Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Sunday, February 20, 2022

Getting a couple of (difficult) things straight

To return to physics, let me first state again that my expertise is that of a life-long reader of Scientific American and a reader of a few books written for otherwise well educated lay people. That said, I do understand quite a lot about the substantive and philosophical implications of contemporary physical and cosmological theory.


The quantum theory does not admit the possibility of miracles. Events at unimaginably small scales -- measured in picometers, that is 10^-12 meters, i.e. 1/1,000,000,000,000 meter -- are probabilistic rather than deterministic. That is, we can only say that the probability of a neutron in a radioactive nucleus decaying within a certain time is so much, but we can't predict when it will actually decay. We also cannot predict when an "excited" electron -- one at a higher than normal energy state in an atom -- will fall back to its lower state and emit a photon, but only the probability of it happening within a certain time. There are many other non-deterministic processes. 


However, when you put together millions of atoms to make objects that we can interact with in our macroscopic world, including ourselves, all of those probabilities add up to a definite and fully predictable reality. We know how billiard balls will bounce off of each other, and we know we can't walk through walls, even though we can't predict exactly how subatomic particles will interact or whether they will "tunnel" through a higher energy state to a lower one. Newtonian physics and our everyday experience work just fine in the world we live in for all practical purposes. Quantum effects matter to us only because we manufacture micro-electronic devices. 


Second, while we don't know why the universe came into being or why it has the properties we observe, for damn sure it wasn't created for our sake. The Hubble telescope found about 100 billion galaxies, but more sensitive telescopes will find more. And if there are more beyond the 13.8 billion light year horizon, we can't see them at all. They each have something like 100 to 200 billion stars. And it took 13.8 billion years from the Initial Singularity for us to appear on this single planet. 


People do wonder why the universe is hospitable to us. Change one or more of the fundamental constants of nature and we can't happen. One answer to this problem satisfies some people entirely, and others not at all. That is simply that we observe a universe in which our existence is possible. If it weren't possible, we wouldn't be here, but maybe some other kind of entity that can observe and wonder would be. Or maybe not. While any given outcome may be vanishingly improbable, that there will be some outcome is a certainty. 

 

A stronger version of this explanation holds that there may be innumerable universes, and we happen to be in the one of them in which we are possible. And while we can't answer the question of first causes, just saying "God" is meaningless. Where did God come from? And if there is some agency behind the universe, it in no way resembles the god of any actual religion. So again, I'll just live with mysteries until and unless they are solved.

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