Part 8: ROMANCING the ABSURD

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 8: Romancing the Absurd

 

 

“What is the use of our feeble crying in the awful silences of space? Can our dim intelligence read the secrets of that star-strewn sky? Does any answer come out of it? Never any at all, nothing but echoes and fantastic visions. And yet we believe that there is an answer, and that upon a time a new Dawn will come blushing down the ways of our enduring night. We believe it, for its reflected beauty even now shines up continually in our hearts from beneath the horizon of the grave, and we call it Hope. Without Hope we should suffer moral death, and by the help of Hope we yet may climb to Heaven, or at the worst, if she also prove but a kindly mockery given to hold us from despair, be gently lowered into the abysses of eternal slept.”

 

– She by H. Rider Haggard, Chapter X: Speculations

 

 

 

 

“THE COSMOS IS A DIABOLICAL GENIUS; CHANGE MY MIND!”

So, let me see if I got this right, and here I’m picking up where we left off in episode 7:

I’m supposed to believe that the purported unintended, unplanned, undirected, and blind stepwise evolution in form and function of the first instance of life to—somehow—appear on Earth, ultimately led to an adaptive radiation stemming from said original ancestor, and branched out into all the species past, present, and — lest we forget—future ones awaiting  just the right combination of non-deleterious sequence of coordinated, cooperative mutations to occur in order for the first successful mutant to break out on their own (assuming their parents don’t reject them, stomp them to death, or worse yet, cannibalize them right out of the gate) and hopefully thrive, grow, and bump into their gender counterpart, themselves the product of the same mutation (so, talk about having to win the lottery twice, and in short order, because these two mutants have to exist contemporaneously, and within reach) in order for them to successfully propagate what is essentially a new, never-before seen species?

 

That’s what I’m supposed to believe?

 

Therefore, while we may be smart, the universe is a bumbling idiot, and we just got lucky?

 

So much for garbage in, garbage out!

 

Seriously, though, doesn’t that worry you?

 

I mean, just consider the equivalence of mass and energy, you know, E = mc2: an average-sized adult human has enough potential energy within them that is the equivalent of many hydrogen bombs!

 

Oh, but that’s silly of course, because no human being has ever spontaneously turned into a nuclear device! But, are we that sure this could never happen?

 

Don’t look now, but I find it interesting that Darwinists—whose unwavering faith in accidental creation is a testament to their devotion to Scientism—firmly believe in the immutability of the laws of nature, and—speaking strictly from the point of view of cosmic eschatology—almost never bring up the possibility our universe could undergo sudden apocalyptic doom, or that every cell in your body could implode… or for that matter, explode!

 

In fact, ask any astrophysicist—perhaps someone like Dr. Katie Mack, author of the 2020 book, The End of Everything (Astrophisically-speaking), and one whom the Wall Street Journal describes as having “an infectious enthusiasm for communicating the finer points of Cosmological Doom”—why the Big Bang, and ensuing sudden space-stretching expansion of the early universe known as Cosmic Inflation happened or why it ended, if it could happen again, and at any moment, and they’ll probably tell you, “I don’t know.”

 

Listen, while we may inductively bring ourselves to believe that the cosmos, which is purportedly devoid of intelligence, is a stable place on account of the seemingly immutable physical laws that govern it, do we—to a moral certainty—know that it is?

 

Incidentally, and for those who love trivia, the term “gaslighting,” which was Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year, first saw the light of day in the 1938 thriller called Gaslight by British novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton. In the film version—and spoiler alert—a husband, who is searching for the jewels of the woman he had murdered in his attic, turns on the upstairs gas lights in order to see better. As a result, the lights downstairs are dimmed. His wife, who is downstairs, notices the dimming and alerts her husband to that fact. He, in turn, assures her that the lights are fine, that they had not dimmed, and that she’s just imagining things.

 

OK, seriously, in this day and age, can we please have a scientific explanation of how we all got here that has more meat to it than the reductionist: “natural Selection acting on random mutation”?

 

For sure, at the time, Darwinism’s take on how we ended up with all these species roaming the earth, which would ultimately provide the secular world a creation story that was deity-free, was a stroke of diabolical genius.

 

But, is that still the case?

 

Not anymore, and believe it or not, I am paraphrasing Neo-Darwinists, quietly working behind the scenes, trying to plug the holes in the Darwinian mechanism’s purported ability to create new body plans; that is, its alleged creative or generative power.

 

 

A CRISIS OF FAITH

In the prologue to his book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, first published in 2013, Dr. Stephen Meyer made the following provocative claim:

“The technical literature in biology is now replete with world-class biologists routinely expressing doubts about various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory, and especially about its central tenet, namely the alleged creative power of the natural selection and mutation mechanism. Nevertheless, popular defenses of the theory continue apace, rarely if ever acknowledging the growing body of critical scientific opinion about the standing of the theory. Rarely has there been such a great disparity between the popular perception of a theory and its actual standing in the relevant peer-reviewed science literature.”

 

Three years later, in November 2016, The Royal Society of London, which was founded by Robert Boyle and was later headed for 24 years by Sir Isaac Newton, would host a conference that was called by leading evolutionary biologists to “discuss” the textbook theory of Evolution known as “Neo-Darwinism.”

 

The conference started with Gerd Müller who gave a presentation called “The Explanatory Deficits of the Modern Synthesis” (incidentally, and as I’ve explained in episode 6, “the Modern Synthesis” is another name for Neo-Darwinism, which was built upon the same tenets as Charles Darwin’s original theory of Evolution, with the “neo” part reflecting the infusion of biological knowledge that Charles Darwin had not been privy to). In any case, as Dr. Meyer explains, Gerd Müller outlined a number of problems with the neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution, almost all of which had to do with the lack of creative power surrounding the canonical Darwinian mechanism of Natural Selection acting on Random Mutation. As it turned out, this three-day conference on “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology,” during which a thoroughly mainstream scientific organization for all intents and purposes would finally admit—albeit very quietly—that there are problems with the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, was perhaps the most important meeting no one had ever heard about!

 

Luckily for us, EvolutionNews.org was there, and the following is an excerpt from the online article it published on December 5, 2016, titled, “Why the Royal Society Meeting Mattered, in a Nutshell”:

“The opening presentation at the Royal Society conference by one of those world-class biologists, Austrian evolutionary theorist Gerd Müller, underscored exactly Meyer’s point. Müller opened the meeting by discussing several of the fundamental ‘explanatory deficits’ of ‘the modern synthesis,’ that is, textbook neo-Darwinian theory.”

 

Now, before I continue, and just in case you’re not clear on what it means, let’s preemptively go over the definition of Phenotype. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines phenotype as: “the observable characteristics or traits of an organism that are produced by the interaction of the genotype and the environment: the physical expression of one or more genes.”

 

And, don’t worry I got this! Genotype is defined as: “all or part of the genetic constitution of an individual or group.”

Now, if you’re anything like me, you’re probably going, “Uh huh, yeah, I have no idea what you just said!”

 

Listen, it’s simple, … well, kinda … OK, Imagine you have a bunch of brown field mice living in a temperate climate, and whose life expectancy in the wild is about one year on account of predators such as hawks and owls—except for when a non-deleterious mutation produces albino mice whose lack of camouflage makes them easier targets for natural predators.

 

Now—and I will thank all you population geneticists who revel in sophisticated mathematical equations to indulge my vulgarized, unrefined explanation—imagine that the onset of a sudden, radical change in climate results in harsher winters; that is, in a reversal of fortune for the brown mice.

 

And incidentally, for the sake of simplicity, we’re assuming that all the mice, regardless of fur coat color, are able to withstand the frigid temperatures.

 

Now, more than likely, all the darker, easier to spot brown mice will have been eventually picked off by the natural predators, leaving only the white mice to thrive.

And so the environment will have ultimately, so-to-speak, “interacted”—unwittingly, might I add, because… you know, “nature has no mind”—with the “genome” in order to steer (once again, unwittingly) the course of the “observable characteristics” of the mice.

 

Now, as a reminder, from a Daheshist perspective nothing is ever truly random, being that all preordained, inescapable fates mingle with future, potential destinies —all under the auspices of a flawless and Divine system of justice.

 

Therefore, there are real—though transcendent—reasons why a network of spiritual fluids materialized to form the information inscribed along the spine of the DNA molecule, thus creating the necessary digital code to function as the instructions to assemble the protein molecules needed to service the myriad cells, which would ultimately be arranged into a mouse, which is a creature we instinctively recognize as being wholly separate from a man [Insert your own joke here]!

 

Therefore, somewhere along the line, a preordained judgement was handed down, which meant that a mouse had to be born and that, let’s say, at a certain date and time in the future, it will be eaten by this or that particular owl. Now, because—and again from a Daheshist perspective—animals have the capacity to know right from wrong, good from evil, and being that they can pray and raise humble supplications to the Divine Creator, nothing says that one mouse can’t alter its future, potential destiny. In any case, the takeaway here is that whatever awaits mice and men is a function of their spiritual fluids’ behavior in their current, previous, and even concurrent life cycles. But, even if, technically-speaking, one mouse could, through genuine faith and humble supplications to our Creator eventually alter its destiny for the better, said mouse will still live only up to 3 years. Furthermore, try as it might, it could never meditate, pray, or Jedi-mind-trick its way into, dare I say, a miraculously-beneficial mutation anymore than a person could grow wings by dint of (please don’t try this at home) jumping off a window ledge and flapping their arms!

 

That’s not what they mean by “the interaction of the genotype and the environment”!

 

As I’ve explained in a previous episode: for human beings to eventually grow wings in the literal sense—and from a Darwinian perspective—the right random, coordinated mutations need to happen and passed on; that is, assuming the resultant mutant, whose body plan will’ve been further tweaked, by just the right amount and fashion, is able to beat the odds and find a suitable mate. And since we’re tripping down memory lane, and based on the equivocation stylings— intentional or otherwise—of Dr. Kenneth Miller, which I shone a light on in episode 6: according to Darwin’s theory, everything—that is, the mice, you, me, and whatever is in-between that is able to reproduce—is necessarily on its way to becoming something else. And, there’s nothing we can do to stop it!

 

As to what the mice will become? If, as discussed in episode 7, a pig-like animal could supposedly—by dint of natural selection acting on random mutation—become a whale, then anything—I suppose—is possible if we had an unlimited amount of time and resources, which we don’t!

 

Add to that the assertion that there is no hindsight, foresight, design or archetypes in Darwinism. Therefore, no intelligence, no designer, or—for that matter—a project manager to ask, “Whoa! Do we even know how much all this retrofitting’s gonna cost?”

 

Even more importantly, this brings up the question that Müller addressed during the Royal Society meeting, which can be summarized as, “Does the Darwinian Mechanism possess generative power? Can it create new types of life?”

 

So, let’s get back to the conference and learn more about what the experts said, as reported by EvolutionNews dot org:

 

“According to Müller, the as yet unsolved problems include:

Phenotypic complexity (the origin of eyes, ears, body plans, i.e., the anatomical and structural features of living creatures);

Phenotypic novelty, i.e., the origin of new forms throughout the history of life (for example, the mammalian radiation some 66 million years ago, in which the major orders of mammals, such as cetaceans, bats, carnivores, enter the fossil record, or even more dramatically, the Cambrian explosion, with most animal body plans appearing more or less without antecedents); and finally

Non-gradual forms or modes of transition, where you see abrupt discontinuities in the fossil record between different types.”

 

Incidentally, and if I may jog your memory, cetaceans  are marine mammals of the order Cetacea, which include whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

 

Again, and for the record, this is not about whether or not whales are the result of some sort of evolution. Rather, this is about whether or not mindless, blind, undirected processes that preclude any type of intelligent agency is conceivable considering — and for all intents and purposes — unimaginable odds. And we’re not just talking about winning the proverbial lottery once; we’re talking about winning it, over, and over, and over!

 

In any case, consider that in 2003, that is, roughly 13 years prior to the aforementioned conference, Gerd Müller and Stuart Newman had written the following on page 7 of On the Origin of Organismal Form, which they co-edited and which was published by the MIT Press in 2003:

 

Under the heading titled, “Questions Arising from Evolutionary Theory,” the authors first begin by providing a succinct definition of neo-Darwinism:

 

“The neo-Darwinian paradigm still represents the central explanatory framework of evolution, as exemplified by recent textbooks (e.g., Mayr 1998; Futuyuma, 1998; Stearns and Hoekstra, 2000). This refined and canonical theory concerns the variational dynamics and adaptation of existing forms. It is a gene-centered, gradualistic, externalistic theory, according to which all evolutionary modification is a result of external selection acting on incremental genetic variation. The resulting adaptations lead to successive replacement of phenotypes and hence to evolution.”

 

Then the authors point out that although this theory can account for the phenomena it concentrates on, that is, variation of traits in populations, “it leaves aside a number of other aspects of evolution.” And the authors list a few examples, namely, “the roles of developmental plasticity and epigenesis or of nonstandard mechanisms such as assimilation.”

 

Alright, let’s unpack some of this language:

 

First, and on the matter of being a “gene-centered, gradualistic, externalistic [please hold that thought] theory,” neo-Darwinian Evolution is a process of change that occurs over time through the accumulation of genetic mutations and environmental pressures. Thus, it is an externalistic process because it partly occurs in response to external stimuli—such as changes in the environment that occur outside of an organism’s own body or genetic makeup—or competition between different species. And, being that it is also gene-centered, Evolution is an internalistic process as well.

 

Thus, it is driven by both by the internal genetic makeup and characteristics of the organism, and its interactions with the environment.

 

Now, before you go, “Duh, of course it is…”

 

First, please know that, as regards this business of externalism vs. internalism—and never mind “Where’s Waldo?”—the even bigger question is “Where’s the mind?”

In his 2003 book, titled Externalism, Mark Rowlands introduces his reader to controversial externalist conceptions of the mind, and argues that the mind is not purely in the head, and that some of our thinking actually occurs outside of our bodies. And that is, in fact, relevant to Darwinism. For example, in the 2015 textbook Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences, chapter 32, titled Externalist Evolutionary Cognitive Science, Pierre Poirier and Luc Faucher, write in their abstract that they aim to defend “an externalist conception of evolutionary psychology by integrating the two forms of externalism found, respectively, in cognitive science and evolutionary biology.”

