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The Physical Constants as Biosignature
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The Physical Constants as Biosignature
An anthropic retrodiction of the Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis
Two recent discoveries have imparted a renewed sense of urgency to investigations of the anthropic qualities of our cosmos: the value of dark energy density is exceedingly small but not quite zero; and the number of different solutions permitted by M-theory is, in Susskind's words, "astronomical, measured not in millions or billions but in googles or googleplexes."
Abstract
Goal 7 of the NASA Astrobiology Roadmap states: "Determine how
to recognize signatures of life on other worlds and on early Earth.
Identify biosignatures that can reveal and characterize past or
present life in ancient samples from Earth, extraterrestrial samples
measured in situ, samples returned to Earth, remotely measured
planetary atmospheres and surfaces, and other cosmic phenomena."
The cryptic reference to "other cosmic phenomena" would appear
to be broad enough to include the possible identification of biosignatures
embedded in the dimensionless constants of physics. The existence
of such a set of biosignatures—a life-friendly suite of physical
constants—is a retrodiction of the Selfish Biocosm (SB) hypothesis.
This hypothesis offers an alternative to the weak anthropic explanation
of our indisputably life-friendly cosmos favored by (1) an emerging
alliance of M-theory-inspired cosmologists and advocates of eternal
inflation like Linde and Weinberg, and (2) supporters of the quantum
theory-inspired sum-over-histories cosmological model offered
by Hartle and Hawking. According to the SB hypothesis, the laws
and constants of physics function as the cosmic equivalent of
DNA, guiding a cosmologically extended evolutionary process and
providing a blueprint for the replication of new life-friendly
progeny universes.
Introduction
The notion that we inhabit a universe whose laws and physical
constants are fine-tuned in such a way as to make it hospitable
to carbon-based life is an old idea (Gardner, 2003). The so-called
"anthropic" principle comes in at least four principal versions
(Barrow and Tipler, 1988) that represent fundamentally different
ontological perspectives. For instance, the "weak anthropic principle"
is merely a tautological statement that since we happen to inhabit
this particular cosmos it must perforce by life-friendly or else
we would not be here to observe it. As Vilenkin put it recently
(Vilenkin, 2004), "the ‘anthropic' principle, as stated above,
hardly deserves to be called a principle: it is trivially true."
By contrast, the "participatory anthropic principle" articulated
by Wheeler and dubbed "it from bit" (Wheeler, 1996) is a radical
extrapolation from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics
and a profoundly counterintuitive assertion that the very act of
observing the universe summons it into existence.
All anthropic cosmological interpretations share a common theme:
a recognition that key constants of physics (as well as other physical
aspects of our cosmos such as its dimensionality) appear to exhibit
a mysterious fine-tuning that optimizes their collective bio-friendliness.
Rees noted (Rees, 2000) that virtually every aspect of the evolution
of the universe—from the birth of galaxies to the origin of
life on Earth—is sensitively dependent on the precise values
of seemingly arbitrary constants of nature like the strength of
gravity, the number of extended spatial dimensions in our universe
(three of the ten posited by M-theory), and the initial expansion
speed of the cosmos following the Big Bang. If any of these physical
constants had been even slightly different, life as we know it would
have been impossible:
The [cosmological] picture that emerges—a map in
time as well as in space—is not what most of us expected. It
offers a new perspective on a how a single "genesis event" created
billions of galaxies, black holes, stars and planets, and how atoms
have been assembled—here on Earth, and perhaps on other worlds—into
living beings intricate enough to ponder their origins. There are
deep connections between stars and atoms, between the cosmos and
the microworld.... Our emergence and survival depend on very special
"tuning" of the cosmos—a cosmos that may be even vaster than
the universe that we can actually see.
As stated recently by Smolin (Smolin, 2004), the challenge is
to provide a genuinely scientific explanation for what he terms
the "anthropic observation":
The anthropic observation: Our universe is much more
complex than most universes with the same laws but different values
of the parameters of those laws. In particular, it has a complex
astrophysics, including galaxies and long lived stars, and a complex
chemistry, including carbon chemistry. These necessary conditions
for life are present in our universe as a consequence of the complexity
which is made possible by the special values of the parameters.
There is good evidence that the anthropic observation is true.
Why it is true is a puzzle that science must solve.
It is a daunting puzzle indeed. The strangely (and apparently
arbitrarily) biophilic quality of the physical laws and constants
poses, in Greene's view, the deepest question in all of science
(Greene, 2004). In the words of Davies (Gardner, 2003), it represents
"the biggest of the Big Questions: why is the universe bio-friendly?"
Modern statements of the cosmological anthropic principle date
from the publication of a landmark book by Henderson in 1913 entitled
The Fitness of the Environment (Henderson, 1913). Henderson's
book was an extended reflection on the curious fact that there are
particular substances present in the environment—preeminently
water—whose peculiar qualities rendered the environment almost
preternaturally suitable for the origin, maintenance, and evolution
of organic life. Indeed, the strangely life-friendly qualities of
these materials led Henderson to the view that "we were obliged
to regard this collocation of properties in some intelligible sense
a preparation for the process of planetary evolution.... Therefore
the properties of the elements must for the present be regarded
as possessing a teleological character."
Thoroughly modern in outlook, Henderson dismissed this apparent
evidence that inanimate nature exhibited a teleological character
as indicative of divine design or purpose. Indeed, he rejected the
notion that nature's seemingly teleological quality was in any way
inconsistent with Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection.
On the contrary, he viewed the bio-friendly character of the inanimate
natural environment as essential to the optimal operation of the
evolutionary forces in the biosphere. Absent the substrate of a
superbly "fit" inanimate environment, Henderson contended, Darwinian
evolution could never have achieved what it has in terms of species
multiplication and diversification.
The mystery of why the physical qualities of the inanimate
universe happened to be so oddly conducive to life and biological
evolution remained just that for Henderson—an impenetrable
mystery. The best he could do to solve the puzzle was to speculate
that the laws of chemistry were somehow fine-tuned in advance by
some unknown cosmic evolutionary mechanism to meet the future needs
of a living biosphere:
The properties of matter and the course of cosmic evolution are
now seen to be intimately related to the structure of the living
being and to its activities; they become, therefore, far more
important in biology than has previously been suspected. For the
whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and
the biologist may now rightly regard the Universe in its very
essence as biocentric.
Henderson's iconoclastic vision was far ahead of its time. His
potentially revolutionary book was largely ignored by his contemporaries
or dismissed as a mere tautology. Of course there should
be a close match-up between the physical requirements of life and
the physical world that life inhabits, contemporary skeptics pointed
out, since life evolved to survive the very challenges presented
by that pre-organic world and to take advantage of the biochemical
opportunities it offered.
While lacking broad influence at the time, Henderson's pioneering
vision proved to be the precursor to modern formulations of the
cosmological anthropic principle. One of the first such formulations
was offered by British astronomer Fred Hoyle. A storied chapter
in the history of the principle is the oft-told tale of Hoyle's
prediction of the details of the triple-alpha process (Mitton 2005).
This prediction, which seems to qualify as the first falsifiable
implication to flow from an anthropic hypothesis, involves the details
of the process by which the element carbon (widely viewed as the
essential element of abiotic precursor polymers capable of autocatalyzing
the emergence of living entities) emerges through stellar nucleosynthesis.
As noted by Livio (Livio, 2003):
Carbon features in most anthropic arguments. In particular, it
is often argued that the existence of an excited state of the
carbon nucleus is a manifestation of fine-tuning of the constants
of nature that allowed for the appearance of carbon-based life.
Carbon is formed through the triple-alpha process in two steps.
In the first, two alpha particles form an unstable (lifetime ~10-16s)8Be.
In the second, a third alpha particle is captured, via 8Be(α,γ)12C.
Hoyle argued than in order for the 3α reaction to proceed
at a rate sufficient to produce the observed cosmic carbon, a
resonant level must exist in 12C, a few hundred keV
about the 8Be+4He threshold. Such a level
was indeed found experimentally.
Other chapters in the modern history of the anthropic principle
are treated comprehensively by Barrow and Tipler (Barrow and Tipler,
1988) and will not be revisited here.
