In Search of Ultimate Reality E-Book

H Chris Ransford

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 234

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Is there such a thing as a fundamental reality, something which was around before our universe came into existence and which will still remain when all matter, time, and space itself ultimately disappear? Something fundamental which, in turn, can make space and time and matter arise from seemingly nothing? Under most cosmological and physical models, the last known remnants of reality are the disembodied laws of mathematics—beyond which it is extremely difficult to probe further. Using contemporary physics, narrated at popular science level, Chris Ransford shows why full nothingness—a nothingness within which even the disembodied laws of mathematics would not exist—cannot possibly exist, and what most likely underpins and enables reality. This leads the author to a few thoughts as to how such knowledge may be verified, and then deployed to achieve a better alignment with reality.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Introduction

1—A Question of Ultimate Origins

2—Don't Bend Reality

3—Which Ultimate Reality?

Mathematics?

In a Finite Universe

Other Contenders

Space?

Time?

Relativity?

Life?

Mindstuff?

Other views

4—How Our Reality Got Its Start

Whence the Big Bang?

5—Mind Over Matter: Glimpses of Different Realities

6—In the Abyss

7—Experimental Objections

8—New Questions

Epilogue: Aligning with Reality

Further Reading

Copyright

Introduction

This book is about the nature of reality. It draws on contemporary leading-edge research, primarily in physics, to reach a somewhat surprising but compelling answer as to what ultimate reality must be. Two books I had published earlier looked at aspects of reality seen from other, more narrowly specific angles, and any relevant results from these earlier books are briefly recapped here when needed, so that this last volume can stand on its own.

Knowledge always builds on the earlier work and collaborative efforts over time of many. The thesis put forward in this book is no different, and it could not have been formulated without the prior work of so many. I have endeavored to always give credit where credit is due, however mentioning all those whose contributions have been important is impossible, and I apologize for any names that should have appeared but somehow were overlooked.

Measured against how long our forebears have walked the Earth, we have only recently known for sure how, say, bolts of lightning, earthquakes, diseases, and much more besides originate. Our modern objective science is still, give or take a few years, only about 300 years old, and there are still many areas where not all the answers are known, our occasional hubris to the contrary notwithstanding. Yet, thanks to ground-breaking physics, we can now catch educated glimpses of some of the answers to the old key questions, and they are nothing short of astounding. One of these is that, if we apply both sound mathematical reasoning and the rule of simplicity—Ockham's razor—to the competing interpretations of physical theories that purport to explain reality, consciousness is then proven to be neither physically reducible nor an emergent property of the brain, but an independent, fundamental feature of reality. But I'm running ahead of the story here.

Every child, at some point in early childhood, has paused and wondered, just what is this newfangled existence that has so recently been thrust upon me? What is it all about, who I am, what am I, how do I fit in the wider scheme of things if there is such a thing, what am I doing here? In other words, what is reality? During the writing of this book I asked around for memories of such questions, and from the many consistent comments I received I believe this experience of childhood puzzlement is universal. For many, wondering just what this life is, turned out to be one of their very first vivid memories.

Then we grow up, get caught up in the race for good grades and staying on the good side of teachers and parents, soon enough career and all manner of other grown-up demands kick in, and idle questions that do not serve an immediate utilitarian purpose are apt to become relegated to the back of our busy minds.

But the questions never fully go away. Sometimes we blindly contract the answers out to those whose business it is to say they know. But seldom can we be fully convinced that indeed, they hold all the answers, and until recently, we could hardly blame them: our collective science was simply not advanced enough to even hint at the answers, and come what may—the show of life must go on.

In our probing of reality, we will have no choice but to use some concepts and results from the current leading edges of science. If some of the terms used may on occasion seem overly specialized or arcane, don't let it discourage you. Einstein, Nicolas Boileau, David Hilbert and many others have made the point that reality is so consistent and ultimately straightforward that it is fully understandable by all, irrespective of individual education backgrounds. You may have to become acquainted or re-acquainted with some of the concepts and occasional vocabulary used in these pages, but should you lose the thread the fault would not be yours, but entirely mine.

The first three chapters examine some of the thorniest scientific issues we have to face when we try to tease out what fundamental reality may be, and also looks at the tools we have at our disposal to do so. Inevitably, some passages will be a bit technical, because it is essential that a comprehensive, well-buttressed case be made towards the definite and rather surprising conclusion that we'll reach in Chapter 6. Don't let it faze you: on the few occasions when some passage may wax overly intricate, feel free to simply become acquainted with its conclusions in the first instance, as this will not impair your ability to follow the thrust of the overall argument and conclusions.