 

Incidentally, and so far as I can tell, Darwinism has become canonical not only in biology, but also in the field of philosophy of science, which is a branch of philosophy concerned with such questions as what qualifies as science, its ultimate purpose, its foundations and methods, how it works, and the logic through which one builds scientific knowledge. Therefore, and beyond being touted as useful in understanding ecosystems (on that front, please know that the editors of Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking themselves wrote that “the second part of this book scrutinizes Darwinism in the philosophy of science and its usefulness in understanding ecosystems”) we also have such fields as evolutionary economics, Darwinian’s theory of morality and phylolinguistics.

 

Anyway, in the aforementioned chapter 32, Poirier and Faucher disavow what they refer to as an extreme form of internalism, and even its less extreme though not less internalist version, a position that (according to them) holds that the genotype contains each and every bit of information required for the development of a phenotype, for instance in the form of a genetic code. They write, “This view occasionally finds its way into the media (and into the work of some researchers) and roughly corresponds to the layperson’s conception of how the genotype-phenotype relationship functions. It will become more relevant  further on and thus it should be noted that this position represents the relationship between genotype and phenotype found in most evolutionary simulations, even though no serious biologist holds such a position to be true. Consensus among biologists support interaction (what Sterelny and Griffiths 1999 termed ‘the interactionist consensus’) [then, they present the following conclusion]: organisms and their traits are the result of the interaction between genetic and environmental resources.”

 

Now, and back to Mark Rowlands’s position that mental phenomena are hybrid entities: please contrast that with scientific atheism’s materialist assertion that mental activities are accounted for in terms of the brain and what it does. Therefore, what we think, what we believe in, what we desire, everything we feel is are the result of physical processes that occur inside our head.

 

Next, and now back to Müller and Newman, we have the matter of developmental plasticity, which occurs when the same genotype produces distinct phenotypes that are adjusted to the environmental conditions that the adults in a species will experience. Therefore, a Phenotype might as well be defined as: “the observable characteristics or traits of an organism that are produced as the result of developmental plasticity.”

 

As to epigenesis, and as defined by Merriam-Webster’ dictionary, it is “the  development of a plant or animal from an egg or spore through a series of processes in which unorganized cell masses differentiate into organs and organ systems.”

 

As to what genetic assimilation is, and how it pertains to the mechanism of evolution, I’ll give you the fifty-cent tour:

 

In the 1950s, British developmental biologist, Conrad Hal Waddington, discovered the phenomenon of genetic assimilation by conducting a series of experiments on fruit flies.

 

What he found out was that by artificially exerting environmental stresses on the fruit flies, he would induce phenotypic plasticity, which is the ability of an organism to change in response to stimuli or inputs from the environment.

 

Now, here’s the kicker: what Waddington noticed was that after some generations, the same phenotypic variant began to manifest despite a lack of environmental stress. Therefore, both the initial state (where the phenotypic changes were environmentally induced) and the final state (where the phenotypic changes were genetically fixed) are experimental facts. However, and according to an April 2018 paper by Ken Nishikawa and Akira R. Kinjo, titled Mechanism of Evolution by Genetic assimilation published on NIH’s National Library of Medicine, “it remains unclear how the environmentally induced phenotypic change in the first generation becomes genetically fixed in the central process of genetic assimilation itself.”

Of course, here, I would be remiss if I didn’t iterate what I said in episode 2, the Mechanics of Existence, which is: in addition to the Vital Spiritual Fluids that give us life, we have the inherited and the acquired spiritual fluids, which can be passed on from parent to offspring. And we’re not just talking about traits and characteristics—we are also talking about spiritual debt…

 

Now, and back to the Müller-Newman, 2003 paper, and once again as regards neo-Darwinian theory, they write that, “Most important, it completely avoids the origination of phenotypic traits and organismal form. In other words, neo-Darwinism has no theory of the generative. As a consequence, current evolutionary theory can predict what will be maintained, but not what will appear.”

 

So… not only does the neo-Darwinist mechanism of mutation and natural selection not have a theory of the generative, which means it lacks the creative power to generate the novel anatomical traits and forms that have arisen during the history of life, it is not predictive, like, say, Newton’s Laws of motion!

 

As a discipline, it’s probably even less predictive as the field of… economics.

 

On that front, can you remember the last time any noted economist, during a highly spirited debate, going full Archie Bunker on their opponent, and painting them as unpatriotic, commie pinko?

 

And yet, the minute you question Darwinism, you’re pegged as a science-hating, young-earth creationist!

In any case…

 

According to the Evolution.org article, “Yet, as Müller noted, neo-Darwinian theory continues to be presented to the public via textbooks as the canonical understanding of how new living forms arose—reflecting precisely the tension between the perceived, and actual, status of the theory that Meyer described in Darwin’s Doubt.”

 

So, taking all this information into account, and after more than 150 years of being vociferously promoted as being scientific fact, isn’t it perhaps time to call the Darwinist narrative for what it is; that is, pseudoscience? Too harsh? How about “an interesting, yet-to-be-proven hypothesis,” then?

 

I mean, why should string theory be the only one to be derided? And, might I add, unfairly!

 

But I digress!

 

Supposedly, and to paraphrase Gerd Müller, evolutionary biology arose from the age-old desire to understand the origin and the diversification of organismal forms. And based on my research, Darwin, in particular, was bent on undermining religion, especially that the majority of all the modern scientists who preceded him, namely Sir Isaac Newton, believed that the universe was designed by a Creator.

 

So I get it, the secular movement must have its own deity-free version of the creation myth. Couldn’t it at least be one that didn’t insult one’s intelligence?

 

 

 

A COMFORTING LIE

 

During the March 16, 2022 episode of The Good Question Podcast titled “Refining the Human Condition via the Scientific Method,” host Richard Jacobs asked Dr. David Berlinski for his thoughts on the Neo-Darwinist Framework and how it seems to have become a dogma that is suppressing and pushing other scientific alternatives.

 

While Berlinski confirms Darwinism has indeed become a dogma, and that he has little to say about “the sociology of dogmatic formation,” which he’s talked a lot about, he points out that the “interesting thing is otherwise, it’s a matter of the intellectual credibility of the Dogma.”

For example, and this is my take, we could argue that the law is dogmatic because, legally, we’re not allowed to jump off a bridge! Also, what good parent who, in a knee-jerk attempt to stop their kid from asking “Why? ” a gazillion times a day, by saying, “Because, I said so!” is not being “dogmatic.” On that front, and according to author and certified parent educator,  Kelly Holmes, the solution is to say to your kid, “You tell me why.”

 

Anyway, and as regards the intellectual credibility of  Darwinism, Berlinski said that “we should be asking the biological community to do a whole lot better.”

 

He certainly is not satisfied with a theory that says, “Yeah, random accidents and natural selection,” when there’s a “tremendous spectacle of theoretical physics in front of our eyes.”

 

By the way, we’ll definitely be feasting our ears on that shortly!

 

In the meantime, this business of “natural selection acting on random mutation” can’t simply be all there is to it; certainly not for those expecting a serious account of life on Earth, or perhaps life in the universe for that matter. Berlinski adds, “to take Neo-Darwinism as an explanation that’s complete and as profound, as compelling as the Standard Model of Particle Physics seems to me completely unwise; unwise socially; unwise intellectually; unwise as a matter of university attitudes, and unwise as a matter of sheer curiosity.”

 

Richard Jacobs then asks Berlinski, “Why do you think it’s become so entrenched and it’s dictated what people are allowed to publish and not publish? Why has it shaped science so deeply?”

 

Berlinski’s short answer is, “It’s convenient.”

 

Then he explained that Darwin posed a problem, that is, “the origin of living species,” which he couldn’t even articulate properly—that is, aside from the fact he couldn’t define what a species was; not that we can either, he adds.

 

On that front, you might remember my mentioning evolutionary biologist and author Jody Hey in Episode 7, and this whole business of there being over 26 definitions of species at play!

 

 

And so back to the discussion between Berlinski and Jacobs, Berlinski points out that Darwin “didn’t have the tools to adequately describe the genetic mechanism of speciation. His book, On the Origin of Species was largely rhetorical; the theory remains largely unfalsifiable in any considerable detail.”

 

But then he points out that “those are not the deep issues.”

 

 The question you’re asking, is, he tells Jacobs, “What bends, first, a scientific community, and second the entire intellectual literary community to drop its knee in favor of particular theory? ”

 

And then Berlinski noted the ingenuity with which the Neo-Darwinist hypothesis was formed in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s by Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, who reconciled Darwin’s original 1859 ideas with those of  Mendelian genetics, originally developed in the 1860s, by the Austrian monk, and botanist, Gregor Mendel, who introduced a new theory of inheritance based on—of all things—his experiments involving pea plants. Prior to Mendel, the belief was that inheritance was the result of the blending of parental “essences,” much like how mixing blue and yellow paint will produce a green color. Mendel instead believed that heredity is the result of discrete units of inheritance, and every single unit (or gene) was independent in its actions in an individual’s genome. However, and according to the article titled, “Random Mutations and Evolutionary Change: Ronald Fisher, JBS Haldane, & Sewall Wright,” which is available on Berkeley University’s “Understanding Evolution” Webpage, “Many of these first geneticists who rediscovered Mendel‘s insights around 1900 also opposed natural selection. After all, Darwin had talked of natural selection gradually altering a species by working on tiny variations. But the Mendelists found major differences between traits encoded by alleles."

 

Alright, what’s an allele? Merriam-Webster to the rescue: “any of the alternative forms of a gene that may occur at a given locus.”

 

What’s a locus? : the position in a chromosome of a particular gene or… allele. [Crickets]

 Anyway, being that peas are either smooth or wrinkled, and “nothing in between,” the prevailing thought was that “in order to jump from one allele to another, evolution must make giant jumps—an idea that seemed to clash with Darwin.”

 

Now, as we’ve learned, giant evolutionary jumps are problematic to materialists. Why? Well, because they smack of the miraculous on account of the beyond-galactic odds involved in order to achieve success, to say nothing of the fact they are inevitably detrimental, read fatal, to the organism!

 

In any case,  in the 1920s geneticists began to come to terms with the realization that natural selection could indeed act on genes, especially that it had become clear to them that “any given trait was usually the product of many genes rather than a single one. A mutation to any one of the genes involved could create small changes to the trait rather than some drastic transformation.”

 

And that is where scientists, notably Fisher, Haldane, and Wright would show how natural selection could operate in a Mendelian world. They, not only “carried out breeding experiments like previous geneticists, but they also did something new: they built sophisticated mathematical models of evolution.”

 

In a nutshell, through “population genetics,” they would systematically explore the mathematical consequences of Mendelian inheritance. And thus, their approach would reveal how mutations arise and, if they are favored by natural selection, how they can spread through a population.

 

They would also show that “even a slight advantage can let an allele spread rapidly through a group of animals or plants and drive other forms extinct. Evolution, these population geneticists argued, is carried out mainly by small mutations, since drastic mutations would almost always be harmful rather than helpful.”

 

Now, quick sidebar: in episode 5 I talked (among others) about the genesis, as it were, of bees. To believe in that story (as I do) is to believe in spontaneous, evolution-free Creation. Furthermore, Daheshism also supports the notion of directed evolution, by virtue of extraterrestrial beings “upgrading,” as it were, human DNA through intermarriage. And, lastly, for all we know, the reason there are gaps in the fossil record, which we will be revisiting in the next episode, is due to spontaneous Creation, directed evolution, or both.

 

Yes, I know, “Who created the Creator?” Hey, not my job! My job is to show evidence of some sort of creator — or intelligence.

 

Anyway, to Berlinski, the reconciliation of Mendelian genetics with the original ideas that Darwin advanced in 1859 was a “triumph of mathematical ingenuity.”

 

But according to him, the natural mistake, but a mistake nevertheless, was that “people assumed that one triumph inevitably served to predict a whole sequence of triumphs.”

 

But more than that, to Berlinski, Darwin’s theory of evolution “served very adequately as a replacement theory.”

 

He explained that, before Darwin, the prevailing assumption as regards the appearance of living systems was largely religious and theological, which explains why, when Darwin’s ideas were first published in 1859, they “did not immediately triumph.”

 

However, by the time Darwin’s ideas began to dominate the intellectual landscape, a large part of Europe—especially Western Europe— and much of the United States, was “undertaking the long march towards secularism.”

 

And the long and the short of it is that even an increasingly secular society feels the need to formulate a proper explanation for the fact we’re living on a planet swarming with life, and explanation that does not invoke deities.

 

Berlinski says, “Well if we’re secular we can’t very well say ‘we have no idea how life arose!’ What a lucky break, there is a theory that explains how life arose and how it diversified. It behooves us to embrace it. And that’s exactly what I think a lot of intellectuals and sophisticated people did—they just embraced it because it served so many ancillary needs.”

The problem, however, is that our ability to explain the emergence of the complexity of the biological cell, is hampered by the fact the cell is “unbelievably complex. And we haven’t understood its complexity at all. Every time we look, there seems to be additional layer of rebarbative complexity that needs to be factored into our theories” said Berlinski to host Peter Robinson, during the July 22, 2019, episode of Uncommon Knowledge titled “Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory.”

 

Dr. Stephen Meyer, also present, would later add that, “Darwinism has filled a niche in our intellectual life that is necessary. You've gotta give some kind of account of where all these wonderfully intricate systems we call living organisms came from. And the fundamental commitment of Darwinism is that there's some kind of bottom-up, materialistic account where the molecules get more complex and form more complex molecules and cells, and the cells compete to form more complex organisms. So now what we're getting is post neo-Darwinian theories of evolution that are trying to provide new mechanisms that will account for the things that the Darwinian mechanism doesn't account for.”

 

That's when Peter Robinson says to Stephen Meyer, “Even you, who bears the scars of abuse from Darwinists say Darwin may have been mistaken in his answers, but he was asking invaluable questions.”

 

Meyer replies, “He was asking invaluable questions but he got it wrong, I think all Darwinians in the broad sense get it wrong. They're trying to explain something very, very complex in terms of bottom up, undirected processes; and what we see in life — complex miniature machines, complex information processing systems, digital code — these are things that bear the hallmark of mind, and they suggest rather a top down, instead of a bottom up approach. So I'm sure people committed to a materialistic view of things will continue to generate bottom up explanations.”

 

As Dr. David Berlinski puts it, “Darwin created a 19th Century local theory—without looking at extreme cases, that was reasonably successful for breeders, for the explanation of local characteristics like beak size or the growth of wings. But he entirely failed to explain what he thought he was explaining, the emergence of biological complexity on the species level or higher order levels.”

