Friday, July 14, 2006

Funny thing about the universe... (Part 3 of 3)

Part I, Part II


Imagine a simple universe:




Basically it’s a box with space for nine items that can be in one of two states, empty or full. Nine possible locations two possible states 2^9 = 512 possible combinations. Now, imagine that you could label this:




As state "A", and this:




As "B" and so on. Eventually you’d have labeled all the states with some combination of letters. If matter spontaneously recycles back into the universe then it stands to reason that given enough time (remember, you have infinite time) even very low probabilities will come to fruition. Given enough time the improbable becomes a certainty. So one can imagine that the evolution of this simple universe might occur from state “N” to state “E”, “V”, “E”, “R”, “O”, “D”, “D”. Or some such, and that’s all fine and good, but wait a bit longer and perhaps the states unfold in this order: NEVER ODD OR EVEN. You see that it’s palindrome. And just as a hundred monkeys banging away at keyboards will produce Shakespeare, so this simple universe will eventually make Shakespeare, perhaps King Lear, and then King Lear backwards, making one very long palindrome. Complete time symmetry. In which direction then can we say the “arrow of time” is pointing?



And though the real universe is much less simple than the one pictured (duh), the principle transfers. Max Tegmark in Scientific American (May ’03) says that there are roughly 2^10^118 possible states in our universe, and each state could be similarly labeled (whoa, tha’d be a TON of letters though). So the metaphor is still valid, and so is the time symmetry problem.



And just as Thomas Aquinas always gave Aristotelian steady-state philosophy the benefit of the doubt when discussing God because “if he were to start with the premise that the universe had a beginning, then his task would be too easy! Obviously, if there was a beginning, something had to bring the universe into existence,” (Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator). However, Dobson admits that the symmetry problem in his steady-state theory doesn’t get away from what he smugly calls the “Interior Designer”. He says that in order to measure change, it must be compared to something that doesn’t change. Something unchanging can’t be part of an eternally changing universe, and therefore must be external to the universe. Hmm, an external unchanging timeless base by which we measure change… could not another name for this be God?



It's a funny thing about the universe: it requires a deposit of faith into something external to the universe in order to make sense. I’ve had debates about evidence for God in a big bang scenario, but this has recently come to my attention, steady-state models don’t quell the debate either.

2 comments:

Michael Turton said...

It's a funny thing about the universe: it requires a deposit of faith into something external to the universe in order to make sense.

No, it doesn't require any "faith" at all. It's an inference from known data and methods: the universe must have come from somewhere/something, because it is here. The more interesting problem with this statement is the second half: "to make sense." Statistics, cosmology, and relativity are counterintuitive and do not "make sense." Perhaps your problem in coming to terms with the lack of design and a designer in the universe lies in the issue of "sense."

Michael

D.J. Skull-Fog said...

Although relativity and to a higher degree quantum theory are counter intuitive they do make sense mathematically. What I mean by "make sense", in this instance (a steady-state model of the universe), is that in order to gague the very change of the universe (something we call "the passage of time") the model requires an external entity that does not change. Becuase without it causality (the requisite for "sense") is meaningless.

Check out "Astronnomy" magazine October '05 (vol. 33, issue 10) about multiple universe theory, or the above mentioned "Scientific American" May '03. And then we can talk about the deposit of faith that you have in multi-universe theories.