eyeoneblack
13th July 2011, 08:25 PM
I have read recently the following books in this order:
The Grand Design Hawking/Mlodinow
The Hidden Reality Brian Greene
The Fabric of the Cosmos Brain Greene
The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning Victor Stenger
And just in passing, I threw in Solar by Ian McEwan (a novel) while on vacation. I do not recommend this book. While the topic, replicating photosynthesis to produce oxygen and hydrogen from water then to power a fuel cell, is, well, topical - but the story of the central character, a Nobel physicist, is far from gratifying. IMO, it's a dud.
That aside; the books dealing with Classical and Quantum Physics were everything intriguing. Many of us, no doubt, are familiar with the first three, but The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning is perhaps more obscure, and brought things together for me in a surprising way.
The author, Stenger, takes up the task of debunking the anthropic principle that invokes (but is not limited to) the "there must be an Intelligence behind it" argument to the statistically unlikely odds that our universe exist. He backs each and every argument against this notion with what I suppose is sound mathematics, even troubling to explain the details and rationales of the very formulas that lie at the heart of the physics. Frankly, my calculus and statistics are like a faded dream and I resigned myself to passing over the math and just stuck with the text.
The math, however, is one of the appealing features of the book as the author does his best to at least familiarize the reader with formulas we often run into but the actual meaning of which is deemed beyond our kin. I borrowed a copy from the library, but I will buy it for its reference value, if nothing else.
So, Stenger takes up the many parameter values that are apparently within an infinitesimally tight constraint and shows that these values may actually vary by magnitudes and still allow for life, something as we know it, to exist. Like I said, I couldn't follow the math so I was forced to take most of his conclusions at face value. In other words, I can't be convinced, but I can be a little persuaded.
Far and away the case the author makes for the Holographic Universe was the most appealing. He only takes it up to debunk the so-called tight constraint on the Cosmological Constant, concluding that the number is not so fine-tuned if we consider the critical density of forces of the universe to be summed within a two-dimensional framework, comparable to the event horizon of a black hole (as opposed to a three-dimensional volume).
Fascinating. But what I want to get to (if it matters anymore - I keep going-on so) are two concepts that taken together sort of gave me a Eureka moment. These are ‘resonance’ and the notion of treating the ‘finely tuned’ elementary forces of nature as variables in a system.
Actually these overlap, although the connection isn’t made by Stenger. For one, the author maintains that the ‘theists and apologists’, scientists themselves, tend to pick and choose variances in one particle or another and then recalculate their ‘model’ with the new arbitrary value which then describes a universe that can’t sustain stars and life. Wisely, I think, Stenger argues that these fundamental values (say, of the proton and electron) are interdependent. That to have a different value for one ‘at the Big Bang’ would simply have resulted in a compensatory value for the other.
Ok, as a musician, my gears are starting to whirr. The author’s mention of Hoyle’s Resonance was confined to a discussion of stellar nuclearsynthesis and whether enough carbon would have been produced for carbon-based life forms in a ‘different’ genesis of elementary forces. Once again he makes the point that these forces tango together in such a way that sufficient carbon would be likely from a wide range of initial conditions.
Resonance, that’s the word I needed. The wonder that the universe appears to be so fine-tuned isn’t such a wonder at all if we allow that nature seeks harmony, and perhaps, that is the Unified Theory of Everything!
This little analogy is lame enough, but it is what came to mind: Play a B and a C together in a minor second. They produce an irritating sound, one that ‘wants’ to be ‘fixed’. Invert them once, that is, make them nearly an octave apart and now it’s a little different situation where they just seem a little ‘empty’. Something in a musician’s mind (or anybody else’s for that matter) says, “Give me a G.” THAT’S better, now how about an E? Ah...., now we have a C major seven chord which is really quite pleasing - the major sevens being the foundation of many of a great and romantic melody.
I may be overstepping logic to suggest that the elementary forces of nature ‘tend to tune’ to themselves, but I’m not embarrassed to say that I’ve only pushed the pea back a-ways; buried it a little deeper. If Nature Seeks Harmony, still the question of Why remains.
Fifty years from now, if my grandson reads tid-bits of the physics that today are my only my clue, I hope and expect he’ll find it quaint and amusing. Physicists are making a lot of grand conjectures even when 73% of the energy of our universe is tied up in something we simply dismiss as ‘dark energy’.
I think we are far from anything really definitive today. For example; why has no scientist postulated a universe practically free of matter as we know it but still capable of life? The world I enter when I dream.... is THAT not a universe itself?
