Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt

Author:Jim Holt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2012-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

HAD IT DEEPENED my insight into the mystery of existence? Well, I was surprised that Weinberg, so bracingly skeptical and scientifically tough-minded, had declared himself open to a metaphysically extravagant notion like the principle of fecundity. I went back to his Dreams of a Final Theory to see what he might have to say there about the matter. The principle of fecundity, he had written, “supposes that there are entirely different universes, subject to entirely different laws. But, if these other universes are totally inaccessible and unknowable, then the statement that they exist would seem to have no consequences, except to avoid the question of why they do not exist. The problem seems to be that we are trying to be logical about a question that is not really susceptible to logical argument: the question of what should or should not engage our sense of wonder.”

The best that physicists can do to satisfy this sense of wonder, Weinberg seemed to believe, is to discover their holy grail, the final theory. “This may happen in a century or two,” he has written, “and if it does then I think that physicists will be at the extreme limits of their powers of explanation.”

The final theory envisaged by Weinberg promises to go far beyond current physics in clarifying the origins of the universe. It might, for instance, show how space and time emerged from still more fundamental entities that we as yet have no conception of. But it is hard to see how even a final theory could explain why there is a universe instead of nothing at all. Are the laws of physics somehow to inform the Abyss that it is pregnant with Being? If so, where do the laws themselves live? Do they hover over the world like the mind of God, commanding to exist? Or do they inhere within the world, amounting to a mere summary of what goes on inside it?

Cosmologists like Stephen Hawking and Alex Vilenkin sometimes entertain the first possibility, only to be perplexed by it. Here, for example, is Vilenkin on the “quantum tunneling” by which, he submits, the universe might have been born from nothing at all: “The tunneling process is governed by the same fundamental laws that describe the subsequent evolution of the universe. It follows that the laws should be ‘there’ even prior to the universe itself. Does this mean that the laws are not mere descriptions of reality and can have an independent existence of their own? In the absence of space, time, and matter, what tablets could they be written upon? The laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations. If the medium of mathematics is the mind, does this mean that mind should predate the universe?” As to whose mind this might be, Vilenkin passes over that question in silence.

Hawking, too, has admitted to bafflement over the ontological status, and seeming potency, of the laws of physics: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a

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