"...the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.My ordinary mind has difficulty wrapping itself around the concept that a "universe" can be one of many. I don't disagree with him, but I think I need to defer any ponderings about astrophysics and concentrate on the more prosaic aspects of life.
Many improbable occurrences conspired to create Earth's human-friendly design, and they would indeed be puzzling if ours were the only solar system in the universe. But today we know of hundreds of other solar systems, and few doubt that there exist countless more among the billions of stars in our galaxy. Planets of all sorts exist, and obviously, when the beings on a planet that supports life examine the world around them, they are bound to find that their environment satisfies the conditions they require to exist...
Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."
That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many..."
07 September 2010
Stephen Hawking on God and the universe
Excerpts from a column at the Wall Street Journal, which is in turn an excerpt from "The Grand Design," by Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, to be published by Bantam Books today.
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It is said that the universe can and will create itself from nothing. This is not correct. This belief is not scientific. This is against the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy. Nothing can be created from ‘NOTHING’. In fact, the universe has been created from Infinite Expanse of Virtual Nothingness. In theologians terminology this is known as Infinite Expanse of Spirituality (Consciousness). Both gravitational waves and current of consciousness could not so far been seen by any manner. Since they can not be seen, they have been termed as ‘NOTHING’ or ‘ZERO’. This state of nothingness is eternal and the universe has been created from here.
ReplyDelete"My ordinary mind has difficulty wrapping itself around the concept that a "universe" can be one of many."
ReplyDeleteI would highly recommend the book "The Fabric of Reality" by David Deutsch for you, if you're interested in picking up some of the ideas advanced by experiments with quantum physics.
Though it is a brisk read, the book introduces some heady concepts (including Everettian multiverse theory and - my personal favorite - the Tipplerian omega point) and manages to de-mystify some apparent contradictions.
My favorite part of this whole excerpt, the one thing that separates science from religion is this:
ReplyDelete"If it is true"
This post is awesome!
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ReplyDeletenirudh: The Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy applies in one, very limited case, as do all of the other laws of thermodynamics: A closed system.
ReplyDeleteThe point of M-theory, hell, even of our observation of Dark Energy and the press onward to the Higgs field, is that the universe isn't a closed system. This universe, along with countless others, are created by the interaction of larger structures outside the scope of space-time. You can't even talk about an "Infinite Expanse of Virtual Nothingness" reasonably in this case, since every word in that phrase with the exception of "of" and "Virtual" are specific concepts of space-time.
Indeed at the quantum level, we know that energy and particles are created all the time at random. The point Hawking is making is that there is another superstructure outside space-time where such random occurrences create not spare protons, but spare universes.
This is like one of those idiotic discussions about what happened "before" the big bang. Nothing happened, because there was no time before the big bang, so you can't ascribe a time component to something that happened outside time.
Hawking also believes that anything that cannot be measured cannot exist...a piece of psychological naivete if there ever was one.
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