Chapter 4 looks back at how our reality began billions of years ago, and Chapter 5 looks at the way some reported instances of reality, deemed by some to be scientifically impossible, nevertheless keep insistently intruding into our world reality. As president Obama once put it, reality has a way of imposing itself, and any theory that would simply ignore some of its aspects repeatedly observed by many, would be necessarily incomplete, and hence not credible. By the end of this Chapter, the stage has been sufficiently set and we are at last ready to delve into what the cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin dubbed the ‘Abyss’—the ultimate mystery of why there is existence at all, and finally explore, and indeed discover in Chapter 5 what this ultimately extraordinary reality we are a part of, is.

The rest of the book looks first at possible objections, and analyses how such can be understood and, in some as-yet unsettled cases, tested in the framework of the thesis put forward in Chapter 6. Some of the new questions that inevitably arise are then raised, and hopefully, workable answers are found. A few ideas, or perhaps better said wishes, as to how we could use and weave this new view of reality into the fabric of society to build a better world, more aligned with its deeper reality, are then broached.

1—A Question of Ultimate Origins

The question of why there is something rather than nothing, of who we are and what are we doing here, has preoccupied humankind since time immemorial. Thanks to scientific progress, we have been able to steadily push back ever more the question's envelope, but consensus on what the science ultimately means remains elusive, and for all the sound and fury of debates in different scientific disciplines, and beyond them in other walks of life, the bottom line is that we have been unable to answer the question of ultimate origin, let alone meaning, with any degree of certainty or consensus.

Physics has become, in our modern era of attempted objective knowledge, the go-to science of what makes nature tick, of what is (perhaps) possible and what is not, and thence of ultimate origins. Many physicists hailing from different areas of specialization, particle physicists, cosmologists, and others, have attempted to come to grips with ultimate origins—to begin with, by starting from what is rock-bottom definitely there, plain to see and incontrovertible, to wit, the fact that our universe exists—never mind, for the time being at least, that there might be other universes out there, or that our own universe may in fact be far more complex and astonishingly odd than first meets the eye. One inescapable and, truth be told, slightly irksome conclusion they all reached1 was that, whereas there exist many different theoretical ways whereby a universe such as ours could come into being, and whereas there are also many fundamentally different scenarios capable of giving rise to a Big Bang event, which, billions of years later, would look all the same to any then-existing sentient beings, a key shared fact, common to all the possible foundation scenarios that have been thought up, is that these scenarios require the existence of something existing prior. Physics—or at least our understanding of it—mandates that our universe came from something that existed beforehand. Invoking some version of ‘Godhood’ does not explain anything at all, but merely re-labels our lack of knowledge or understanding of what it was that gave rise to this universe, and thence to reality: it shifts the question sideways, without answering it.

The whole history of science has shown that the mere fact of asking questions is always salutary and unstintingly productive: the process of asking often generates new unforeseen questions and sub-questions, some of which may be easier to deal with and which typically, on the way, lead to new, wholly unforeseen insights. In the course of that process, some of the questions that were once thought to be meaningful may become moot or meaningless, replaced with new ones or by insights which provide a wider, overarching context within which the answers may become self-evident, or the earlier questions no longer relevant. We'll discover a few astonishing instances of this process at work.

The question we are facing is, of course, is that of what was that ‘prior something’ and how did it originate? Irrespective of any particular scenario, reality seems to keep generating itself from another, already existing (form of) reality. Does this endless regress end somewhere?

Yes it does.

At an interesting price.

This very question kept nagging Alex Vilenkin, a Ukrainian-born cosmologist at Tufts University. After much thinking and discussions, he envisioned the possible universe-generating scenario that would be free of the requirement of prior reality, and what he came up with is unexpected, and captivating.

To understand where he ended up, we need to first take a brief look at what vacuum is—aka nothingness, total emptiness, move along, there is absolutely nothing there to see here.

There are two kinds of vacuums, so-called false and true. In essence, false vacuums are vacuums that contain a bit of faint residual energy, in the form of fields2 and/or elusive, ghostlike matter, such as (pretty exotic) particles. There is an infinity of possible renditions of the false vacuum, ranging through an infinite range of possible vacuum energies. All false vacuums are potentially unstable and can theoretically decay into any lower-energy vacuum, much like a football stuck somewhere on a house roof can potentially roll down from its location and fall to lower-lying ground. Because any false vacuum can always decay to yet another, lower-energy new false vacuum, it follows that any false vacuum cannot be a fundamental feature of reality. Furthermore, whereas any existing false vacuum can decay to energetically lower ranking vacuums, it can never reach the status of true vacuum—for the simple reason that it's too late for that: since something, somewhere in the universe already exists in some form (matter, energy,….), that something may and can morph and transform into something else, including something extremely different from what it was, as long as the laws of physics allow it3, but it can never wholly disappear into full nothingness without some trace, some echo of what has been—unless, as we shall see, if reality itself were not fundamental.