The New Urgency of Anthropic Investigation
Two recent developments have imparted a renewed sense of urgency
to investigations of the anthropic qualities of our cosmos. The
first is the discovery that the value of dark energy density is
exceedingly small but not quite zero—an apparent happenstance,
unpredictable from first principles, with profound implications
for the bio-friendly quality of our universe. As noted recently
by Goldsmith (Goldsmith, 2004):
A relatively straightforward calculation [based on established
principles of theoretical physics] does yield a theoretical value
for the cosmological constant, but that value is greater than
the measured one by a factor of about 10120—probably
the largest discrepancy between theory and observation science
has ever had to bear.
If the cosmological constant had a smaller value than that suggested
by recent observations, it would cause no trouble (just as one
would expect, remembering the happy days when the constant was
thought to be zero). But if the constant were a few times larger
than it is now, the universe would have expanded so rapidly that
galaxies could not have endured for the billions of years necessary
to bring forth complex forms of life.
The second development is the realization that M-theory—arguably
the most promising contemporary candidate for a theory capable of
yielding a deep synthesis of relativity and quantum physics—permits,
in Bjorken's phrase (Bjorken, 2004), "a variety of string vacuua,
with different standard-model properties."
M-theorists had initially hoped that their new paradigm would
be "brittle" in the sense of yielding a single mathematically unavoidable
solution that uniquely explained the seemingly arbitrary parameters
of the Standard Model. As Susskind has put it (Susskind, 2003):
The world-view shared by most physicists is that the laws of
nature are uniquely described by some special action principle
that completely determines the vacuum, the spectrum of elementary
particles, the forces and the symmetries. Experience with quantum
electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics suggests a world with
a small number of parameters and a unique ground state. For the
most part, string theorists bought into this paradigm. At first
it was hoped that string theory would be unique and explain the
various parameters that quantum field theory left unexplained.
This hope has been dashed by the recent discovery that the number
of different solutions permitted by M-theory (which correspond to
different values of Standard Model parameters) is, in Susskind's
words, "astronomical, measured not in millions or billions but in
googles or googleplexes." This development seems to deprive our
most promising new theory of fundamental physics of the power to
uniquely predict the emergence of anything remotely resembling our
universe. As Susskind puts it, the picture of the universe that
is emerging from the deep mathematical recesses of M-theory is not
an "elegant universe" but rather a Rube Goldberg device, cobbled
together by some unknown process in a supremely improbable manner
that just happens to render the whole ensemble fit for life. In
the words of University of California theoretical physicist Steve
Giddings, "No longer can we follow the dream of discovering the
unique equations that predict everything we see, and writing them
on a single page. Predicting the constants of nature becomes a messy
environmental problem. It has the complications of biology."[1]
Two Contemporary Restatements of the Weak Anthropic Principle:
Eternal Inflation Plus M-Theory and Many-Worlds Quantum Cosmology
There have been two principal approaches to the task of enlisting
the weak anthropic principle to explain the mysteriously small (and
thus bio-friendly) value of the density of dark energy and the apparent
happenstance by which our bio-friendly universe was selected from
the enormously large "landscape" of possible solutions permitted
by M-theory, only a tiny fraction of which correspond to anything
resembling the Standard Model prevalent in our cosmos.
Eternal Inflation Meets M-Theory
The first approach, favored by Susskind (Susskind, 2003). Linde
(Linde, 2002), Weinberg (Weinberg, 1999), and Vilenkin (Vilenkin,
2004) among others, overlays the model of eternal inflation with
the key assumption that M-theory-permitted solutions (corresponding
to different values of Standard Model parameters) and dark energy
density values will vary randomly from bubble universe to bubble
universe within an eternally expanding ensemble variously termed
a multiverse or a meta-univers. Generating a life-friendly cosmos
is simply a matter of randomly reshuffling the set of permissible
parameters and values a sufficient number of times until a particular
Big Bang yields, against odds of perhaps a googleplex-to-one, a
permutation that just happens to possess the right mix of Standard
Model parameters to be bio-friendly.
Sum-Over-Histories Quantum Cosmological Model
The second approach invokes a quantum theory-derived sum-over-histories
cosmological model inspired by Everett's "many worlds" interpretation
of quantum physics. This approach, which has been prominently embraced
by Hawking (Hawking and Hertog, 2002), was summarized as follows
by Hogan (Hogan, 2004):
In the original formulation of quantum mechanics, it was said
that an observation collapsed a wavefunction to one of the eignestates
of the observed quantity. The modern view is that the cosmic wavefunction
never collapses, but only appears to collapse from the point of
view of observers who are part of the wavefunction. When Schrödinger's
cat lives or dies, the branch of the wavefunction with the dead
cat also contains observers who are dealing with a dead cat, and
the branch with the live cat also contains observers who are petting
a live one.
Although this is sometimes called the "Many Worlds" interpretation
of quantum mechanics, it is really about having just one world,
one wavefunction, obeying the Schrödinger equation: the wavefunction
evolves linearly from one time to the next based on its previous
state.
Anthropic selection in this sense is built into physics at the
most basic level of quantum mechanics. Selection of a wavefunction
branch is what drives us into circumstances in which we thrive.
Viewed from a disinterested perspective outside the universe,
it looks like living beings swim like salmon up their favorite
branches of the wavefunction, chasing their favorite places.
Hawking and Hertog (Hawking and Hertog, 2002) have explicitly
characterized this "top down" cosmological model as a restatement
of the weak anthropic principle:
We have argued that because our universe has a quantum origin,
one must adopt a top down approach to the problem of initial conditions
in cosmology, in which histories that contribute to the path integral,
depend on the observable being measured. There is an amplitude
for empty flat space, but it is not of much significance. Similarly,
the other bubbles in an eternally inflating spacetime are irrelevant.
They are to the future of our past light cone, so they don't contribute
to the action for observables and should be excised by Ockham's
razor. Therefore, the top down approach is a mathematical formulation
of the weak anthropic principle. Instead of starting with
a universe and asking what a typical observer would see, one specifies
the amplitude of interest.
Critique of Contemporary Restatements of the Weak Anthropic Principle
Apart from the objections on the part of those who oppose in principle
any use of the anthropic principle in cosmology, there are at least
three reasons why both the Hawking/Hogan and the Susskind/Linde/Weinberg
restatements of the weak anthropic principle are objectionable.
First, both approaches appear to be resistant (at the very least)
to experimental testing. Universes spawned by Big Bangs other than
our own are inaccessible from our own universe, at least with the
experimental techniques currently available to science. So too are
quantum wavefunction branches that we cannot, in principle, observe.
Accordingly, both approaches appear to be untestable—perhaps
untestable in principle. For this reason, Smolin recently argued
(Smolin, 2004) "not only is the Anthropic Principle not science,
its role may be negative. To the extent that the Anthropic Principle
is espoused to justify continued interest in unfalsifiable theories,
it may play a destructive role in the progress of science."
Second, both approaches violate the mediocrity principle. The
mediocrity principle, a mainstay of scientific theorizing since
Copernicus, is a statistically based rule of thumb that, absent
contrary evidence, a particular sample (Earth, for instance, or
our particular universe) should be assumed to be a typical example
of the ensemble of which it is a part. The Susskind/Linde/Weinberg
approach, in particular, flouts this principle. Their approach simply
takes refuge in a brute, unfathomable mystery—the conjectured
lucky roll of the dice in a crap game of eternal inflation—and
declines to probe seriously into the possibility of a naturalistic
cosmic evolutionary process that has the capacity to yield a life-friendly
set of physical laws and constants on a nonrandom basis.
Third, both approaches extravagantly inflate the probabilistic
resources required to explain the phenomenon of a life-friendly
cosmos. (Think of a googleplex of monkeys typing away randomly until
one of them, by pure chance, accidentally composes a set of equations
that correspond to the Standard Model.) This should be a hint that
something fundamental is being overlooked and that there may exist
an unknown natural process, perhaps functionally akin in some manner
to terrestrial evolution, capable of effecting the emergence and
prolongation of physical states of nature that are, in the abstract,
vanishingly improbable.
The Darwinian Precedent
Hogan (Hogan, 2004) has analogized the quantum theory-inspired
sum-over-histories version of the weak anthropic principle to Darwinian
theory:
This blending of empirical cosmology and fundamental physics
is reminiscent of our Darwinian understanding of the tree of life.
