UPDATE: 18 December 2022: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 4 October 2022 awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to:
Alain Aspect Institut d’Optique Graduate School – Université Paris- Saclay and École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France
Alain Aspect, winner of 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics
John F. Clauser
J.F. Clauser & Assoc., Walnut Creek, CA, USA
Anton Zeilinger University of Vienna, Austria
“for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”
UPDATE: September 5, 2019: I stumbled across this research published in NATURE during December 2011, where scientists reported entanglement of vibrational patterns in separated diamond crystals large enough to be viewed without magnification. Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2011.9532
UPDATE: May 8, 2018: This video from PBS Digital Studios is the best yet. Click the PBS link to view the latest experimental results involving quantum mechanics, entanglement, and their non-intuitive mysteries. The video is a little advanced and fast paced; beginners might want to start with this link.
UPDATE: February 4, 2016: Here is a link to the August 2015 article in Nature, which makes the claim that the last testable loophole in Bell’s Theorem has been closed by experiments conducted by Dutch scientists. Conclusion: quantum entanglement is real.
UPDATE: Nov. 14, 2014: David Kaiser proposed an experiment to determine Is Quantum Entanglement Real? Click the link to redirect to the Sunday Review, New York Times article. It’s a non-technical explanation of some of the science related to Bell’s Theorem.
Someone nominated Irish physicist, John Stewart Bell, (1928-1990) for a Nobel Prize during the year he died from a sudden brain hemorrhage. Nobel rules prevent the awarding of prizes to people who have died. Bell never learned of his nomination.
John Stewart Bell‘s Theorem of 1964 followed naturally from the proof of an inequality he fashioned (now named after him), which showed that quantum particle behavior violated logic.
It is the most profound discovery in all science, ever, according to Henry Stapp—retired from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and former associate of Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg. Other physicists like Richard Feynman said Bell simply stated the obvious.
Here is an analogy I hope gives some idea of what is observed in quantum experiments that violate Bell’s Inequality: Imagine two black tennis balls—let them represent atomic particles like electrons or photons or molecules as big as buckyballs.
The tennis balls are created in such a way that they become entangled—they share properties and destinies. They share identical color and shape. [Entangled particles called fermions display opposite properties, as required by the Pauli exclusion principle.]
Imagine that whatever one tennis ball does, so does the other; whatever happens to one tennis ball happens to the other, instantly it turns out. The two tennis balls (the quantum particles) are entangled.
[For now, don’t worry about how particles get entangled in nature or how scientists produce them. Entanglement is pervasive in nature and easily performed in labs.]
According to optical and quantum experimentalist Mark John Fernee of Queensland, Australia, ”Entanglement is ubiquitous. In fact, it’s the primary problem with quantum computers. The natural tendency of a qubit in a quantum computer is to entangle with the environment. Unwanted entanglement represents information loss, or decoherence. Everything naturally becomes entangled. The goal of various quantum technologies is to isolate entangled states and control their evolution, rather than let them do their own thing.”
In nature, all atoms that have electron shells with more than one electron have entangled electrons. Entangled atomic particles are now thought to play important roles in many previously not understood biological processes like photosynthesis, cell enzyme metabolism, animal migration, metamorphosis, and olfactory sensing. There are several ways to entangle more than a half-dozen atomic particles in experiments.
Imagine particles shot like tennis balls from cannons in opposite directions. Any measurement (or disturbance) made on a ball going left will have the same effect on an entangled ball traveling to the right.
So, if a test on a left-side ball allows it to pass through a color-detector, then its entangled twin can be thought to have passed through a color-detector on the right with the same result. If a ball on the left goes through the color-detector, then so will the entangled ball on the right, whether or not the color test is performed on it. If the ball on the left doesn’t go through, then neither did the ball on the right. It’s what it means to be entangled.
Now imagine that cannons shoot thousands of pairs of entangled tennis balls in opposite directions, to the left and right. The black detector on the left is calibrated to pass half of the black balls. When looking for tennis balls coming through, observers always see black balls but only the half that get through.
Spin describes a particle property of quantum objects like electrons — in the same waycolor or roundness describe tennis balls. The property is confusing, because no one believes electrons (or any other quantum objects) actually spin. The math of spin is underpinned by the complex-mathematics of spinors, which transform spin arrows into multi-dimensional objects not easy to visualize or illustrate. Look for an explanation of how spin is observed in the laboratory later in the essay. Click links for more insight.
Now, imagine performing a test for roundness on the balls shot to the right. The test is performed after the black test on the left, but before any signal or light has time to travel to the balls on the right. The balls going right don’t (and can’t) learn what the detector on the left observed. The roundness-detector is set to allow three-fourths of all round tennis balls through.
When round balls on the right are counted, three-eighths of them are passing through the roundness-detector, not three-fourths. Folks might speculate that the roundness-detector is acting on only the half of the balls that passed through the color-detector on the left. And they would be right.
These balls share the same destinies, right? Apparently, the balls on the right learned instantly which of their entangled twins the color-detector on the left allowed to pass through, despite all efforts to prevent it.
So now do the math. One-half (the fraction of the black balls that passed through the left-side color-detector) multiplied by three-fourths (the fraction calibrated to pass through the right-side roundness-detector) equals three-eighths. That’s what is seen on the right — three-eighths of the round, black tennis balls pass through the right-side roundness-detector during this fictionalized and simplified experiment.