 

Berlinski (who actually opined that although Darwin’s theory will disappear, and whatever replaces it will be called Darwinian—thus in that sense Darwin is eternal) remarked that Darwin’s question regarding the origin of species was premature in nature because, “he couldn’t say anything about what he did not know, what he could not comprehend, and the fact he did not know or could not comprehend these things is simply a reflection of the fact that we do not know or cannot comprehend in the 21st Century.” Therefore, in Berlinski’s view, the question addressed was widely premature in the 19th Century and it’s still premature.

 

Then he adds, “We’re just learning the structure of intellectual inquiry necessary to understand something like the biological cell. And it’s much harder a problem than we ever suspected. Much harder.”

 

In fact, in the documentary I discussed in episode 6 titled, “Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed,” starring Ben Stein, and in a segment filmed in Paris at David Berlinski’s apartment, Stein asks Berlinski, “Darwin had an idea of the cell as being quite simple, correct?” Berlinski replies, “Yeah, everybody did.”

 

“OK, if he thought of the cell as being a Buick, what is the cell now in terms of its complexity by comparison?” Stein asks.

 

“A Galaxy,” Berlinski replies.

 

Incidentally, when Stein asked Dr. Richard Sternberg, a similar question, “If Darwin thought a cell was, say, a mud hut, what do we now know that a cell is?” Dr. Sternberg replies, “More complicated than a Saturn V.”

 

 

“SO, IS THIS BIOLOGY OR... ROCKET SCIENCE?”

You tell me! I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the notion that the deepmost foundational component of the Cosmos comprises the Spiritual Fluids; that is, eternal, sentient, capable yet imperceptible radiations emanating from Mother Spirits populating The Divine Worlds, the purest of which are The Heavens: the realm of God almighty. Therefore, the Spiritual Fluids, which have woven the multidimensional fabric of the causally-shaped material realms of Paradise and Hell, are the extensions of the Spirits; and they, in turn, are extensions of the Divine.

 

And given that the fundamental particles comprising what physicists have called The Standard Model are, in essence, waves of their respective underlying quantum fields, which in turn denote the physical limit of what we’ve been able to —so far— discern as being the real building blocks of the observable universe, intelligence is therefore visceral to, and inextricable from its underlying, inscrutable topology.

 

And that would apply to all the particles, which aren’t really particles at all. As we’ve learned in episode 6, and according to Cambridge University professor of theoretical physics Dr. David Tong, particles are but waves of underlying quantum fields, which are tied into little bundles of energy, and which we consequently perceive as “particles.” And so the upshot is that we’re all interconnected to one another through “fluid-like substances which are spread throughout the entire universe and ripple in strange and interesting ways.”

 

And so, from a Daheshist perspective, both quantum fields and the particles down to the electrons, or the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons, are a characteristic of the Spiritual Fluids.

 

Spiritual Fluids are also responsible for the positive and negative virtual particles that are constantly popping in and out of the energy of empty space between the quarks, effectively canceling each other at such unimaginable speeds as though they were never there—thus ensuring no physical law of nature is broken. Incidentally, without these virtual particles, we wouldn’t exist! Apparently, theirs accounts for 90% of the mass of the particles, therefore making them responsible for most of the the mass in our bodies!

 

Now, aside from the fact everything I just shared with you pertaining to Spiritual Fluids, which are sentient, is not falsifiable, how does one test for intelligence in the human cell—of all places?

 

Well, today we know enough about what goes on inside the biological cell to confidently draw an inference to intelligence by employing Charles Darwin’s own scientific method. In other words, and as we’ve learned in episode 5, we’ll use abductive reasoning to draw an inference to the best conclusion, to paraphrase Dr. Stephen Meyer, and to establish causal adequacy, a scientific criterion developed by the geologist Charles Lyell, who in turn influenced Darwin.

 

In his 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer writes, “Lyell argued that when scientists seek to explain events in the past, they should not invoke some unknown type of cause, the effects of which we have not observed. Instead, they should cite causes that are known from our uniform experience to have the power to produce the effect in question."

 

In other words, if you saw a turtle stuck atop a fence post, your most logical, rational, based conclusion would be that somebody had to have put it there! Again, neither deductive nor inductive; rather, abductive reasoning.

 

And so according to Dr. Meyer, “Darwin adopted this methodological principle as he sought to demonstrate that natural selection qualified as a vera causa, that is, a true, known, or actual cause of significant biological change. In other words, he sought to show that natural selection was ‘causally adequate’ to produce the effects he was trying to explain.”

 

Was he successful, though? Not really, being that he extrapolated an elaborate fiction known as macroevolution based on our everyday experience of microevolution, and challenged us to prove that small changes do not slowly accumulate over time to produce new species.

 

In other words: go ahead, prove that unicorns do not exist!

 

That’s right, you cannot prove a negative!

 Again, Darwin wrote, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

 

Now, and using Darwin’s approach—minus of course any gratuitous extrapolation and cheap parlor trick of challenging one to prove a negative—is there anything going on inside the cell, or behavior that could be deemed causally adequate to suggest there’s a hint of intelligence at play?

 

 

 

 

INFORMATION, THE STOCK-IN-TRADE OF LIFE!

 

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines Information as 1) “The communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence,” and 2) “The attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (such as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects”

 

Now, when referring to information in DNA, it is important not to think of the kind of information that would best be defined as, for example, “a piece of knowledge.” In other words, information in this context should not be confused with meaning.

 

Nor should we think of information in that special mathematical sense that information scientists refer to as Shannon Information.

 

The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper, would introduce the kind of precise formalism that would allow communication engineers to solve specific technological problems.

 

In a nutshell, and in order to quantify the amount of data that can be stored in, or conveyed across a communication channel, Claude Shannon developed a theory that involves an interplay between information (read data), uncertainty, and probability.

 

And for extra credit, we’ll throw in the term “entropy,” which Shannon “borrowed” from the field of thermodynamics, to describe a degree of randomness, or equivalently, the absence of — what in this context is referred to as — information.

 

So, in terms of its relationship with this thing we call “information,” Shannon’s theory cannot help us determine if a particular sequence of letters or symbols are message-bearing, that is, functional from our vantage point, or simply random—that is, utterly useless. It is quintessentially non-semantic, because concepts such as meaning, reference, or representation, cannot be quantified.

 

So, what does any of that have to do with DNA?

 

Well, this ultimately goes to identifying evidence of mind.

 

Remember, in DNA, it’s not the physical or chemical properties of the nucleotide bases that are important to their function, to paraphrase what Dr. Stephen Meyer said during his May 24, 2019, appearance on the Ben Shapiro show Sunday Special pt. 43; but rather, it’s their “sequential arrangement in accord with an independent code, which was later elucidated, and we now call the genetic code. So what we have is a true information-bearing system, that is expressing, as it happens, for building the proteins and protein machines that cells need to stay alive.” After which Meyer compared the process of cell building with Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing (that is, CAD/CAM) at the BOEING company, saying, “you’ve got the same thing happening inside the cell. You’ve got information directing the construction of proteins and protein machines that are absolutely necessary for survivability. So the big question is ‘where does that information come from?’ and ‘what kind of information is it?’ and that’s where the information theory comes in.”

 

And that’s when Meyer touched upon Claude Shannon and his Mathematical Theory of Information, explaining that his theory on information had to do with the reduction of uncertainty, which he showed was inversely related to probability. “More improbable an arrangement of characters, the more Shannon Information that was carried.” And Meyer adds that Shannon’s notion of information “didn’t capture the notion of meaning, or communication function. So you could have a series of characters that were basically gibberish, but because they were aperiodic and random you couldn’t really tell if they were meaningful or not.” Of course, from Claude Shannon’s point of view, despite being gibberish, theses series of characters had “a big information measure.” And so Meyer explains that Shannon didn’t capture the difference between—on the one hand—functional or meaningful information, and on the other, just an improbable arrangement of characters.

 

Just to give you an idea what that translates into, consider the following, resulting paradox: Long meaningless sequences can have more information than shorter, meaningful sequences as measured by Shannon’s theory.

 

And so Meyer explains that where DNA is concerned, (and by the way, you might remember this from episode 5) “it’s not actually information theory, but it’s information theory plus a qualitative judgment about what the sequence is doing that allows us to recognize the kind of information we’re familiar with in our parlance—the one the dictionary talks about: The variable sequences of characters for conveying a meaning or a function. And that’s what we have in DNA,” adding that, “Francis Crick was very clear on that from the beginning, saying it’s not mere Shannon Information, it’s information that’s functional, and that’s the kind of information that, in our experience, always indicates the prior activity of an an intelligence.”

 

The bottom line being, if the information in DNA were merely a random arrangement of characters, then one could argue that this was the result of undirected processes. However, being that it is very specific, and complex, and it’s operating in accord with a symbol convention, then “you’ve got information that is the product of mind,” according to Meyer.

Incidentally, the preceding will be come in handy in the next episode, where we will be exploring the topic of intelligence a little further, thus picking up where we left off in episode 6, The Good Fight.

 

 Also, and because energy and information are related at a much deeper level, to quote a 1971 Scientific American article titled Energy and Information, only an in-depth talk about how the highly important topic of entropy relates to information science could do this topic justice. Unfortunately, that is outside the scope of this particular discussion. Nevertheless, here’s a condensed overview of what entropy means in terms of information science jargon!

 

Again, in information science it is called Information entropy — not to be confused with thermodynamic entropy—because Claude Shannon, widely considered the “Father of the Information Age,” didn’t know what else to call it!

 

As the story goes, Shannon, while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories as an electrical engineer, was trying to mathematically quantify the statistical nature of “lost information” in phone-line signals, and he didn’t know what to call that particular aspect of his theory pertaining to probability and uncertainty.

 

According to what John Avery wrote in his 2003 book, Information Theory and Evolution:

 

“When Shannon had been working on his equations for some time, he happened to visit the mathematician John von Neumann, who asked him how he was getting on with his theory of missing information. Shannon replied that the theory was in excellent shape, except that he needed a good name for ‘missing information.’ ‘Why don’t you call it entropy?’ von Neumann suggested. ‘In the first place, a mathematical development very much like yours already exists in Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics, and in the second place, no one understands entropy very well, so in any discussion you will be in a position of advantage!’

Shannon took von Neumann’s advice, and used the word ‘entropy’ in his pioneering paper on information theory. Missing information in general cases has come to be known as “Shannon entropy.”

 

Oh, and as though this is not confusing enough, Avery notes that, “Shannon’s ideas can also be applied to thermodynamics.”

 

Which actually makes sense given the deep connection between energy and information…

Although, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that, Norbert Weiner, in his 1948 book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine wrote, “Information is information, not matter or energy.”

 

Norbert Weiner’s description—which is arguably a tautology—is essentially saying that though we require matter and energy to process information, information itself sits outside of time and space.

 

By the way, please note that, a little earlier, I mentioned “Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics.”

Sit tight, we’ll get back to that soon, as Boltzmann (or Boltzmänn, for you persnickety purists out there) is a key player in our story.

In the meantime, it behooves us to ponder whether or not intelligence lurks in the wings, deep inside the cell.

 

In summary, the nucleotide bases, or base-pairs in DNA—whose sugar-phosphate backbone make up the familiar double helix, or twisted ladder—function as placeholders for—if you will—a four-letter alphabet that, and with the help of a mind-boggling pageantry of molecular machinery, orchestrates the assembly of protein chains from (in this case) a twenty-letter alphabet, with each one of the twenty amino acids acting as a stand-in for this or that particular letter. Therefore, what we have here is a virtual manufacturing blueprint in which abstraction translates into tangibility.

 

More specifically, this information is stored on each strand of the Deoxyribonucleic Acid molecule by means of four chemical bases, denoted by the letters: A, T, G, and C. A (for Adenine), T (for Thymine), G (for Guanine), and C (for Cytosine), which, although they are chemicals, function as SYMBOLS—a biochemical code—through which genetic messages are apparently conveyed and understood; the result of which commands are issued and tasks are assigned, orchestrated, and accomplished within a nine-month construction schedule (in the case of a human being) during which an organism is biochemically constructed from the original cell—the human egg—though a giant compared to other cells in the body, is no bigger than about 100 microns in diameter—or roughly the thickness of a strand of hair.

 

Putting aside the matter of whether or not it is possible for DNA to have evolved blindly and without guidance using alleged Darwinian pathways, which biologists are yet to figure out, and—also putting aside—the second law of thermodynamics, that is, entropy (that’s coming up, by the way) — and speaking of “causal adequacy,” or a lack thereof — one great lingering mystery is where did that information come from?

 

The short answer is that  no one actually knows.

 

And I’ve already talked at length about Crick and Orgel‘s Directed Panspermia. And if you just did a double take, you need to listen to in Episode 5, A Question of Meaning, really bad!

 

That aside, therein lies yet another great mystery in DNA:

 

In his book, The Advent of the Algorithm: the 300-year journey from an idea to the computer, published in 2000 Dr. David Berlinski writes, “It is an algorithm that lies at the heart of life, ferrying information from one set of symbols (the nucleic acids) to another (the proteins).”

 

Berlinski also writes:

“If bureaucracy resembles a computer at the level of social organization, the living cell, if it resembles anything in our experience, resembles a computer at the level of molecular organization. The metaphor is irresistible and few biologists have resisted it. And for good reason. No other metaphor conveys the intricacies of cellular replication, transcription, and translation; and for all we can tell, nothing besides an algorithm can handle the administration of the biological molecules.”

 

 

OK… SO, WHAT IS AN ALGORITHM, AND WHY SHOULD ANYONE CARE?

Putting aside the images of computer code and complex mathematics that it typically conjures up, an algorithm is essentially a process involving a finite series of steps to accomplish a task. There are two criteria it must meet: one, correctness; in other words that it fundamentally lead to the desired outcome. And two, that it be efficient. An algorithm may or may not have to involve complex mathematics.

 

If you’ve played Mastermind or Wordle, you’ve already used algorithms!

 

In fact, just about every day we make an appeal to algorithms in order to get something done. And most of us just use our common sense. For example, imagine planning a short round trip to the grocery store, and then to the pharmacy, and then back home. One look at the map and your initial, instinctive move would be to select the shortest routes between each destination.

 

Except, you know better!

 

Armed with information you’d received or recorded earlier pertaining to some roadwork taking place midway between your house and the grocery store, and with full knowledge or the intramurals currently happening at the high school situated midway between the grocery store and the pharmacy, which ultimately means you’re liable to hit bumper to bumper traffic, you might decide to forgo your usual shorter, scenic routes, and use the interstate highway instead. If you’ve ever done anything remotely similar, you have in essence designed an algorithm that suited your particular needs by selecting intelligently from a great number of possibilities.