The double helix, the four-base codon alphabet and the triplet
genetic code for amino acids, any particular gene for a protein
in a particular organism—all are frozen accidents of evolutionary
history. It is futile to try to understand or explain these aspects
of life, or indeed any relationships in biology, without referring
to the way the history of life unfolded. In the same way that
(in Dobzhansky's phrase), "nothing in biology makes sense except
in the light of evolution," physics in these models only makes
sense in the light of cosmology.
Ironically, Hogan misses the key point that neither the branching
wavefunction nor the eternal inflation-plus-M-theory versions of
the weak anthropic principle hypothesize the existence of anything
corresponding to the main action principle of Darwin's theory: natural
selection. Both restatements of the weak anthropic principle are
analogous, not to Darwin's approach, but rather to a mythical alternative
history in which Darwin, contemplating the storied tangled bank
(the arresting visual image with which he concludes The Origin
of Species), had confessed not a magnificent obsession with
gaining an understanding of the mysterious natural processes that
had yielded "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful," but
rather a smug satisfaction that of course the earthly biosphere
must have somehow evolved in a just-so manner mysteriously friendly
to humans and other currently living species, or else Darwin and
other humans would not be around to contemplate it.
Indeed, the situation that confronts cosmologists today is reminiscent
of that which faced biologists before Darwin propounded his revolutionary
theory of evolution through natural selection. Darwin confronted
the seemingly miraculous phenomenon of a fine-tuned natural order
in which every creature and plant appeared to occupy a unique and
well-designed niche. Refusing to surrender to the brute mystery
posed by the appearance of nature's design, Darwin masterfully deployed
the art of metaphor[2] to elucidate a radical
hypothesis—the origin of species through natural selection—that
explained the apparent miracle as a natural phenomenon.
A significant lesson drawn from Darwin's experience is important
to note at this point. Answering the question of why the most eminent
geologists and naturalists had, until shortly before publication
of The Origin of Species, disbelieved in the mutability of
species, Darwin responded that this false conclusion was "almost
inevitable as long as the history of the world was thought to be
of short duration." It was geologist Charles Lyell's speculations
on the immense age of Earth that provided the essential conceptual
framework for Darwin's new theory. Lyell's vastly expanded stretch
of geological time provided an ample temporal arena in which the
forces of natural selection could sculpt and reshape the species
of Earth and achieve nearly limitless variation.
The central point for purposes of this paper is that collateral
advances in sciences seemingly far removed from cosmology (complexity
theory and evolutionary theory among them) can help dissipate the
intellectual limitations imposed by common sense and naïve
human intuition. And, in an uncanny reprise of the Lyell/Darwin
intellectual synergy, it is a realization of the vastness of time
and history that gives rise to the novel theoretical possibility
to be discussed subsequently. Only in this instance, it is the vastness
of future time and future history that is of crucial importance.
In particular, sharp attention must be paid to the key conclusion
of Wheeler: most of the time available for life and intelligence
to achieve their ultimate capabilities lie in the distant cosmic
future, not in the cosmic past. As Tipler (Tipler, 1994) has stated,
"Almost all of space and time lies in the future. By focusing attention
only on the past and present, science has ignored almost all of
reality. Since the domain of scientific study is the whole of reality,
it is about time science decided to study the future evolution of
the universe." The next section of this paper describes an attempt
to heed these admonitions.
The Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis
In a paper published in Complexity (Gardner, 2000), I first
advanced the hypothesis that the anthropic qualities which our universe
exhibits might be explained as incidental consequences of a cosmic
replication cycle in which the emergence of a cosmologically extended
biosphere could conceivably supply two of the logically essential
elements of self-replication identified by von Neumann (von Neumann,
1948): a controller and a duplicating device. The hypothesis proposed
in that paper was an attempt to extend and refine Smolin's conjecture
(Smolin, 1997) that the majority of the anthropic qualities of the
universe can be explained as incidental consequences of a process
of cosmological replication and natural selection (CNS) whose utility
function is black hole maximization. Smolin's conjecture differs
crucially from the concept of eternal inflation advanced by Linde
(Linde, 1998) in that it proposes a cosmological evolutionary process
with a specific and discernible utility function—black hole
maximization. It is this aspect of Smolin's conjecture rather than
the specific utility function he advocates that renders his theoretical
approach genuinely novel.
As demonstrated previously (Rees, 1997; Baez, 1998), Smolin's
conjecture suffers from two evident defects: (1) the fundamental
physical laws and constants do not, in fact, appear to be fine-tuned
to favor black hole maximization and (2) no mechanism is proposed
corresponding to two logically required elements of any von Neumann
self-replicating automaton: a controller and a duplicator.[3]
The latter are essential elements of any replicator system capable
of Darwinian evolution, as noted by Dawkins (Gardner, 2000) in a
critique of Smolin's conjecture:
Note that any Darwinian theory depends on the prior existence
of the strong phenomenon of heredity. There have to be self-replicating
entities (in a population of such entities) that spawn daughter
entities more like themselves than the general population.
Theories of cosmological eschatology previously articulated (Kurzweil,
1999; Wheeler, 1996; Dyson, 1988) predict that the ongoing process
of biological and technological evolution is sufficiently robust
and unbounded that, in the far distant future, a cosmologically
extended biosphere could conceivably exert a global influence on
the physical state of the cosmos. A related set of insights from
complexity theory (Gardner, 2000) indicates that the process of
emergence resulting from such evolution is essentially unbounded.
A synthesis of these two sets of insights yielded the two key
elements of the Selfish Biocosm (SB) hypothesis. The essence of
that synthesis is that the ongoing process of biological and technological
evolution and emergence could conceivably function as a von Neumann
controller and that a cosmologically extended biosphere could, in
the very distant future, function as a von Neumann duplicator in
a hypothesized process of cosmological replication.
In a paper published in Acta Astronautica (Gardner, 2001)
I suggested that a falsifiable implication of the SB hypothesis
is that the process of the progression of the cosmos through critical
epigenetic thresholds in its life cycle, while perhaps not strictly
inevitable, is relatively robust. One such critical threshold is
the emergence of human-level and higher intelligence, which is essential
to the eventual scaling up of biological and technological processes
to the stage at which those processes could conceivably exert a
global influence on the state of the cosmos. Four specific tests
of the robustness of the emergence of human-level and higher intelligence
were proposed.
In a subsequent paper published in the Journal of the British
Interplanetary Society (Gardner, 2002) I proposed that an additional
falsifiable implication of the SB hypothesis is that there exists
a plausible final state of the cosmos that exhibits maximal computational
potential. This predicted final state appeared to be consistent
with both the modified ekpyrotic cyclic universe scenario (Khoury,
Ovrut, Seiberg, Steinhardt, and Turok, 2001; Steinhardt and Turok,
2001) and with Lloyd's description (Lloyd, 2000) of the physical
attributes of the ultimate computational device: a computer as powerful
as the laws of physics will allow.
Key Retrodiction of the SB Hypothesis: A Life-Friendly Cosmos
The central assertions of the SB hypothesis are: (1) that highly
evolved life and intelligence play an essential role in a hypothesized
process of cosmic replication and (2) that the peculiarly life-friendly
laws and physical constants that prevail in our universe—an
extraordinarily improbable ensemble that Pagels dubbed the cosmic
code (Pagels, 1983)—play a cosmological role functionally equivalent
to that of DNA in an earthly organism: they provide a recipe for
cosmic ontogeny and a blueprint for cosmic reproduction. Thus, a
key retrodiction of the SB hypothesis is that the suite of physical
laws and constants that prevail in our cosmos will, in fact, be
life-friendly. Moreover—and alone among the various cosmological
scenarios offered to explain the phenomenon of a bio-friendly universe—the
SB hypothesis implies that this suite of laws and constants comprise
a robust program that will reliably generate life and advanced intelligence
just as the DNA of a particular species constitutes a robust program
that will reliably generate individual organisms that are members
of that particular species. Indeed, because the hypothesis asserts
that sufficiently evolved intelligent life serves as a von Neumann
duplicator in a putative process of cosmological replication, the
biophilic quality of the suite emerges as a retrodicted biosignature
of the putative duplicator and duplication process within the meaning
of Goal 7 of the NASA Astrobiology Roadmap, which provides in pertinent
part:
Determine how to recognize signatures of life on other worlds
and on early Earth. Identify biosignatures that can reveal and
characterize past or present life in ancient samples from Earth,
extraterrestrial samples measured in situ, samples returned
to Earth, remotely measured planetary atmospheres and surfaces,
and other cosmic phenomena.
