The ID Report

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

Writing in the 1970s, American astronomer Robert Jastrow so poignantly summed up much of what we now know about the origins of our cosmos:

"We have been aware for fifty years that we live in an expanding Universe, in which all the galaxies around us are moving apart from us and one another at enormous speeds. The Universe is blowing up before our eyes, as if we are witnessing the aftermath of a gigantic explosion. If we retrace the motions of the outward-moving galaxies backward in time, we find that they all come together, so to speak, fifteen or twenty billions years ago. At that time all the matter in the Universe was packed into a dense mass, at temperatures of many trillions of degrees. The dazzling brilliance of the radiation in this dense, hot Universe must have been beyond description. The picture suggests the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen bomb. The instant in which the cosmic bomb exploded marked the birth of the Universe" (Ref 1, p.13).

Incredibly our universe displays several aspects of orchestrated design and fine-tuning- aspects to which we owe our very existence. In fact so finely tuned is our universe that, were it just the slightest bit different, stars would not burn for as long as they do and life would never have arisen. TIME Magazine senior science writer Michael Lemonick noted as much

"Many of the most fundamental characteristics of our cosmos- the relative strengths of gravity, electromagnetism and the forces that operate inside atomic nuclei as well as masses and relative abundances of different particles- are so finely tuned that if just one of these were even slightly different, life as we know it couldn't exist. If the so-called weak nuclear interaction were a tiny bit stronger or weaker than it is, for example, stars wouldn't blow up in the mammoth supernovas that spread elements like carbon and oxygen out into space and without those elements, there would be no water and no organic molecules. If the strong nuclear force were just one-half of 1% stronger or weaker, stars could not make carbon or oxygen....Because there is no known law that requires those forces to have the values they do, scientists figure that there must be another explanation for how we got so lucky" (Ref 2).

In order to avoid the metaphysical repercussions that accompany a singular universe with its seeming fitness for the advent of life, some have postulated that ours is but one of a multitude of universes- a Multiverse (Ref 3, pp.157-181). With a large number of universes, we could simply attribute the apparent 'fine tuning' of our cosmic world to an issue of probabilities- after all, the more universes that exist, the greater the probability of finding one that is conducive to the appearance of life. And yet as British Astronomer Royal and Multiverse proponent Martin Rees is quick to point out multiple universe theories are "tentative and should be prefaced by something akin to a health warning" (Ref 3, p.158).

Cosmologist Lee Smolin has developed his own Multiverse theory conjecturing that within the confines of black holes, there might be other universes forming and expanding just like our own that would never be visible to us because of the limited horizon of black holes (their gravitational pull is so strong that even visible light cannot escape) (Ref 4). Smolin's ideas would certainly make good science fiction. Universes that originate from explosions that are hidden from sight in black holes make a backdrop for a great story in which intelligent beings such as us are oblivious to the origin of their cosmos, believing it to be in some way unique (Ref 4, p.89). With so many universes spawning from black holes, Smolin argues, it becomes more probable that at least one of them will have laws of physics that are fine-tuned for the formation of stars, planetary systems and eventually life. Or does it?

Smolin's idea of universe progeny spawning from black holes within parent universes bears striking similarities to the evolutionary tree of common descent that Darwin provided as the sole picture in 'The Origin Of Species'. According to Smolin, as universes 'improve' their ability to generate more stars and thereby produce more black holes, 'fitter' universes will swamp out those that are less finely tuned, have fewer stars and therefore produce less progeny (Ref 4, p.90-100). Given time, enough universes will have produced enough stars to generate enough black holes to produce more progeny universes with life-supporting, physical parameters such as our own.

But what is to say that fine-tuning will necessarily improve to the phenomenal level that we find in the laws of physics that under gird our own cosmos? Smolin's theory relies on the early parent universe going through expansion-collapse cycles before it becomes 'fit' enough to produce stars and consequently black holes for its progeny to form (Ref 4, p.97). For such a cosmos, the mechanical energy needed for expansion-collapse would eventually decay just as a ball bouncing on a living room floor would eventually stop bouncing. Such observations are consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. So for Smolin's parent universes to generate progeny, they would have to get fit before the bouncing energy ran out.