 

Another example, and to really drive home the intimate connection between intelligence and algorithms, you can play the following game with a friend:

 

Take a sheet of paper and write down a sequence of numbers, from 1 to 20.

So, from left to right (or… right to left, if you’re writing in Arabic or Hebrew): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on, all the way to 20.

Now, pick a number—any number—and keep it to yourself.

Then, ask your friend to guess which number you have selected. Of course, there’s a one in twenty chance your friend will guess a number equal to yours. But let’s say your friend does not guess which number you’ve selected on the first try, and they select, say, number 7.

 

Now, tell your friend—truthfully mind you—if the number you selected is greater or less than 7.

 

Based on that information, your friend will try again to guess which number you’ve selected. And once again, you will either tell your friend they chose the right number or if your number is smaller or larger than the product of their second attempt.

 

Repeat the procedure until your friend finally guesses your secret number.

 

Note the number of attempts, and repeat the game, choosing a different secret number each time. What you will notice is that no more than a few attempts is needed each time you play the game.

 

Now, this might seem so evident that you might overlook the obvious: let’s assume you chose number 12 as your secret number and that your friend first picked number 1, then, number 2, then number 3, then number 4… thus necessitating 12 attempts in all to reach the goal.

 

On the other hand, had your friend first chosen number 10, they would have known that the answer lay somewhere between 11 and 20.

 

Now, the smarter — and in this case, no-linear — thinking strategy would be to choose the midway point: let’s say 16. Well, 16 is no good either as it is greater than 12. However, the good news is that your friend is getting closer to the target. They know the answer must be somewhere between 11 and 15 inclusive. And let’s say they stick to the same strategy and choose number 13… you get the idea!

 

In all, 5 or 6 attempts maximum would have been needed. And if you repeat the game, and your friend uses the same algorithm, you’ll see similar results.

 

The moral of the story here is that not all algorithms are created equal.

 

So, what makes a good or better algorithm?

 

Well, we already know that any algorithm worthy of the name must solve a problem, thus it must satisfy the criterion of correctness. A better algorithm helps us achieve the same task more efficiently.

 

And there could be no discussion about algorithms without invoking intelligence.

 

Whenever complexity and intelligence attempt to form an alliance and set off on a journey to transform symbols into things, there is an algorithm at play.

 

Let’s take this business of building proteins, those complex molecular machines that perform a large part of the tasks each biological cell must do and which are composed of folded, linear amino acid chains, (also called polypeptides when there are 50 or more amino acids in the chain), and where the right amino acids must be added, or typeset as it were, one after the other, to form the chain.

 

As for the amino acids themselves, they are the building blocks that link together to ultimately form proteins; that is, once the right, the one-and-only amino-acid chain is successfully assembled then sent—in this particular case—to be folded into my old friend from episode 5, the protein called Hemoglobin, and which is found inside red blood cells.

 

Hemoglobin is formed first as a protein chain, which is then folded and transformed into an intricate, three-dimensional nano-machine whose job is to bind and transport oxygen from capillaries in the lungs to all the tissues in the body.

 

Conversely, this miniature wonder also transports carbon dioxide from the tissues of the body back to the lungs. And we have so many of them inside our body, all working together in concert, that it’s not even worth attempting to imagine what that entails.

 

Except that… and here we go again (and this is a shout-out to all you devotees of the Miller-Urey experiment, which really pertains to the origin of life problem, and has nothing to do with it evolution) one amino acid doth not life make—not even a whole flock of amino acids flying about, bumping into one another haphazardly for that matter.

 

And that is because in order to get from chemistry to a living biological cell, and again whatever your definition of life might be, you need a digital code in order for the protein-manufacturing process to occur within the cell, using quite literally a combination of Computer-Aided Design (I know, the word “Design” is taboo in Biology, but please indulge me) and Computer-Aided Manufacturing—essentially CAD-CAM.

 

So even the simplest of living cells on Earth contains, not only the digital-code-carrying DNA embedded within it, but a complex information processing system to boot that makes the aforementioned CAD-CAM process possible.

 

Therefore, we are faced with not merely complexity—such as leftover aggregate, Portland cement, steel rebars, and water strewn about a construction site,  which would not necessarily be incompatible with the notion of chance—but rather with a very special type of complexity called specified complexity—such as the reinforced-concrete building standing before you, which was built, using these materials, according to an architect’s blueprints, which provide a detailed view of what goes where; and the specifications book, which provide the necessary instructions, notes, and procedures for successful assembly!

 

And as I will explain a little later, specified complexity is more than a little problematic if one posits only purely undirected processes as the mechanism responsible for the advent of the information required to build said complexity, upon which living organism depend.

 

 

 

SORRY, NOT SORRY!

Speaking of advents… you have no idea how hard I am trying to restrain myself from talking at length, and among others, about singularities. But I can’t resist… So, I’m gonna have to have to talk a little about. Plus, it’s really fascinating stuff… Besides, have I ever let you down?

But before I talk about, or, as the case may be, butcher the concept of the singularity I need to go over a couple of housekeeping items:

I don’t know about you, but I can only perceive reality from the point of view of classical physics despite the fact — and putting Spiritual Fluids aside for a moment — every atom in my body obeys Quantum Mechanics, which is “based on some properties that just seem impossible classically,” to quote noted American-Canadian Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist, Dr. Lawrence Maxwell Krauss. For example, and according to Krauss, a quantum mechanical object can exist in many classical states at the same time. And when we measure them, we measure them to be in one state. To paraphrase Dr. Krauss, whether we “Like it or not,” one property of Quantum Mechanics is the fact that quantum systems can be in a superposition of different states, and are only put into a single state when you measure them. “It may sound crazy, but that’s the way the world works,” he says.

 

Where I am going with this?

 

Well, if you’ve ever heard the aphorism, “You can’t debate science!” you’ll wanna hear what follows.

 

First, when I say, “debate science,” I am not suggesting (for example) people flat-out reject the notion of evolution, which is a consequence of genetic mutation. Rather, to keep an open mind to the possibility that any suggestion all this is the result of unguided processes is, how should I put this… oh, yeah: cuckoo!

 

Seriously, though, and to my surprise, and aside from debating the creative power of the Darwinian Mechanism—behind the scenes—scientists even debate gravity, that is, whether or not it can be quantized. In fact, and according to German theoretical physicist Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, creative director and host of the YouTube channel “Science without the Gobbledygook,” Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, “Can’t be quite right.”

 

Apparently, although General Relativity is well confirmed, there are reasons to believe it cannot ultimately be the correct theory for space and time. Meaning, “it is an approximation that works in many circumstances, but fails in others.”

 

For starters, in its current state, General Relativity does not fit together with Quantum Mechanics, hence the search for a theory of Quantum Gravity. Plus, in General Relativity, we have, once again, the dreaded singularity, which I’ll talk about shortly. In the meantime, and according to Dr. Hossenfelder: any theory in which singularities pop up, is a sign that the theory breaks down and must be replaced.

 

Furthermore, it might interest you to know that this business of getting rid of the singularity is all part of the story of how we ended up debating about multiverses. Unfortunately, it’ll have to be for a later episode, as we’ve still got a lot of ground to cover in this one!

 

Now, given that I’ve mentioned General Relativity a few times already, perhaps I should share some useful notes I’ve curated on the subject to help you better visualize what it entails:

 

So, General Relativity came after Special Relativity , in which, among other things, Einstein demonstrated how time was not absolute, which saved Newton’s theory from oblivion because it could not explain why light always appeared to us to be traveling at the same speed, in space, regardless of the observer’s position and velocity. In other words, the fact that the speed of light is independent of all observers, and that we can never outrace light.

 

As a result, now we know that just moving faster relative to someone else, means we are actually aging at a slower rate than they are. However, being that we move at speeds that are far slower that the speed of light, this age difference is incredibly tiny.

 

Now, in the case of General Relativity, what we have is, to paraphrase Lawrence Krauss, “not a theory of how objects moved through space and time, but rather, how space and time themselves moved.”

 

In his 2005 book titled, The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, Boston-based writer and producer John Farrell writes:

 

“In Einstein’s theory, the curvature of space (or, to be more precise, the curvature of space-time, the combination of them required by the theory) is determined by the presence of matter and energy. This is radically different from Newton’s classical theory of gravity as a universal force that depended on mass alone. In Einstein’s theory, objects move along curved paths determined by the presence of matter and energy; as physicist John Archibald Wheeler once wrote, matter tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells matter how to move.”

 

And according to Lawrence Krauss, General Relativity was “the first theory of space and time, consequently, the first theory that could describe the universe.”

 

Incidentally, the reason you might hear physicists refer to Einstein’s Field Equations (with an “s”), is because General Relativity consists of one equation, which uses something called tensor calculus, with variables that ultimately yield more equations. Therefore, the Einstein Field Equations consist of a total of ten equations that are contained in the tensor equation that has (of course) a left-hand side and a right-hand side. And so the equation balances two things:

 

The left-hand side refers to the curvature of spacetime (please hold that thought); and the right-hand side refers to mass and energy.

 

In other words, the left-hand side describes the geometry of the universe: space can curve in the presence of matter; it can expand and contract, and do all sorts of stuff.

 

The right hand side of that equation deals with energy and momentum: the source of that curvature; that is, the energy and momentum of space.

 

Alrighty, now we’re about to get to the part where you go, “Oh, so this wasn’t accurate but useless information!”

 

In 1915, being that the Universe in which Einstein thought he existed in was believed to be static and eternal, it followed that conventional scientific wisdom of the day went something along the lines of: the universe—at the time believed to consist of just the Milky Way, being that the idea of other galaxies was still nebulous—has been around forever and would be around forever; the end.

 

“Yay…”

 

However…

 

“…?”

 

Einstein’s equations were now suggesting that the universe should even not even exist because, once you put gravity and matter in a universe that supposedly never had a beginning—hence with plenty of time to spare—then gravity should should clump everything together, into one, single mess.

 

So, the fact that gravity is attractive posed a problem that Einstein had to solve, somehow, once he noticed the anomaly in 1917. Incidentally, you might remember my telling you in episode 1 the story of how Einstein first added, then removed the Cosmological Constant— that is, Lambda—from his field equations.

 

In any case, the implication was that the universe was not static, which went contrary to everything Einstein believed. Now, let’s set aside Lambda, which we’ll pick up on later.

Next, it behooves us to look at the morphology, as it were, of “Spacetime,” given that, for one, I use the term with total abandon.

 

So, try to imagine squashing or compressing three dimensional space into a flat 2-dimensional x y plane, then add a vertical z axis, which represents time.

 

Next, imagine moving up the z axis, which represents time, and at each point you have an instance of the two dimensional x-y plane representing 3-dimensional space. Once again, we’ve squashed three-dimensional space into a 2-dimensional plane.

 

Now, imagine you’re trying to represent a sphere growing in size starting from a point. Why a sphere? I’ll tell you in a second. Again, we want that sphere to start from a point—actually, it’s going to start as a point, and then grow in size.

 

I know, “mental, 3-D geometry; really?” Just… trust me, and thank you for indulging me!

Now, because you can only represent each instance of the sphere as a circle on the 2-dimensional x-y plane of space—starting of course from a dot— as you stack these circles, one on top of the other, and assuming they’re concentric (meaning, the object is stationary) you’ll end up with a cone.

And that is why, if you look up a graphic representation of the Light Cone, which is a term used in both special and general relativity, which denotes (and here, I’m citing Wikipedia) “the path that a flash of light, emanating from a single event (localized to a single point in space and a single moment in time) and traveling in all directions, would take through spacetime" you’ll see an actual cone, instead of a whole of lot of spheres growing in size, starting from a point. Again, if you slice the cone at any point along the time axis, you’ll see the section of the light sphere.

 

The fact of the matter is, and according to Dr. Jeffrey Bennett, author of the 2014 book, What Is Relativity?: An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein's Ideas, and Why They Matter,

 because “we cannot picture all four dimensions of spacetime at once, we can imagine what things would look like if we could.”

 

Now, let me give you a practical example: let’s consider an analogy, from everyday life, that illustrates how one can “imagine” what we otherwise wouldn’t be able to picture, in reality.

 

Imagine standing in front of a building (by the way, it doesn’t have to be a building… it could be anything three dimensional). Anyway, can you see the building from all sides, all at once? Of course not.

 

And whatever side of it you’re able to see, would look foreshortened!

 

Anyway, the bottom line here is that there is no way for you to see all sides, or elevations, at once, and without some measure of distortion. Plus, imagine you’re standing on one side of the building, and I’m standing on the other; more than likely, we’d be experiencing the building differently. Imagine for example, we’re both looking at a structure, but, where I’m seeing a circle, you’re seeing a rectangle, and someone else might be seeing a foreshortened cylinder. Unless we each walked around the structure, we wouldn’t be able to agree.

However, I could show you a series of drawings and renderings that will allow you to visualize that structure.

 

Now, let’s add the component of time to the picture.

 

Bennet writes:

 

“In addition to the three spatial dimensions of spacetime that we ordinarily see, every object would be stretched out through time. Objects that we see as three-dimensional in our ordinary lives would appear as four-dimensional objects in spacetime. If we could see in four dimensions, we could look through time just as easily as we look to our left or right.”

 

Of course, because we’re forced to move along with time, which marches on no matter what, we could never actually see the instance of every object, as though in a movie frame.

 

Bennett says, “If we looked at a person, we could see every event in that person’s life. If we wondered what really happened during some historical event, we’d simply look to find the answer.”

 

Now, and in the interest of disambiguation: while any space with more than three dimensions is called hyperspace, meaning “beyond space,”spacetime is a particular type of hyperspace in which time is not a spatial dimension per se. It is simply one of the four directions of possible motion, to paraphrase Dr. Bennet.

 

Now, let’s, so to speak, look at hyperspace, which is inherent to String Theory, and which requires additional dimensions beyond the ones we know to exist; that is, once again, going beyond the three spatial dimensions of length, width, and depth, plus that of time. On that front, you’ve probably heard of the Tesseract, or have seen movies describing what it is on YouTube.

 

To help you appreciate what adding a fourth spatial dimension entails, let alone 7 or more, first imagine you have a three-dimensional cube in front of you and it is casting a two-dimensional shadow, on the table or the ground.

 

Now, please consider that — and fair warning, this may blow your mind—this three-dimensional cube is the shadow that a  4-dimensional cube (or hypercube)—which we could never visualize because we cannot imagine the world of 4 dimensions (although we can certainly think about it, to paraphrase Carl Sagan) is casting into our realm.

 

Now, in terms of what spacetime actually is… I mean, it sounds fancy and all, but what does it actually mean to invoke spacetime?