Does this retrodiction qualify as a valid scientific test of the
validity of the SB hypothesis? I propose that it may, provided two
additional qualifying criteria are satisfied:
- The underlying hypothesis must enjoy consilience[4]
with mainstream scientific paradigms and conjectural frameworks
(in particular, complexity theory, evolutionary theory, M-theory,
and theoretically acceptable conjectures by mainstream cosmologists
concerning the feasibility, at least in principle, of "baby universe"
fabrication); and
- The retrodiction must be augmented by falsifiable predictions
of phenomena implied by the SB hypothesis but not yet observed.
Retrodiction as a Tool for Testing Scientific Hypotheses
There is a lively literature debating the propriety of employing
retrodiction as a tool for testing scientific hypotheses (Cleland,
2002; Cleland, 2001; Gee, 1999; Oldershaw, 1988). Oldershaw (Oldershaw,
1988) has discussed the use of falsifiable retrodiction (as opposed
to falsifiable prediction) as a tool of scientific investigation:
A second type of prediction is actually not a prediction at all,
but rather a "retrodiction." For example, the anomalous advance
of the perihelion of Mercury had been a tiny thorn in the side
of Newtonian gravitation long before general relativity came upon
the scene. Einstein found that his theory correctly "predicted,"
actually retrodicted, the numerical value of the perihelion advance.
The explanation of the unexpected result of the Michelson-Morley
experiment (constancy of the velocity of light) in terms of special
relativity is another example.
As he went on to note, "Retrodictions usually represent falsification
tests; the theory is probably wrong if it fails the test, but should
not necessarily be considered right if it passes the test since
it does not involve a definitive prediction." Despite their legitimacy
as falsification tests of hypotheses, falsifiable retrodictions
are qualitatively inferior to falsifiable predictions, in Oldershaw's
view:
But, in the final analysis, only true definitive predictions
can justify the promotion of a theory from being viewed as one
of many plausible hypotheses to being recognized as the best available
approximation of how nature actually works. A theory that cannot
generate definitive predictions, or whose definitive predictions
are impossible to test, can be regarded as inherently untestable."
A less sympathetic view concerning the validity of retrodiction
as a scientific tool was offered by Gee (Gee, 1999), who dismissed
the legitimacy of all historical hypotheses on the ground that "they
can never be tested by experiment, and so they are unscientific....
No science can ever be historical." This viewpoint, in turn, has
been challenged by Cleland (Cleland, 2001) who contends that "when
it comes to testing hypotheses, historical science is not inferior
to classical experimental science" but simply exploits the available
evidence in a different way:
There [are] fundamental differences in the methodology used by
historical and experimental scientists. Experimental scientists
focus on a single (sometimes complex) hypothesis, and the main
research activity consists in repeatedly bringing about the test
conditions specified by the hypothesis, and controlling for extraneous
factors that might produce false positives and false negatives.
Historical scientists, in contrast, usually concentrate on formulating
multiple competing hypotheses about particular past events. Their
main research efforts are directed at searching for a smoking
gun, a trace that sets apart one hypothesis as providing a better
causal explanation (for the observed traces) than do the others.
These differences in methodology do not, however, support the
claim that historical science is methodologically inferior, because
they reflect an objective difference in the evidential relations
at the disposal of historical and experimental researchers for
evaluating their hypotheses.
Cleland's approach has the merit of preserving as "scientific"
some of the most important hypotheses advanced in such historical
fields of inquiry as geology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, paleontology,
and archaeology. As Cleland has noted (Cleland, 2002):
Experimental research is commonly held up at the paradigm of
successful (a.k.a.good) science. The role classically attributed
to experiment is that of testing hypotheses in controlled laboratory
settings. Not all scientific hypotheses can be tested in this
manner, however. Historical hypotheses about the remote past provide
good examples. Although fields such as paleontology and archaeology
provide the familiar examples, historical hypotheses are also
common in geology, biology, planetary science, astronomy, and
astrophysics. The focus of historical research is on explaining
existing natural phenomena in terms of long past causes. Two salient
examples are the asteroid-impact hypothesis for the extinction
of the dinosaurs, which explains the fossil record of the dinosaurs
in terms of the impact of a large asteroid, and the "big-bang"
theory of the origin of the universe, which explains the puzzling
isotropic three-degree background radiation in terms of a primordial
explosion. Such work is significantly different from making a
prediction and then artificially creating a phenomenon in a laboratory.
In a paper presented to the 2004 Astrobiology Science Conference
(Cleland, 2004), Cleland extended this analytic framework to the
consideration of putative biosignatures as evidence of the past
or present existence of extraterrestrial life. Acknowledging that
"because biosignatures represent indirect traces (effects) of life,
much of the research will be historical (vs. experimental) in character
even in cases where the traces represent recent effects of putative
extant organisms," Cleland concluded that it was appropriate to
employ the methodology that characterizes successful historical
research:
Successful historical research is characterized by (1) the proliferation
of alternative competing hypotheses in the face of puzzling evidence
and (2) the search for more evidence (a "smoking gun") to discriminate
among them.
From the perspective of the evidentiary standards applicable to
historical science in general and astrobiology in particular, the
key retrodiction of the SB hypothesis—that the fundamental
constants of nature that comprise the Standard Model as well as
other physical features of our cosmos (included the number of extended
physical dimensions and the extremely low value of dark energy)
will be collectively bio-friendly—appears to constitute a legitimate
scientific test of the hypothesis. Moreover, within the framework
of Goal 7 of the NASA Astrobiology Roadmap, the retrodicted biophilic
quality of our universe appears, under the SB hypothesis, to constitute
a possible biosignature.
Caution Regarding the Use of Retrodiction to Test the SB Hypothesis
Because the SB hypothesis is radically novel and because the use
of falsifiable retrodiction as a tool to test such an hypothesis
creates at least the appearance of a "confirmatory argument resemble[ing]
just-so stories (Rudyard Kipling's fanciful stories, e.g., how leopards
got their spots)" (Cleland, 2001), it is important (as noted previously)
that two additional criteria be satisfied before this retrodiction
can be considered a legitimate test of the hypothesis:
- The SB hypothesis must generate falsifiable predictions as well
as falsifiable retrodictions; and
- The SB hypothesis must be consilient with key theoretical constructs
in such "adjoining" area of scientific investigation as M-theory,
cosmogenesis, complexity theory, and evolutionary theory.
As argued at length elsewhere (Gardner, 2003), the SB hypothesis
is both consilient with central concepts in these "adjoining" fields
and fully capable of generating falsifiable predictions.
Concluding Remarks
In his book The Fifth Miracle (Davies, 1999) Davies offered
this interpretation of NASA's view that the presence of liquid water
on an alien world was a reliable marker of a life-friendly environment:
In claiming that water means life, NASA scientists are... making—tacitly—a
huge and profound assumption about the nature of nature. They
are saying, in effect, that the laws of the universe are cunningly
contrived to coax life into being against the raw odds; that the
mathematical principles of physics, in their elegant simplicity,
somehow know in advance about life and its vast complexity. If
life follows from [primordial] soup with causal dependability,
the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative,
which tells them: "Make life!" And, through life, its by-products:
mind, knowledge, understanding. It means that the laws of the
universe have engineered their own comprehension. This is a breathtaking
vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep.
I hope it is correct. It would be wonderful if it were correct.
But if it is, it represents a shift in the scientific world-view
as profound as that initiated by Copernicus and Darwin put together.
An emerging consensus among mainstream physicists and cosmologists
is that the particular universe we inhabit appears to confirm what
Smolin calls the "anthropic observation": the laws and constants
of nature seem to be fine-tuned, with extraordinary precision and
against enormous odds, to favor the emergence of life and its byproduct,
intelligence. As Dyson put it eloquently more than two decades ago
(Dyson, 1979):
The more I examine the universe and study the details of its
architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some
sense must have known that we were coming. There are some striking
examples in the laws of nuclear physics of numerical accidents
that seem to conspire to make the universe habitable.