Polarization is a term used to describe a wave property of quantum objects like photons. Polarizing filters are rotated in experiments to determine some of the properties of atomic particles, like spin.
According to Bell’s Inequality, twice as many balls should pass through the right-side detector (three-fourths instead of three-eighths). Under the rules of classical physics (which includes relativity), communication between particles cannot exceed the speed of light.
There is no way the balls on the right can know if their entangled twins made it through the color detector on the left. The experiment is set up so that the right-side balls do not have time to receive a signal from the left-side. The same limitation applies to the detectors.
The question scientists have asked is: how can these balls (quantum particles) — separated by large distances — know and react instantaneously to what is happening to their entangled twins? What about the speed limit of light? Instantaneous exchange of information is not possible, according to Einstein.
The French quantum physicist, Alain Aspect, suggested his way of thinking about it in the science journal, Nature (March 19, 1999).
He wrote: The experimental violation of Bell’s inequalities confirms that a pair of entangled photons separated by hundreds of meters must be considered a single non-separable object — it is impossible to assign local physical reality to each photon.
Of course, the single non-separable object can’t have a length of hundreds of meters, either. It must have zero length for instantaneous communication between its endpoints. But it is well established by the distant separation of detectors in experiments done in labs around the world that the length of this non-separable quantum object can be arbitrarily long; it can span the universe.
When calculating experimental results, it’s as if a dimension (in this case, distance or length) has gone missing. It’s eerily similar to the holographic effect of a black hole where the three-dimensional information that lives inside the event-horizon is carried on its two-dimensional surface. (See the technical comment included at the end of the essay.)
Here is a drawing of an apparatus the French physicist, Alain Aspect, designed to quickly change the angle of polarity-measurements for emitted photons. In experiments, he used the logic of Bell’s Inequalities and the speed of his switches to show that it was not possible for photons to carry specific (or unique) polarity-angles until after they were measured by the polarization detectors. Once measured, Alain showed that the new, narrowly defined polarity states of his photons always propagated to their distant entangled twins, instantly.
Another way physicists have wrestled with the violations of Bell’s Inequality is by postulating the concept of superposition. Superposition is a concept that flows naturally from the linear algebra used to do the calculations, which suggests that quantum particles exist in all their possible states and locations at the same time until they are measured.
Measurement forces wave-particles to “collapse” into one particular state, like a definite position. But some physicists, like Roger Penrose, have asked: how do all the super-positioned particles and states that weren’t measured know instantaneously to disappear?
Superposition, a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics, has become yet another topic physicists puzzle over. They agree on the math of superposition and the wave-particle collapse during measurement but don’t agree on what a measurement is or the nature of the underlying reality. Many, like Richard Feynman, believe the underlying reality is probably unknowable.
Quantum behavior is non-intuitive and mysterious. It violates the traditional ideas of what makes sense. As soon as certainty is established for one measurement, other measurements, made earlier, become uncertain.
It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. The location of the mole whacked with a mallet becomes certain as soon as it is struck, but the other moles scurry away only to pop up and down in random holes so fast that no one is sure where or when they really are.
Physicists have yet to explain the many quantum phenomena encountered in their labs except to throw-up their hands to say — paraphrasing Feynman — it is the way it is, and the way it is, well, the experiments make it obvious.
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) downplayed Bell’s Inequality because, he said, it simply pointed out what was already obvious from experiments.
But it’s not obvious, at least not to me and, apparently, many others more knowledgeable than myself. Violations of Bell’s Inequality confound people’s understanding of quantum mechanics and the world in which it lives. A consequence has been that at least a few scientists seem ready to believe that one, perhaps two, or maybe all four, of the following statements are false:
1) logic is reliable and enables clear thinking about all physical phenomenon;
4) a model can be imagined to explain quantum phenomenon.
I feel wonder whenever the idea sinks into my mind that at least one of these four seemingly self-evident and presumably true statements could be false — possibly all four — because repeated quantum experiments suggest they must be. Why isn’t more said about it on TV and radio?
Some scientists think non-physicists cannot grasp quantum mechanics. This little girl disagrees.
The reason could be that the terrain of quantum physics is unfamiliar territory for a lot of folks. Unless one is a graduate student in physics — well, many scientists don’t think non-physicists can even grasp the concepts. They might be right.
So, a lot is being said, all right, but it’s being said behind the closed doors of physics labs around the world. It is being written about in opaque professional journals with expensive subscription fees.
The subtleties of quantum theory don’t seem to suit the aesthetics of contemporary public media, so little information gets shared with ordinary people. Despite the efforts of enthusiastic scientists — like Brian Cox, Sean M. Carroll, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene — to serve up tasty, digestible, bite-size chunks of quantum mechanics to the public, viewer ratings sometimes fall flat.
When physicists say something strange is happening in quantum experiments that can’t be explained by traditional methods, doesn’t it deserve people’s attention? Doesn’t everyone want to try to understand what is going on and strive for insights? I’m not a physicist and never will be, but I want to know.
Even me — a mere science-hobbyist who designed machinery back in the day — wants to know. I want to understand. What is it that will make sense of the universe and the quantum realm in which it rests? It seems, sometimes, that a satisfying answer is always just outside my grasp.