 

 

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE… MAYBE

During an April 3, 2021, YouTube segment of Closer to Truth featuring a talk with Lee Smolin, whose full title is “Lee Smolin — How Can Space and Time Be the Same Thing?” and which I highly recommend you watch, host Robert Lawrence Kuhn points out that we’re starting to believe what Einstein had said about space and time, which—in his view —are things we tend to take for granted. And so according to Einstein, space and time are “not quite as they seem, that they’re dynamic, they’re mobile, they can curve, they can slow, they can expand… the two are really unified together and to understand spacetime is critical to understanding the nature of our universe.”

 

Lee Smolin concurs, and says, “It’s the most important question. What is time? What is Space?”

 

Robert Kuhn then asks if this might be even more important than the question of “What are the Particles? What are the forces?”

 

“I think so,” Smolin replies.

 

Now, as regards space, and in the words of Lawrence Kuhn, “Some people have thought of it as the arena in which all the particles in physics play out. But it may be more than that.”

 

To that observation, Dr. Smolin first explains that the very question of whether space is a framework, an absolute background, or an aspect of reality that “grows out of a network of relationships of causality of change,” has been the fundamental question for 400 years.

 

Therefore, is space “an arena in which things happen, in which things come on and off? Or is there no arena? Is space just a network of relationships?”

 

According to Smolin, “A way to ask the question is if the whole universe were moved entirely 10 meters to the left, would it matter?”

 

And apparently, the division in the subject goes back to debates between Newton and his contemporaries, such as Leibniz. And in this regard, Newton was of the opinion, that yes, if you moved the universe a few meters to the left or to the right, it would be a different universe; whereas Leibniz, according to Smolin, said, “No, it’s even wrong to ask the question because there’s no discernible difference between the universe here or 10 meters to the left.”

 

And then at one point in the conversation, Lawrence Kuhn introduces the concept of emergence when qualifying space and time.

 

And so, before we proceed, what does emergence mean in this context?

First, the term emergence, come to find out, does not have a single definition that “can encompass all the uses the word has enjoyed” according to Sophia & Steven Kivelson. In their November 25, 2016, Nature.com article titled Defining Emergence in Physics, they write, “The term emergent is used to evoke collective behavior of a large number of microscopic constituents that is qualitatively different than the behaviors of the individual constituents. This usage is appealingly intuitive but problematically ill-defined: it is vague concerning what qualifies as a large number and what constitutes a qualitative difference.”

 

And at one point in the article, they propose the following definition: “An emergent behavior of a physical system is a qualitative property that can only occur in the limit that the number of microscopic constituents tends to infinity.”

 

OK, wow! I tell you what… being a more mortal, I think I’ll stick to the appealingly intuitive but problematically ill-defined interpretation of emergence. In other words, you, me, and everyone, as entities, are made of parts that, on their own, do not exhibit any of the behaviors or properties that emerge out of us when we are observed. I mean… good luck having a conversation with a biological cell!

 

Now, of course in Daheshism, everything boils down to Spiritual Fluids and Spiritual Fluids are sentient. But, as far as science is concerned, these properties and behaviors are not immanent, or built-in, and only emerge when said individual parts interact; consequently, transcending them.

 

Alright, back to Lawrence Kuhn: he says, “OK, so now we have this new concept of space as perhaps an emergent property of relationships and causes between events,… now, let’s bring time into it.”

 

Smolin quickly interjects, “But time is already in it, because causality is time…”

 

Kuhn: “Causality is a sequence?”

 

Smolin concurs.

 

Kuhn: “So what you’re saying is that time is also emergent because once you have the cause, time is a natural product of that; as opposed to time being something that we flow through.”

 

Smolin: “Yes, if you take that point of view, then causality is the fundamental aspect of time and our experience of the flow of time is a product of that.”

 

Kuhn: “A derivative.”

 

Smolin concurs, reinforcing the notion that our experience of the flow of time is a derivative of causality being the fundamental aspect of time.

 

 

CONFUSED YET?

Alright… so, and to paraphrase Lawrence Kuhn, can one keep space and time as one unit, thus forming Einstein’s so-called block universe? Incidentally, and here I am grossly vulgarizing: owing to Einstein’s theory of  relativity’s commitment to determinism (that is, the philosophical view  in which events are determined completely by previously existing causes) he would make a connection between his theory and that of the block-universe where, “the universe is a giant block of all the things that ever happen at any time and at any place. On this view, the past, present and future all exist—and are equally real” according to Dr. Kristie Miller, who tells us (and here I’m paraphrasing) that while time travel is possible in the block universe, the perception of time passing is an illusion! For more head-spinning and mind-bending revelations, please check out her September 3, 2018, article titled The Block Universe Theory Explained, on RealClearScience.com

 

You’re welcome!

 

Anyway, and back to Lawrence Kuhn posing the question pertaining to the 4 dimensional block universe, Lee Smolin posits that from the point of classical General Relativity, one can have it both ways, that is, “you can think of this block universe picture, and you can get away with that to a certain extent.”

 

However, when one brings in other questions about how quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and entropy fit into the picture, Smolin thinks it gets harder to maintain the block universe image because of this issue of, “is time really fundamental, so that it's the one thing that is not emergent, or is time somehow emergent or a sequence of other things? And of course, we don't know the answer.” Adding that different approaches to the fundamental questions about cosmology, quantum gravity “line up on on different sides of those questions,” with the upshot being that Lee Smolin is thinking more and more in the direction that time is fundamental, as opposed to being emergent; thus differentiated from space.

 

As to why Dr. Smolin is proposing the radical-sounding idea of teasing apart space and time:   It is, in his words, “the most conservative solution to a set of conundrums that we face when we try to bring together quantum theory and gravity.”

 

And just when you thought you were beginning to understand and accept, even if at an intuitive level, spacetime and the idea of 3 dimensions of space and the one of time as being the same thing according to Einstein, you can count on leading particle physicist, Dr. Nima Arkani-Hamed to come along and tell you that…

 

 

 

“SPACETIME IS DOOMED!”

In a July 5, 2021 conversation with Lawrence Kuhn, Dr. Arkani-Hamed explains that the demise of spacetime is an elementary consequence of the existence of both quantum mechanics and gravity. In a nutshell, if spacetime were something real, then we should be able to meaningfully talk about separations in space and separations in time of any arbitrary amount we like.

 

It’s one thing talking about separations in time and space in terms of seconds and meters respectively.

 

However, if we try to probe extremely small distances and times—that is, the Planck Length, which is roughly 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, and the Planck Time, which is around 10 to the minus 43 seconds—we find that it’s impossible on account of gravity!

 

You see, because of the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, in order for us to probe such absurdly small scales, we would need to use so much energy (which thanks to Einstein’s equation E = mc2 would translate into a ridiculously gargantuan amount of mass) that we end up collapsing that little region of spacetime into a black hole!

 

Boy, oh boy, aren’t experiments fun?

 

 

 

THE BANE OF COSMOLOGISTS

 

As stated, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible. And the byproduct of their incompatibility are the dreaded singularities those places in the universe where the laws of physics break down.

 

And where do we find singularities? In the center of black holes and the Big Bang.

 

Of course, we can only observe remnants of the Big Bang in the form of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

 

However, there is plenty of evidence that Black Holes are real and abundant in the universe.

 

In fact, on May 12, 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released an image of the accretion disk around Sagittarius A* the supermassive black hole lying at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. ( By the way “AY star” is spelt with a capital A, followed by an asterisk—or the star symbol—because, again, scientists and their knack for branding). Anyway, it’s official: there is a huge black hole at the center of the Milky,  located 25,640 light years from Earth, and whose diameter is 44 million kilometers. And we have no idea what lies beyond the event horizon of that or any black hole.

 

Now, you’ve most certainly heard of the event horizon of a black hole, but you might not be really clear on what that is.

 

Here’s a condensed version based on Dr. Jeffrey Bennett’s explanation, which you can find in more expanded format in his aforementioned 2014 book “What Is Relativity?: An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein’s Ideas, and Why They Matter.”

 

Imagine you’re orbiting a black hole, which, incidentally you can do. In other words, if our sun suddenly were to collapse into a singularity (please hold that thought), and except for the obvious disappearance of sunlight (8 minutes and 20 seconds after-the-fact), the Earth, the moon, and all the planets in our solar system would still remain in their usual orbits.

 

Anyway, imagine you’re in a space ship, orbiting a black hole, and you have two clocks with numerals that glow with blue light. You synchronize them and push one of them out of the airlock towards the black hole.

 

One of the things you’ll eventually begin to notice is that the clock falling towards the black hole is running noticeably slower than the one you kept with you in the spaceship, thus confirming what Einstein predicted, which is that time will run slower as gravity becomes stronger.

 

In fact any increase in the strength of gravity in your frame of reference slows down time, compared to someone else’s. That’s why, if you want to age slower than your sibling, or college roommate, you best sleep on the bottom bunk!

 

Now, back to the clock falling towards the black hole: another thing you’ll notice about it, is that the blue numerals on it are becoming increasingly red—again, from your point of view. In other words, if you were unlucky enough to be falling along with that clock towards the black hole, you wouldn’t notice any change in either the color of the numerals, or the rate at which time is passing. But, from your vantage point on the ship where one second for the outside clock is longer than one second for you—that is, inside the ship away from the black hole, therefore where gravity is weaker, and as Jeffrey Bennett explains it: the 750 trillion cycles-per-second frequency of the blue light emanating from the numerals on the clock falling towards the black hole will, from your vantage point, appear to be less than that. Therefore, from your vantage point, a lower frequency will result in a redder color. And that effect is called gravitational redshift, and it occurs when “objects in strong gravity emit redder light than they would otherwise.”

 

 Eventually, the clock falling towards the black hole will accelerate to higher and higher speeds. And so, from your vantage point on the ship, Bennett writes,“as you watch the clock get closer to the black hole, its acceleration will be offset by the slowing of time.”

 

 That means, first, to your eyes, the ticking of the clock will continue to slow down as it nears the boundary known as the event horizon of the black hole.

 

Theoretically, and because not even light can escape a black hole—which is why it looks black with a halo of stuff orbiting it—by the time the clock reaches the event horizon, time will have have come to a full stop; meaning, the clock would appear to never actually fall past that point.

 

Again, that’s in theory.

 

In actuality, this is what will happen:

 

Because of the constant increase in gravitational redshift as the clock falls towards the black hole, the frequency of its light will get lower and lower, becoming infrared light; and eventually radio waves! So, for a while, you might be able to see the clock with an infrared camera, then after that with a radio telescope. But, Bennett explains, “before the clock reaches the event horizon, its light will have reached such low frequencies that no conceivable telescope could detect it. It will vanish from your view, even as you realize that time is about to come to a stop on it.” So, the moral of this story?

 

 

STAY AWAY FROM SINGULARITIES!

Singularities, which as we’ve learned lie that the heart of black holes, are predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. That prompted Belgian mathematician, theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, to work out compelling solutions that would begin—in 1927—with his making a case for, and ultimately exploring  the logical consequences of, an expanding universe. And so, with the help of the new quantum theory of matter, in 1931, Lemaître would boldly propose that the universe must have originated at a finite point in time. In other words he reasoned that, if the universe is expanding, it must have been smaller in the past. Therefore, by rewinding the movie if you will, thus extrapolating back to an epoch when all the matter in the universe was packed together in an extremely dense state, Lemaître argued that the physical universe was initially a single particle—that is, the “primeval atom.”

In other words, a singularity, which Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking would prove to be unavoidable in all relativistic world models, according to John Farrell.

In his aforementioned 2005 book, The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, we learn that although Einstein very much liked what Lemaître was saying about “cosmic rays and their potential role as fossils left over from the super-dense cosmic quantum at the origin of the universe,” he didn’t like the idea of “Primeval Atom,” telling Lemaître “No, not that, that suggests too much the creation.”

But, oddly enough, all this disdain for the notion of a “Primeval Atom,” Einstein apparently had no problem with the notion of a cosmic beginning, of some sort (this is, of course, after he begrudgingly gave up the belief that the universe was static, as I mentioned earlier, and we’ll get back to that again later). In any case, therein lies the irony because, from a Daheshist perspective, Einstein, despite being an atheist—or, as some have argued, a deist—and like many pillars of human civilization, such as Socrates, Alexander the Great, Beethoven, Kahlil Gibran, and aside from the Divine Prophets—was endowed with a Spiritual Fluid ultimately linking him directly or indirectly to The Christ.

Now, that being said, he did consider himself to be a religious person of sorts. Let me explain:

 

In a short 1934 essay called “The Religious Spirit of Science,” which was published in Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, Einstein writes that a scientist’s “religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

 

So, for Einstein—who for the record was not implying that nature possessed a vastly superior intellect, for that would imply a universe endowed with intelligence—knowing that there exists something inaccessible to our minds constituted true religiosity; and it was in this sense, and in this sense alone, that he considered himself a deeply religious man.

 

That’s why, and according to Scott Bembenek, author of the 2017 book, The Cosmic Machine, “After leading the way in quantum theory for almost twenty years and being the first to introduce transition probabilities into it (in 1916)… By 1926, he had become completely unforgiving of quantum probability, and in response to a letter Born had written to him, Einstein wrote: Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.”

 

Of course, Einstein was using “God” as metaphor. Again, despite the lofty Spiritual Fluid he carried within him (according to Daheshism), that has helped humanity—and while the jury is still out on whether he was an atheist or a deist—one thing for sure, Einstein was no theist!

 

Because it reminded him too much of Divine Creation, Einstein unequivocally rejected the notion of the Primeval Atom (which, incidentally, Sir Fred Hoyle would rebrand with the irreverent “Big Bang” designation, on a whim, during a BBC radio broadcast).

 

And so, Einstein, for whom “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” could not bear the idea of the universe having had a beginning.

 

In his aforementioned 1934 essay “The Religious Spirit of Science,” he writes that he was “satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life …”

 

And to my mind, Einstein’s alluding to “the eternity of life” in his 1934 essay stands out because it arguably shows his continuing belief in what is called an “steady-state” cosmic model of the universe (more on that later), despite a failed attempt in 1931 at formulating an alternative to what we now call the Big Bang Theory, which, ironically, started when People like Russian physicist Aleksandr Friedmann in 1922, and the aforementioned Georges Lemaître in 1927, would independently produce similar solutions to Einstein’s gravitational field equations, which in the case of Lemaître, would ultimately imply that the galaxies were not merely moving away from one another within preexisting space, but that space itself was expanding.

