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I agree with Dawkins. (He's a good friend of mine.) I agree with him that the simplest hypothesis is that the universe is made up matter, that's all we see, and we have no evidence -- there's no requirement to introduce any other elements in the universe, any supernatural element, any spiritual element. So, until we can, until someone can prove it -- and they have the burden of proof, not us. We don't have the burden of proof in saying that the supernatural doesn't exist.
Cliff Walker: What are some of their tougher points that they make?
Victor Stenger: They would say that their argument is simpler, because what could be simpler than to just say that it was God that made it all? How could it be simpler than that?
Well, it's not a theory. They have to give us some kind of mechanism. For every single phenomenon that is observed, they have to say, "Okay, God did that." And that's yet another assumption. It's a really much more complicated assumption to say that there is this unknown entity out there (we have to hypothesize all kinds of things about that unknown entity) that I claim we don't need to hypothesize at all, because we have no reason (within a framework of existing scientific knowledge) to make that assumption.
Now, one of the theories where the debate really gets tough is that the cosmologists today agree that the constants of nature are a very fortuitous combination, that our universe and our type of life would not have existed with a different set of constants. But they've also said that there is no reason that we have, in existing knowledge, to assume ours is the only universe. This is where the Occam's Razor argument will come in, because the theist will say, "You're being very nonparsimonious by talking about more than one universe. What could be simpler than one universe created by God?"
Well, I think (again, based on what we know) we have no reason to rule out the existence of other universes. They have to provide some principle to say that there is only one universe. So again, it's uneconomical of them to add these assumptions that are not required by the data.
So, when we say there may be other universes, that doesn't mean we know, for sure, there are other universes. We're not saying that we can prove that there are other universes. We're saying that, as far as we can tell, there is nothing to rule them out. There could be one universe, there could be an infinite number of universes. The simplest assumption is that there are many universes, all things have happened in pretty much all combinations, and we just happen to be in the one that had the kind of laws and constants of nature that led to us.
It's like saying that the sun gives off visible light because humans have eyes that are sensitive to the visible region, and therefore the sun was designed to give off visible light. But I think it's pretty obvious that life evolved on the Earth with eyes sensitive to visible light because visible light was coming from the sun.
Cliff Walker: Another form of that is that the Earth is rotating around the sun at just the right distance to provide for life. I don't see it that way.
Victor Stenger: Well, there are all these planets where life didn't form. In fact, only one in the solar system just happened to be right for the formation of life. There's the recent thing about life on Mars, but I don't think that's going to pan out. It's sort of falling out of favor now. Even then, it's obviously clear that we're the only planet with any kind of extensive life. It's just for-tuitous. We wouldn't exist on Mars. We wouldn't exist on Pluto. We exist on the Earth because the Earth happens to be the one that has the properties suitable for us.
I think the same idea can be extended to the universe: we exist in this universe because this universe has the properties that were needed to lead to us. Another universe might have a different set of properties. And we have no right to say that there's only kind of life possible, the kind that we have on Earth, or at least the kind that comes from chemical complexity.
I wrote a little program that you can find on my web page (you can execute it on the web page) where you change some of the basic constants of physics and see what kind of universe you get. You can change things, you can look at how big the atoms are, and it's a very easy program to run.
The key thing I calculate is the age of stars, because it's claimed to be very strange and very coincidental that the stars live so long. We need long-lived stars to produce the carbon and other materials for life, and to allow life a long time to evolve and develop. If the constants were different, if gravity were much stronger than it is now, you wouldn't have stars living so long.
So what I did is I showed that -- (for a wide range of variation of the constants) I changed these four constants randomly over ten orders of magnitude. More than half of the universes that were produced had stars that lived more than a billion years. So, long life is not that rare. I think that's what happens with a lot of these coincidences. When you look a little closer to them, you find that they're not that strange, and that you could think of making some changes here and there and still getting something out if it that would be capable of evolving life. It wouldn't look like us!
If you wound the universe over again, if you wound it back and started it over again, it would look different, too.
Cliff Walker: All some dinosaur had to do was sneeze.
Victor Stenger: Exactly. There was so much randomness. And even the laws of physics as we know them today developed in the early universe (according to the current cosmological picture that we have) by a set of random processes. These could have happened by accident.
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Cliff Walker: The largest fraction of the letters I get are about ethics and morals: Can atheists have morals? Where do we get our morals from? The second largest fraction is about origins.
In Not By Design you make what I found to be an astonishing statement that the Big Bang did not need any energy in order to start. Would you go over that with us?
Victor Stenger: There are two things that people say. The one is, "How can you get something for nothing?" and the other one is (and they wave around), "How could all this have happened by chance?"