Here is a concise statement of Bell’s Theorem from the article in Wikipedia — modified to make it easier to understand: No physical theory about the nature of quantum particles which ignores instantaneous action-at-a-distance can ever reproduce all the predictions about quantum behavior discovered in experiments.
Familiarity with concepts like wave polarization and particle-spin can help demystify some aspects of quantum mechanics. One aspect that can’t be demystified: in experiments quantum objects display the properties of both waves and particles.
To understand the experiments that led to the unsettling knowledge that quantum mechanics — as useful and predictive as it is — does indeed violate Bell’s proven Inequality, it is helpful not only to have a solid background in mathematics but also to understand ideas involving the polarization of light and — when applied to quantum objects like electrons and other sub-atomic particles — the idea of spin. Taken together, these concepts are somewhat analogous to the properties of color and roundness in the imaginary experiment described above.
This essay is probably not the best place to explain wave polarization and particle spin, because the explanation takes up space, and I don’t understand the concepts all that well, anyway. (No one does.)
But, basically, it’s like this: if a beam of electrons, for example, is split into two and then recombined on a display screen, an interference pattern presents itself. If one of the beams was first passed through a polarizer, and if experimenters then rotate the polarizer a full turn (that is, 360°), the interference pattern on the screen will reverse itself. If the polarizer-filter is rotated another full turn, the interference pattern will reverse again to what it was at the start of the experiment.
So, it takes two spins of the polarizer-filter to get back the original interference pattern on the display screen — which means the electrons themselves must have an intrinsic “one-half” spin. All so-called matter particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons (called fermions)have one-half spin.
Yes, it’s weird. Anyway, people can read-up on the latest ideas by clicking this link. It’s fun. For people familiar with QM (quantum mechanics), a technical note is included in the comments section below.
Otherwise, my analogy is useful enough, probably. In actual experiments, physicists measure more than two properties, I’m told. Most common are angular momentum vectors, which are called spin orientations. Think of these properties as color, shape, and hardness to make them seem more familiar — as long as no one forgets that each quality is binary; color is white or black; shape is round or square; hardness is soft or hard.
Crystals can be used to “down-convert” photons into entangled pairs.
Spin orientations are binary too — the vectors point in one of two possible directions. It should be remembered that each entangled particle in a pair of fermions always has at least one property that measures opposite to that of its entangled partner.
The earlier analogy might be improved by imagining pairs of entangled tennis balls where one ball is black, the other white; one is round, the other square; add a third quality where one ball is hard, the other soft. Most important, the shape and color and hardness of the balls are imparted by the detectors themselves during measurement, not before.
Before measurement, concepts like color or shape (or spin or polarity) can have no meaning; the balls carry every possible color and shape (and hardness) but don’t take on and display any of these qualities until a measurement is made. Experimental verification of these realities keep some quantum physicists awake at night wondering, they say.
Anyway, my earlier, simpler analogy gets the main ideas across, hopefully. And a couple of the nuances of entanglement can be found within it. I’ve added an easy to understand description of Bell’s Inequality and what it means to the end of the essay.
This cardboard cut-out of a cat was imaged by entangled photons. Lower energy photons interacted with the cut-out while their higher energy entangled twins interacted with the camera to create the picture. Credit: Gabriela Barreto Lemos
In the meantime, scientists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna recently demonstrated that entanglement can be used as a tool to photograph delicate objects that would otherwise be disturbed or damaged by high energy photons (light). They entangled photons of different energies (different colors).
They took photographs of objects using low energy photons but sent their higher energy entangled twins to the camera where their higher energies enabled them to be recorded. New technologies involving the strange behavior of quantum particles are in development and promise to transform the world in coming decades.
Perhaps entanglement will provide a path to faster-than-light communication, which is necessary to signal distant space-craft in real time. Most scientists say, no, it can’t be done, but ways to engineer around the difficulties are likely to be developed; technology may soon become available to create an illusion of instantaneous communication that is actually useful. Click on the link in this paragraph to learn more.
Non-scientists don’t have to know everything about the individual trees to know they are walking in a quantum forest. One reason for writing this essay is to encourage people to think and wonder about the forest and what it means to live in and experience it.
The truth is, the trees (particles at atomic scales) in the quantum forest seem to violate some of the rules of the forest (classical physics). They have a spooky quality, as Einstein famously put it.
The quantum forest is a spooky place, Einstein said.
Trees that aren’t there when no one is looking suddenly appear when someone is looking. Trees growing in one place seem to be growing in other places no one expected. A tree blows one way in the wind, and someone notices a tree at the other end of the forest — where there is no wind — blowing in the opposite direction. As of right now, no one has offered an explanation that doesn’t seem to lead to paradoxes and contradictions when examined by specialists.
John Stewart Bell proved that the trees in the quantum forest violate the laws of nature and logic. It makes me wonder whether anyone will ever know anything at all that they can fully trust about the fundamental, underlying essence of reality.
Some scientists, like Henry Stapp (now retired), have proposed that brains enable processes like choice and experiences like consciousness through the mechanism of quantum interactions. Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose have proposed a quantum mechanism for consciousness they call Orch Or.
Others, like Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung, have gone further — asking, when they were alive, if the non-causal coordination of some process resembling what is today called entanglement might provide an explanation for the seeming synchronicity of some psychic processes — an arena of inquiry a few governments are rumored to have already incorporated (to great effect) into their intelligence gathering tool kits.