Incidentally, this prompted Einstein to tell Lemaître, in-person, something to the effect of “your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable.”

 

And as stated earlier, undaunted, in 1931 Lemaître would put forth the hypothesis that the universe must have been smaller, much much smaller in the past, therefore, implying a beginning from what he described as the “primeval atom,” that is, the hypothesis, [in the words of the late mathematician and physicist Howard P. Robertson] that the universe originated from a “single massive super-radioactive atom, whose decay products after many generations are to be identified with the material particles and radiation constituting the universe.”

 

Back to John Farrell, he writes, “Lemaître believed cosmic rays might be the leftover ‘fires and smoke’ he had mentioned of the super-dense cosmic nucleus from which he theorized the entire universe evolved. Clearly Einstein must have understood their importance to his theory, so his sudden outburst against the primeval atom theory seems inconsistent. In fact there is reason to believe that Einstein not only had no problem with the idea of a cosmic beginning, but also that he and Lemaître discussed whether it was possible to avoid cosmic singularities at the proposed origin of space and time. Singularities in Einstein’s field equations are essentially elements, such as density or pressure, that cause the equations of general relativity to break down, due to one or more factors rising to ∞ (infinity) and in effect making the equations unworkable.”

And so singularities make black holes utterly opaque to relativistic laws, prompting the quest for the aforementioned physical law named Quantum Gravity, in the hope to circumvent the Big Bang Singularity by attempting to mathematically unify General Relativity and Quantum Theory, which lead to string theory and superstring theory and the Multiverse, which apparently is overflowing with a near-infinite number of universes… and, let’s set this aside for when I address the topic of the origin of life in a future installment. Besides, we do need to go back to Lambda and this business of Einstein believing in a static, eternal, universe, and his subsequently hanging on — tooth and nail — to the Steady-State cosmic model.

 

 

 

ALBERT HAD A LITTLE LAMB

 

Alright, so, in 1917, two years after he published his Theory of General Relativity, Einstein realized something might be amiss with his system on account of the stationary stars he could see in the night the sky. In other words, during a time before the known existence of other galaxies had been confirmed, Albert Einstein — who firmly believed the universe was eternal and never had a beginning, and that gravity was a kind of bottomless, attractive force that will act upon you no matter how far you happen to be relative to another massive object — probably looked up at the night sky and wondered why of all of the stars hadn’t collapsed already; that is, why hadn’t every one of these seemingly stationary stars attract every other star? After all, and to quote Dr. Katie Mack, “Einstein’s own calculations said that any universe populated with massive objects should already have collapsed upon itself. The very existence of the cosmos was a contradiction.”

 

In The Day Without Yesterday, John Farrell writes, “That’s why Einstein invented the cosmological constant as a sort of buttress, a number he had insisted on inserting into his field equations for gravity in order to construct a model of the world as a closed system, spherical, and in perfect equilibrium—not changing over time.”

 

Now, the thing about this Cosmological Constant, is that it had to be a sort of anti-gravity. Since nothing existing within space could ever counter the gravity generated by matter, the solution lay in the nature of space itself. Meaning, space itself had to possess some sort of repulsive force, that is, a sort of constant of nature. Hence, the idea of it being a cosmological constant. Therefore, Lambda was a property of Space itself, where every bit of space possessed some kind of repulsive energy.

 

And so it went, he introduced the cosmological term, named Lambda, into his equations to force a static universe. Also, Einstein realized that such a cosmological term would produce a small repulsive force throughout all of space, so small that we wouldn't notice it here on earth; and you wouldn't notice it around the solar system either. And so all the great predictions that Newton had developed, which led to Newtonian gravity, would not be affected. That cosmological term would be so small that you couldn’t perceive it. But over the scale of the galaxy, that small, repulsive force could build up and hold the galaxy apart and stop it from collapsing. So he thought that would solve the problem. But, if you remember from episode one, when it was discovered that the universe was expanding, Einstein begrudgingly removed the cosmological term. Also, he figured if the universe is expanding, then gravity could just act to slow the expansion. And so one of the big question of 20th century cosmology pertained to whether or not there was enough gravity to stop the expansion and make the universe collapse in a big crunch.

But, in any case, and to paraphrase John Farrell, By 1929 Edwin Hubble provided enough evidence to support the Alexandr Friedmann and Georges Lemaître expanding models. More specifically, Hubble’s findings on the galactic redshifts indicating what he had “cautiously called their ‘apparent’ velocities of recession, which increased with distance out into space.”

 

And by the early 1930s the larger scientific community would conclude, that, “bizarre as it seemed, the universe was expanding like a balloon. Einstein also accepted this conclusion officially by 1931 when he was visiting California.”

 

Consequently, he would dispense with the lambda term, about which he’d always “had a bad conscience” as he told Lemaître, according to Farrell, who also notes that Einstein supposedly referred to it as the “biggest blunder” of his life, when he spoke about it to George Gamow. Incidentally, Gamow, and based on the work Lemaître had done, would formulate —in more detail— what we now call “The Big Bang,” which was, once again, a term of derision coined by Fred Hoyle, during a 1948 BBC Radio broadcast. During that program, [and here I am paraphrasing from an online article titled “Hoyle on the Radio: Creating the 'Big Bang'” featured on the St John's College, University of Cambridge website] Fred Hoyle was contrasting the cosmological theory that the universe had a definite beginning at a single point in space (which was anathema to him) with the theory of a steady-state universe (more on that later) in which galaxies move apart from one another because of the continuous creation of matter, which Hoyle had developed with Thomas Gold and Herman Bondi in 1948.

 

 

Anyway, and back to Einstein, if only he knew what the future had in store!

 

And here, I’d like to share with you this sidebar regarding Georges Lemaître and George Gamow: First, according to John Farrell, “Lemaître argued that the temporal origin of his cosmological model in no way necessitated the conclusion that it was the moment of divine action from outside.” But then, an unexpected plot twist discouraged Lemaître from developing his cosmological theory any further, (in fact, and according to Farrell, Lemaître left at least two unpublished papers that show he had been thinking a lot more about the role of quantum theory). Apparently, on November 22, 1951, Pope Pius XII would publicly proclaim that Lemaître’s theory provided a scientific validation for Catholicism! Lemaître, who was as much a scientist as he was a priest, was broadsided by that controversial statement, one that would make the headlines and provide “an endless source of amusement” to physicist George Gamow, a habitual prankster. As the story goes, and according to Farrell, not only did Gamow append a portion of the pope’s statement to the introduction of his 1952 paper titled “The Role of Turbulence in The Evolution of the Universe,” raising a few eyebrows as he hoped but he apparently continued to encourage the pope’s “incursions into the realm of cosmology and religion, by feeding him articles via an archbishop he knew would deliver his material directly to the Vatican doorstpt.” This prompted Lemaître and Daniel O'Connell, the Pope's scientific advisor, to persuade the Pontiff  to stop making proclamations about cosmology that neither help the cause of the Church nor the progress of science!

 

And so according to John Farrell, and as far as Georges Lemaître was concerned, “the primeval nucleus could just as easily be the beginning of a new phase of evolution of an eternal universe that went through oscillations, cycles of expansion, and collapse before the big bang took place.”

 

In the meantime, and back to 1931, following Einstein’s renouncing of Lambda, this is where the story gets interesting: Farrell explains that, unlike Einstein, who used the cosmological constant on the left side of the equation, thus assigning to it a purely “geometric role, to prop up the static model,” Georges Lemaître, who “believed the cosmological constant was more than a mathematical balancing factor,” switched it to the right side of the equation. Why? Because he firmly believed it was an actual physical force; that is, the vacuum energy of space. An energy that—though virtually undetectable at the local level of the solar system or nearby stars—became serious business at the scale of the galaxies and the universe as a whole. And so, by switching lambda to the right side of the equation, he used it as a force that was “negligible on the small scale of the solar system, but grew proportionally with distance on the cosmic scale.” And what’s more, Lemaître, according to Farrell, and to the end of his days “included Λ in his work—on the right side of the field equations, which govern energy density—underlying its physical connection to the energy density factors.”

Also, in his book, Farrell notes that whenever Einstein and Lemaître went for a walk, the running joke among reporters was that they were sure to be discussing “little lamb” the reporters’ shorthand for Λ [lambda].

 

Now, if everything I just said so far sounds familiar, it is because it harkens back to what I said in episode 1 regarding the evidence that came to light in 1998, and how cosmologists realized that the expansion is accelerating, thus, and to paraphrase Farrell, necessitating either a positive lambda, as Lemaître believed, or some type of similar energy force to explain it. And of course, here, we’re talking about Dark Energy.

 

And according to Katie Mack, “The discovery of the expanding universe meant a whole new view of cosmology and a minor embarrassment for Einstein. He somewhat reluctantly removed the cosmological constant term from his equations… And so thing went, with the evolution of the universe making a reasonable amount of sense, RIGHT UP UNTIL the SUPERNOVA MEASUREMENTS made a mess of it all again in 1998. Accelerated expansion meant the cosmological constant had to be revived, with the only mercy being that it was by then far too late for Einstein to say, “I told you so.’ ”

 

 

 

STILL, WHAT’S THE BEEF WITH THE BIG BANG?

For that, we need to revisit the STEADY-STATE theory of the universe:

 

In cosmology, Steady-State theory is a model in which the universe is always expanding, though maintaining a constant average density with matter (somehow) being continuously generated to coalesce into new stars and galaxies. Also, and more importantly, a steady-state universe has neither a beginning nor end. Nowadays, the prevailing scientific conclusion is that Steady-state theory has largely been discredited.

 

Be that as it may, the question today remains relevant: did the universe spring into being from that mathematical equivalent of a red flag—to paraphrase Dr. Paul Steinhardt — the dreaded singularity, which scientists have been trying to get around? Or, are we to believe in the Big Bounce, a cyclic model of the universe where there was not a Big Bang, but perhaps an infinite number of Big Bangs, each not a beginning per se, but a repeating pattern of expansion and contraction, occurring once every trillion years?

 

To-date, no one knows what happened at that point where space, time, and matter exploded into being. And, for what it’s worth, the Big Bang, we’re told, did not happen at one particular location. Instead, it happened everywhere. In fact, each one of us, including aliens that might reside on the other side of the observable universe, about 45 billion light years away, is the center of the universe. And let’s leave it at that for now.

 

In the meantime, and once again, it would seem that the only way out of this singularity business is to somehow unite General Relativity and Quantum Theory.

 

And as we’ve learned, that is an urgent matter to scientists, because there can be no singularity—or worse, the conclusion that the universe began from it!

As it stands, and because of this pesky singularity problem, there isn’t yet any way for us to recreate the physical conditions coinciding with the exact moment the Big Bang happened.

Therefore, any prospect of empirical observation of what actually happens when the laws of physics break down is out of the question—well, currently anyway. Add to that the fact we don’t even know if space, time, and the laws of physics existed before the Big Bang.

 Again, and to paraphrase Dr. Steinhardt, we all learned in school, that anytime we get one over zero for an answer, we're in trouble, because that's a nonsense answer, indicating we’ve made a mistake somewhere in our calculations!

 

Now, as for the size of the observable universe: does it go on forever, or is it finite? That’s another tough nut to crack, although it must said that based on what we can observe, one can argue that it is finite.

 

Take Olber’s paradox for example, which can be stated simply as follows: if the universe is infinitely large with a roughly uniform distribution of an infinite number of stars, how come the night sky appears so dark? Some argued that the light from the very distant stars might exhaust itself and never reach us. Others, postulated that the universe had an infinite amount of space but not an infinite number of stars. And others, still, posited that the invisible substance known as “ether” would absorb light from the stars, and so on and so forth.

 

Finally, in 1848, “a poet not an astronomer, formulated an explanation—one that anticipated by three-quarters of a century a later scientific discovery that would finally resolve Olber’s paradox to the satisfaction of scientists” writes Dr. Stephen Meyer in his 2021 book titled Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. That poet was Edgar Allan Poe. According to Meyer, in his extended essay entitled Eureka: A Prose Poem, Poe argued that “the immense extent of the universe did not afford enough time for the light to arrive from distant stars.”

 

And indeed, in Eureka Poe writes, “No astronomical fallacy is more untenable, and none has been more pertinaciously adhered to, than that of the absolute illimitation of the Universe of Stars.”

 

Poe adds that the reason the universe must be finite is because no observation has shown that it isn’t. Granted, at the time, he was making an argument from ignorance by asserting, in this case, that his proposition was true because it had not yet been proven false. But then he says, “Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy — since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.”

 
Basically,  Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eureka” moment, to paraphrase Dr. Meyer, anticipated Hubble’s discovery that implied an expanding universe that was temporally finite.

 

Now, and until you get a chance to read and appreciate Poe’s vision in Eureka for yourself, here’s yet another opinion rendered by John Farrell: Farrell writes that Edgar Allen Poe, departing from his gothic tales of horror, “wrote a fascinating discourse on the universe, titled Eureka. In no sense to be taken as a scientific treatise, according to Poe, the work was written simply to exercise his imagination. But Poe’s imagination served him well and has often given him a footnote in histories of cosmology. He suggested the entire universe had developed originally from an explosive ball of fire, expanding outward until the stars coalesced out of its dispersion and slowly evolved into the Milky Way.”

Still, and despite Poe’s prescience, Stephen Meyer writes, “few physicists and astronomers at the beginning of the twentieth century doubted the infinite date of the universe for several reasons.”

 

And for that, we can thank the geologists.

 

In his 2004 book, titled Big Bang, Physicist Dr. Simon Singh explains how uniformitarians, namely the geologists who were adepts of the geologic doctrine known a uniformitarianism—the polar opposite of catastrophism—struck a chord with the scientific community.

 

First, and in a nutshell, Uniformitarianism holds that natural processes acting over long spans of time are enough to account for all the geological features that we see. Whereas Catastrophism posits that changes in the Earth’s crust—and to quote Merriam Webster’s dictionary—“have in the past been brought about suddenly by physical forces operating in ways that cannot be observed today.”

 

And so before the nineteenth century, Catastrophism was the prevailing scientific view.

 

Quite simply, scientists believed that catastrophes and cataclysms, alone, could explain the history of the universe. However, after studying the earth in more detail, and based on the results obtained from dating rock samples, scientists moved towards a uniformitarian view of the world, in which the history of the universe could be attributed to gradual and uniform change.

 

Wait a second… “Gradual, uniform… random… progressive… change,”  Now why does that sound famil…?

 

 Oh…

 

Well played, Darwin! Well played!

