Posted on 05/23/2002 3:02:41 AM PDT by lavaroise
Despite an aging Albert Einstein's famous comment, "God does not play dice with the universe," renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking and his academic collaborator Thomas Hertog now suggest that God did roll the dice at least once – at the moment of creation.
Like that familiar wizened sage atop the highest peak, God cast that first die down a mountain of potential energy where, according to Hawking and Hertog, it rolled like a snowball, growing, expanding and inflating into the universe we know today.
"The quantum origin of our universe implies one must take a 'top down' approach to the problem of initial conditions in cosmology," Hawking and Hertog write in their latest paper on the subject – "Why does inflation start at the top of the hill?"
Inflation – and creation – started at the top of a potential energy mountain, the two cosmologists claim, where fundamental field particles acted like snowflakes that coalesced into cosmological snowballs. A rolling stone may gather no moss, but the rolling die of creation – known to physicists as a subatomic particle called the "Hawking-Moss instanton" – gathered these snowflake-like particles.
"The early evolution of our universe is a bit like a ball of snow that grows while rolling down a hill," Hertog told WorldNetDaily in an exclusive interview. Hertog equated the growing snowball to a field of particles. "Our calculations show that our universe was most likely created by this field at the top of a 'potential hill.'"
Like mischievous children, quantum fluctuations in the early universe rolled the cosmological snowball down the hill and it expanded.
"Because of Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle, the field at the top of the hill fluctuates," Hertog explained. "Because the top of the hill is an unstable point, these fluctuations eventually cause the field to roll all the way down."
The snowball of creation eventually settled into a valley and became the universe that surrounds us today, Hertog explained. Although this valley is lower than it was at the beginning of everything, "the bottom of the valley doesn't seem to be at sea level," Hertog said. Cosmological sea level may be described by Einstein's famous "cosmological constant that cosmologists are measuring," he added.
Hawking and Hertog assert that their "top down" approach to cosmology is a fundamental departure from scientific tradition.
"The usual approach to the problem of initial conditions for inflation is to assume some initial configuration for the universe and evolve it forward in time," Hawking said. "This could be described as the 'bottom up' approach to cosmology."
The quantum nature of the cosmos, however, dictates the "top down" approach, Hawking claims, because the history of the universe depends on the mountain, the dice, the snowflakes and the snowballs. In other words, the universe "depends on the observables being measured."
God may play dice then, but only if the dice are loaded. If the universe depends on observables, it also depends on we the observers, so the dice had to somehow guarantee that we humans would emerge. Physicists call this idea the so-called "Weak Anthropic Principle" from the Greek "anthropos," which means "man" or "human."
"The top-down approach is a mathematical formulation of the Weak Anthropic Principle," Hawking writes, in which observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are restricted by the requirement that carbon-based life must exist.
"The top-down approach incorporates the Weak Anthropic Principle because it takes into account certain observed features of our universe – such as the fact that it expands – in order to explain its origin," Hertog said. "In other words, a top down approach does not tell us how the universe should be, but why the universe is the way it is."
"If Hawking speaks, we should probably listen," Randolph-Macon College physics professor George Spagna told WorldNetDaily from Ashland, Va.
"The approach Hawking and Hertog apply in their paper is to work backwards from the current state of the universe to its possible origins, rather than attempting to cook up the appropriate initial state and see if it evolves forward into something resembling the present universe," Spagna explained. "Hence, it is akin to attaching mathematics to the Weak Anthropic Principle, because we obviously inhabit a universe whose conditions permit our very existence in the first place."
Mike Martin regularly reports on breaking science news for ScienceNewsWeek, United Press International and other publications. View his other stories at sciencenewsweek.com.
There is likely no "identical" solar system or location in our galaxy or any other. I recommend you read "Rare Earth" by Ward & Brownlee. Earth and our solar system are indeed rare - perhaps unique in all the universe.
These are commonly known as boundary conditions. If life and man are a boundary condition of ultimate creation, then we get the extreme right end of the boundary conditions. From there you can get the initial conditions. Inversely, initial conditions determine functions. In our case we have to deal with final conditions.
People ragging on a particular discipline are often those most ignorant of it.
Well, duh. If there is no life, the universe will never be observed by anything. If a trillion universes arise in succession and life arises in only one of them, only the life-bearing universe will constitute observed data.
Also central to the Theory of Special Relativity.
As I understand it, this is a bit of an overstatement of the WAP. Rather, I think that this:
Rather, our existence is possible because it is compatible with the universe. The universe was not made to be compatible with us.
...is very close to what the WAP actually is. IOW, what you say you agree with is really just a restatement of the WAP - I don't think you're really disagreeing with it much at all. Or, to put it another way, would you find this description more attractive?
The idea that we must observe that the universe contains properties compatible with the existence of an observer because if it did not, no one would be here to observe it, is called the anthropic principle or the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP). The WAP is significant in that it makes the improbability of any one universe (i.e. our own) irrelevant. We should expect that our universe has features compatible with our existence, since, after all, we exist.
John Ch. 6 V. 68 "Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.
Regards,
Az
Yes, that's what I had in mind.
The idea that we must observe that the universe contains properties compatible with the existence of an observer because if it did not, no one would be here to observe it, is called the anthropic principle or the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP). The WAP is significant in that it makes the improbability of any one universe (i.e. our own) irrelevant. We should expect that our universe has features compatible with our existence, since, after all, we exist.
Perhaps I was thinking of the "Strong Anthropic Principle." What you described doesn't trouble me one bit. If indeed, we somehow discovered that we were not compatible with the universe, this would be evidence of something miraculous at work.
I had another one, but I seem to have misplaced it.
From here, although this is not the exact quote either.
Twain had it wrong. The world was created for the dinosaurs, but something went wrong and now it's all for naught. We're just rummaging around in the debris.
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