A view of The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin, prepared by Steve Bell, steven.bell@mcione.com

Why is the world made the way it is?

Why is it varied enough to support life?

What is life?

• Stable non-equilibrium system.
• Critical Self-organizing system.
• Structure at every scale.

What conditions are necessary that this can occur?

• Particles that can be organized into a wide variety of molecules which can be organized into complex self-organizing systems.
• Stars, which organize particles into molecules and then distribute them.

What is the probability of these conditions arising by chance?

10^-229 calculated from relations we observe among:

Failure of existing theories.

• Newtonian does not explain the properties of time and space; they are a given, fixed background or arena.
• Standard model does not explain the values of the parameters.

The process of formation of a universe

• No singularities at which time stops, due to quantum effects.
• From a state of enormous density (10⁷⁹ of an atomic nucleus) an explosion takes place, a "bounce".
• This is probably what happens inside a black hole after the event horizon has formed.
• This is the start of a new universe.

1. The basic forms of the laws of nature donít change; the standard model still applies.
2. The values of the parameters change. The changes are small and random.

A progeny is formed when a bounce take place. Bounces happen in black holes. So the more black holes the more progeny. The principles of natural selection thus lead to a situation where the most likely universes are those that maximize black hole production.

Operating principle derived from the theory: The parameters of the standard model of elementary particle physics have the values we find them to because these make the production of black holes more likely than most other choices.

Prediction of the theory

Most changes in values of the parameters will lead to fewer black holes.

Miscellaneous quotes:

• The fact that our universe is young and evolving puts the question of the origin of the laws of nature in quite a different light. If the universe is eternal, there are only two possible answers for the question of why the laws of nature are as we find them to be: religion or Platonism. Either God (who is, in most tellings, eternal) made the laws of nature as he made the world; or they are as they are because there is a mathematical form for the laws that is somehow fixed by some abstract principle. But although deism and Platonism seem, at first, poles apart, in a certain sense these two kinds of explanation are not really very different. Mathematical truth is supposed to be something that holds irrespective of what is in the world, or indeed whether the world exists at all. A world made by mathematical law, like a world made by a god, is a world constructed by something that exists eternally and outside of the world it creates.
• But if our world is not eternal, then new possibilities open up. It seems, all of a sudden, a bit too much to postulate eternal laws for a world whose origins we can, almost literally, see. If our world could have been made a short time ago, could not the laws that govern it also have been made? If it is possible to imagine natural processes that created the world, can we not also imagine processes that could have created or selected the laws that the universe would obey? P. 17
• I hope to convince the reader that the desire to understand the world in term of a naïve and radical atomism in which elementary particles carry forever fixed properties, independent of the history or shape of the universe, perpetuates a now archaic view of the world. It suggests a kind of nostalgia for the absolute point of view, a way of seeing the world that was lost when the Newtonian conception of space and time was overthrown. P.18

Time:

• The problem of time in quantum cosmology is hard exactly because it seems to lead us to confront the possibility that time and change themselves are illusions. This is because it turns out to be hard to extend from general relativity to the quantum world the notion that time is no more than a measure of change. If we cannot do this, we may have to come to terms with a world which, at the most fundamental level, must be described in a language that includes no words for time or change. P. 286

• An approach to the problem of time that does not presume that time and change have meaning has been developed by Julian Barbour, who for the last several years has been arguing that the notion that time is what is measured by a clock cannot work in a quantum theory of gravity. Instead he has proposed a radical view of quantum cosmology in which time has no fundamental meaning at all. The proposal is simplicity itself. According to it, what exists ñ the universe ñ is nothing but a great collection of moments. Each moment is a snapshot of the universe, a simple configuration of things. He calls the collection of all these moments the heap. The heap contains a great many moments. But there is no sense in which the different moments can be ordered in time. They just simply are. Period. The quantum state of the universe serves only one function, which is to give the probability that any given moment may be found in this collection. P. 289

• There seems to be no viable approach to the problem of time in quantum cosmology that does not lead to the conclusion that time can only exist in a structured and complex universe, with a sufficient balance of order and entropy. But if this is correct then it must be the final blow to the Newtonian, atomist conception of the world. If time requires a universe that is structured enough to have clocks and time capsules, then we cannot speak of even the simplest possible physical process, such as the motion of a single particle, without at least implicit reference to the configuration of the universe as a whole. The things in the world may very well be built from elementary entities, but it is no longer possible to take seriously a view of the world in which their properties are independent of each other, and of the overall configuration and history if the world. P.291

Lighten up:

The old search for the absolute is heavy and it has weighed us down for long enough. It implies that there is a stopping point, a final destination; it reeks, really, of the Aristotelian belief in the meaningfulness of being at rest, of Newtonís absolute space, of hierarchy, in knowledge as well as in society, of stasis. P. 298