If you translate these two statements into physics statements, the first one is, "How could you get energy?" The Universe contains energy and matter, and you have a law of physics called the Conservation of Energy (it's also called the First Law of Thermodynamics), and that appears to have been violated (or so these think it was violated) at the origin of the Universe.
Well, if you look and you ask yourself (from observations of the Universe), "What is the total energy of the Universe?" It turns out, that, as far as we can tell, it's zero.
Cliff Walker: Have we found the WIMPs yet? [WIMPS: Weak Interacting Massive Particles, not yet observed, that may constitute the major component of the matter of the Universe.]
Victor Stenger: No. But even if we find those, it's not going to change this picture. Even though we can't see this dark matter (that you're referring to), we know its gravitational effect.
Every measurement that we make indicates that the total energy of the Universe is balanced between the rest energy that's in the matter, the kinetic energy that's in the motion of objects, and then this is balanced by a negative potential energy of gravity. And the total energy is very close to zero. So, if the total energy is zero, and if you had zero energy to begin with, there was no violation of energy conservation. There was no miracle that created energy at the beginning of the Universe (other than, perhaps, a little quantum fluctuation that is, again, in agreement with existing knowledge, and so would not be a miracle).
Then you have the Second Law, which says that, "Where did the order come from? If you started out from complete disorder, how could you develop order from that? because the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the Universe is always moving toward a state of increasing disorder, what is called entropy (which for our purposes is the same thing as disorder).
This actually was a legitimate question a hundred years ago, when we thought that the Universe was a firmament, but now we know that the Universe is expanding. An expanding universe leaves increasingly more space for order to form.
An example I like to give on this, is, suppose that you have a very small yard, and every day you take your rubbish and you dump the rubbish into the yard. Eventually it's going to cover up those petunias that you plotted over there your garden, and your yard is going to become very disordered. How can you, then, get some more petunias growing? Well, what you can do is buy the land around your yard. Then you have more space and you can plant some petunias. As time goes on, of course, you keep dumping the rubbish and it fill up the space, you've got to keep buying more and more land. But, in principle, you can do it that way; you can always have some space left over. As long as the Universe continues to expand, in other words, there's always room for more order to form.
So neither of these two principles of physics, the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics were violated were violated in the process of producing the Universe.
Cliff Walker: I think you were saying that the Universe was expanding faster than entropy can happen.
Victor Stenger: Yes, and we generate entropy. The amount of order in the Universe is very small. Because we live in this tiny little pocket of order over here on the Earth, we tend to think that it's a very organized place. But, in fact, it's mostly random.
If you take the particles, for example, and just count the particles in the Universe, and you have the protons and the neutrons and the electrons, that make up the atoms, that make up the molecules, that make up the stars and planets and galaxies, and all that stuff that we see and that we're part of, that's only one part in a billion of all the particles in the Universe. Most of the particles are photons (particles of light) and neutrinos. These are remnants of the Big Bang. They're at three degrees above absolute zero, and almost -- but not quite -- at complete equilibrium.
About ten years ago there was an experiment, a satellite experiment (the COBE satellite, that, I'm sure, people read about) that [found] a one part in a hundred thousand deviation from smoothness in this background. And interestingly enough, that was exactly the amount that was predicted by the Inflationary Big Bang Theory (which I'm using when I talk about scenarios of the Universe coming about by chance).
Everything sort of fell together with that. But, the point being -- still -- is that most of the Universe is of these photons and neutrinos, and they are mostly just moving around randomly, and only one part in a hundred thousand of those shows any deviation from just being a completely smooth thing.
So what we have is a universe that's mostly chaos, that's mostly random motion, and here and there are little, tiny, tiny, tiny, little pockets of order. And so they get organized and they kick out their entropy to the rest of the universe, and it hardly notices the amount that we pump out. The Earth, for example sends out entropy -- radiation from the Earth. Infrared radiation from the Earth adds entropy to the Universe. And the Universe doesn't even notice it.
Cliff Walker: Is it proper to speak about a beginning -- or -- what does Stephen Hawking mean when he says that the Big Bang has no boundary? (And that's just a suggestion on his part.)
Victor Stenger: He is talking about a specific idea of his (and of others, I'm sure), that the universe is sort of like a closed sphere. A good example would be, we think of the surface of the Earth, but think now of the surface being two-dimensional. Well, you know that our picture of space and time (time is one of the dimensions), of a four-dimensional space-time structure, underlies things. Well, let's just think about one dimension of space and one dimension of time, and imagine the space being the longitude (around the sphere, a point on the surface of the Earth), and then the time would be the polar angle, the co-latitude (the latitude is measured up from the equator, imagine measuring time down from the poles along a line of longitude). Then you would have a point in space-time defined by a point on this sphere.