In a future essay I hope to speculate about how quantum processes like entanglement might or might not influence human thought, intuition, and consciousness.
Billy Lee
P.S. A simplified version of Bell’s Inequality might say that for things described by traits A, B, and C, it is always true that A, not B; plus B, not C; is greater than or equal to: A, not C.
When applied to a room full of people, the inequality might read as follows: tall, not male; plus male, not blonde; is greater than or equal to: tall, not blonde.
Said more simply: tall females and dark haired men will always number more than or equal to the number of tall people with dark hair.
People have tried every collection of traits and quantities imaginable. The inequality is always true, never false; except for quantum objects.
Schrödinger’s Wave Equation describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes with time. It can be used to calculate quantized properties and probability distributions of quantum objects.
One way to think about it: all the ”not” quantities are, in some sense, uncertain in quantum experiments, which wrecks the inequality. That is to say, as soon as ”A” is measured (for example) ,”not B” becomes uncertain. When ”not B” is measured, ”A” becomes uncertain.
The introduction of uncertainties into quantities that were — before measurement — seemingly fixed and certain doesn’t occur in non-quantum collections where individual objects are big enough to make uncertainties not noticeable. The inability to measure both the position and velocity of small things with high precision is called the uncertainty principle and is fundamental to physics. No advancement in the technology of measurement will ever overcome it.
Uncertainty is believed to be an underlying reality of nature. It runs counter to the desire humans have for complete and certain knowledge; it is a thirst that can never be quenched.
But what’s really strange: when working with entangled particles, certainty about one particle implies certainty about its entangled twin; predicted experimental results are precise and never fail.
Stranger still, once entangled quantum particles are measured, the results, though certain, change from those expected by classical theory to those predicted by quantum mechanics. They violate Bell’s Inequality and the common sense of humans about how things should work.
Worse: Bell’s Theorem seems to imply that no one will ever be able to construct a physical model of quantum mechanics to explain the results of quantum experiments. No ”hidden variables” exist which, if anyone knew them, would explain everything.
Another way to say it is this: the underlying reality of quantum mechanics is unknowable. [A technical comment about the mystery of QM is included in the comments section.]
Twelve launch-capable space agencies (having as members about thirty countries) are, among other tasks, looking for alien life inside the solar system. They are exploring the four planets closest to the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, which have three moons among them, and the five outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, which have one-hundred-and-sixty-three.
With so many moons and planets, the hope is that one of them will harbor life.
(Click pic to enlarge in new window.) Some recommend the Drake Equation to calculate odds that intelligent life which can communicate across space might exist elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy where our solar system is located.
Of the 166 moons and nine planets in the solar system, probes have managed to land on only five: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Earth’s moon, and Titan (a moon of Saturn).
Just three moons are located in the Goldilocks zone where most scientists believe life has the best chance to take hold. Two orbit Mars at the outer edge of the habitable zone and are probably too cold and irradiated for life. The third moon orbits Earth.
(Click pic to enlarge.) Each column contains the orbiting moons of each planet (and a few other objects) inside the solar system.
Six moons in the solar system are comparable in size to the moon of Earth: Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Europa and Triton. All the rest are tiny with very little gravity — the force that can hold an atmosphere.
The twelfth largest rocky object in the solar system after Earth is Titania of Uranus, named for the Queen of the Fairies in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The moon is nearly a thousand miles in diameter. A 175 pound person on Titania takes on the weight of a newborn baby — a mere six pounds twelve ounces.
Few places in the solar system have enough gravity to hold a human securely, let alone an atmosphere.
No life has been found on any moon — or on any planet (except Earth) thus far. During the next several hundred years, humans will continue to look for life in the solar system should technology and civilization survive and advance.
The Kuiper Belt — which starts at Neptune and extends past Pluto — is a region that is home to an estimated 100,000 bodies of frozen methane, ammonia, and water.
Editors’ Note:(August 2016) The explorer spacecraft,New Horizons, flew by Pluto on July 14, 2016; it will fly by a Kuiper Belt object in January 2019.
Freeman Dyson — physicist, mathematician, and astronomer — has suggested that life might be pervasive in the Kuiper Belt and be easily detected once spacecraft get there. People wait and wonder.
Editors’ Note: (December 2018) Current analyses of data from the Pluto flyby describe a living, dynamic planet with a nitrogen atmosphere and a subsurface ocean. Portions of the surface are smooth with no signs of meteor impacts. Water-gushing volcanoes are common.
The solar system lies within a large disc-shaped galaxy called the Milky Way, which folks can see edge-on in the night sky should they travel out into the countryside away from well-lit cities, which tend to wash out vision.
It might surprise some readers to learn that no one really knows how many stars are in our galaxy. Credible astronomers believe the number to be somewhere between one-hundred and four-hundred billion — a huge range of uncertainty.
No one knows how many stars are similar to the sun. No one knows how many planets there are, or how many moons. Despite a lot of reporting and speculation, humans know almost nothing about the Milky Way.
Space is vast, and astronomers have few telescopes and satellites to accomplish the enormous job of taking it all in and cataloguing what they discover.