 

Anyway, the uniformitarians—who believed that mountains did not appear overnight, and that the Earth was more than a billion years old, and the universe even older, perhaps infinitely old—struck a chord with the scientific community.

Why?

 

Simon Singh writes, “An eternal universe seems to strike a chord with the scientific community, because the theory had a certain elegance, simplicity and completeness. If the universe has existed for eternity, then there was no need to explain how it was created, why it was created or Who created it. Scientists were particularly proud that they had developed a theory of the universe that no longer relied on invoking God.”

 

Now, having said that, Sir Isaac Newton—though a devout Christian who had written extensively about Christianity—did in fact believe the universe to be static and infinite.

 

Simply stated, Newton solved the mystery of why the planets and stars have not collapsed onto one another by assuming there’s an infinite amount of stuff spread out over an infinite amount of room. However, Newton did agree with Richard Bentley that although this infinite system is in “perfect equilibrium,” it is nevertheless as unstable as stacking an infinite number of needles, and cause them to “stand accurately poised upon their points.”

 

So, for Newton, the universe was static and infinite, though it did have a beginning.

 

Furthermore, please note that while the universe may have been eternal, and might not have had a beginning, let us not forget, that (1) as I intimated in episode 6, the Origin of life problem is separate from the problem of its having subsequently evolved, and (2) there couldn’t have been nearly enough time for matter to clump together, randomly, and somehow come to life, let alone, somehow, evolve without any sort of intelligent agent… or a miracle.

 

Therefore, one can see why the scientific evidence that the universe actually had a beginning, therefore a cause, hence the implication that something might have caused it to begin, is problematic.

 

 

And for that, we can thank (wait for it) Albert Einstein.

 

 

 

THE RUNNING COSMIC GAG

On November 18, 1915, Albert Einstein publishes the 3rd in a series of 4 papers making up his theory of General Relativity, titled, “Explanation of the Perihelion Motion of Mercury from the General Theory of Relativity.”

 

It was a master stroke.

 

Supposedly, Einstein was “so excited that he was unable to work for the next three days, and later called the moment of this success the high point of his scientific life,” recounts Dr. Bennett in What Is Relativity?

 

Now, are your the geeky or nerdy type? Then you’re gonna love this fascinating tale!

 

So, here goes:

 

The year is 1859 and an anomalous rate of precession of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit was detected by Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, a French Astronomer and Mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics and is best known for predicting the existence and position of Neptune using only mathematics.

 

Before we proceed, let’s briefly go over some terminology and concepts: First, the perihelion of a celestial body orbiting the sun is the point nearest to the sun, as this celestial body orbits around it. By contrast, the farthest point is called Aphelion (a-ˈfēl-yən), orˌ ap-ˈhēl-yən)

 

Now, the orbit of Mercury around the the Sun is almost an ellipse: Basically, and due to the pull from the other planets, Mercury’s perihelion rotates as it goes around, and around the sun. This rotation of the orbit is called a precession. prē-ˈse-shən

 

 To be clear, precession is not peculiar to Mercury. In fact, all the planetary orbits precess, and Newton's theory predicts these precessions as the product of the gravitational pull of the planets on one another.

 

The issue is whether Newton’s theory can accurately predict the amount an orbit precesses. And, as it turned out, the orbits of all all planets can be accounted for using Newton’s equations… except for Mercury!

 

So, to recap:

 

The issue wasn’t that planet Mercury was precessing.

 

Again, Newton’s law of gravity predicted that the orbit of Mercury around the sun should slowly precess due of the gravitational interferences of the other planets. And that prediction was confirmed by careful observations of Mercury’s orbit—in the nineteenth century.

 

The problem lay in the tiny discrepancy between what was being observed and the calculations made with Newton’s law of gravity. More specifically, In 1859, Le Verrier calculated the discrepancy of Mercury’s precession to be 43 arcseconds, that is, 0.01 degrees per century’s worth, which was—once again—unaccounted for by Newton’s laws of gravity, and which, according to Le Verrier either meant the sun was not a perfect sphere, or that there must another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, which was called Vulcan.

 

However, and outside of Hollywood, there was no real planet Vulcan as Einstein demonstrated in the third paper on General Relativity.

 

Still, and to be fair, it must be said that the planet Vulcan hypothesis was not an unreasonable extrapolation given that Le Verrier’s mathematical calculations helped German Astronomer Johann Galle officially confirm the existence of planet Neptune, on September 23, 1846. I mean, sure, long before that, others, such as Galileo had seen Neptune, but it was not considered to be a planet.

 

Now, the amazing part of that story is that Urbain le Verrier postulated and calculated the existence and position of Neptune as a way to explain why the orbit of Uranus looked strange, as though something was perturbing it.

 

Well, that something did turn out to be planet Neptune.

 

And so it was arguably cogent for Le Verrier to apply that same logic to the precession of Mercury, which he spent decades recording!

 

But then Albert Einstein would show that this long-standing problem in the study of the Solar System—that (apparently) whopping 0.01 degrees (or 43 seconds of arc) per century discrepancy—stemmed from Newton’s law of gravity’s a-priori assumptions, which were: one, that time was absolute; and two, that space was flat.

 

Incidentally, and you might want to sit down for this, while space is definitely not flat, the universe—and based on what the data is saying—is flat.

 

Anyway, according to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, time should run more slowly, and space should curve more in Mercury’s perihelion—that is the point nearest to the sun in the path of Mercury’s orbit.

 

And so by taking into account the distortion of spacetime, the equations of general relativity provided predictions pertaining to the orbit of Mercury that precisely matched observations.

 

And very soon after, other observations followed that would forever change the field of cosmology, and probably make Einstein regret he had ever let the proverbial genie out of the bottle back in 1905, when he published the four papers that would make him famous—including the one one on the “photo-electric effect,” which helped lead to the discovery and development of the branch of physics called quantum mechanics, which in turn lead to the idea of a probabilistic universe, something Einstein, and incidentally, Erwin Schrödinger of all people, would reject.

 

And so, while Einstein was willing to accept that using the statistical approach when describing quantum interactions was useful, and as I stated earlier, he simply could not accept that atomic physics involved this level of statistics and chance.

 

And if grappling with the implications of Quantum Theory, which he helped create, was not enough, and because, as we’ve learned, he couldn’t help but ponder the stars, and wonder, “Hey, wait a second, how come they’re still up there?” Einstein would spend the last 30 years of his life—‘’even including the last moments just before his death on April 18, 1955,” according to a March 27, 2018, Scientific American article by Scott Bembenek — to finding a unified field theory that, among other things, would unify gravity and electromagnetism; and most importantly, it was to rid physics of the “quantum uncertainty.”

Now, in principle, even though at the time Einstein was unaware of the weak and strong nuclear forces, his quest to show that gravity and electromagnetism were different manifestations of the same force might have worked. After all, history has shown that one can unify some of the forces while excluding others. As a case-in-point, Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. And in the 70s, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, also known as the weak interaction, were shown to be two aspects of the same force, and that’s how we got the electroweak force.

 

However, even still today, because gravity simply refuses to play—if you will—with the other forces, the search for unification, hence solving the problem of the singularity whence came the four fundamental forces carried by a menagerie of particles (or the “particle zoo” to quote professor Michio Kaku) remains elusive.

 

 

A MATERIALIST’S LAMENT

In chapter 9 of his 1992 book, God and the Astronomers, the late Dr. Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote the following:

"Scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause; there is no First Cause.”

 

And so in his chapter aptly titled “The Religion of Science,” Jastrow, who was a self-professed agnostic, reveals that “this religious faith of the scientists is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover."

Now, even though Jastrow doesn’t actually refer to it by name, he was talking about this thing known as the singularity. More on that shortly.

 

In the meantime, I’d like to share with you the following transcript from a candid and thought-provoking, on-camera talk by Dr. Jastrow. In it he says, “Just as I can’t believe that there was a creator, I can’t believe that this all happened by chance, which implies there was a creator. Again, I find it hard to believe this is all a matter of atoms and molecules. And So, you see, I’m in a completely, hopeless bind. And I’ve stayed there. And so I try to fit into my concept of the world the conclusion that there is a larger force of some kind, which we can call God or you can call it whatever. But I can’t accept that. I’m what’s called a materialist, in philosophy. That doesn’t mean I like Cadillacs and big cars, my students always used to think that. It means that I believe the world consists entirely of material substances; and when you specify those substances — the atoms and molecules and the laws by which they interact — you’ve done it all; there isn’t anything more to be said or inserted into your model of the universe. That’s what my science tells me, and I’ve been a scientist all my life—but I find it unsatisfactory. In fact, it makes me uneasy. I feel I’m missing something. But I will not find out what I’m missing within my lifetime.”

 

Now, as regards the matter of the singularity, Dr. Jastrow explained that if you reversed the the outward motions of the galaxies, and went backward in time, they become closer and closer together, and we reach the point where they are nearly infinite in density and temperature — and, according to him, we wouldn’t be able to go farther than that. “So there's a beginning,” he said,  a “point in time from which it all started, and that's a remarkable thing because it has a very strong theological flavor to it.”

 

And that intrigued him because, as an agnostic he felt that if “there was a beginning, a moment of creation in the universe then there was a creator.” And so to Jastrow, a creator is not compatible with agnosticism and he found that message so interesting that he felt a strong compulsion to share it with others, and that is why he wrote his aforementioned book, God and the Astronomers.

 

Nearly two decades later, in his 2009 book titled The Devil’s Delusion, Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, and to my understanding, Dr. David Berlinski summarizes the two main goals of scientific atheists. He writes:

 

 “The first is to find a way around the initial singularity of standard Big Bang cosmology. Physicists accept this aim devoutly because the Big Bang singularity strikes an uncomfortably theistic note. Nothing but intellectual mischief can result from leaving that singularity where it is. Who knows what poor ideas religious believers might take from cosmology were they to imagine that in the beginning the universe began? The second aim is to account for the emergence of the universe in some way that will allow physicists to say with quiet pride that they have gotten the thing to appear from nothing, and especially nothing resembling a deity or a singularity.”

 

In fact, you know how in episode 6 Richard Dawkins showed, using synthetic evolution that was ultimately non-Darwinian, how the Darwinian mechanism allegedly led to the “origin of species”? Well, in his best selling book,  A Brief History of Time, a book that, and to quote once again Dr. Berlinski, “was widely considered fascinating by those who did not read it, and incomprehensible by those who did,” Stephen Hawking, and by his own admission, used imaginary time as a “trick” to get rid of the problem of the singularity, whose existence — ironically — he had proved, so that he can remove the need for a Creator.

 

Again, the notion of a Beginning elicits a Cause, which in turn begs the question of what or who was the causer?

 

And if there was a beginning to the universe, then, more than likely, there’s an…end?

Now, skipping over the riveting discussion about the true nature of the Cosmological Constant, which is why, according to Dr. Mack, we “generally call any hypothesized phenomenon that could make the universe accelerate in its expansion DARK ENERGY,” it would appear, that “based on observations at the moment, it really looks a lot like dark energy is a cosmological constant: AN UNCHANGING PROPERTY of SPACETIME that has only recently (i.e., in the last few billion years) come to dominate the evolution of the universe.”

OK, what does that mean?

Well, according to Katie Mack, “If we follow that through to its future consequences, it’s kind of ironic, actually. Because now it seems that the term Einstein used to save the universe will end up spelling its doom.”

Oh…

In The End of Everything Dr. Katie Mack writes, “The distant future of a universe governed by Dark Energy in the form of a cosmological constant is one of darkness, isolation, emptiness, and decay. But (she adds) this slow fade is just the beginning of the ultimate end: The Heat Death.” Incidentally, and for the purists out there, the term “Heat Death,” is clearly a misnomer because—once again—scientists’ demonstrated lack of acumen when it comes to naming stuff! On that front, Katie Mack explains that, in physics, the term “heat,” (and here’s another doozie) does not mean “warmth” but rather “disordered motion of particles and energy.”

 

And here, Dr. Mack is referring to entropy, which she describes as “perhaps one of the most essential, versatile, and tragically obscure topics in all of science. It shows up everywhere—not just in the physics of everything from balloons to black holes, but also computer science, statistics, and even economics and neuroscience. Entropy is usually explained in terms of disorder.”

 

Now, before I proceed to tell you perhaps more than you care to know about Entropy, let me assure you that is a crucial topic. In fact, let me give one of the punchlines: because of this thing called entropy, we’re not, really, supposed to exist. Or… maybe we don’t, but we think we do! Again, sit tight, because, and speaking from a strictly scientific point of view, the universe is a lot weirder than might think! Clearly (and here I refer you to episode 5) Richard C. Lewontin wasn’t kidding about accepting ideas that defied common sense!

 

 

ENTROPY, OR THE UNSTOPPABLE MARCH TOWARDS OBLIVION...

 

In an August 8, 2017 NBCnews.com article titled, The 7 Biggest Unanswered Questions in Physics, we learn that one such question is, “Why does time seem to flow only in one direction?” Toronto-based science journalist and author Dan Falk writes, “Since Einstein, physicists have thought of space and time as forming a four-dimensional structure known as “spacetime.”  But space differs from time in some very fundamental ways. In space, we’re free to move about as we wish. When it comes to time, we’re stuck. We grow older, not younger. And we remember the past, but not the future. Time, unlike space, seems to have a preferred direction — physicists call it the “arrow of time.”

 

Now, before you go, “gee, thanks, captain obvious!” bear with me a second, as we continue down that path:

 

According to the article, the second law of thermodynamics, that is, Entropy, provides a clue.

 

Simply stated, and in terms of thermodynamics, “the entropy of a physical system (roughly, the amount of disorder) rises over time, and physicists think this increase is what gives time its direction. (For example, a broken teacup has more entropy than an intact one — and, sure enough, smashed teacups always seem to arise after intact ones, not before.)”

 

Now, You know that heat-death I mentioned earlier? Here’s a little heads-up: when there is left in the universe to decay, hence, entropy will have reached such a high degree, time will stop… literally. And when that happens, anything is possible, when you factor in quantum fluctuations (remember those?) and statistical mechanics (which, among others, gave us the Infinite Monkey Theorem), and which is why I asked you to keep the name Boltzmann —or Boltzmän— in the back of your mind.

 

Alright, so entropy is therefore, a scientific concept as well as a measurable physical property that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty, and it is used in diverse fields, such as classical thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.

 

In the field of Classical Thermodynamics, the concept of entropy, was introduced by German physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius in 1865, to give a name to  irreversible heat loss. Back in the 1700s for example, and compared to today, heat-powered engines were inefficient, converting but a small amount of the input energy into useful work, prompting physicists to tackle this problem of energy loss. So, and in a nutshell, in thermodynamics, entropy pertains to the efficiency of engines that rely on energy being converted into work.