Oddly enough Smolin's theory also suffers from a lack of testability and falsifiability. We have no way of testing whether or not a host of universes and other worlds actually exist behind black holes. Historian and theologian Ben Witherington III emphasized that we should "stick to the story" when looking at historical accounts, using what we know to be true or falsifiable to back up our assertions (Ref 5). To do otherwise is to open ourselves to the possibility of almost anything happening. The very fact that we are here to look back on the history of the universe is being used as testimony that the very small probability of obtaining the precise fine-tuning of our cosmos must have been achieved without recourse to a designer's 'hand'. Without the evidence and without testability, such a position becomes a philosophical and not a scientific one.

CERN cosmologist Gabriele Veneziano has been emphatic in his view about possible alternatives to the singularity of the universe implicit in the cosmic Big Bang (Ref 6). 'Going further north than the North Pole' is the phrase that Veneziano has coined for this idea that time extends back beyond the origin of our universe (Ref 6). Astronomer Ed Hubble's discovery that galaxies were moving away from each other in a celestial expansion and Roger Penrose's and Stephen Hawking's proof that time does not extend indefinitely into the past certainly support the view point that the big bang beginning is, "the ultimate cataclysm, beyond which our cosmic ancestry cannot extend" (Ref 6). What has proven difficult for cosmologists to understand is just how it might be that, from a singular origin, the universe became so homogeneous, with the properties of one galaxy being the same as those of another many billions of light years away (Ref 6). Today cosmology has answered this apparent paradox by suggesting that a period of hyper inflation was responsible for the massive distances between different regions of the universe that initially were much closer together. What is most appealing of this latter view is that it has predicted several crucial observations of the cosmos with a very high degree of precision (Ref 6).

Nevertheless Veneziano has questioned certain aspects of the hyper inflationary model. For example, no one knows the exact nature of the so-called 'Inflaton' that caused the hyper inflation to counteract the forces of gravitational collapse (Ref 6). One theory that has challenged the singularity of the Big Bang suggests that the universe contains structures called 'branes' that, through forces of attraction, periodically collide just as a ship coming into a port might collide with the side of a dock (Ref 6). Physicists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok are the major protagonists of this brane collision theory (otherwise known as the Ekpyrotic or Conflagration theory) in which branes hit and bounce off each other (Ref 6). They propose that each time branes collide, a 'big bang' event occurs spawning off a new universe in the process. In short, Steinhardt and Turok tell us that our universe may have arisen as a result of two branes banging together.

The difficulty with the brane collision theory, as Veneziano points out, is that in order to get the homogeneous bang required by inflationary cosmology, the colliding branes that supposedly set off our universe must have been exactly parallel (Ref 6). Steinhardt and Turok are ever hopeful that, had they not been parallel, successive collisions would have allowed them more time to straighten out without any external guidance (Ref 6). It is just as if a ship, coming into a port has multiple opportunities to line up with the side of the dock but with the added feature that the captain could leave the bridge and go and sleep in his cabin with absolute confidence that, sooner or later, the boat would line up and dock correctly. A rather uncomfortable affair for all the passengers concerned!! Just like Smolin, Steinhardt and Turok rely on buying time to achieve highly improbable events (in this case, the almost perfect coming-together and subsequent rebounding of parallel branes). More importantly however, neither their colliding branes nor Smolin's budding universes remove the requirement for a creation event of some kind- after all, something must still come into existence if we are going to have branes to collide or universes to budd. There must be some singular event that brings the initial universe into existence.

It is ironic that Smolin should choose Darwin's tree of life to illustrate his model. After all, Darwin himself called for a singularity in so far as all existing life could be brought together through the ages to one or at least a few common ancestors at some defined point in time (Ref 7, pp. 480, 615, 630). With the different Multiverse theories we have still not answered the fundamental question of why there is something rather than nothing.

REFERENCES

1. Robert Jastrow (1978), God And The Astronomers, W.W. Norton and Company Inc, New York

2. Michael Lemonick (2004), Cosmic Conundrum, TIME Magazine, November 29th, Vol 164, Number 22, pp. 58-61

3. Martin Rees (2001), Our Cosmic Habitat, Weidenfeld and Nicolson Publishers, UK

4. Lee Smolin (1997), The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford University Press, New York

5. Ben Witherington III (2004) 'In Search of the Real Jesus', Seminar presented at Blackhawk Free Evangelical Church, Madison WI on 8th of May, 2004

6. Gabriele Veneziano (2004), The Myth of the Beginning of Time, Scientific American Volume 290 (5) pp. 54-65

7. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival, Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York

Copyright(c), 2008, Robert Deyes