Why this should be so remains a profound mystery. Indeed, the
mystery has deepened considerably with the recent discovery of the
inexplicably tiny value of dark energy density and the realization
that M-theory encompasses an unfathomably vast landscape of possible
solutions, only a minute fraction of which correspond to anything
resembling the universe that we inhabit.
Confronted with such a deep mystery, the scientific community
ought to be willing to entertain plausible explanatory hypotheses
that may appear to be unconventional or even radical. However, such
hypotheses, to be taken seriously, must:
- be consilient with the key paradigms of "adjoining" scientific
fields,
- generate falsifiable predictions, and
- generate falsifiable retrodictions.
The SB hypothesis satisfies these criteria. In particular, it
generates a falsifiable retrodiction that the physical laws and
constants that prevail in our cosmos will be biophilic—which
they are.
References
Baez, J. 1998 on-line commentary on The Life of the Cosmos
(available at http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/smolin.txt).
Barrow, J. and Tipler, F. 1988 The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,
Oxford University Press.
Bjorken, J. 2004 "The Classification of Universes," astro-ph/0404233.
Cleland, C. 2001 "Historical science, experimental science, and
the scientific method," Geology, 29, pp. 978-990.
Cleland, C. 2002 "Methodological and Epistemic Differences Between
Historical Science and Experimental Science," Philosophy of Science,
69, pp. 474-496.
Cleland, C. 2004 "Historical Science and the Use of Biosignatures,"
unpublished summary of presentation abstracted in International
Journal of Astrobiology, Supplement 2004, p. 119.
Davies, P. 1999 The Fifth Miracle, Simon & Schuster.
Dyson, F. 1979 Disturbing the Universe, Harper & Row.
Dyson, F. 1988 Infinite in All Directions, Harper &
Row.
Gardner, J. 2000 "The Selfish Biocosm: Complexity as Cosmology,"
Complexity, 5, no. 3, pp. 34-45..
Gardner, J. 2001 "Assessing the Robustness of the Emergence of
Intelligence: Testing the Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis," Acta Astronautica,
48, no. 5-12, pp. 951-955.
Gardner, J. 2002 "Assessing the Computational Potential of the
Eschaton: Testing the Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis," Journal of
the British Interplanetary Society 55, no. 7/8, pp. 285-288.
Gardner, J. 2003 Biocosm, Inner Ocean Publishing.
Gee, H. 1999 In Search of Deep Time, The Free Press.
Goldsmith, D. 2004 "The Best of All Possible Worlds," Natural
History, 5, no. 6, pp. 44-49.
Greene, B. 2004 The Fabric of the Cosmos, Knopf.
Hawking, S. and Hertog, T. 2002 "Why Does Inflation Start at the
Top of the Hill?" hep-th/0204212.
Henderson, L. 1913 The Fitness of the Environment, Harvard
University Press.
Hogan, C. 2004 "Quarks, Electrons, and Atoms in Closely Related
Universes," astro-ph/0407086.
Khoury, J., Ovrut, B. A., Seiberg, N., Steinhardt, P., and Turok,
N. 2001 "From Big Crunch to Big Bang," hep-th/0108187.
Kurzweil, R. 1999 The Age of Spiritual Machines, Viking.
Linde, A. 2002 "Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic
Principle," hep-th/0211048.
Linde, A.1998 "The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe," Scientific
American, 9(20), pp. 98-104.
Livio, M. 2003 "Cosmology and Life," astro-ph/0301615.
Lloyd, S. 2000 "Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation," Nature,
406, pp. 1047-1054.
Mitton, S. 2005 Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in
Science, Joseph Henry Press.
Oldershaw, R. 1988 "The new physics: physical or mathematical science?"
American Journal of Physics, 56(12).
Pagels, H. 1983 The Cosmic Code, Bantam.
Rees, M. 1997 Before the Beginning, Addison Wesley.
Rees, M. 2000 Just Six Numbers, Basic Books.
Smolin, L. 1997 The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford University
Press.
Smolin, L. 2004 "Scientific Alternatives to the Anthropic Principle,"
hep-th/0407213.
Steinhardt, P. and Turok, N. 2001 "Cosmic Evolution in a Cyclic
Universe," hep-th/0111098.
Susskind, L. 2003 "The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory," hep-th/0302219.
Tipler, F. 1994 The Physics of Immortality, Doubleday.
Vilenkin, A. 2004 "Anthropic predictions: The Case of the Cosmological
Constant," astro-ph/0407586.
von Neumann, J. 1948 "On the General and Logical Theory of Automata."
Weinberg, S. 21 October 1999 "A Designer Universe?" New York
Review of Books.
Wheeler, J. 1996 At Home in the Universe, AIP Press.
Wilson, E. O. 1998 "Scientists, Scholars, Knaves and Fools," American
Scientist, 86, pp. 6-7.
[1] http://www.edge.org/discourse/landscape.html.
[2] The metaphor furnished by the familiar process
of artificial selection was Darwin's crucial stepping stone. Indeed,
the practice of artificial selection through plant and animal breeding
was the primary intellectual model that guided Darwin in his quest
to solve the mystery of the origin of species and to demonstrate
in principle the plausibility of his theory that variation and natural
selection were the prime movers responsible for the phenomenon of
speciation.
[3] Both defects were emphasized by Susskind
in a recent on-line exchange with Smolin which appears at www.edge.org.
Smolin has argued that his CNS hypothesis has not been falsified
on the first ground (Smolin, 2004) but conceded that his conjecture
lacks any hypothesized mechanism that would endow the putative process
of proliferation of black-hole-prone universes with a heredity function:
The hypothesis that the parameters p change, on average,
by small random amounts, should be ultimately grounded in fundamental
physics. We note that this is compatible with string theory, in
the sense that there are a great many string vacua, which likely
populate the space of low energy parameters well. It is plausible
that when a region of the universe is squeezed to Planck densities
and heated to Planck temperatures, phase transitions may occur
leading to a transition from one string vacua to another. But
there have so far been no detailed studies of these processes
which would check the hypothesis that the change in each generation
is small.
As Smolin noted in the same paper, it is crucial that such a mechanism
exist in order to avoid the conclusion that each new universe's
set of physical laws and constants would constitute a merely random
sample of the vast parameter space permitted by the extraordinarily
large "landscape" of M-theory-allowed solutions:
It is important to emphasize that the process of natural selection
is very different from a random sprinkling of universes on the
parameter space P. This would produce only a uniform distribution
prandom(p). To achieve a distribution peaked
around the local maxima of a fitness function requires the two
conditions specified. The change in each generation must be small
so that the distribution can "climb the hills" in F(p)
rather than jump around randomly, and so it can stay in the small
volume of P where F(p) is large, and not diffuse
away. This requires many steps to reach local maxima from random
starts, which implies that long chains of descendants are needed.
[4] Wilson has identified consilience as one
of the "diagnostic features of science that distinguishes it from
pseudoscience" (Wilson, 1998):
The explanations of different phenomena most likely to survive
are those that can be connected and proved consistent with one another.
© 2005 James
N. Gardner. Reprinted with permission.
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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next paradigm: multidimensional spaces and times
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Amazingly enough, almost respectible scientific speculations exceed most visions
in science fiction -- another result of the doubling of scientists and scientific
literature every 20 years or so -- and who can estimate the actual increase of
cross-fertilizing scientific and cultural activity since the mass explosion of the
world Net in ten years?
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/messages/6
Rich Murray: CSICON: Murray's Law:
Eternal Exponential Expansion of Science 4.5.97 6.22.1
Rich Murray April 5 1997 CSICON
Communion for the Subjective Investigation of Claims of the Normal
April 5, 1997
Murray's Law: Eternal Exponential Expansion of Science
Millenia of worldwide commonsense traditions have culminated in a
recent few centuries of exponential scientific work. Since 1660, the
number of scientists has grown from about 100 to about 10,000,000.
Likewise, the volume of accumulated scientific literature, both
doubling unstopably every twenty years, rather like Mickey Mouse's
hordes of relentlessly marching brooms in Disney's "The Sorcerer's
Apprentice".....
Gardner's thought, however, is still grounded in some primary root
assumptions:
reality is single-level, evolving only-time forward in a single dimension and level
of one-way causality flow, strictly from nearest neighbors in space and time.
