between things and nothing in the universe would change if it were three
feet to the left, so the question itself was nonsensical. General
relativity is in fact a realization of the relational view. In quantum
gravity we had to adopt the relational point of view in order to get
sensible answers out of our theory.
Q: But we don't experience things that way in real life.
A: Actually we do. We notice where something is with respect to something
else.
Q: That's true, but we think of things as fixed against a fixed background.
A: That's a habit of thought but it's incorrect.
Q: Do you experience the world relationally?
A: I've been thinking about this stuff for so long it's just natural for me
to think about the world that way.
Q: It kind of shifts your sense of figure and ground, doesn't it?
A: Precisely. And it's a very important shifting not just for physics but
many areas. Darwinian biology is an example of relational thinking, going
from an idea of absolute categories that different biological species
represented, to the idea that species are a result of evolution within a
network of relationships. You see it in social theory, explicitly in the
writings of Harvard legal theorist Roberto Unger. He asks: do you see law
as reflecting absolute principles of justice which are true eternally and
which come from God or human nature or some completely absolute framework?
Or do you see law as the result of an historical process by which different
groups with different points of view interact to define the rules of
society? You see it in art. The old fashioned idea of perspective is that
a painting shows things in relation to some absolute geometry, that things
are fixed in space, which then gave way to abstract art, where what's
happening on canvas just has to do with relationships. And look at the use
of space in modern dance as opposed to 19th century ballet.
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