Then, as you go back along that line of longitude to time t=0, you go to the pole. Well, then you continue back along another t line, you see that it's not really a boundary, it's not the end of things, it's just one particular point on a sphere that you've defined as t=0. It's not an end. It's not a boundary. That's the boundary-free view of the Universe, but that's just his particular model that he would like to see develop into something.
Cliff Walker: I'd like to hear about your model, but I see we're running out of time.
Victor Stenger: The alternative to all this -- remember, Hawking is not a particle physicist (although he talks a lot about particle physics in his book), he comes from the more traditional kind of cosmology, that comes through gravitational studies and General Relativity. The Inflationary Big Bang Theory came out of particle physics, so he has a different perspective on this. He brings things from that perspective, and the Inflationary Big Bang that I talk about, that I think is much more --
Cliff Walker: Could you run over that, briefly, with us?
Victor Stenger: The idea is that there is a vast, super-universe out there, and ours is just one: it's a multi-universe or multi-verse. It's just, basically nothing.
Cliff Walker: Are you talking along the lines of a larger system?
Victor Stenger: Yeah. Then our universe occurs as just a quantum fluctuation, a bubble of what's called false vacuum in this true vacuum, and that expands into our universe, and these bubbles are going off all over the place making other universes. The inflationary part is the early part of our universe, where it expands very rapidly -- all these processes that I've talked about, that generate the first particles (and forces get developed) -- all during those very early stages of the Big Bang. That theory is, of course, still tentative, and could eventually be shown to be incorrect, but it's been around now for close to twenty years. And as I've said, it's made some successful predictions, and provides, really, the only explanation for an awful lot of observations that we make about the Universe.
Cliff Walker: Can we peer into beyond that point of the Big Bang?
Victor Stenger: Only with our equations, you see, we can't see beyond our own universe. That's where it becomes speculation, rather than actual physics; that's where the theists get into the picture. They say, "Well, you're just speculating, you're not doing science."
Cliff Walker: One guy wanted me to ask you if it was faith.
Victor Stenger: Well, I don't think that it is. Faith is when you believe something that nobody in his right mind would believe. That's faith! [Laughs]
Cliff Walker: Well, they would dispute that!
Victor Stenger: Belief is, I think, different from faith. I think one can believe in science, and believe in the message of science, without saying that that is faith. If you're a scientist, and if you're a true scientist, you will always accept the possibility that it could change. So, you just have to rely on the data -- what the data tell you. What I'm talking about today is what the data tell us; when the data tell us something different, we'll have to change our minds about it. You always have to leave yourself open to that possibility.
Cliff Walker: I heard a lecture at United States Atheists last year, and I got a letter from Brazil this year [Is the Big-Bang a Religious Hoax? by Huascar Terra do Valle] -- you must have encountered this one: Atheists who think that the Big Bang is a creationist hoax.
Victor Stenger: Well, you know, there are still some people out there who think that the Big Bang is not solidly verified. What happened was the Big Bang, actually, was picked up by the theists, who say, "See? That's what the Bible was telling us all along!" Of course, not just the Bible, practically every religion that has ever existed has a creation myth of some sort that talks about creation out of nothing. There's certainly nothing in the Bible that looks even remotely like the Big Bang: the Earth is created before the sun and the stars in the Bible, so I don't know how you can say that resembles the Big Bang!
But this is, again, something that they began throwing around. "Aha! You see? People that are opposing the Big Bang, they're opposing it because they're really atheists, and the Big Bang is showing us that the Bible was right all along." Well, there are an awful lot of atheists who look at the Big Bang as a well-established theory.
We have to leave open the possibility that it could be wrong, but it doesn't look very -- every year that goes by, and more astronomical data comes in, it's more and more consistent with at least the general Big Bang picture.
Cliff Walker: It sounded enticing until I realized that the presentation that they're making is the same kind of reasoning that the anti-evolutionist use. They're using the associations -- this group of scientists' associations, the history of that dogma and who supported it -- to argue against the model.
Victor Stenger: There was a real terrible book that came out about ten years ago called, The Big Bang Never Happened by a guy by the name of [Eric J.] Lerner. He tried to make this argument in there, because he was promoting a different model of the Universe, a sort of steady-state model. He was trying to say that the only reason why scientists are believing in this Big Bang is because of religion, you see (he was very anti-religion as well). But that book was just absolutely awful; it just did not have any basis. While it was on the bookshelves for a while, I think it was shot down by many people, not just me. |
