Read The Return (Enigma of Modern Science & Philosophy) Page 12
There are endless questions to be asked. Children continually ask questions because they live in a world full of strange occurrences. A young child has no inductive experience. He hasn’t seen the sun rise often enough to realize that it rises everyday without fail. As the baby’s world extends outward from its cradle to its room, it may see the window as an opening from which light enters or leaves. The sub-conscious recording of the cycle of day and night becomes one of the many accepted facts of the child’s environment. There are so many and he can ask only so many questions. The questions must have explanations and the concept of cause and effect is rapidly embedded in the sub-conscious. Soon the child recognizes that all things are subject to cause and effect and the questions subside. Thereafter the child only asks questions that have a particular interest and the general inquisitiveness recedes into a mild apathy for knowledge of the happenings of the environment.
Yet a child can always startle an adult with a naive question. It is because the child is still looking at the world with the eyes of the innocently wise. The adult has long accepted the environment and all its wonders as something that is just there. If a child asks why the blue sky doesn’t fall to the ground, the adult will look uneasily upwards and struggle for an answer. The child is wiser than the adult in terms of the questions posed.
It is this childish wisdom that is necessary to question the relevance of modern science and philosophy. It is the fear of sounding naive that prevents people from asking the correct questions of some of the more radical theories that infest both areas of human thinking. More lateral thinking or being outside the box is required to place our theories in new and challenging contexts. This type of approach may lead to the revelation of the foundational questions of our existence.
In order to answer the question of life, the questions must first be properly posed. What quantum theory teaches us is that the answer and the question form a totality. They cannot be separated and are meaningless by themselves. To ask a question of reality you must set up a specific apparatus that will interfere with that reality and the interference observed is the answer to the question. What this means in effect is that two elements of reality interfere with each other to give a third element which is recorded in consciousness. If it is not recorded by a consciousness is it still a question? Most certainly, as the act of recording by consciousness is merely the positing of another question to the experimental set-up. In this respect questions are just parts of reality that come in contact and interfere with each other. The answer is the outcome of the interference. In the macro world this coming together of pieces of reality is governed by Newtonian mechanics and the dynamical laws. If two billiard balls meet the question is how they rebound. The answer is the vector summation of their momentums. There is only one answer as the dynamical laws are very precise. The world at this level is precisely deterministic. The answers to questions are fixed and eternal.
Applying the same question to two electrons meeting does not give the same answer. The ways in which they rebound vary and the best we can do is predict the rebound to a probabilistic degree. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means that even if we know their momenta very precisely we can only know their position to a limited degree. Momentum and position are complementary properties of the electron - they do not commute. Yet in a way the question is still the same as for the billiard balls. In the case of the balls we know the path of each ball before contact and this allows us to know it after contact to an equal level of precision. In the case of the electron, the original paths are known only to an approximation as is the resulting outcome.
In each case the question as to the outcome of the contact reduces to the level of knowledge we can have of the original paths of the balls or electrons. The question throws up more basic deeper questions. The question now concerns the path of the ball or the electron. The ontology of the ball is a traditional cause and effect - a cue hit the ball in a certain direction. That of the electron is different because quantum theory gives a dual reality to the entity - a wave and a particle reality. There is no obvious cause and effect to the motion of the electron. Certainly we can ask questions of it - how does it interfere with an imposed electric field and a cloud chamber. The answer we get is specific to the question and tells us little if anything about the nature of the electron itself. We can never know the electron in itself. We can only set up various experimental devices to interfere with it and record the outcomes. This we do with macro items and get reasonable results because the scale of the macro item is such that the interfering experimental apparatus (say a photon) is so small that it doesn’t change the reality of the item being questioned. But in the case of the electron the interference of a photon has very great impact on its position and its momentum. It is rather like firing a cannonball at a billiard ball. It tends to destroy the essence of the billiard ball.
So we can ask many questions of reality at the microscopic level but they reveal little of the underlying reality at this small scale. At best we can piece together the shattered pieces of the jigsaw and try to assemble a reasonable picture of reality. We can know the electric charge, the mass or a strange concept called spin, of the electron. But maybe the electron has many more properties that we just haven’t got around to measuring because we haven’t formulated the proper questions. We don’t even have an intuitive knowledge of what electron spin is. Some like to think of it as the spherical electron spinning like a top but a strange top that takes two revolutions to return to the same point instead of the conventional single revolution. That such revolution would entail speeds greater than the relativistic light speed limit is conveniently ignored. Scientists take a pragmatic view and just use the concept which arose experimentally and fitted nicely with theory. Philosophically this is a cop out. If the questions we ask of reality throw up concepts like spin then we should do our best to incorporate them into our paradigm of reality. There may be deep messages lurking there.
If questions are two elements of reality coming into contact then the smaller the one element of reality the comparably much smaller the other questioning part needs to be. This means that we can ask less and less about the micro scale reality and in effect more and more about the cosmos. In terms of questioning productivity the cosmos provides the better market place. Yet there is a limit there too, in that the distances involved mean that our questioning is time constrained. We need an eternity to pose some questions to the cosmos. Instead we are led back into theory which has brought us back to the scale of the infinitesimal and the problems of uncertainty. This is because our theory tends to be reductionist - leading to a cause and effect ontology that inevitably leads to the decomposition of reality to an area where we cannot ask proper questions. Could this be a major flaw in our thinking?