 

Now, in Statistical Mechanics, entropy takes on a different meaning. First, as regards its importance, and, according to what Software Engineer Peter Eastman published on Stanford University’s website, Statistical Mechanics is “either the least fundamental or most fundamental of all fields of physics. That is because it not really science at all. It is pure mathematics.”

 

Developed in the second half of the 19th by Ludwig Boltzmann, it grew out of thermodynamics, which described the behavior of the then misunderstood, mysterious substance called “heat.” Now compared to Statistical Mechanics, Thermodynamics was “a physical theory of the more conventional sort. It involved natural laws discovered by experiment, and made no claims about why those laws happened to hold.” Writes Eastman. Heat, or Caloric as it was also called, was assumed to be a substance much like other forms of matter. However, this view turned out to be incorrect. Peter Eastman explains that Heat is actually an emergent phenomenon because it is a mathematical quantity defined in terms of a more detailed theory; that is, the movement of individual atoms. Now, that is an important clarification because, at the macro level, we can ignore the details of how each atom is moving and find that the all the atoms collectively behave in a way that resembles a continuous fluid. Thus, Eastman explains that this is what statistical mechanics is all about; that is, “deriving high level descriptions by starting from lower level ones and then averaging out lots of details.”

 

Incidentally, Eastman notes that many physicists suspect gravity is an emergent phenomenon, that “it arises from the collective behavior of some deeper degrees of freedom.”

 

Anyway, this brings us back to what entropy means in Statistical mechanics, and how it ultimately relates to the question of intelligence in the cosmos:

 

Ludwig Boltzmann, remember him? Well, he defined entropy as a measure of possible microscopic states, or microstates of a system in thermodynamic equilibrium.  Now, to illustrate thermodynamic equilibrium, imagine you drop an ice cube in a glass of water. To make it more interesting, imagine your ice cube is dark red because you added Red Dye 40 to the water before freezing it into ice cubes.

 

Anyway, as the ice cube—which incidentally, and from the point of view of classic thermodynamics, is at a lower entropy state than the surrounding water—please hold that thought—begins to melt, the dye diffuses, first in a complicated, difficult to predict manner. However, after sufficient time has passed, the water in the glass will be uniform in color; that is, in a state much easier to describe and explain.

 

And, oddly enough, that calm, serene water compared to ice cube, has higher entropy.

 

According to Samuel Flender’s definition that he published on Medium dot com:

 

Entropy can be considered as the amount of randomness, or equivalently, the absence of information. In the meantime, Flender goes on to say, “Physically, entropy is a quantity that is proportional to the number of “microscopic configurations” that are consistent with the observed “macroscopic state.”

 

In other words, if you take any “thing,” such as a sand castle, water in a cup, or an ice cube,

entropy measures “the number of combinations in which you could re-arrange the atoms and molecules of a “thing” such as to observe the same structure of that thing.”

 

In other words, and for you Star Trek fans, every time the transporter beams you up or down, in one piece, by successfully breaking down your molecules into energy, then reassembling them into matter, there is no increase in entropy; that is, compared to a scenario in which a catastrophic transporter malfunction converts your energy pattern into a calm and serene… gooey mess!

 

In any case, and back to this here reality, the moment we place an ice cube in a glass of water, we begin the move towards thermal equilibrium, in accord with the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the entropy of an isolated system always increases. In other words, the ice cube, which compared to water is a system with low entropy (please keep holding that thought), will begin to melt, until all that is left is water in the glass. And, short of a miracle that rewinds reverses the arrow of time, the process is irreversible.

 

Now, whether or not the ice has melted, we can all agree that the entire physical “system” consisting of the water and ice has a finite number of molecules.

 

And, hopefully, we can all agree that there are far more ways to combine said molecules of water, in such a manner as to retain its physical characteristics, than in the case of the ice cube.

 

So, to paraphrase Flender, there is a far greater number of combinations of the molecules that correspond to the final all-water system configuration. Therefore, this is equivalent to saying that the final state (that is, a system where it’s all water) has a higher entropy than the initial state (which involves a solid, not-yet-melted ice cube that is more restrictive in terms of the number of molecular combinations that would not alter its physical characteristics).

 

Incidentally, complexity is not necessarily a measure of entropy. A completed puzzle, for example, while arguably complex, has a low state of entropy compared to when the puzzle pieces are strewn and mixed on the table. As Katie Mack explains, “The more disordered a system, the higher its entropy. A pile of puzzle pieces has higher entropy than a completed puzzle; a scrambled egg has higher entropy than an intact one.”

 

And in cases where, as a property, disorder is not immediately obvious, Katie Mack explains that we can think of entropy as a measure of how free or unconstrained the elements of the system are. She writes, “To be concrete, a completed puzzle has low entropy because there’s only one way for all the pieces to be arranged to make the puzzle whole, whereas a pile of pieces can be in any of a number of configurations and still successfully constitute a pile.”

 

And even if it looks as though we’ve transformed disorder into order by completing a jigsaw puzzle, we will have reversed neither entropy, nor the arrow of time. As a matter of fact, the total entropy will always go up. In the case of the puzzle, consider the effort it takes you in terms of expenditure of energy, which ultimately leads to your heating up the room, and wrinkling your shirt!

 

So, and back to the difference between the ice cube and water: Compared to the ice cube, there are infinitely more ways for the molecules of water to be arranged. Plus, consider that, liquid water, compared to the pile of puzzle pieces — or an ice cube for that matter — is a dynamic environment.

 

Now, all this to say—and back to what Katie Mack was saying in terms of the Heat Death of the universe—it’s not the death of heat, but a death by heat. That is, “It’s the disorder in particular that kills us.”

 

That’s when statistical mechanics will run amok, as it were, courtesy of those random Quantum fluctuations I talked about in episode 6. In a post-heat-death universe, if “you were willing to wait something like a trillion trillion times the age of the universe, you could watch an entire piano spontaneously assemble itself in a seemingly empty box,” according to Katie Mack. Once again, in physics, the term “heat” does not mean “warmth” but the “disordered motion of particles and energy.”

 

In fact, and assuming the cosmological constant which is causing a rapid expansion of our universe, by literally adding space, and pushing whatever is in space away from one another, the prediction is that such a universe is evolving toward darkness and emptiness. As the expansion accelerates, there’s more empty space and more dark energy, causing more and more expansion ad infinitum. Eventually, the universe will have reached what is known as a state of thermal equilibrium, where all the stars will have burned out, all the particles will have decayed, and even all the black holes will have evaporated, leaving only the cosmological constant, that is Dark Energy. Welcome to what is known as the De Sitter space. And I’ll just add that the De Sitter space is thought to reflect the conditions of our early Cosmos during what is known as this thing I mentioned early on, called cosmic Inflation, which is, according to Dr. Alan Guth, “a minor modification in the overall scheme of things of standard Big Bang theory. It is a prequel to conventional Big Bang theory. A short description of what happened immediately before the Big Bang,” and which was developed to address certain problems inherent in the classical Big Bang theory, and which we don’t need to discuss at this juncture. And to be clear, Inflation Theory does not explain The Ultimate Beginning of the Universe. Essentially, and according to the theory, you need around 1 gram of matter to create the vastly more massive universe — which is why Dr. Guth call Inflation Theory “The Ultimate Free Lunch.” Others call it “prior fine-tuning.” I mean, seriously, where did that 1 gram of matter come from? Anyway, Inflation theory only addresses what happened afterwards. And according to Dr. Guth, even though this seems to be inconsistent with the very tight principle we believe is exact—that is, the total energy is always conserved—when one factors-in the fact that not all energies are positive, it all checks out! And one last thing, please know that inflation theory also leads to a multiverse known as The Inflationary Multiverse or Eternal Inflation, albeit different than the kind we get with String theory. In fact, there are several other Multiverse theories, such as the Quilted Multiverse, The Brane Multiverse (again, Brane as in Membrane), and the Cyclic Multiverse. But again, we’ll be talking about all that in a future episode.

 

In the meantime, and back to the topic in hand: in a universe of maximum entropy, there are no energy sources, no differences in potential energy, no stars, light, or radiation; nothing to even contribute to an increase in entropy. And the moment entropy can no longer increase, energy will not be able to flow from one place to another. Consequently, time will come to a dead stop. And that’s a problem because existence requires the arrow of time. Again, to quote Dr. Lee Smolin, “causality is the fundamental aspect of time. And our experience of the flow of time is a derivative of that.”

 

 And I might as well add that while—according to Katie Mack and generally-speaking in physics—reversing the arrow of time doesn’t make a difference, just about the only part of physics that seems to care at all about the direction of time is entropy; except when… it doesn’t?

 

Wait… what?

 

Oh, I see!

 

Remember the second law of the thermodynamics, which tells us that entropy of a closed system always increases? Well, according to Columbia professor of physics and mathematics Dr. Brian Greene, “The second law of thermodynamics should really be called ‘[the] second tendency of thermodynamics…’ or ‘the second overwhelming likelihood of thermodynamics,’  because it is a probabilistic statement that says it’s overwhelmingly likely that if  particles are seeded out to the world, they will evolve in a manner that increases their entropy. But (he adds) that tendency can be violated.”

 

Again, the reason he said that is because the Universe that we know is a closed system, which means we should expect entropy to increase over time, and that given enough time, which we’ve certainly had since the Big Bang occurred, there should be nothing but thermodynamic equilibrium. And yet, here we are, life forms whose existence perhaps suggests there is some yet-to-be revealed error in our current theories of physics, which could explain our existence.

 

Now, mathematically-speaking, and as I’ve intimated in episode 6, there is a non-zero chance (meaning, “Hey, it could always happen”) of that tendency to be violated. In other words, and just like, statistically-speaking, monkeys filling the entire observable universe might be able to produce every book that has ever been written, if you afforded them a timespan equal to hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe, there is always that not-quite-impossible chance all the molecules of air in your room to spontaneously revert into a much lower state of entropy and pack themselves into one corner of said room. Not impossible, just highly unlikely.

 

Similarly, and despite the overall tendency towards disorder, there’s always the highly unlikely possibility — perhaps as highly unlikely as throwing 100 pennies on the floor and ending up with all heads or all tails — of pockets of order to form within the overall tendency towards disorder in the universe because there is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents it from happening.

 

 

Now, let’s go back to Dr. Katie Mack: according to her, that inescapable law of the universe that says entropy always increases, “technically only applies on average over sufficiently large scales.”

 

Whereas, on the quantum scale, or even on large scales if we wait long enough,

“unpredictable fluctuations will, from time to time, spontaneously shift some part of the system into a lower-entropy state at random."

 

So, thanks to the magic of statistical mechanics, once the universe has “ended” and all that is left is eternal expansion courtesy of the cosmological constant, also known as Dark Energy, there would be all the time in the world, so-to-speak, because apparently entropy is what defines the arrow of time; and once the universe reaches its maximum entropy, time will no longer flow… or exist… just about anything, including low-probability events, will happen.

 

Therefore, technically-speaking, that scene in the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the whale and a bowl of petunias suddenly popping into existence (albeit, in the movie, it wasn’t in an utterly, and completely dead universe, but still) could happen, if we waited long enough.

 

And If anything can spontaneously pop into existence after the Heat Death, Katie Mack writes, why not another universe?

 

Again, thanks to the magic of statistical mechanics, “any arrangement a system of particles finds itself in can happen again, if you wait long enough.” Therefore, in a post-heat-death universe where statistical mechanics steps in to provide random fluctuations, nothing says a Big Bang can’t “fluctuate out of the vacuum, to start the universe anew.”

 

This is why, once again, if you have an infinite amount of time, the Poincaré recurrence states that “any state the system can be in is a state it WILL be in again, an infinite number of times, with a recurrence time determined by how rare or special that configuration is.”

 

But, see, and this what happens when you think a little too much, in an entirely random universe—because, remember, allegedly, there is no Creator, no purpose, no mind… right?—our “conventional” brains should be at equilibrium with the rest of the surroundings, therefore, not even exist in the first place. Now, according to Brian Greene, if you’re waiting for an effectively infinite amount of time, the number of conventional, that is, biological brains that can be created in a conventional manner, starting from the Big Bang onward, is relatively smaller compared to the number of…

 

Disembodied what… that can form in the what, now?

 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is — statistically-speaking— far more likely for disembodied brain, called a Boltzmann brain, to fluctuate into existence out of the vacuum, than for a universe—any universe for that matter, never mind one that is arguably fine-tuned for our existence—to materialize, thus allowing biological brains to form in a conventional manner, and evolve the ability to think.

 

Therefore, because Boltzmann brains are statistically more probable to form than human brains, it follows that our human brains could be Boltzmann brains, floating out there in the void, with false memories of having existed in this here universe, believing they came about as the result of a rare process, starting with the Big Bang.

 

And so for all we know, we’re just part of a Boltzmann brain that had popped into “existence” because, and never mind the Infinite Monkey Theorem I told you about in episode 6,  it is, once again, and this bears repeating, far more likely for a Boltzmann brain to fluctuate into existence out of the vacuum, in a post-heat-death universe, than for a universe, any universe, never mind one that is arguably fine-tuned for our existence to materialize, thus allowing biological brains to form, and evolve the ability to think about what amounts to a meaningless simulation, they shouldn’t be able to notice in the first place, let alone test that hypothesis.

 

According to String physicist Brian Greene, there is a disturbing quality inherent in that conclusion. He says, “Take my brain, imagine it’s actually now formed in the void. That brain thinks it understands the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity, because that brain seems to remember having taken quantum mechanics and general relativity, and seems to recall looking at all the data that confirm those theories.”

 

Now, and to Dr. Greene, the idea of a fully-functioning brain, floating in space, possessing the same particle configuration as our own brains is, of course, absurd. But, that doesn’t seem to refrain or dissuade the greatest scientific minds from pondering this question because “if quantum mechanics says that something can happen, even with an incredibly small probability, if wait long enough, you’re virtually assured that that unlikely event will—at some point—happen,” he says.

 

But, he says, all of that is fake. Even worse, that brain, now, can’t trust anything at all. He describes it as a skeptical nightmare, in which “The brain can’t even trust the very reason that led us to conclude that the brain should form. So (he adds) you’ve undercut all rationality when you allow these Boltzmann  Brains into the story.”

 

In other words, might an excess of so-called rational thinking potentially lead to its own demise?

 

 

MARIO HENRI CHAKKOUR, AIA

 

May 29, 2023

 

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