I’ve said before that I don’t necessarily believe in the Big Bang as the first cause of everything, in fact I’ve yet to hear anything that I would consider a plausible explanation of how it all began. The question that you’re always left with is but what caused that?
If the Big Bang started the universe, how did it happen? If one or other of the multitude of gods created the universe, what created him? Whichever way you look at it you’re forced into a position of infinite regression, of turtles as far as the eye can see.
There is I believe a way that we could explain this though, without recourse to gods or demons and without violating the laws of physics (much).
Firstly I want to share with you a brilliant little game/simulator called Life. This was invented by a guy named John Conway in 1970 and demonstrates how complexity can arise from very simple beginnings. The game consists of a grid of squares, and the player chooses at the start of the game which of the squares are “alive”. The game then proceeds in rounds with the following rules being observed:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
Generally any given random pattern will eventually exhaust itself, but there are certain patterns of cells that will cause an infinite amount of activity.
For example this is the famous “Glider Gun”:
Remember that this activity is driven entirely by the four rules above.
A more advanced pattern gives this result, known as a breeder for obvious reasons:
Life impresses me because it really does prove that with no intelligent input and with very basic rules a self-replicating system can flourish.
Isaac Newton’s second law of thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one state to another. This obviously gives us a real problem if we try to come up with a start of everything and is no doubt why so many people are content just to say that God did it.
To say that Newton invented physics would not be a massive overstatement, and to say that he was very, very correct would be almost an understatement. Between 1687 and the early 1900s there was no challenge whatsoever to his view of the world, but then a revolution in physics happened: quantum mechanics.
Quantum physics does not contradict Newton per se, but it does describe a very different world that exists at the sub-microscopic level. At this level the standard rules of physical interaction simply do not apply.
Quantum physics does not contradict Newton per se, but it does describe a very different world that exists at the sub-microscopic level. At this level the standard rules of physical interaction simply do not apply.
One of the many and varied interesting things about quantum physics is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This states that when measuring a particle’s position for example, its motion cannot be accurately measured. The more accurately one aspect of the particle is measured, the less accurate it is possible to be about the other aspects.
The Uncertainty Principle can be interpreted as meaning that we can never know absolutely everything, which in itself seems to be against the whole ethos of science and is therefore a pretty big deal.
More interesting still is that the Uncertainty Principle can mean that a particle’s energy is not known, and in fact that the particle has potentially more energy than it would have if Newton’s second law applied. This gives us the potential for energy to be created from nothing, with no need for divine intervention or perplexingly sudden massive expansions of spacetime.
One of the classic questions in philosophy is “why is there something rather than nothing”? Philosophers throughout the ages have argued about this one way or another, in that annoyingly semantic way that never really gets anyone anywhere.
I want you now to imagine that there is nothing at all, no space, no time, no matter and no energy. Let’s say there’s a 50% chance of there being something, and an equal chance of there being nothing. Due to the Uncertainty Principle, something appears. That something has only to be the smallest piece of something imaginable, but once it’s there, it’s there. In fact the 50/50 chance of there being something or nothing is greatly tipped in the favour of something when you consider that once something is there, there is no reason for it to go away.
Once that something is there, it’s reasonable to expect that it would make an impression in space, for the purposes of this let’s picture it as a sphere displacing the space around it by an equal but opposite amount, a bit like this:
In order that it can be presented visually it’s had to be simplified, in fact every conceivable angle through the sphere would distort the space equally (rather than just a distortion in a flat left to right plane as in the image).
So the sphere that has come from nothing is now not just itself, but also a reflection of itself. If the space around it changed it would affect the sphere and if the sphere changed it would affect the space around it. Given time and Uncertainty, it’s reasonable to assume that the sphere would become more complex, and its environment would grow as an equally complex reflection of it. There is no reason that there would be reduction in complexity over time, and in fact as the something got more and more complex it is likely that the rate of change would increase.
At some point this something that is a perfect reflection of its environment duplicates itself. I won’t pretend that I can say how this would work, but the observable fact of reproducing life should make this part self-evident.
