Why Does The World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
Tour D'Horizon
The Big Bang hypothesis opened up a new and purely scientific inquiry into the ultimate origin of the universe. And the explanatory possibilities seemed to multiply. There were, after all, two revolutionary developments in twentieth-century physics. One of them, Albert Einstein's relativity theory, led to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning in time. The other, quantum mechanics, had even more radical implications. It threw into doubt the very idea of cause and effect.
According to quantum theory, events at the micro-level happen in aleatory fashion; they violate the classical principle of causation. This opened up the conceptual possibility that the seed of the universe might itself have come into being without a cause, supernatural or otherwise. Perhaps the world arose spontaneously from sheer nothingness. All existence might be chalked up to a random fluctuation in the void, a "quantum tunneling" from nothingness into being.
The Arithmetic of Nothingness
Mathematics has a name for nothing, and that is "zero." It is notable that the root of zero is a Hindu word: sunya, meaning "void" or "emptiness." For it was among Hindu mathematics that our notion of zero arose. To the Greeks and Romans, the very idea of zero was inconceivable -- how could a nothing be something?
The idea of emptiness was familiar to Indian mathematics from Buddhist philosophy. They had no difficulty with an abstract symbol that signified nothing. Their notation was transmitted westward to Europe during the Middle Ages by Arab scholars -- hence our "arabic numerals." The Hindu sunya became the Arabic sifr, which shows up in English in both the words "zero" and "cipher." Whether discovered or invented, zero was clearly a number to be reckoned with. As for the origin of the numerical "0," that has eluded historians of antiquity.
Now, suppose we let 0 stand for Nothing and 1 stand for Something. Then we get a sort of toy version of the mystery of existence: How can you get from 0 to 1?
Consider a simple equation:
0=1-1
What might it represent? That 1 and -1 add up to zero, of course.
Picture the reverse of the process: not 1 and -1 coming together to make 0, but 0 peeling apart, as it were, into 1 and -1. Where once you had Nothing, now you have two Somethings! Opposites of some kind, evidently. Positive and negative energy. Matter and antimatter. Yin and yang.
Even more suggestively, -1 might be thought of as the same entity as 1, only moving backward in time. This is the interpretation seized on by the Oxford chemist Peter Atkins. "Opposites," he writes, "are distinguished by their direction of travel in time." In the absence of time, -1 and 1 cancel; they coalesce into zero. Time allows the two opposites to peel apart -- and it is this peeling apart that, in turn, marks the emergence of time. It was thus, Atkins proposes, that the spontaneous creation of the universe got under way.
All that from 0=1-1
(*Note: John Updike was so struck by this scenario that he used it in the conclusion of his novel Roger's Version as an alternate to theism as an explanation for existence.)
...........................................................................................................................................
Excerpts from Why Does The World Exist? by Jim Holt
(Pgs 27, 36-37, 39)
Liveright Publishing Corporation - 2012
A Division of W.W. Norton & Company
New York - London
*The World As A Bit Of Light Verse
"As you know, inside the Planck length and the Planck duration you have this spacetime foam where the quantum fluctuations from matter to non-matter really have very little meaning, mathematically speaking. You have a Higgs field tunneling into a quantum fluctuation through the energy barrier in a false-vacuum state, and you get this bubble of broken symmetry that by negative pressure expands exponentially, and in a couple of microseconds you can have something go from next to nothing to the size and mass of the observable present universe.
"Imagine nothing, a total vacuum. But wait! There's something in it! A kind of dust of structureless points..." It is this swirling dust of points, that by chance becomes "knotted" or "frozen" into a little bit of structured spacetime. "The seed of the universe has come into being." And once you've got that seed," Ka-boom! Big bang is right around the corner."
Excerpt from Why Does The World Exist? by Jim Holt
Pgs 245-246
...........................................................................................................................................
