How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence

9 | If only we knew exactly how the story began. If only we could say, ‘Once upon a time’ and know what follows.

10 | An ancient Greek cosmology has the world created out of a pre-existing condition called chaos. Kaos is not emptiness but formlessness. It was the world before there were things in it. The word nothing, like some fossil of ancient thought, still retains that original concept of no thing. The universe emerged when Logos, meaning variously form, knowledge and word, came into contact with Kaos. Out of their union comes Cosmos (beauty or order, as in cosmetics, which bring order to the face). The opening words of St John’s gospel repeat this ancient prescription: In the beginning was the Word. In the original Greek the word translated as ‘word’ is Logos. And in Genesis we find God creating nature by separating out from chaos what then become things with names. Naming is a process of separating out, and the first step in any scientific investigation of the world. Before explanation must come the naming of parts. The idea of nothing as emptiness came later. That the universe was created out of emptiness, ex nihilo, is a radical departure from how creation was envisaged by certain ancient Greek philosophers, and was an interpretation imposed on the Biblical story by medieval scholars.

11 | Our current best modern-day creation stories are variants of the Big Bang theory, a mathematical description of the universe coaxed out of the equations of general relativity. Even though they were his equations, Einstein at first denied the Big Bang. Later he changed his mind.

The most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.

Einstein, of an exposition of the Big Bang given by its inventor (discoverer?) Georges Lemaître (1894–1966), priest and physicist

12 | All matter can ultimately be reduced to constituent particles – bosons and fermions – that are the excitations of various types of energetic field. At the Big Bang there may have been a single kind of energetic field which, in an expanding universe, evolved into other kinds of energetic field.

Within a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe is a cascade of particles decaying into other particles. Whole eras of the universe passed before it was even a second old.

13 | We know what happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, but what happened in the beginning?

14 | In the beginning everything was in the same place at the same time. In the beginning the physical world is pure energy, whatever that is. In the beginning the universe is some condition of form, number and energy held in perfect symmetry. It cannot last. The symmetry breaks and becomes a world of asymmetries, imperfections and accidents. The world falls into existence.

The positive energy within matter can be counterbalanced by the negative sink of the all-pervading gravitational field such that the total energy of the universe is potentially nothing; when combined with quantum

uncertainty,

this allows the possibility that everything is … some quantum fluctuation living on borrowed time. Everything may thus be a quantum fluctuation of nothing.

Frank Close, particle physicist

Zero exists now, it has always existed, and it will always exist. It is the native state of existence. It is what the physicist David Bohm called implicate order. It is the timeless quantum superposition of all universes and all life in an infinite universe. As the most brilliant physicists have long held, a perfect zero is the most ordered state of all, it just isn’t found in the past where time begins. It exists in the future where time ends.

Gevin Giorbran, science writer

15 | Energy leaks out of the vacuum for no reason at all except randomness and the pressure exerted by a sink of infinite negative energy. Overall the universe is nothing at all.

16 | Take matter out of the universe and reality becomes unstable, liable to give birth randomly to new universes. The vacuum is the birthing ground of universes; like the silence of the mystics, a roiling place of visions and madness, of annihilating forces.

17 | In the outer reaches of the universe, as far away from here as it is possible to be, beyond time and space and meaning and matter, nothing was happening. And the nothing was without form, pure potential for becoming, an evanescent yet heaving sea of energy coming into and out of existence. For reasons not yet understood, a bubble of energy that should have burst back into non-existence breaks free with the rage of Achilles from the conditions of the quantum world and sweeps out a universe.

18 | The universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time. Everything that is exists only by happenstance, randomly, out of nothing.

19 | If less is more, is nothing too much?

20 | For now the most widely-agreed-on model that describes how the universe got going is the theory of eternal inflation. An infinite number of ‘bubbles’ arose in an eternally inflating quantum landscape. One of these bubbles became the island universe we call home. An infinite number of other island universes exist in all the possible forms determined by some constraining mathematical model, most popularly string theory.

The landscape out of which these island universes emerged is called the multiverse.

21 | Inflation is happening eternally, elsewhere. Our ‘island’ universe inflated briefly. It doubled in size every 10

seconds. After about a hundred such doublings it had grown to about the size of a grapefruit, at which point the period of inflation came to an end.

Why inflation came to an end locally is not yet known.

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space.

Shakespeare (1564–1616), Hamlet

22 | i You do not need God in order to create a universe, says Stephen Hawking. All you need is gravity, quantum electrodynamics, special and general relativity, M-theory and a few other bits and pieces of physics. But where these ingredients come from remains, for the moment at least, an unanswered question.

ii M-theory (no one can remember what the M stands for) is a formulation of string theory, and a quantum theory of gravity – an abstract and mathematical theory, as yet without physical proof. M-theory describes a multiverse of eleven dimensions in which there may be many island universes like ours, adrift in four dimensions of time and space; and many other kinds of universes adrift in different numbers of dimensions of space, some perhaps with several dimensions of time (whatever that might look like). M-theory describes 10

different universes.

Consider the most obvious question of all about the initial state of the universe. Why is there an initial state at all?

Lawrence Sklar, philosopher of physics

The desire to find a beginning comes from the idea that everything has the real, solid existence that our minds generally perceive.

Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus

As far as I can see, such a theory [as the Big Bang] remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being … For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God. It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the Universe.

Georges Lemaître

23 | In saying that the universe randomly evolved out of some initial energy condition that we don’t yet fully understand, we sweep everything we don’t know about the universe under the carpet. All the unanswered questions about the physical universe get pushed to its horizons, far away from where humans are. The horizons of the universe are the limits of what we can see and what we can understand. The universe disappears over its own horizon, taking with it the laws of nature, forever just out of our reach. For a while, the more we found out about the physical universe the larger it became. But largeness itself has become passé. The universe shows itself to be subtler than mere size. All our creative speculations, even when they harden into theories, merely push the mystery of what we are and where we come from to ever more distant regions of an ever more elusive universe.

SECTION 5 (#ulink_2fb8d9f7-8871-58ad-b468-f43972196aad)

What is science? (#ulink_2fb8d9f7-8871-58ad-b468-f43972196aad)

Science (a term in itself inoffensive and of indefinite meaning).

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), The Secret Agent

That bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progression.

Terry Eagleton, literary theorist and critic

1 | Life may be messy, but in the physical world there appears to be underlying order. Evidence of this order has encouraged scientists to believe in the existence of physical laws of nature. Why nature should have unifying features is a deep mystery. That physical laws of nature are ultimately reducible to mathematics is an even deeper mystery.

2 | The difference between the ways of science and the ways of other truth-seeking enterprises is that science has a method.

First find what you think might be a solution to a problem, then express it as a mathematical model, then test it.

David Deutsch, physicist

3 | In science, to look is not enough, there needs also to be intervention in order to affirm what it is that is being looked at. A testable theory is required, not just mere description, though a description is a start. A theory is proven for as long as it is confirmed in that repeatable process of measurement called experiment. Sometimes we improve our ability to measure and theories are further confirmed, and sometimes theories fail when examined more closely.

If the explanation of physical phenomena were evident in their appearance, empiricism would be true and there would be no need for science as we know it.

David Deutsch