Those of us who have had the surprisingly common experiences
of ordinary daily life precognition, including some theoreticians,
have reason to ponder how to expand scientific and mathematical visions to
accomodate multi-level reality manifolds with infinite-dimensional spaces and
times (flows of causality), with noncontiguous properties.
How might we expand the concept of the Mandelbrot Set, for example,
to include iteration operators that connect widely separated, not just
contiguous, points? Or cellular automata?
On all fronts, the playground is vast.
In mutual service, Rich Murray
http://www.kurzweilai.net/bios/frame.html?main=/bi os/bio0228.html
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/archives/2005/05-0 6-10.html
http://www.biocosm.org/
http://www.tfi.com/pubs/ntq/articles/view/96Q4_A2. pdf
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/ar ticles/art0647.html
The Physical Constants as Biosignature:
An anthropic retrodiction of the Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis by James N.
Gardner
************************************************** **********
Rich Murray, MA Room For All rmforall@comcast.net 505-501-2298
1943 Otowi Road Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 USA
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/messages
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/messages
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/messages
group with 151 members, 1,308 posts in a public, searchable archive
************************************************** ***********
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Re: next paradigm: multidimensional spaces and times
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http://global-dialog.org/mvd/mvl.cgi?NextName=wArt icle_BuddhaandChrist.html
The Buddha and Christ Are Always Present, We don't Have to Wait for the
Millennium
Reflections of a Buddhist Theoretical Physicist
By Fred Cooper, Ph.D
Published as: "The Millennium: A Bridge between the Relative and the
Ultimate", Tricyle: The Buddhist Review, Winter 1999; pp. 69-71.
(reprinted by permission of the author)
"One way of viewing the Millennium is that the Infinite
would again take finite incarnation to benefit beings at a certain point in
space and time.Although such an occurrence is always welcome, we should
be aware that the infinite is always present and place our emphasis on
recognizing that. Otherwise, we are always stuck in finite, relative
reality, where the concepts of space and time constrain and solidify our
experience. It is exactly beyond the relative reality in which the concepts
of space and time exist that we contact the infinite, space and time being
constructs co-emergent with our finite incarnate mind-body system...."
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December 26, 2005
Since I have often had precognitive dreams about ordinary events the next
day since 1982, it follows that, since "subjective" experience is a
co-existing aspect, along with the imputed "objective external physical
reality", of the single infinite unity, then the widely conjectured single
linear flow of time and casuality must necessarily be recast within a much
broader view, in which every "future" point directly interacts with every
"past" point.
As Feinman and others have often found to be a useful metaprinciple:
"What is not prohibited, is mandatory."
The trajectory of interactions that comprise the world line or world tube of
a history is not only driven by one-way directional time (casuality) from
adjacent instants in next neighbor locations, conveyed by some exchange of
information conveying energy, but also by contributions by two-way
transactions from every "future" instant and location, and therefore, every
"past" location, ie, the entire trajectory evolves simultanously and
perpetually.
This might be imaged as a "sideways" time (casuality) flow in an infinity of
"sideways" dimensions along the entire line of any trajectory of history:
then there would be unlimited realms of "parallel", "alternative"
histories, which all interact "sideways" among each other.
What seems to be a single strand of history would turn out to be a complex
rope of somewhat similar histories.
All of this is forever spontaneously, creatively, freely evolving at every
point of "time" and "place".
Are there any available mathematical frameworks for this?
If we choose look for them, casting aside centuries of allegiance to linear
time, will we find that certain models that might indicate avenues to
resolve various paradoxes and dilemmas in fundamental physics?
Would not the infinite, which is what is indubitably here, be inviting "us"
to open together into vast new realms of experience, understanding, and
cognition?
This has some bearing on the remarkable fact that the miniscule, remarkably
uniform and featureless, Big Bang has managed to generate this moment of
experience, in which these little black m a r k s in "your"
visual awareness instantly elicit subtle complex understandings in other
aspects of your awareness, related somewhat to events in "my" awareness.
In mutual service, Rich Murray
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Re: next paradigm: multidimensional spaces and times
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/messages/6
CSICON, Communion for the Subjective Investigation of Claims of the Normal: Murray's Law: Eternal Exponential Expansion of Science:
Murray 1997.04.05
Millenia of worldwide commonsense traditions have culminated in a
recent few centuries of exponential scientific work. Since 1660, the
number of scientists has grown from about 100 to about 10,000,000.
Likewise, the volume of accumulated scientific literature, both
doubling unstopably every twenty years, rather like Mickey Mouse's
hordes of relentlessly marching brooms in Disney's "The Sorcerer's
Apprentice".
This global orchestration of thought and practice has been firmly
founded on certain principles, rarely questioned and widely held to be
unquestionable. Experience is held to be entirely based on and derived
from a basic reality, itself "external" to experience: physical,
or more abstractly, time-space-energy.
This base reality is universally assumed to be impersonal,
consistent, orderly, lawful, causal, uniform, single, measurable,
describable and communicable, continuous, contiguous,
inherently simple, and based on a small set of unchangeable (in
themselves) logical-mathematical operations.
Therefore this reality can be modeled
and predicted by the self-qualifying global society of scientists,
based solely on communication by the external senses.
In short, the primary reality, and its derivative, conscious
experience, is absolutely normal. The primary image of this paradigm
is that of the machine, or the modern embodiment, the computer:
well-defined elements interacting in three-dimensional space along a
single one-way track of causality to produce utterly normal results,
however marvelous, varied, valuable, or unpredictable they may be in
practice.
This towering structure of established normality paradoxically
both hides and makes even more significant any hints of "nonnormality".
Hitherto, "anomalies", such as random variations in offspring, the
fogging of sealed photographic plates by uranium ore, or slight static
in sensitive radios, have become mere fodder for the assimilation
program of science, leading to vast extensions of the range of the
normal, including evolution, quantum mechanics, and the Big Bang.
"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated"-- the implacable
marching song of the Borg juggarnaut.
Willem of Occam proclaimed, "Thou shalt not multiply entities
needlessly." Indeed, hordes of angels, demons, ghosts, spirits,
influences, and innate qualities have been relegated to that final
dustbin of our race's mythic heritage, children's Saturday morning
cartoons. Mature minds, entranced by ever more lofty and subtle
theoretical visions, fed feasts of observation and experimentation on
every level, constrained by principles of parsimony, generality, and
elegance, have exuburantly, soberly created in a mere century:
at the ever tapering tail of the dragon, atoms that are .999999 empty
space,
said empty space as a fully occupied negative energy sea of prodigious
density, with incessant particle pair production-annihilation within
that good old vacuum,
the equivalence of mass and energy,
the relativistic variation of observed time,
with irreducible randomness, fuzziness, discontinuity,
and, feh!, nonlocality at the very core of reality,
the weird phenomena of superconductivity and superfluidity,
the ever fecund boson-fermion zoo of baryons, mesons, quarks, gluons,
neutrinos, WIMPs, gravitons, Higg's, magnetic monopoles, and their
antis, and their superpartners, all cascading into actuality as
infinitesimal loops or membranes vibrating within that most spacious
crystal of abstraction, E8XE8 Group (The Monster) Symmetry, while
now 7 additional dimensions of space are parsimoniously mandated.
Whew!
meanwhile, at the ever bigger end of said dragon,
suddenly the galaxy!,
sprinkled with pulsars and quasars, oh!, then an expanding universe of
galaxies, salted with gamma-ray bursters, oh!, that all sprang into
being as a space-time bubble with zero total energy as an infinitesimal
quantum vacuum fluctuation in "something", oh!, our bubble of galaxies
extends 10E+25 further than the 15 billion light years presently
observable (that's 10E+75 greater volumn, folks), oh!, might be untold
zillions of universe bubbles, forever disconnected, each with unique
intrinsic properties, effervescing cheerily within "something", just
the facts, Mam, heh, heh. Funny what the principle of parsimony leads
to...
gee whiz, I near forgot, black holes, them's wierd nuff, huh? Lot of
'em, too, all sizes! Oops, they evaporate! Blow up too! Wow!
Gravitation radiation, anyone? We can plain see gravitational lensing!
How about cosmic string and cosmic texture, frozen phase changes in
space-time itself?
remember, if it ain't prohibited, it mandatory. Yep! (Is anything
really prohibited?) .
