http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9977/08/index22article1.html
No doubt we’ll never know the name of the first cosmologist to look to the sky and ask, “What is all this? How did it get here? What am I doing here?” What we do know is that it occurred deep in the prehistoric past, probably in Africa. The first cosmologies, creation myths, were nothing like today’s scientific cosmology, but they were born of the same human curiosity. Not surprisingly these myths were about earth, water, sky, and living creatures. And of course they featured the supernatural creator: how else to explain the existence of such complex and intricate creatures as humans, not to mention rain, sun, edible plants that seemed to be placed on earth just for our benefit?
The idea that precise laws of nature govern both the celestial and terrestrial world dates back to Isaac Newton. Before Newton, there was no concept of universal laws that applied both to astronomical objects like planets and to ordinary earthly objects like falling rain and flying arrows. Newton’s laws of motion were the first example of such universal laws. But even for the mighty Sir Isaac, it was far too much of a stretch to suppose that the same laws led to the creation of human beings: he spent more time on theology than physics.
I’m not a historian, but I’ll venture an opinion: modern cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them, they provided explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents. Two natural laws underlie Darwinian evolution. The first is that copying information is never perfect. Even the best reproduction mechanisms from time to time make small errors. DNA replication is no exception. Although it would take a century for Crick and Watson to uncover the double helix, Darwin intuitively understood that accumulated random mutations constitute the engine that drives evolution. Most mutations are bad, but Darwin understood enough about probability to know that every now and then, by pure chance, a beneficial mutation occurs.
The second pillar of Darwin’s intuitive theory was a principle of competition: the winner gets to reproduce. Better genes prosper; inferior genes come to a dead end. These two simple ideas explained how complex and even intelligent life could form without any supernatural intervention. In today’s world of computer viruses and Internet worms, it’s easy to imagine similar principles applying to completely inanimate objects. Once the magic was removed from the origin of living creatures, the way lay open to a purely scientific explanation of creation.
Darwin and Wallace set a standard not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well. The laws that govern the birth and evolution of the universe must be the same laws that govern the falling of stones, the chemistry and nuclear physics of the elements and the physics of elementary particles. They freed us from the supernatural by showing that complex and even intelligent life could arise from chance, competition, and natural causes. Cosmologists would have to do as well: the basis for cosmology would have to be impersonal rules that are the same throughout the universe and whose origin has nothing to do with our own existence. The only god permitted to cosmologists would be Richard Dawkins’s “blind watchmaker.”
… As the new century dawns, we are finding ourselves at a watershed that is likely to permanently change our understanding of the universe. Something is happening that is much more than the discovery of new facts or new equations. Our entire outlook and framework for thinking, the whole epistemology of physics and cosmology, are undergoing upheaval. The narrow twentieth-century paradigm of a single universe about ten billion years old and ten billion light-years across with a unique set of physical laws is giving way to something much bigger and pregnant with new possibilities. Gradually cosmologists and physicists like myself are coming to see our ten billion light-years as an infinitesimal pocket of a stupendous megaverse. At the same time, theoretical physicists are proposing theories that demote our ordinary laws of nature to a tiny corner of a gigantic Landscape of mathematical possibilities.
The word Landscape, in the present context, is fewer than three years old, but since I introduced it in 2003, it has become part of the cosmologist’s vocabulary. It denotes a mathematical space representing all of the possible environments that theory allows. Each possible environment has its own Laws of Physics, its own elementary particles, and its own constants of nature. Some environments are similar to our own but slightly different. For example, they may have electrons, quarks, and all the usual particles but with gravity a billion times stronger than ours. Others have gravity like ours but contain electrons that are heavier than atomic nuclei. Still others may resemble our world except for a violent repulsive force (called the cosmological constant) that rips apart galaxies, molecules, and even atoms. Not even the three dimensions of space are sacred; regions of the Landscape describe worlds of four, five, six, and even more dimensions…
— Leonard Susskind,
The Cosmic Landscape:
String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design
Filed under: natural philosophy