We have become enthralled by the theory of the Big Bang and the confluence with the broad spectrum of quantum theory and cosmology. There are strong theoretical reasons for this. There is even some physical reasoning for this in the discovery of the cosmic background microwave radiation that permeates the entire universe. The low temperature of this residual radiation from the Big Bang event was theoretically predicted to be of the order of several degrees above absolute zero. The precise value of the temperature of this radiation and its homogeneity over the entire celestial sphere is a strong feature of our current reality at the cosmic level. It and the configuration of the galaxies across our night sky are the signals from our distant past. Yet to leap from two such perceived facts to the origin of time in a gigantic explosion or big bang is an incredible leap of theory. If a question is two realities coming into contact and revealing their mutual interference, then the Big Bang idea has its origins in the coming into contact of the present observed state of the cosmos and the present state of knowledge represented by quantum theory. While the former is deeply rooted to an observed reality, the latter is tenuously linked to reality by what can at best be described as an incomplete theory.
While the Big Ba
ng is the best fit theory at present, it would be wrong to consider it in any way a final theory just as it is wrong to consider quantum theory a final theory - which clearly it isn’t as it doesn’t incorporate general relativity and gravity. The questions we ask of reality must not be confined to an existing paradigm. Childlike naivety is required to open up new domains or new perspectives and test and possibly replace existing theory. It is only right that science should be the sphere in which all theories are put to the test but it is not the sole preserve of science to generate theory. The problem becomes that science invests so much effort in creating complexity in theory that it simply reproduces itself as a model of the exterior world. Science creates apparatus that asks the questions it wants answers to, answers it already has designed in theory. Science becomes the engineering of answers to these postulated theoretical questions. An apparatus can always be so engineered to give a required output. This is the danger of science leading humanity up a scientific garden path. It has done so before. In the last century the Newtonian theory was seen as the deterministic basis of all reality - all you needed was to define the initial boundary conditions and the future would emerge. The paradigm lasted several hundred years but now has been cast aside in its totality being but a very specific case of a more general theory. Then that general theory of relativity was joined by a totally separate theory of quantum mechanics describing reality at the micro level. The long sought-after union of these theories is still as elusive as ever yet the Big Bang theory has taken hold even though it is a brute cobbling-together of the theories of the day.
Because of the cause and effect drilled into our psyche since we were first born, our human disposition is to interpolate between points. We naturally think in terms of a starting point and a finishing point with a continuous path of causality between the two. Crucially the continuous path of causality extends into time both before starting point and after ending point. The continuous paths of causality are the laws of nature, the dynamical laws that control existence at all levels. In all our experience, beginnings are just end points of previous paths. When we look at the cosmos we see no sign of the initial singularity where the laws of nature disappear or suddenly appear out of nothing. Even the postulated black holes are entities that change over the long eons of time eventually decaying by radiation emission. Despite this world of perception that informs us, science has opted for a theory of the cosmos that links our known present to a point of singularity before which there was no causal path. Out of this singularity some fourteen billions years ago the entire cosmos and all its laws emerged as if by complete chance - the only example of a non-causal beginning in the entire space-time.
While the Big Bang Theory may be correct or near to the actual origins of the universe, until it is absolutely verified if ever it can be, then it is wrong to give up asking the many other questions of the cosmos that a naive child might ask. Because it’s the biggest shot in town shouldn’t mean it’s the only shot in town. There should be room for any number more and we should even be encouraging more. No matter that they be wacky or zany or trite, someday someone will hit on an idea that may fit the evidence more seamlessly. Perhaps we should start by declaring that a beginning point or endpoint is beyond our immediate ken and search for the laws of the continuous path. Perhaps the laws as we see them are true just for our space-time and that they change over eons too big for the latter-day homo sapiens to decipher. After all, all our laws are inductive, based on the combined perception of all our species. Something that is inductive on one scale of space-time may appear chaotic on another - like vortices in a whirling flowing river.
We need theories and good theories, like the Big Bang Theory that has yielded some physical corroboration. Yet a good theory should not be a blinker to the wider terrain to which it could possibly lead. A good theory may be like a break in a mountain range that reveals a vast plateau of discovery. The difficulty is to reach the open expanse of the plateau and not get caught in the pass blinded by the high walls on either side. It is a long time since another counter theory such as a continuously regenerating universe was postulated. Despite the gaping holes in the Big Bang Theory - the ultimate expansion or contraction of space, the acceleration of expansion rate, the mystery of dark energy and matter, and the enigma of the initial singularity - there has been no attempt to critically challenge its legitimacy. Society itself is happy with the idea of a beginning of space-time as it concurs with most major religions which have a creation metaphysic. This perhaps, more than most issues, has led to a somewhat premature acceptance of the theory. Indeed its origins as a theory may have emanated from such religious imprints in the minds of scientists. It may be a classic example of engineering a desired outcome to the great question of reality.