I'm not complaining. It's surely wonderful. We taxpayers are
getting our money's worth, and then some. But do you see any sign of
convergence? Any saturation? Any deceleration? In emprirical fact,
isn't what we see in a mere hundred years an unstopably exponential
avalanche of proliferation of creative subtleties?
Isn't the most obvious outcome for the next century a continuation
of this inexhaustibly creative weaving of this coat of many colors,
worlds within worlds, without end, without any possible end, not in a
hundred billion years of sentient evolution, not ever, forever? Isn't
this, ahem, trend, amen, the primary observational fact of the whole
hundred years?
I say so. I hereby dignify this empirical law by a suitable
appellation:
Murrray's Law: In the overall exponential evolution of the
scientific process, the scale of reality available for consideration
and the diversity and sublety of its entities and interactions all
increase exponentially, forever.
In 1660, the linear grid of Cartesian coordinates comprised the
primary paradigm for scientific reality. On its empty black and white
board Newton drew alike the falling apple, the orbiting Moon. Now the
archetypal image is the Mandlebrot Set, brilliantly and arbitrarily
colored, forever inexhaustible in timeless infinity of subtle detail.
************************************************** *******
Rich Murray, MA Room For All rmforall@comcast.net 505-501-2298
1943 Otowi Road Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 USA
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/messages
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AstroDeep/messages
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/messages
group with 152 members, 1,311 posts in a public, searchable archive
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/ 1165
short review: research on aspartame (methanol, formaldehyde, formic acid)
toxicity: Murray 2005.07.06 rmforall
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/ 1230
recent research re aspartame (methanol, formaldehyde)
toxicity: Murray 2005.10.25
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Re: The Physical Constants as Biosignature
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You'd pretty much have to be ignorant, (willfully, or otherwise), of all of the vast multitude of diametrically opposing runaway ecobalances that make the anthropic principle what it is, in order to make your statement.
Wich brings me to jpfulton:
Perhaps another angle of the anthropic principle is that if parameters are slightly different, it may not be so much that carbon based life, such as we understand it, is not possible, but that being the case, what other types of life would be possible, given different circumstances?
You can't change the force constants a little bit and still produce life of any kind, becauses all of the anthropic coincidences are balanced between opposing runaway tendencies.
For example, the unexplained near-perfect "flatness" of the expanding universe. Any sustained deviation in the rate of expansion would rapidly accumulate to cause the universe to race so far away from your wildest dreams for what constitutes life, that it would make your head swim.
The runaway greenhouse effect is another example of this, as counterbalanced by the long-term tendency toward glaciation that is predicted by milankovitch models, there is a cumulative runaway effect that is inhererent to all valid anthropic coincidences.
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Re: The Physical Constants as Biosignature
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island,
I assume that your response located underneath my previous post was directed at me (Robert K.)
Assuming this is the case, you are caught up in the very amazement about life that I speak of. And being amazed about life is NOT the issue. It's the WHY of being amazed.
My statement does not show ignorance; it shows deeper awareness than those who use retrodictive evidence seem to understand.
You cannot say "universe favors life",..... until AFTER you emerge to see this life that IS universe. What's so amazing about being exactly as things worked out? The amazing thing is that we are a product of how things worked out.
Universe need not have "known of us" in order to work out this way. Had it not worked out this way, we would not be here to notice one way or the other.
This does not mean we are accidents. There are no accidents, really. There are just best ways of emergence, given the conditions. One set of conditions leads to one emergence. Another set of conditions leads to another emergence. A particular working out of emergence does not mean that it was somehow "known about" in the fabric of the universe.
Hydrogen - first most abundant element in known universe.
Oxygen - third most abundant element in known universe.
Water - mixture of hydrogen and oxgen - prime foundation of life as we know it.
Hydrogen, oxygen - initial conditions leading to water planet, leading to life. That's the way it worked out. We are a product of this unique initial condition of abundance of these vibrations/atoms.
Yes, it's amazing and wonderful that we can be conscious to see this. But, no, it is not amazing that the universe "anticipated" us.
We are the universe of THOSE PARTICULAR CONDITIONS.
You cannot make bread out of sand. But does this mean that flour is somehow more amazing than sand? Just think: if the molecular structure of the fine constituents of bread had been just slightly off, then we would not be tasting bread but dirt. Therefore, the universe must have anticipated our making bread instead of concrete.
Maybe this is a bad analogy, but I can't find the words yet to adequately nail my resolution and felt disposition.
Robert K.
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Re: The Physical Constants as Biosignature
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Because we are here, we must have been planned for, in other words.
I still think this is a reaction to our human frame. Little wonder, then, the term "anthropic".
My sense is that we are in a human frame, because this is the frame of the universe which bore us.
Not so sure that we disagree, as much as we prefer a different priority in how we state matters.
My priority is to say the universe need not have known us in order for us to emerge. We simply are results of that, from which we came.
Your priority seems to be to say that because we are here, the information about our being here somehow had to be "wired into" the substrate of this reality.
I do not think that our specific form had to be "wired in", so much as that our specific form represents some aspect of the universe's specific form, irregardless of how such aspect plays out to become us.
We are, in a sense, a cusp of the big fractal. That's how tied up in universal form we are. We came from it. We arise from it unavoidably. The form is already there on a grand scale that trickles down to our measly selves, which then trickles down to ever smaller scales, indefinitely.
Could you expand on your statement about the efficiency of entropy and evolution a bit? Get me up to speed a little more, I mean?
Thanks,
Robert K.
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Re: The Physical Constants as Biosignature
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Now you're making a lot more easily-followed sense, thanks.
Because we are here, we must have been planned for, in other words.
Not so much "planed for" as it is an inevitable consequence of the need for it. This is proven by General Relativity without quantum weirdness when GR is applied to the natural evolution of the initial conditions, per the arrow of time.
I still think this is a reaction to our human frame. Little wonder, then, the term "anthropic".
The thing that you can't avoid though, (without willful ignorance), is that anthropic bias is absolutely necessary and warrented in an anthropically constrained universe, for good reason.
My sense is that we are in a human frame, because this is the frame of the universe which bore us.
Which I don't necessarily disagree with, but my point is that there is an unavoidably inherent prediction that an anthropic constraint on the forces of the universe will necessarily include a mechanism which enables the universe to carry its traits or characteristics forward in the exact same manner that we did when when lept from apes.
Such a mechanism would make the TOE the ToE, because, in this context, evolutionary theory explains *why* the forces cannot be unified... since they never were.
Not so sure that we disagree, as much as we prefer a different priority in how we state matters.
My priority is to say the universe need not have known us in order for us to emerge. We simply are results of that, from which we came.
Your priority seems to be to say that because we are here, the information about our being here somehow had to be "wired into" the substrate of this reality.
I do not think that our specific form had to be "wired in", so much as that our specific form represents some aspect of the universe's specific form, irregardless of how such aspect plays out to become us.
We are, in a sense, a cusp of the big fractal. That's how tied up in universal form we are. We came from it. We arise from it unavoidably. The form is already there on a grand scale that trickles down to our measly selves, which then trickles down to ever smaller scales, indefinitely.
Could you expand on your statement about the efficiency of entropy and evolution a bit? Get me up to speed a little more, I mean?
Does the universe have a goal, or not... is the question. The answer is, yes, absloute symmetry, but this is unattainable, because asymmetry is inherent, so it's all about the journey, not arriving.
The big bang produced a near-perfectly super-symmetrical balance between matter and antimatter, but not quite!
See: "Supersymmetry theory"... and then understand why what I just said is highly relevant.
Expansion is another way for the imbalanced universe to achieve symmetery, notice that this effort does not stop.
Don't assume that this predominant effort can stop, and the only conclusion that you can draw is that it must leap/bang to a higher order of the same exact process.
So the next universe will be just a tiny bit "flatter", (more symmetrical), and it probably won't include life, but it will include a mechanism that does the same thing that we do to the symmetry of this universe when we make matter/antimatter pairs from vacuum energy.
We are, **cumulatively** (don't assume that we're alone in this, because that isn't what is indicated by extension of the principle to other galaxies LIKE OURS, time-wise in the history of the universe), the cause for the universal scale evolutionary effect which the evolutionary extension predicts will eventually lead to a big bang, and relativity theory exposes the mechanism for how this is possible when applied in the manner that I previously stated.
