Dear Colleagues,Science & Ultimate Reality
As I wrote a few days ago, I once asked John Wheeler what he regarded as his
greatest contribution to science. After a few moments reflection he
announced, "Mutability!" Wheeler was impressed by the awesome and inexorable
power of gravitational collapse, a phenomenon of such all-encompassing
ferocity that it seemed to spell the obliteration of spacetime itself. What,
then, might we make of physical laws, formulated as they are within the
framework of space and time? Would these laws go into the melting pot too?
Wheeler envisioned the cherished laws of physics being transcended one by
one as the death-knell of spacetime was tolled. There would be no ultimate,
absolute, inviolable, supra-universal laws underpinning physical reality.
Instead, only chaos - or "higgledy-piggledy" - from which lawlike
regularities might emerge under less violent conditions.
Echoes of this philosophy found favor among cosmologists, who like to think
of the hot big bang origin of the universe as an event of limitless violence
and fuzzy lawlessness. From this primeval blandness, familiar physics
"freezes out" in a succession of phase transitions and symmetry breaks as
the universe expands and cools. Taken to its extreme, this point of view
implies that the so-called laws of physics we know and love are but random
relics of the cosmic birth, frozen haphazardly into our region of space, and
not god-given rules on how to run a cosmos.
History has shown that regularities formerly regarded as absolute laws of
nature turn out to be the result of special circumstances. For example, the
law of conservation of matter is transcended once high enough energies are
reached to permit particle creation. Conservation of baryon number would
fail for a black hole and most likely fail in the super-hot furnace of the
very early universe too. But extreme violence is only one way that laws
might be relegated to by-laws. Another is extreme duration. What appears to
be fixed might actually vary slightly over immense periods of time. A
possible candidate is the so-called fine-structure constant of atomic
physics, a universal quantity obtained by combining the speed of light,
Planck's constant and the fundamental unit of electric charge. The idea that
this number, known to physicists as "alpha," might change over cosmological
time is an old idea, but only recently has there been half-way credible
observational evidence for it. John Barrow is a theoretical physicist and
astronomer at Cambridge University, and has been closely involved in the
work on the spectral lines of distant quasars that display tantalizing hints
of a varying alpha. His paper is summarized below.
Paul Davies
__________________________________________
--------------------------------------------------------
Title: Cosmology and Mutability
Author: John D. Barrow
Summary:
This chapter will provide a discussion of what are the unchanging attributes
of the Universe. We will discuss the identity and character of the
traditional constants of Nature and discuss the evidence for their constancy
in space and time. This discussion will draw on recent observational and
experimental investigations of the constancy of the fine structure constant,
particle mass ratios and the gravitation 'constant' of Newton, and introduce
the modern theoretical motivations for considering the variations of
constants. We will also consider the narrow ranges of values that many
constants are seemingly permitted to take in a Universe similar to ours if
complexity is to be possible. The role of extra dimensions of space and time
will also be described together with future prospects for understanding the
status of the constants of Nature.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This email list is part of the Science & Ultimate Reality Symposium in honor
of John Archibald Wheeler, March 15-18, 2002 in Princeton, N.J. For more
information go to: http://www.metanexus.net/ultimate_reality. This list is
moderated by Paul Davies. Please feel free to forward these messages
to friends, colleagues, and students.
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or access the online archives, please go to:http://listserv.metanexus.net/metanexus/archives/wheeler.html.
This publication is hosted by Metanexus Online http://www.metanexus.net. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Metanexus or its sponsors.
Metanexus welcomes submissions between 1000 to 3000 words of essays and book reviews that seek to explore and interpret science and religion in original and insightful ways for a general educated audience. Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for acceptable essays. Please send all inquiries and submissions to . Metanexus consists of a number of topically focused forums (Anthropos, Bios, Cogito, Cosmos, Salus, Sophia, and Techne) and periodic HTML enriched composite digests from each of the lists.Copyright notice: Except when otherwise noted, articles may be forwarded, quoted, or republished in full with attribution to the author of the column and "Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science ". Republication for commercial purposes in print or electronic format requires the permission of the author. Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 by Metanexus Institute.