Once the something has “learnt” to reproduce, the acceleration in change would step up a gear. At some point the something becomes aware of its environment and at that point it is able to direct its own reaction to its environment. I mean “aware” in the simplest possible sense, a bacterium for example is able to sense where its food is and travel towards it – this is not awareness in any conscious sense, but it is certainly a directed reaction to its environment.
There are a few things that I’d like to use to support my position and also to hopefully make the implications clear.
Around 540 million years ago there was a sudden explosion in types of animal life. Prior to the so-called Cambrian Explosion the majority of life was single-celled (i.e. bacteria), and much of that bacteria was anaerobic, that is to say that they did not breathe oxygen and in fact oxygen was a waste product excreted by these bacteria. There are still many bacteria around today that have this characteristic.
It is my belief that once the anaerobic bacteria had excreted enough oxygen into the atmosphere to support more complex life it triggered a massive and close-to-inexplicable diversification in types of life. If we accept the notion that causality between life and environment runs both ways then this starts to make more sense though. The reflection of increased oxygen is a wide variety of creatures that use oxygen as a vital and major part of their metabolism.
There is also the famous case of the peppered moths. White moths were able to avoid being eaten by virtue of them being camoflaged against the similarly-coloured trees, but due to pollution during industrialisation the trees became soot-blackened and the white moths were eaten in large numbers by the birds which could now see them more easily. At the same time, black moths started appearing, and these were camoflaged against the now-black trees and so their numbers exploded.
The two moths are the same species, it's just that one is black and one is white. Given that prior to the industrial revolution there would be no benefit to a moth to be black, you would think that natural selection would have weeded out the genes that cause a moth to be black. But instead when the trees became black, the black moths appeared and were able to take advantage of it. Could it be that they reflected their environment in a way not accounted for by accepted natural selection theory?
From a more human point of view there are many implications that are very interesting. As intelligent beings we are able to imagine how we would like the world to be and then using the tools at our disposal shape the world as we choose. Something as seemingly everyday as painting a wall can be described as our environment becoming a reflection of us. Of course, after the wall is painted we will feel calmer, and happy with our work, a reflection into us from our environment. In fact every desire anyone has is influenced by their environment, and then their environment is changed in whatever way as a direct result of this. It’s still turtles all the way round, but instead of needing a first cause, causality is looped on itself.
You may have noticed that a lot of what I’ve said about progression of species seems to contradict Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, that creatures randomly mutate over time and those with the good fortune to adapt appropriately survive and those that do not die off.
Prior to Darwin, a gentleman by the name of Lamarck actually had the idea that creatures adapted “intentionally” to their environment, but as there was no known way for this to happen without the intervention of an intelligent God his ideas were discredited and he was not taken seriously by history. Interestingly, the modern field of epigenetics suggests a mechanism by which Lamarck could have been more correct than anyone realised, but that’s a whole other story.
What I’ve suggested above would, if true, turn a lot of very well-respected and long-held beliefs if not on their heads then at least slightly out of place. I appreciate that these are bold claims to make, so I’ll finish with an anecdote about the philosopher Wittgenstein:
“I’ve always wondered why”, says Wittgenstein, “for so long people thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth.”
“Why?” said his surprised interlocutor, “well, I suppose it just looks that way”
“Hmm”, retorted Wittgenstein “and what would it look like if the Earth revolved around the Sun?”.
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The Uncertainty Principle can be interpreted as meaning that we can never know absolutely everything, which in itself seems to be against the whole ethos of science and is therefore a pretty big deal.
More interesting still is that the Uncertainty Principle can mean that a particle’s energy is not known, and in fact that the particle has potentially more energy than it would have if Newton’s second law applied. This gives us the potential for energy to be created from nothing, with no need for divine intervention or perplexingly sudden massive expansions of spacetime.
One of the classic questions in philosophy is “why is there something rather than nothing”? Philosophers throughout the ages have argued about this one way or another, in that annoyingly semantic way that never really gets anyone anywhere.
I want you now to imagine that there is nothing at all, no space, no time, no matter and no energy. Let’s say there’s a 50% chance of there being something, and an equal chance of there being nothing. Due to the Uncertainty Principle, something appears. That something has only to be the smallest piece of something imaginable, but once it’s there, it’s there. In fact the 50/50 chance of there being something or nothing is greatly tipped in the favour of something when you consider that once something is there, there is no reason for it to go away.
