Learned men talk about origins

UNIVERSE

By THOMAS HUKAHU

HAVE you wondered about how the world began?
Did it start from something or nothing?
Is there just one Universe or many (Multiverse)?
Well, those are the kind of questions that were asked in a discussion six years ago where a physicist and two philosophers were members on a panel in the event organised by the New York Academy of Sciences.
The discussion took place on Oct 14, 2014.

The people on the panel
The moderator of the discussion was Steve Paulson.
The panel members included Neil Turok, Jim Holt and David Albert. Turok is a theoretical physicist and has lectured in Cambridge, Princeton and, until last year, the director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.
Holt is a philosopher, author and essayist. He has a degree in mathematics and was a faculty fellow in philosophy at Columbia University.
Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. He has a PhD in theoretical physics.
The title of the discussion was “The Origins of the Universe: Why is There Something Rather than Nothing?”

Starting the discussion
Moderator Paulson started the discussion by saying: “If you have to pick the hardest questions in all of science, you’d probably end up with two. How did the Universe begin? And, how does the physical stuff in our brains produce conscious experience?”
He went on to say: “For thousands of years, philosophers, theologians and scientists have wrestled with this huge question: How did it all start? Did the Universe have a clear point of origin or has it always been here?”
“Of course, we’ve had remarkable scientific breakthroughs particularly in the last few decades as physicists keep developing and refining our understanding of what happened 13.8 billion years ago.
“But that primal mystery of how it all started is very much still with us. In fact, there have been fierce debates and competing theories about the origins of the Universe. And whether there is multiple or perhaps an infinite number?”

General discussion
As the discussion went on, it was clear that the philosophers, Holt and Albert, believed that there are more than one Universe.
They believed in Multiverse, a theory that states that more than one universe exist.
Holt particularly quoted other theoretical physicists that believe in the Multiverse model.
The two philosophers supported the inflationary theory of the universe, which states that there was a moment after the Big Bang where the universe underwent an exponential expansion but later the expansion slowed down.
Turok, on the other hand, believed that there was a beginning when the expanding Universe began from a certain point, a singularity. Holt stated that they should remember the principles of the conservation of mass and energy which state that matter and energy cannot be created nor destroyed.
It was logical then that if matter and energy was always present, then there was no beginning.
Turok on the other hand did not believe in the inflationary model and said that empirical evidence does not support that theory. He also believes that the Big Bang started from just one single mystery particle.

When physics challenged philosophy
Before I share other information about that origins talk, let me take you back to something I shared in another article in Weekender.
Before Galileo, some of the greatest thinkers and philosophers were also scientists and inventors.
There was no dividing line between the theories they proposed and which of those were validated by scientific observation or experiments, or just mere theories. It was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the Italian physicist, mathematician and astronomer, who approached theories in a different way.
He used experiment to validate any proposed scientific theory and was said to be the first experimental scientist.
Among other things, he was the scientist who got into trouble with the top people in the Catholic Church (of which he was a member) and the government leaders of his time because he supported the view that the earth revolved around the sun (as in the sun-centred model) and not the sun and other planets orbiting the earth (as in the earth-centred model).
The earth-centred model was the one that philosopher Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) promoted, and that became part of the Church’s accepted teachings.
That is to say, the Church and the authorities (including other scientists) supported the Aristotelian view for almost 2000 years and persecuted people who thought otherwise.
Galilei’s support of the sun-centred model was due to him observing the moons of Jupiter through his telescope. He noted that the moons, which were smaller than Jupiter, revolved around the planet, which was more massive.
From that observation, he drew the conclusion that the earth is also orbiting the sun, the more massive of the two. It was Galilei who used observation or experimentation as a key element in the scientific method, which is: Unless you have data from an observation of, or experimentation about, a phenomenon, you cannot support a theory or hypothesis.
Since Galileo’s time, there was a line drawn which separated true science from just philosophy, or even philosophy of science.

Which theory is correct?
So, which theory is correct in describing the Universe?
As said earlier, the two philosophers, who are atheists, believe in multiple universes, not just one. They believed in the inflation theory, which “brings together ideas from quantum physics and particle physics that explore the early moments of the universe, following the Big Bang.
“According to inflation theory, the universe was created in an unstable energy state, which force a rapid expansion of the universe in its early moments”.
Turok, who said he is not religious, says he doesn’t believe the inflation theory is correct.
He also said the Multiverse concept and string theory, another popular physics theory, are not good models.
Turok said: “The Multiverse is an example of a bad theory. For the Multiverse, can you predict anything? No!
“Can you accommodate anything?
“Oh yeah. You can accommodating everything.
“There is Multiverse … It is a remarkable imprecise theory.”
Interestingly, Turok, who believes the world began with a single particle with infinite mass and energy, has worked with theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt and proposed a cyclical theory.
But Turok explained that they proposed that theory to challenge the inflation theory, which they believed was a bad one.
Turok said: “We invented our theory to correct the bandwagon, the inflationary bandwagon.
“I was dismayed that the majority of the world’s cosmologists and the theoretical physicists had bought into this model which seemed to be very ill-founded. It wasn’t making precise predictions. We (Steinhardt and Turok) discussed this. Let’s make a model that’s just as good as inflation but is able to explain the models of everything around us from completely different assumptions.
“And in our case, our assumption was there was a universe before the Big Bang and it underwent a collapse and went through this collapse and rebounded or bounced and gave rise to everything around us.”
So, Turok was generally saying again that everything started from the Big Bang and he did not believe in the Multiverse concept and inflation theory.

Is philosophy important?
As different as they are, physics and philosophy, or particularly philosophy of science, both are vital in developing better theories of the world. That is what Albert stated towards the end of the discussion.
“What’s interesting for many, many years, going back to the scientific revolution, is that there has been a boundary between physics and philosophy across which they’ve been yelling at each other … and asking very interesting questions which has been enormously productive.
Everybody now acknowledges, for example, that if it hadn’t been for the Marxian analysis of the role that time plays in classical mechanics, (Albert) Einstein wouldn’t have come up with the special theory of relativity.”

Ending notes
The discussion ended with some interesting remarks.
I found one made by Holt quite startling. He said that philosophers were more like theoretical physicists while physicists were more like experimental physicists. He was trying to say that theoretical physicists are like philosophers in that they toy with ideas and models and try to figure out which best describes the physical world as we see it. On the other hand, experimental physicists take measurements of physical quantities and can use those to validate proposed theories.
Maybe Holt should have said theoretical physicists also check their theories with existing empirical data or mathematically proven principles. That separates them from just any person proposing a new theory regarding what can be observed in the physical world.
There are many interesting points made in the video which you can access on YouTube (under the heading given at the start of this article).
So, was the Big Bang the unique beginning of the Universe, or where there other beginnings and other universes?
I suggest you follow their discussion and decide.
For me, I feel comfortable with a single Big Bang, as what Turok believes in.
Next time: Predicting a particle 48 years before its discovery

• Thomas Hukahu is an Australia Awards student in Adelaide.