True vacuum, the true vacuum, is a totally different animal. It does not currently exist anywhere in the universe, but in our quest for ultimate origins and first causes, it is where the buck stops: true vacuum does not require something prior, or something there, the way any false vacuum does. We cannot even assume that it ever existed—but the question, as it will turn out, becomes irrelevant: if it ever exists, the true vacuum turns out to be unstable. The question then becomes that of just what it is that can make pure nothingness unstable in principle. We'll find a surprising answer to this question, which will then in passing answer the age-old question of why there is something rather than nothing, a question that has been addressed by many scientists and philosophers, such as Jim Holt, Lawrence Krauss, John A. Leslie, but for which a definite answer has remained elusive.

The recognition that all of the existing scenarios purporting to explain how a universe could be born required the existence of something prior—a parent universe, a false vacuum, time, anything—was to Vilenkin's mind, nothing short of exasperating. Just what was it that started it all? If an ever-first appearance of reality into the realm of hitherto pure nothingness ever happened, he reasoned, then a mechanism must be found whereby reality can surge forth from pure nothingness, rather than from something prior, whatever that something may turn out to be.

One possible way this conundrum could be addressed would be if there were ultimately no such thing as time, in which case there could never be anything ‘prior’, and presto! the question of prior origins would magically vanish. Unfortunately, it does not quite work: irrespective of what may become of time under certain circumstances and environments (which we will have to look at briefly later on), attempting to solve the conundrum of ultimate origins that way would be the logical equivalent to saying that reality exists because it exists, which is little more than circular reasoning, and does not add much value.

Long story short, the only such mechanism that proved to work turned out to be (a form of) reality somehow spontaneously appearing out of pure nothingness, in other words some false vacuum tunnelling (Vilenkin's word) out of the true vacuum4. Then the emerging reality would take it from there, and the rest, as they say, would become history.

This ‘tunnelling’ scenario, whereby there is pure unadulterated complete nothingness before some reality begins, is workable … on one condition. Tunneling can occur if and only if mathematical laws already exist prior, in some weird disembodied state.

The condition is that mathematical laws must pre-exist within pure nothingness.

As Vilenkin put it:

“The tunnelling process is governed by the same fundamental laws that describe the subsequent evolution of the universe. It follows that the laws should be ‘there’ even prior to the universe itself. Does this mean that the laws are not mere descriptions of reality and can have an independent existence of their own? In the absence of space, time, and matter, what tablets could they be written upon? The laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations. If the medium of mathematics is the mind, does this mean that mind should predate the universe?

This takes us far into the unknown, all the way to the abyss of the great mystery. It is hard to imagine how we can ever get past this point. But as before, that may just reflect the limits of our imagination.”

Therein lies the question dealt with in this book: is mindless mathematics sufficient on its own, or is there something else at the back of it, something that underlies and uses mathematics as the vehicle through which it manifests itself into some reality? We'll discover a surprisingly compelling answer—on the incontrovertible basis of pure science.

But isn't incontrovertible science, accepted by all, rarer than the white elephant? In an age of advanced, complex science, of difficult experiments that can be interpreted in different ways, the quality of incontrovertibility or otherwise remains firmly in the eye of the beholder. Reading through the various conference papers of virtually any leading-edge scientific conference today can prove a sobering, oftentimes slightly bizarre experience: there will invariably be one or several papers enthusiastically espousing some given theory or view of reality (within the context of the conference), and then other paper(s) forcefully supporting the exact contradictory views5. Those scientific disagreements prove to be both a serious boon, and a serious bane. On the one hand, they ensure that the hard results of science, no matter how unacceptable or unpleasant they may appear to people who would prefer their reality to be different, eventually impose themselves: it is the very mechanism that enables overall progress. On the other hand, when truth first appears, no matter how compelling, math-compliant, and obvious it may be, many people would still not recognize it if, as the colourful phrase goes, it hit them in the face. All we ever have to go on is the impartiality of impeccable and applicable math, buttressed by experimentation.