3.75 billion years from now, the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own Milky Way. In this artist’s conception, Andromeda Galaxy is on the left; the Milky Way Galaxy is to the right.
Lack of knowledge about the details of our own galaxy helps to explain why it is difficult to understand the universe as a whole. When I first published this essay in late summer 2014, astronomers estimated that between a hundred and two-hundred billion galaxies populated the visible universe (the estimate is now known to be wrong).
Editor’s Note:On October 1, 2017 CBS News was among the first to report to the public that the Hubble space telescope had detected as many as two trillion galaxies — ten times more than previous estimates.
Two-trillion galaxies — and all the other objects in the universe that lie outside the local area of our own galaxy —are far away and too fuzzy for astronomers to know almost anything about them. The galaxies are out there, true, but the numbers are staggering. The small amount of data astronomers have already gathered is overwhelming scientists’ abilities to process and make sense of it all. And they are just getting started.
The Webb Telescope is scheduled for launch on 30 March 2021. Image is an artist’s rendition featured on Wikipedia.
Civilization is in the very first stages of placing sensors into space which eventually will help astronomers to learn more. One — the James Webb space telescope — is scheduled to launch sometime during the 2020s. Its purpose? — to tear down the 400-million-light-years-after-the-Big-Bang limit of the Hubble telescope.
Humans are going to be able to look back to the beginning of time, at long last. Understanding the process that brought us here is going to expand dramatically. Until then, the Drake equation (see illustration at beginning of the essay) and other speculative tools remain not much more than intriguing diversions.
New sensors like the Webb telescope will upgrade human understanding and bring a new realism that promises to sweep away much of the science-fiction people drink to satiate their thirst for ultimate knowledge.
Most articles, television shows, and movies that purport to portray the universe are (to risk overstating it) kind-of scammy. They seduce a gullible and curious public, which is hungry for answers about the universe that no one yet has.
The science community has a vested interest in public funding; they tend to go-along with dubious depictions to pander popular support. Claims that astronomers today understand fully the nature of the universe are ludicrous. The universe is vast. Much of its matter and energy that scientists believe is “out there” can’t be found — not yet anyway.
Most stars are too faint to see with unaided eyes. The closest star system to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, is too faint to see without a telescope.
Three out of four stars in the galaxy are probably red dwarfs. Red dwarfs burn essentially forever but are smaller and much cooler than the Sun, which makes them impossible to observe without special infrared detectors.
These infrared detectors are launched into outer-space beyond Earth’s atmosphere to avoid being blinded by the infrared heat radiating off Earth’s surface.
Proxima Centauri main star. Image by Hubble Telescope.
Red dwarfs seem to be emitting solar flares that are a thousand times more energetic and frequent than those generated by stars like the Sun. They emit light in frequencies not useful for plant photosynthesis — the basic life-support process on Earth.
It’s difficult to see how Earth-style life could get started and survive inside a red dwarf planetary system. No one knows what percentage, if any, of red dwarf stars have planets suitable for life.
Canon 85mm photo of Proxima Centauri three-star system by Skatebiker on English Wikipedia.
Red dwarfs live for thousands-of-billions of years. The Sun’s lifespan is eight to ten billion years — a tiny fraction of a red dwarf’s.
The Sun is similar to — who knows? — maybe one in five stars in the galaxy. It’s an optimistic guess, based on sampling and wishful hoping. Astronomers seem to agree that the Sun ranks as one of the largest stars in the Milky Way.
Statistical sampling of two-trillion galaxies argues that the Milky Way galaxy is also among the largest. A full 90% of all galaxies are smaller.
Calculations involving galaxy-motion and gravity suggest that when astronomers look at the cosmos, they aren’t seeing ninety-five percent of what’s out there. Physicists call the missing stuff dark energy and dark matter. Something that no one has yet been able to detect seems to be distorting the rotation of galaxies and disrupting the metrics of space-time.
The universe seems to be expanding, and the expansion is accelerating. Where is the missing mass and energy that drives the expansion? No one knows.
Perhaps parallel universes are stacked on every side against our own. They might swarm like bees around a hive. The gravitational pull of their enormous masses might be pulling our own universe apart. Galaxies inside our universe might be falling toward massive structures that lie outside our field of vision beyond a kind of event horizon.
Again, no one knows. It’s speculation. Today the expansion is described by a simple constant added into Einstein’s equation for General Relativity. A constant seems too simple, at least for me. It describes but doesn’t explain.
Einstein’s equation accounts for the accelerating expansion of the universe by including a term called the ”cosmological constant”. It is the Greek letter lambda ( Λ), which is multiplied against every member of the metric tensor, ”g” and then added to the left side of the equals sign, which is the side of the equation that describes the shape (curvature) of spacetime. The right side describes the distribution of mass / energy in spacetime.
Many of the galaxies that are visible from Earth are tens-of-thousands of times farther away than the farthest stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which astronomers say is at least 100,000 light years across — a distance of six-hundred-thousand trillion miles. The galaxy is perhaps 200 light years thick, but its center is thicker still — about 10,000 light years.
If the Milky Way was shrunk to the diameter of a ten-inch plate, the plate would assume a thickness of a few human hairs but at the center it would thicken to the size of an egg-yolk.
