Do the Laws of Nature govern or describe our universe?

Lent 2018: Day 25

Into the second half of Lent, z górki now... and indeed coming to an end of the second part (of three) of Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe, my Lenten read this year. In chapter 14, Kauffman asks about the foundations of our universe, the frame of Newton's billiard table, if you like, the 23 physical constants (such as the speed of light, the strength of gravity, the forces that bind atoms together)... well... do they govern or do they describe?

The reductive materialists would have us believe that they merely describe. But the fact that if any of these constants had slightly different values, the universe would have been so different that intelligent life would probably not have emerged. If, for example, the strong nuclear force were just 2% stronger than it is, then hydrogen atoms would behave quite differently, drastically altering the physics of stars, ruling out the existence of life similar to what we observe here on Earth. Or if there were just slightly more dark energy in the universe, it would have expanded too fast for galaxies to form.

It seems to many physicists that the universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life; indeed only the presence of beings intelligent enough to be able to measure these constants requires them to be such as they are for us to exist in the first place. To get around this conundrum, some physicists propose a multiverse, in which an infinite number of universes co-exist, none of which is measurable by any other, most of them being lifeless duds because the different physical constants there precluded the evolution of life.

Here on earth then, our biosphere evolved as it did in a way that no Newtonian equation could have foreseen - the complexity being too great to capture. Which in turn, suggests Kauffman, means that no "final grand theory can entail the entire becoming of the universe or multiverse. There are in this universe, three dimensions,  plus time, as far as we know, runs one way, from past to future. There maybe other universes in which this is not the case...

The evolution of complex systems breeds systems that explode into further complexity. Consider, says Kauffman, going back 50,000 years and seeing what goods and services would be on offer to humans to trade for. The number would be small and basic. As human society, and its economy grew in complexity, so did the permutations of goods and services, multiplying exponentially. Just looking at the clutter on my desk as I write, I see so many. Darkened lenses on fashionable wire frames to place over my eyes when the sun is shining brightly. A satirical fortnightly magazine offering me laughter at the expense of the people who run the country. A graphite rod clad in wood that allows me to write down symbols on paper. And a sharpener for it, and an eraser to remove its marks from the paper, should I make a mistake. Above all, a laptop and all the services that it offers - including the ability to write this very blog post. "Combinations of the old and new uses of old goods, services and production functions to create new complements and substitute goods, services and production functions. Diversity begets an explosion of further diversity." And so we allow the emergence of an ever more complex universe - here at the human scale - that no physical law could have prestated.

OK - so now Kauffman poses another question; in the same way that Darwinian evolution is occurring within our biosphere, could the physical constants not have evolved over time until they got to where they are now? "If so the universe can 'try' different laws and constants, and that set [of them] that at any moment yields the most complex universe, wins."  By trial and error, then laws of physics that don't work are rejected for the ones that favour an ever-better functioning universe.

Can these laws and constants emerge from, as physicist John Archibald Wheeler, 'the higgledy-piggledy'? "Imagine... something outside of space but inside of time that might have predated the Big Bang". In this chapter, Kauffman says that we have allowed ourselves to be trapped in the Pythagorean dream, a dream further entrenched by Newton, a dream whereby we claim that our universe has fixed foundations. Religious people say God fixed those foundations, which govern our universe. Reductionist-materialist scientists say those foundations just accidentally happened, and that they describe our universe.

A new way is to say that those foundations came into being in a higgledy-piggledy way, and that they are themselves evolving. Why they are evolving, where they are evolving towards - that, dear reader, is the nature of God - for me at least. The Unfolding, the Becoming.

This time last year:
Coincidence, consciousness and quantum physics
[Coincidentally, this post also quotes John Archibald Wheeler]

This time three years ago, Warsaw's M2 metro line opened:
It's been 19 years, 11 months and 1 day...

This time five years ago:
A selfless faith

This time six years ago:
Ul. Profesorska after the remont

This time seven years ago:
Lent kicks off again, for the 20th year in a row for me

This time eight years ago:
Half way through Lent

This time ten years ago:
Spring much closer