Modern physics rests on two fundamental mainstays, quantum physics on the one hand and relativity on the other hand. It is often said that quantum physics is the science that applies at very small scales and relativity at very large scales, but it's not quite right: both theories fully apply at all scales—otherwise they would not qualify for the status of fundamental theories of nature. However,

• At macroscopic scales, statistical effects become overwhelming and quantum physical effects are replaced by much coarser, yet far more predictable statistical averages. The phenomenon of radioactivity provides a case in point: in the case of, say, uranium, a mere gram of it contains a staggering two and a half thousand billion billon atoms (that’s 2.5 followed by 21 zeroes), so that its half-life becomes easily and accurately predictable, because the uncertainty in principle of when a particular atom will decay is replaced at such large scales by the average number of atoms that decay within a given period of time (the number of atoms that decay every second within one gram of uranium is about 20,000 atoms6

• At everyday distances, relativistic effects become negligible, and a corresponding loss of relevance applies to relativity at ordinary scales. A case in point here would be gravitational time dilation. The farther away you are from a main source of gravity, the faster time elapses. Which means that if you live on the second floor of your house, you'll age faster than someone who lives on its ground floor, by a calculable but thoroughly negligible amount, of the order of a billionth of a second per year (on the pure basis of elevation, since further relativistic effects would also occur, such as the slightly higher tangential speed on the second floor due to the earth's rotation, with the overall resultant effect depending on the precise geometry of the house.)

For our purposes, the part of physics that holds first explanatory power for the very essence of what things are, rather than how they may behave, is quantum physics, which we'll turn to examining now.

2—Don't Bend Reality

As any neuroscientist will easily and compellingly confirm, all we ever have access to is an interpretation of reality, of facts—we have no direct access to reality, our body-intermediated interface to raw external reality forever stands in the way, filtered through limited senses and, more importantly, by a brain that has its own agenda, most of which we are never consciously aware of.

(A simple but telling illustration of this agenda at work is provided by the reason why we tend to feel nauseous when we're in a moving car, or on a rolling and pitching boat7: the brain collects sensory input data from a number of different, simultaneous sensory channels and compares and maps these inputs to produce a real-time image of reality.

When we're walking, consistent signals from our legs, body, inner ear, eyes, etc. confirm that we are actually moving: everything's fine. In a car, however, the brain receives strong signals of ever-shifting body balance and of movement, our eyes may or may not confirm the movement, but our legs definitely signal that we're neither running nor walking, and the brain therefore suspects that we might in fact not be moving at all. At sea, too, there is a strong sense of movement—pitch and roll—but our legs are signalling that we are not walking at all, i.e., that we are most likely not moving. Moreover, the sea out there is largely featureless and uniform—no trees nor buildings are filing past, which could visually confirm that we are actually somehow moving. So—fully unbeknownst to ourselves, aka to the small ‘conscious’ part of the brain—the brain thinks: why do I have the feeling that the world is spinning around me, moving, stomping and rolling, even though I'm not moving at all? Ha ha, thinks your brain, I have been poisoned and become dizzy, that's why! Let me empty all stomach contents at once, and save the day. That's why we throw up when we're car- or seasick, and also why seasickness is more prevalent and more severe than car sickness, because of the absence, at sea, from external reference points such as passing trees which can at least partially confirm motion.)

This is but one among so many examples of the brain's hidden agenda at work, which reminds us that the brain's foremost mandate is to keep us alive—long enough to pass on our genes and ensure with as high a level of likelihood as possible that our offspring will, in turn, also make it.

There is no other evolutionary purpose to the brain: life emphatically does not do priggish. Lives must be led and mouths fed, and whatever works, works, and will be used. If something helps with survival—anything, a habit, a belief, a way of doing things—but that something happens to be factually wrong, the brain does not care: it will lie and make it up into a truth, because that's how survival works. Any gut feelings we may have for what is ‘true’ or not do not take their source in what is factual, but exclusively in the imperatives of evolution. Nature selects for and uses whatever ideas, feelings or techniques happen to work to keep living organisms alive, and it does not matter a whit if such are made out of false beliefs, misapprehensions or outright lies (be they passive lies such as, say, a predator's coat camouflage, or active lies, such as the built-in prey decoys in some species of deep-sea fish), or even, devastatingly enough, of curbs on freewill or intelligence itself and/or, as the case may be, limits on character—as long as such properties enable their owners to stay alive just a little longer, a moment at a time.