The Grand Design Hawking/Mlodinow
The Hidden Reality Brian Greene
The Fabric of the Cosmos Brain Greene
The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning Victor Stenger
And just in passing, I threw in Solar by Ian McEwan (a novel) while on vacation. I do not recommend this book. While the topic, replicating photosynthesis to produce oxygen and hydrogen from water then to power a fuel cell, is, well, topical - but the story of the central character, a Nobel physicist, is far from gratifying. IMO, it's a dud.
That aside; the books dealing with Classical and Quantum Physics were everything intriguing. Many of us, no doubt, are familiar with the first three, but The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning is perhaps more obscure, and brought things together for me in a surprising way.
The author, Stenger, takes up the task of debunking the anthropic principle that invokes (but is not limited to) the "there must be an Intelligence behind it" argument to the statistically unlikely odds that our universe exist. He backs each and every argument against this notion with what I suppose is sound mathematics, even troubling to explain the details and rationales of the very formulas that lie at the heart of the physics. Frankly, my calculus and statistics are like a faded dream and I resigned myself to passing over the math and just stuck with the text.
The math, however, is one of the appealing features of the book as the author does his best to at least familiarize the reader with formulas we often run into but the actual meaning of which is deemed beyond our kin. I borrowed a copy from the library, but I will buy it for its reference value, if nothing else.
So, Stenger takes up the many parameter values that are apparently within an infinitesimally tight constraint and shows that these values may actually vary by magnitudes and still allow for life, something as we know it, to exist. Like I said, I couldn't follow the math so I was forced to take most of his conclusions at face value. In other words, I can't be convinced, but I can be a little persuaded.
Far and away the case the author makes for the Holographic Universe was the most appealing. He only takes it up to debunk the so-called tight constraint on the Cosmological Constant, concluding that the number is not so fine-tuned if we consider the critical density of forces of the universe to be summed within a two-dimensional framework, comparable to the event horizon of a black hole (as opposed to a three-dimensional volume).
Fascinating. But what I want to get to (if it matters anymore - I keep going-on so) are two concepts that taken together sort of gave me a Eureka moment. These are ‘resonance’ and the notion of treating the ‘finely tuned’ elementary forces of nature as variables in a system.
Actually these overlap, although the connection isn’t made by Stenger. For one, the author maintains that the ‘theists and apologists’, scientists themselves, tend to pick and choose variances in one particle or another and then recalculate their ‘model’ with the new arbitrary value which then describes a universe that can’t sustain stars and life. Wisely, I think, Stenger argues that these fundamental values (say, of the proton and electron) are interdependent. That to have a different value for one ‘at the Big Bang’ would simply have resulted in a compensatory value for the other.
Ok, as a musician, my gears are starting to whirr. The author’s mention of Hoyle’s Resonance was confined to a discussion of stellar nuclearsynthesis and whether enough carbon would have been produced for carbon-based life forms in a ‘different’ genesis of elementary forces. Once again he makes the point that these forces tango together in such a way that sufficient carbon would be likely from a wide range of initial conditions.
Resonance, that’s the word I needed. The wonder that the universe appears to be so fine-tuned isn’t such a wonder at all if we allow that nature seeks harmony, and perhaps, that is the Unified Theory of Everything!
This little analogy is lame enough, but it is what came to mind: Play a B and a C together in a minor second. They produce an irritating sound, one that ‘wants’ to be ‘fixed’. Invert them once, that is, make them nearly an octave apart and now it’s a little different situation where they just seem a little ‘empty’. Something in a musician’s mind (or anybody else’s for that matter) says, “Give me a G.” THAT’S better, now how about an E? Ah...., now we have a C major seven chord which is really quite pleasing - the major sevens being the foundation of many of a great and romantic melody.
I may be overstepping logic to suggest that the elementary forces of nature ‘tend to tune’ to themselves, but I’m not embarrassed to say that I’ve only pushed the pea back a-ways; buried it a little deeper. If Nature Seeks Harmony, still the question of Why remains.
Fifty years from now, if my grandson reads tid-bits of the physics that today are my only my clue, I hope and expect he’ll find it quaint and amusing. Physicists are making a lot of grand conjectures even when 73% of the energy of our universe is tied up in something we simply dismiss as ‘dark energy’.
I think we are far from anything really definitive today. For example; why has no scientist postulated a universe practically free of matter as we know it but still capable of life? The world I enter when I dream.... is THAT not a universe itself?