To put these distances into perspective, the latest space probes, which travel at roughly twelve miles-per-second, are not capable of escaping the gravity of our solar system until they are mechanically slung by multiple encounters with planets to a velocity greater than 27 miles per second. At that speed, crossing the Milky Way takes nearly 700 million years.
What the Milky Way might look like if photographed by an extremely powerful telescope from the galaxy Andromeda, which is two-and-a-half million light-years from Earth.
The Milky Way is one galaxy in what astronomers have learned is a universe of two trillion.
Until scientists know more — and it could be decades or even centuries from now — prudence and the scientific method advise odds-makers to use the most conservative estimates, not the most optimistic, to speculate about intelligent life in the cosmos.
Until evidence accumulates that is more compelling than what is available today, plugging conservative numbers into the Drake equation, or any other speculative tool, always seems to give the same discouraging result — a number so small it might as well be zero.
No intelligent life that can communicate across space should exist in our galaxy or anywhere else in the universe. None. Yet, here we all are. It’s kind of mysterious, at least to me.
Substituting less conservative numbers yields a different result. Intelligent civilizations could number in the thousands or even millions. No empirical evidence supports such optimism, at least not yet.
Planets and Sun are shown to scale in this model. Distances are not. From left to right, largest to smallest: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Pluto. Pluto — recently demoted to the status of a ‘’dwarf planet” — has been re-argued for planet-hood by some cosmologists because the recent NASA fly-by showed Pluto slightly larger and more planet-like than previously thought.
Looking closer to home within our own galaxy, astronomers in 2003 discovered Sedna, which some think is another dwarf-sized planet orbiting far beyond Pluto.
Astronomers seem to discover new planet candidates every other month — Eris and Makemake are two more Pluto-sized objects out of hundreds that come to mind.
In 2014 Caltech astronomers presented evidence for another planet they called the ninth planet, which might be an object ten times the mass of Earth orbiting in a highly elliptical orbit at the farthest reaches of the solar system.
Regardless of what astronomers continue to discover, it seems likely that the Sun will always contain at least 99% of the mass in the solar system.
Earth is fortunate to orbit a star that is located in a less active region of space than many other stars in the Milky Way. The Sun lies safely between two spiral arms that are bright because of ongoing birthing of new stars. The location lies halfway from the center of the galaxy to its outer edge.
Click pic for better view of Earth’s position inside Milky Way galaxy.
Although stars are spread more or less evenly throughout the Milky Way, life-destroying cosmic events are less likely in regions where stars aren’t being born. Earth lives between bright spirals in a zone of relative inactivity, which has enabled the evolution of eukaryotic one-celled life to progress to intelligence, then civilization, and finally to space exploration over the past billion-and-a-half years.
Earth has a number of unusual features that make it a good candidate for highly evolved life. One important feature is its nearly circular orbit around the Sun, which helps Earth avoid the catastrophic temperature variations characteristic of the more egg-shaped (elliptical) paths of some of the other planets, like Mars.
Only the orbits of Venus and Neptune are more round than Earth’s. Mar’s orbit is five times less round. Of all the solar objects, only Neptune’s moon Triton is known to have for all practical purposes a perfectly circular orbit.
Another advantage for Earth is its 300-mile thick atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen, 80% of which lies within 10 miles of its surface. Nitrogen and oxygen make up 99% of Earth’s atmosphere. These gases are opaque to non-electrically-charged, high-frequency light.
Nitrogen molecules block high-frequency, ultra-violet light while oxygen molecules, slightly smaller, block higher-frequency (shorter wave-length) x-rays and gamma-rays, which can be lethal to living organisms.
A three-atom form of oxygen molecule known as ozone helps to absorb in the upper atmosphere a dangerous-to-life, lower-frequency-band of ultra-violet light that nitrogen can’t block.
In the distant past — during the Carboniferous Period 300 to 360 million years ago — Earth’s atmosphere held 60% more oxygen than it does now, which provided more shade against damaging high-energy light. Dinosaurs and large insects — like dragonflies with three-foot wing-spans — thrived in the highly-oxygenated air they breathed.
It is one of the wonderful ironies of our planet that the oxygen which empowers the biology of life also defends it against the physics of life-destroying high-energy light and cosmic rays that are always raining down from outer space.
Without atmospheric moisture and greenhouse gases, Earth’s average temperature would fall to 100°F below zero.
In contrast to nitrogen and oxygen, which block high-frequency light from reaching Earth’s surface, carbon-dioxide, methane, and water vapor trap low-frequency light (infra-red light, or heat) and prevent it from radiating (or escaping) into space.
These green-house gases work like a blanket to help keep Earth at a constant temperature. Carbon dioxide, though rare, is heavy compared to oxygen and nitrogen. It tends to cling close to Earth’s surface where it is respirated by plants. Without atmospheric moisture, methane, and carbon dioxide the temperature of Earth would average 100°F below zero and vary widely between day and night as it does on the Moon.
Although water vapor and carbon dioxide make but a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, they have a significant impact on the planet’s ability to retain heat when their concentrations increase in the atmosphere. Exhaust from commercial jet aircraft, believe it or not, contributes greatly to the concentration of carbon dioxide and water vapor in the eight-mile highs of the atmosphere where these jets fly.
After the terrorist attack on 911, the government suspended all flights over the United States — including those by commercial aircraft — for four days. The skies over America cleared themselves of clouds and turned deep blue. Temperatures dropped.