Bonus Round: Scoping Out A Cosmic Mystery
Penn Scientists are among those turning a spy satellite's gaze heavenward to study the puzzling "dark energy" that is pulling galaxies apart.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer Article by Faye Flam
Tour D'Horizon
The Big Bang hypothesis opened up a new and purely scientific inquiry into the ultimate origin of the universe. And the explanatory possibilities seemed to multiply. There were, after all, two revolutionary developments in twentieth-century physics. One of them, Albert Einstein's relativity theory, led to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning in time. The other, quantum mechanics, had even more radical implications. It threw into doubt the very idea of cause and effect.
According to quantum theory, events at the micro-level happen in aleatory fashion; they violate the classical principle of causation. This opened up the conceptual possibility that the seed of the universe might itself have come into being without a cause, supernatural or otherwise. Perhaps the world arose spontaneously from sheer nothingness. All existence might be chalked up to a random fluctuation in the void, a "quantum tunneling" from nothingness into being.
The Arithmetic of Nothingness
Mathematics has a name for nothing, and that is "zero." It is notable that the root of zero is a Hindu word: sunya, meaning "void" or "emptiness." For it was among Hindu mathematics that our notion of zero arose. To the Greeks and Romans, the very idea of zero was inconceivable -- how could a nothing be something?
The idea of emptiness was familiar to Indian mathematics from Buddhist philosophy. They had no difficulty with an abstract symbol that signified nothing. Their notation was transmitted westward to Europe during the Middle Ages by Arab scholars -- hence our "arabic numerals." The Hindu sunya became the Arabic sifr, which shows up in English in both the words "zero" and "cipher." Whether discovered or invented, zero was clearly a number to be reckoned with. As for the origin of the numerical "0," that has eluded historians of antiquity.
Now, suppose we let 0 stand for Nothing and 1 stand for Something. Then we get a sort of toy version of the mystery of existence: How can you get from 0 to 1?
Consider a simple equation:
0=1-1
What might it represent? That 1 and -1 add up to zero, of course.
Picture the reverse of the process: not 1 and -1 coming together to make 0, but 0 peeling apart, as it were, into 1 and -1. Where once you had Nothing, now you have two Somethings! Opposites of some kind, evidently. Positive and negative energy. Matter and antimatter. Yin and yang.
Even more suggestively, -1 might be thought of as the same entity as 1, only moving backward in time. This is the interpretation seized on by the Oxford chemist Peter Atkins. "Opposites," he writes, "are distinguished by their direction of travel in time." In the absence of time, -1 and 1 cancel; they coalesce into zero. Time allows the two opposites to peel apart -- and it is this peeling apart that, in turn, marks the emergence of time. It was thus, Atkins proposes, that the spontaneous creation of the universe got under way.
All that from 0=1-1
(*Note: John Updike was so struck by this scenario that he used it in the conclusion of his novel Roger's Version as an alternate to theism as an explanation for existence.)
...........................................................................................................................................
Excerpts from Why Does The World Exist? by Jim Holt
(Pgs 27, 36-37, 39)
Liveright Publishing Corporation - 2012
A Division of W.W. Norton & Company
New York - London
*The World As A Bit Of Light Verse
"As you know, inside the Planck length and the Planck duration you have this spacetime foam where the quantum fluctuations from matter to non-matter really have very little meaning, mathematically speaking. You have a Higgs field tunneling into a quantum fluctuation through the energy barrier in a false-vacuum state, and you get this bubble of broken symmetry that by negative pressure expands exponentially, and in a couple of microseconds you can have something go from next to nothing to the size and mass of the observable present universe.
"Imagine nothing, a total vacuum. But wait! There's something in it! A kind of dust of structureless points..." It is this swirling dust of points, that by chance becomes "knotted" or "frozen" into a little bit of structured spacetime. "The seed of the universe has come into being." And once you've got that seed," Ka-boom! Big bang is right around the corner."
Excerpt from Why Does The World Exist? by Jim Holt
Pgs 245-246
...........................................................................................................................................
Bonus Round: Scoping Out A Cosmic Mystery
Penn Scientists are among those turning a spy satellite's gaze heavenward to study the puzzling "dark energy" that is pulling galaxies apart.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer Article by Faye Flam