The very first order of business when attempting to probe the mysteries of the universe is therefore to let go of our instincts, and sideline in the first instance ‘conventional wisdom’ or common-sense notions that our minds insist on proffering. In this bid to free ourselves from what our hopelessly skewed brains would attempt to make us believe, we have, however, a strong ally: neutral, objective, prejudice-free mathematics. Or rather, more narrowly, numbers.

An argument is sometimes made that mathematics is a figment of the human mind based on prior foundational assumptions—aka axioms—and that it hence cannot be relied on to properly and objectively reflect or grasp outside reality. We can in the first instance safely gainsay this argument here, first because the only part of mathematics that we need for our purpose is numbers, and numbers are robust. Looking for the very irreducible core of mathematics, for some objective, affect-independent way of mapping reality, what we find is that numbers are made of pure vocabulary definitions, not in any way presupposing any feature of possible external reality. Most of mathematics, and all of number theory, ultimately spring from the simple definition that 1+1=2. When we somehow put 1 and 1 together, we thereby create a new object, a whole new animal, different from what we started from, which we are now free to label and define as something called 28. This definition is robust, since it does not make any assumption, and is also language-independent, since any other label can be seamlessly used instead of ‘two’. Yet, from this simple, unimpeachable definition seamlessly flows a whole, increasingly exotic zoo of numbers—natural, rational, irrational, complex, quaternion, transfinite, aleph, beth, prime, Graham's number, etc. … upon which ultimately the whole edifice of physics, and hence our understanding of reality, rests. As we shall see, modern science says that it is not only our understanding of reality that flows from this definition—but reality itself, independently of our comprehension of it.

Incidentally, contrary to a common view, mathematics is demonstrably not a human invention nor a human mental construct, but is independently embedded in nature. Consequently, many animal species avail themselves of it and are quite able to count, in other words to use arithmetics9. Some even make use of simple mathematical modelling: Howard Bloom (2000) describes how bees have been known to seamlessly use simple predictive mathematics to find sources of food.

Unfortunately, as we shall see, even mathematics will often prove insufficient. When we try to make objective sense of reality, it will turn out that what most often remains is the way we (choose to) interpret reality. And, for reasons that we'll be able to elucidate, this limitation is nowhere as glaring as in the key theory of physics whose predictive power—its power to accurately predict observations—has never been faulted: quantum physics, no matter how bizarre and even abhorrent these observations may on occasion appear to our instincts and common sense.

This is hardly news nor intrinsic to physics, of course. Whole cultural genres have been built on the comically different interpretations that can be made of bare, hard facts—classic British comedies, French vaudevilles, and similar spring to mind. It also so happens that try as we may, some facts will be forever hidden from us. We will explore the question of whether ultimate origins belongs in this category, and we will discover, perhaps somewhat astonishingly, that it does not.

In ordinary life however, aspects of reality routinely remain hidden to us, unless we proactively seek explanations. For instance, a new twenty-something panhandler has recently appeared on the streets in the neighbourhood. From this bare fact, a range of starkly differing explanations as to why this person appeared exists. At one end point, this person has fallen victim to inextricably difficult circumstances or to some form of abuse and has become homeless; at the other end, she is a sociology student, field-investigating people's responses to begging across a range of neighborhoods of various degrees of affluence and wealth. Unless we go and talk to her, we will not discover which is which. Sometimes, we just cannot or can no longer know, as the underlying causes of some aspect of reality may have become forever lost to our knowledge, even when the discovery of such cause would not be trivial and could lead to new understandings and/or political or policy decisions. There are many such cases in history. A recent news item made for an intriguing example: it involved a Mr. Jean-Marie Loret, purported to be the French son of a historical German dictator. The balance of much circumstantial evidence seemed to point to Mr. Loret being indeed the dictator's son (it included the fact, for instance, that the German government financially supported Loret's adoptive parents even at a time when it was caught up in a time-consuming and costly war effort.) In 2018, relatives of the erstwhile German dictator (on his father's side) were traced to a village in Austria, and under an understandable proviso of strict confidentiality, their DNA was sampled and compared with that of Mr. Loret's son. The results came back unequivocally: the DNAs were definitely not related. Those are the bare hard facts, but as all hard facts, they are open to extremely different yet equally plausible interpretations. One is to say that Mr. Loret clearly never was the dictator's son, end of story—never mind the abiding rumors to the contrary and the many coincidences. The other way is to say that the dictator's mother committed an indiscretion which resulted in the future dictator's birth. A factoid of history that makes the question relevant is that the father ceaselessly physically abused both the son and the mother during the future dictator's formative years. Could it be that an indiscretion led to the beatings which ultimately deranged the man and took the world down the path to devastation?