I was amazed to observe these changes develop so quickly after all flying was suspended. It took about two weeks for aviation to return to pre-attack intensity. With the return of aviation, familiar weather patterns followed.
Unlike Earth, the planet Venus has so much carbon dioxide that its surface broils with heat. An explorer would have to hover thirty-seven miles above its surface to experience atmospheric pressures and temperatures similar to those on Earth.
By contrast, the atmosphere of Mars, though almost entirely carbon dioxide, is thin — only 1% as thick as Earth’s. Even so, near their surfaces the density of carbon dioxide is 15 times higher on Mars than on Earth — enough to grow plants and — if poisons in the soil can be avoided — terraform the surface should humans decide.
Although Mars is cold, especially at night, its carbon dioxide atmosphere enables daytime temperatures to sometimes reach 85° F during summer in its southern latitudes. The problem is that any plants that might grow in Martian soil must endure bombardment by dangerous-to-life high-frequency light and cosmic particles. Also, Martian soils are poisoned by perchlorates. The soil is useless for agriculture though perchlorates could be broken down to provide a source of oxygen.
I should mention argon, which is 1% of Earth’s atmosphere. It is formed by the radioactive decay of a rare isotope of potassium in Earth’s crust. It is transparent to infra-red heat, so it has no effect on global warming. It is heavy — like carbon dioxide — so it clings to the surface, but its small atoms, widely spaced, do little to prevent the escape of infra-red radiation.
Another asset that gives Earth an advantage for life is its large moon whose gravitational field acts like a vacuum cleaner to suck up cosmic-debris like asteroids and comets that might threaten to strike. Only Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune are similarly equipped.
Image courtesy of NASA
The moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt as it orbits the sun. The tilt is about 23.4°, which is why Earth has seasons. The tilt swings back and forth a few degrees over periods of 41,000 years. This variation is stable enough to permit life to survive and evolve despite the periodic generation of ice-ages.
Computer simulations of a moonless Earth show that with no moon to stabilize it, tilt variations could approach 90°. Dramatic destabilization has emerged in some simulations that make it difficult to imagine how advanced life could evolve and survive the climate extremes that might result from chaotic wobbling.
The Moon is receding away from Earth at a rate of almost two inches per year. It will take at least a billion years for the motion of Earth to destabilize. It seems that humans have time to figure something out.
Sadly, the sun gets brighter and less massive with each passing day. Over the course of a billion years, Earth will move farther from the sun to conserve its angular momentum. Meanwhile, the warming sun will overtake Earth’s great escape to evaporate its oceans and make the planet uninhabitable.
Looking at coming events from a more optimistic perspective, people can probably agree that a billion years is a long time. The species-human is likely to be extinct by then anyhow. So why worry?!
Another life-enhancing feature of Earth is its large, open, ice-free, salt-water oceans. Most scientists believe salt-water oceans provide safe habitat for evolving life.
Earth’s oceans make up three-fourths of the planet’s surface. In addition to providing a vast incubator for life, oceans reduce the probability that space-debris will fall onto land.
Odds are that debris will fall into the oceans where it is rapidly cooled and rendered harmless. Should debris strike land and throw up clouds of dust and ash to block the sun, the oceans provide a safety-blanket of thermal protection.
This photo of Titan’s surface is the only picture taken at the surface of a moon or planet that is farther away than Mars.
Besides Earth, only Titan — one of Saturn’s many moons — has open oceans (of liquid methane and ethane) on its surface. These oceans are more like shallow seas or lakes, estimated to be about five-hundred feet deep. Scientists think Titan has a salty sub-surface water ocean, as well.
NASA reported this year that another moon of Saturn, tiny Enceladus (310 miles in diameter), holds a six mile deep subsurface ocean — confirmed from Cassini fly-bys. Its over one-hundred geysers are what is populating Saturn’s E-ring. Data from the geysers indicate that the ocean is warm and salty and saturated with organic molecules. Analysis by Cassini instruments is on-going.
Of the moons of Jupiter, only Europa, Ganymede, and Calisto are thought to harbor salt-water oceans.
Europa is known to have a salt-water ocean, but it is covered by miles-thick ice.
Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, is believed to have a 500 mile deep salt-water ocean that lies beneath a crust 125 miles thick. The crust is thought to be a rock and ice mixture.
Scientists suspect that Callisto has a salt-water ocean, but it might be sandwiched between ice layers sixty or more miles beneath its surface.
Only the oceans of Earth are open, un-frozen, and deep enough (averaging three miles) to protect Earth against most encounters with meteors and other space-debris.
Fortunately for Earth, the solar system itself contains a massive structure that helps to protect and shield it from danger. It is Jupiter, the large and strongly gravitational planet, which like the moon pulls away space-debris that might otherwise zoom toward Earth to imperil all life. Observations suggest that comets strike Jupiter every couple of years. Comets that don’t strike are gravitationally deflected out of the solar system more often than not.
Another fortunate feature: Earth has, geologists say, a molten iron-core that emits a strong magnetic field to deflect life-destroying, electrically-charged cosmic particles, that have energies, some of them, approaching those of baseballs traveling sixty miles-per-hour. Cosmic particles accelerated the process of ripping away Mar’s atmosphere. Without a magnetic field the Mars atmosphere is defenseless against cosmic erosion.