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Re: The Physical Constants as Biosignature
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Let me say it this way:
We matter in the universe.
But more strongly. . . .
We ARE the matter in the universe.
Patterns, numerical constants, etc. do not somehow "prefigure" us. Instead,.. these things are in us because they were the nature of the unverse to start with.
We (humans) follow from the universe.
NOT the other way around. In other words, the universe does NOT follow from us.
The constants in us are the constants of the universe, as the universe "reveals" this awareness in its particular local resonance of its partitions (i.e., observer/observed interfaces).
We (humans) are the universe "seeing itself" for what it is. This does not require our local minds reflecting on the how of this resonance, which amounts to us speaking of mathematical constants. Such mannar of speaking is an expression locally of underlying truths that far exceed those comprehension schemes characterized by our talk of numbers, constants, etc.
The universe would have arrived at us, whether we spoke in these terms or not. The universe "claims us" by other means.
Robert K.
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Re: The Physical Constants as Biosignature
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Hi Jack,
Is it even possible to summarize the main points of your very technical paper in less-technical language?
I know that you are probably too busy to wade through it and do yet another treatement of it, but (if by chance) you have it in you, then (of course) I would find it very helpful.
Even at my level of understanding, the paper seems to find places of resonance in me.
I noticed that you spoke of a two-fluid model actually being a three-fluid model. Maybe you might start here by clearly indicating how you mean this.
What aspects, for example, of your treatment correspond to one fluid?, two fluids?, three fluids? And how, in general, can math be reoriented towards embedded fluid-conceptual modes, when dealing with cosmological ideas (computationally-friendly or otherwise).
I tend to be "otherwise".
Robert K.
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Re: The Physical Constants as Biosignature
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Popularizing well is difficult of course. I try to do it in the 2nd edition of my book Super Cosmos that I think is now on Amazon? If you get it, contact Authorhouse first and make sure it's the 2nd edition. I am trying again in "Star Gate" to make the ideas more accessible. Here is a blurb for Asilomar Conference on Time July 2007
Theme: Consciousness, Cosmology, and Gravity
The possible connection between these three ideas has been suggested by Sir Roger Penrose in his series of semi-popular books. What do all three ideas have in common? John Archibald Wheeler speaks of IT FROM BIT in which the material world emerges from what Sir James Jeans called "mind stuff." Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker", P.K. Dick's VALIS and Gene Roddenberry's "Q" in Star Trek resonate with this possible enigmatic mind-matter connection. The boundary between fact and fiction is not as sharp as it once was. Time travel to the past is now the subject of papers in the Physical Review. The cosmic dark energy, though only 10^-30 density of water is 73% of the the stuff of our pocket universe in the "Cosmic Landscape." What is the "dark matter" that is 23%? Are they both simply forms of quantum vacuum zero point energy of negative and positive pressure respectively. Can the dark energy be amplified on a small scale to make traversable wormhole time travel machines to the past that evade Hawking's "chronology protection"? Is consciousness some kind of physical field that can couple strongly to the fabric of space-time itself? Michio Kaku calls this a "Type IV" super-civilization. George Chapline and Robert Laughlin suggest gravity as an emergent macro-quantum vacuum coherent phenomenon analogous to a superfluid. I have published a different detailed model of that as well on the Cornell Archive. That the conscious mind is also a macro-quantum coherent field like a superfluid with holographic properties is also now a common idea. Is the common factor macro-quantum coherence? Can the coherent phases that may make the fabric of curved spacetime be locked to the coherent phases of a machine or even a living mind? One of the basic properties of quantum information/computer theory is the "no perfect cloning a quantum" theorem that forbids the sending of signals through the particle and event horizons of cosmology and black hole physics. This implies that string theory's "Cosmic Landscape" of parallel universes is unscientific. This is David Gross's lament in a recent Nature. However, experiments by Dick Bierman and others suggest "signal nonlocality" in living matter. The theory of "signal nonlocality" has been developed by Antony Valentini. It violates micro-quantum theory, but not the macro-quantum theory of emergent phenomena that may include consciousness, cosmology and gravity. This would then, perhaps, give us Hawking's "Mind of God", the Vast Active Living Intelligence of perhaps a "spin foam" cosmic computer, with the Megaverse as a "simulation" in The Matrix of M-Theory?
3-fluid model
This is joint work with Robert Becker.
Landau 2-fluid model has superfluid-normal fluid.
Superfluid is 100% at absolute zero and 0% at phase transition.
However, the problem is that at absolute zero the Bose-Einstein condensate is only maybe a tenth of the total density. The rest is locally random zero point fluctuation. I proposed that this zero point fluctuation in the motiion of helium atoms, for example, though locally random, is nonlocally coherent is nonlocally phase coherent in the sense of Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky entanglement. This would be the 3rd fluid explaining how the phenomenological superfluid density is actually the sum of the Bose-Einstein condensate density + the nonlocally coherent zero point density. The coherence is in the momentum ordering not the posiition ordering. The momentum is nonlocal by Heisenberg's uncertainty so that there is local random position uncertainty compatible with nonlocal momentum coherence. This is all inside the "ground state" (vacuum). Normal fluid is elementary excitations outside of the ground state.
Note in an entangled photon pair in say Aspect's famous Paris experiment, each photon is locally randomly unpolarized in an incoherent mixed state even though the pair as a whole is in a coherent pure state. That's the key idea generalized from spin ordering to momentum ordering.
Now in cosmology and emergent gravity we have something very similar where the anti-gravitating dark energy is locally incoherent but nonlocally coherent. The key geometrodynamic field is called the Cartan tetrad field and, in my theory, it emerges from the modulation of the holographic coherent "Goldstone phases" of the vacuum inflation field in a way similar to how the superflow velocity field emerges from a single Goldstone phase in simple Helium II.
PW Anderson calls this theory of emergence "More is different" in condensed matter physics. Sidney Colman calls it "hidden" or "secret" symmetry in particle physics. Roger Penrose discusses it as "spontaneous symmetry breaking" in "The Road to Reality." Ch. 28 Another good book is Robert Laughlin's "A Different Universe." |
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Re: The Physical Constants as Biosignature
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WOW!,
Thanks Jack.
You are soooooo out of my league with regard to formal disciplinary training, but that doesn't really scare me, especially since I STILL seem to find what you have to offer somehow sinking in..... via a sort of "stupid radar" (for lack of a more eloquent phrase). (^____^)
I just finished a very short paper trying to reconcile one of my approaches to painting with the concept of fluidity in all human history.
Interestingly, in my mesely little research, I came across the idea of an ancient twin-water creation myth in Assyro-Babylonian culture.
I find it interesting that I seem to be seeing some recurrance of this idea in the modern guise of mathematical physics. But instead of twin waters, we're talking about some other sort of fluids or fluid-like conceptualization scheme.
God forbid the term "aether" or the phrase "fluid aether" be used! But something fluid-like seems to be going on. We (historically) have ventured away from the solid aether of old, to the confusing Einsteinian manifold (medium-well-maybe-not-a-medium?), to "the fabric of space/time", to strings and branes, to quantum foam, to zero-point energy field, to spin networks, to spin foams, to loop quantum what-the-heck-who-knows-what-it-all-is.
It seems to me that human beings REQUIRE calling reality by a name and identifying that name with a local metaphor, in order to generate, share and build on a common understanding.
THAT's why fluid models appeal to me. They seem to beckon to something very basic in our MANNER OF UNDERSTANDING.
Even if we admit that it is only a MANNER OF UNDERSTANDING, a fluid model seems to be a best metaphorical mannar of creating that understanding. If a mathematical approach can support it, then even better!
Joel Morrison is very in tune to this fluid thing too, as you might have observed in his postings here under the guise of his screen name... (HOPE YOU DON'T MIND, JOEL,...... breaking your incognito, in the name of understanding here).
Anyway,.... interesting statistics you noted:
* "dark energy" = 10^-30 density of water, 73% of stuff of our pocket of the universe
* "dark matter" = 23% of stuff of our ... universe
We have these mysterious names for what we're supposed to be made of. It's almost as if we are not willing to say that we are anything.
Copenhagen has ruined us!
Robert K.
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