Once that something is there, it’s reasonable to expect that it would make an impression in space, for the purposes of this let’s picture it as a sphere displacing the space around it by an equal but opposite amount, a bit like this:
So the sphere that has come from nothing is now not just itself, but also a reflection of itself. If the space around it changed it would affect the sphere and if the sphere changed it would affect the space around it. Given time and Uncertainty, it’s reasonable to assume that the sphere would become more complex, and its environment would grow as an equally complex reflection of it. There is no reason that there would be reduction in complexity over time, and in fact as the something got more and more complex it is likely that the rate of change would increase.
At some point this something that is a perfect reflection of its environment duplicates itself. I won’t pretend that I can say how this would work, but the observable fact of reproducing life should make this part self-evident.
Once the something has “learnt” to reproduce, the acceleration in change would step up a gear. At some point the something becomes aware of its environment and at that point it is able to direct its own reaction to its environment. I mean “aware” in the simplest possible sense, a bacterium for example is able to sense where its food is and travel towards it – this is not awareness in any conscious sense, but it is certainly a directed reaction to its environment.
There are a few things that I’d like to use to support my position and also to hopefully make the implications clear.
Around 540 million years ago there was a sudden explosion in types of animal life. Prior to the so-called Cambrian Explosion the majority of life was single-celled (i.e. bacteria), and much of that bacteria was anaerobic, that is to say that they did not breathe oxygen and in fact oxygen was a waste product excreted by these bacteria. There are still many bacteria around today that have this characteristic.
It is my belief that once the anaerobic bacteria had excreted enough oxygen into the atmosphere to support more complex life it triggered a massive and close-to-inexplicable diversification in types of life. If we accept the notion that causality between life and environment runs both ways then this starts to make more sense though. The reflection of increased oxygen is a wide variety of creatures that use oxygen as a vital and major part of their metabolism.
There is also the famous case of the peppered moths. White moths were able to avoid being eaten by virtue of them being camoflaged against the similarly-coloured trees, but due to pollution during industrialisation the trees became soot-blackened and the white moths were eaten in large numbers by the birds which could now see them more easily. At the same time, black moths started appearing, and these were camoflaged against the now-black trees and so their numbers exploded.
The two moths are the same species, it's just that one is black and one is white. Given that prior to the industrial revolution there would be no benefit to a moth to be black, you would think that natural selection would have weeded out the genes that cause a moth to be black. But instead when the trees became black, the black moths appeared and were able to take advantage of it. Could it be that they reflected their environment in a way not accounted for by accepted natural selection theory?
From a more human point of view there are many implications that are very interesting. As intelligent beings we are able to imagine how we would like the world to be and then using the tools at our disposal shape the world as we choose. Something as seemingly everyday as painting a wall can be described as our environment becoming a reflection of us. Of course, after the wall is painted we will feel calmer, and happy with our work, a reflection into us from our environment. In fact every desire anyone has is influenced by their environment, and then their environment is changed in whatever way as a direct result of this. It’s still turtles all the way round, but instead of needing a first cause, causality is looped on itself.
You may have noticed that a lot of what I’ve said about progression of species seems to contradict Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, that creatures randomly mutate over time and those with the good fortune to adapt appropriately survive and those that do not die off.
Prior to Darwin, a gentleman by the name of Lamarck actually had the idea that creatures adapted “intentionally” to their environment, but as there was no known way for this to happen without the intervention of an intelligent God his ideas were discredited and he was not taken seriously by history. Interestingly, the modern field of epigenetics suggests a mechanism by which Lamarck could have been more correct than anyone realised, but that’s a whole other story.
What I’ve suggested above would, if true, turn a lot of very well-respected and long-held beliefs if not on their heads then at least slightly out of place. I appreciate that these are bold claims to make, so I’ll finish with an anecdote about the philosopher Wittgenstein:
“I’ve always wondered why”, says Wittgenstein, “for so long people thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth.”
“Why?” said his surprised interlocutor, “well, I suppose it just looks that way”
“Hmm”, retorted Wittgenstein “and what would it look like if the Earth revolved around the Sun?”.
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