I finally finished Timothy Ferris’s The Whole Shebang, and all I can say is, wow.  Physics & astronomy have produced some ideas that are so wild I doubt I really understand them.  But they are so fascinating and the implications so potentially important that I have to write a post about them, if only as a way to try to clarify them for myself.

    I posted some thoughts on the first third of the book here.  The second third of the book was tough to get through - it was pretty technical.  The last third of the book was where things really got interesting, starting with string theory.  The goal physics is to mathematically describe all physical phenomena.  It’s very good at this, and has been able to describe even the behavior of subatomic particles through quantum physics.  Although I haven’t seen them and will never understand them, there is a set of equations (if I’m understanding Ferris correctly) called “the standard model” which describes and predicts the behavior of everything at the quantum level, except for gravity.  So the major goal of modern physics is to come up with something better than the standard model, something which also explains gravity.

    Enter string theory.  The basic concept is that subatomic particles are actually tiny strings made of self-contained space.  In order for string theory equations to work, they have to include the quantum carrier of gravity, the gravitron.  So string theory accounts for all quantum particles and forces, including gravity.  Hooray for physics!

    But to me string theory is interesting because it seems to be saying that everything is made out of nothing more than space.  Apparently these super tiny quantum strings are just curved space.  Ferris writes, “The central riddle of genesis - how can the universe have come into being if, as Shakespeare put it, ‘Nothing can be made out of nothing’? - is answered thus: Everything is nothing, in a sense, for all is made of space, which in this context means pure geometry.”

    At first blush this would seem to support the traditional Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo “from nothing,” and be at odds with the Mormon belief that God created the universe from pre-existing matter.  String theory is not finished, however; physicists are working on refining it and some criticize it for being more complicated than the physics it purports to replace (generally in science, the more parsimonious a theory is, the more likely it is to be true).  But to ponder this idea of creation from nothing a bit more, exactly how would space roll up into little strings, and at what point would they be considered “something?”  Unless I am misreading Ferris, physics can’t answer those questions yet.

    Another interesting idea he writes about is inflation, which is a new idea to replace, well more like transcend, the big bang.  To begin to try to explain this, I’ll start with the idea of a vacuum.  We generally think of a vacuum as empty space.  But this presents a logical difficulty. If a vacuum is literally nothing, how can it exist?  For a while physicists assumed interstellar space was full of an ether of some sort, but this was shown not to be true.  Quantum physics filled space with the fact that some things are both particles and waves, and I guess waves can be around even when nothing else is.  Space is full of quantum fields, and if the values of the fields cancel each other out, there is a classical vacuum.  If the fields do not cancel each other out, there is a false vacuum.  A false vacuum contains more energy than a classical vacuum, and it is thought that during the first moments of cosmic history, the ambient energy of the false vacuum was very great.  All systems tend to devolve from high energy to low energy, so the false vacuum decayed into a classical vacuum, and its energy precipitated into the “hot particles of the big bang.”  And the universe started inflating. 

    The false vacuum theory of inflation is called simple inflation, but there’s a more advanced version of it called chaotic inflation.  This begins with something called a scalar field.  Scalar fields possess only magnitude, whereas, say, electromagnetic fields have both magnitude and direction.  Scalar fields may have been the dominant form taken by energy/matter in high-energy conditions like the big bang. 

    “The customary way to visualize these [scalar fields] is to picture the vacuum as a cowboy hat with an indented crown.  The dent at the top of the crown represents the local minimum value of the relevant scalar field. During inflation the field sits in the dent, hung up at its local minimum value.  Inflation ceases when the field descends to the brim, which represents its global minimum value.” (Ferris, 240).  According to chaotic inflation, there were a huge number of scalar fields at the beginning of the universe.  Our universe came from one of them.  The theory predicts there are a limitless number of other universes.  Chaotic inflation “resonates well with string theory, since both would build the foundations of the cosmos out of space itself.”

So whether creation was ex nihilo or not may be a matter of semantics.  If the universe started with a high-energy scalar field or a false vacuum, or both (I don’t understand if these are mutually exclusive ideas or two aspects of the same thing), that field/vacuum is something, isn’t it?  Which leads to the question, where did it come from?

    Ferris says the origin of the universe is a paradox: There can be no effect without a cause.  Every event has a prior event, so we can never attain an account of the very beginning.  The universe must have originated from another system, and that system from another, and so we are caught in infinite regress.

The bottom line is that “Chaotic inflation has two startling implications.  First, it mandates the existence of a universe precedent to our own.  Second...it implies the existence of countless other universes.”  Our universe came not from the big bang, but from a “pretty big bang.”  “There were - are - innumerable ‘pretty big bangs,’ with countless more to come.  The history of the cosmos is darker than the depths of the sea, and its myriad futures richer and less predictable than all the unpainted paintings and uncomposed songs yet to emerge from the minds of all the humans to be born from now till the sun goes red and dies.”  (Ferris 263).

    Which is somewhat frustrating to science because there is no apparent way to see beyond the beginning and no way to observe other universes.  This idea is much less discomfiting to religious people who are used to the idea of eternity (having no beginning and no end) and more comfortable with the idea that some things are known only to God.

If you’re still with me, there’s a final thing modern physics has discovered which I think is really worthy of attention.  They call it quantum weirdness.  You may be familiar with the fact that it’s impossible to know both the position and momentum of an electron at the same time.  Not impossible because we lack the tools, but theoretically impossible.  Ferris says that if you set up an experiment to sort electrons based on some of their properties, to avoid jargon he says sweet/sour and soft/hard, filtering out the sweet ones, then the hard ones, the electrons in the end should all be sour and hard.  But in fact they’re all sour and half soft half hard.  Observing them actually makes them change.  This means information gets transferred instantaneously, like, faster than the speed of light.  Physicists call this “nonlocal” behavior.  Apparently this nonlocal behavior can change something instantaneously over any distance.  And this has been experimentally proven.

    “The specifics need not detain us: They involved testing the polarization of large numbers of photons.  Their significance was that they would produce different results if the particles behaved in a local way...the verdict is clear: nonlocal effects do occur in quantum systems...fiddling with one particle really does mean that its sister particle is altered, instantly, even if it is far away.  As the physicist F. David Peat puts it, ‘The choice before us is either to abandon any hope of knowing the nature of quantum reality or to accept a nonlocal universe.’” (Ferris 285).

That is simply amazing.  It’s amazing that it’s true, and amazing that human beings discovered it.  And I have to say it really adds to my faith, or at least makes it easier for me to have faith.  Not that it proves anything about God, but that it reveals some possibilities about how God might operate.  One of the things that’s sometimes troubled me about the idea of a personal God is how God could possibly know our thoughts or hear our prayers from light years away if nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  I know, faith is not about having a materialistic explanation for everything, but I at least want science to not directly contradict things I believe about God.  But if, at least on a quantum scale, information can travel instantaneously, then it’s certainly possible that God knows our thoughts and loves us personally.  To me, that’s an amazing realization.