As for Earth, high energy particles that do manage to blast through it’s magnetic shield (magnetosphere) are often scattered and rendered harmless — fortunately — by collisions with the oxygen molecules in Earth’s dense atmosphere.
One exception is muons, which are byproducts of particle collisions high in Earth’s atmosphere that are energetic enough to burrow down to hundreds of yards beneath Earth’s land surfaces and oceans. In rare heavy bombardments at high altitudes, muons can increase risks of cancer and cataracts to pilots and their passengers. Muons are like electrons except that they are 207 times heavier and much shorter-lived.
Sun’s solar wind deflected by Earth’s magnetosphere. NASA art.
The magnetosphere is strong enough to deflect the solar wind, which can strip away all or part of the atmosphere of any planet that lacks one (like Mars).
The magnetosphere is effective and strong, because it is huge and surrounds Earth out to five Earth-diameters on the side facing the sun; one-hundred Earth-diameters on the side opposite. In any small area of space, though, a simple bar-magnet is fifty times stronger.
The solar wind isn’t all bad. As it radiates outward from our Sun, it forms a huge magnetic bubble called the heliosphere that extends 3.5 billion miles past the Kuiper Belt.
Inside this Sun Bubble the rest of the solar system is protected from massive cosmic particles that pour in from the two trillion galaxies of stars that make the universe. The Sun bubble deflects to shade our solar system in relative safety.
The heliosphere of the Sun works together with the magnetosphere of Earth and its oxygenated atmosphere to break up and knock away the vast majority of cosmic particles (high-speed protons and atomic nuclei) that would otherwise rip Earth-life to shreds.
Absent the magnetosphere, life could evolve safely only in the deep oceans or far below the surface of Earth. Stated differently: a strong, protective magnetic field is essential for the survival of surface life on any planet.
Large solar flares are known to have enough energy to kill exposed astronauts. It’s one of many reasons NASA doesn’t send people to Mars, which lacks a magnetosphere. Mars is under relentless bombardment of atomic particles that can damage the atoms and molecules in the cells of a human body.
All planets have magnetic fields of various strengths except Venus and Mars. The iron in the core of Mars is believed to have frozen solid, or nearly so, hundreds of millions of years ago, which helped force its protective magnetic field to collapse.
Venus retains its molten iron-nickel core, but the planet lacks tectonic action in its crust. The heat of its core can’t escape through its surface, which prevents in its molten center the emergence of the turbulence essential to make a planetary dynamo of sufficient power to rev-up a magnetosphere.
It’s a shame that both Mars and Venus lack magnetospheres, because both planets have attributes that might otherwise make them good candidates for life.
Earth’s core is huge — it rivals the entire planet of Mars in size. The inner third of the core — the center — is already frozen solid. It is believed to be pure iron. The core is freezing itself solid from the inside out.
The rest of the core is hot liquid iron and nickle, mostly, with some sulfur and other impurities mixed in. It circulates in complex eddies, which generate the magnetic fields that protect Earth by deflecting the solar wind.
The flow of currents in the molten metal is made stable and more reliable by the unusual plate tectonics peculiar to Earth. Gaps in Earth’s crustal plates allow heat to escape from volcanic valves, which help to maintain a controlled roil in the eddy currents to produce the dynamo that drives its magnetosphere.
The only moon known to have a magnetic field is Jupiter’s Ganymede. Jupiter itself harbors a field fourteen times more powerful than Earth’s. The giant planet’s four largest moons orbit inside it, where they are protected from the solar-wind and low frequency (low-energy) cosmic particles. By contrast, Mercury’s magnetic field is one-hundred times less powerful than Earth’s.
Despite these several advantages for sustained evolution of life, Earth has the apparent disadvantage of a volatile climate which, scientists believe, has turned cold and icy during several extended periods. I mention this volatility to remind people that the circumstances that have enabled life to advance to the technological civilization of today are complex and not obvious.
Until scientists are able to tease out of history what is actually important and significant for the development of advanced life, no one can know what the rest of the universe may have in store — unless we travel out into space and explore it.
I want to believe: we will find the way.
Here’s the problem. The closest stars to the Sun are twenty-five trillion miles away. To escape the solar system, engineers must build spacecraft that can accelerate to 27 miles per second. At that speed the nearest stars, Proxima Centauri, and the binary star system, Alpha Centauri, are 30,000 years distant.
How are humans going to explore the universe? How are we going to answer the questions about our place in the cosmos, when we can’t travel to the nearest stars?
There are trillions of stars, most of them many millions of times farther away than these, our closest neighbors. It seems hopeless that anyone will ever know the answers to the basic questions about the universe that so many are asking.
Still, in my heart of hearts, I want to believe we will find a way.
Billy Lee
Editors Note:November 2017; NASA announced that the latest count of galaxies might be as high as two trillion. The velocity required by spacecraft to escape the Milky Way galaxy from Earth (our planet is 25,000 light years from the galaxy center) is 342 miles-per-second. At this velocity the nearest galaxy — Andromeda — is a flight of 2.28 billion years. There are two-trillion galaxies more!
It doesn’t really matter. Here’s why:
The Parker Solar Probe scheduled for launch in 2018 will require seven gravity-assists from Venus over a period of six years to reach a velocity of 120 miles-per-second before it embarks on a 2024 suicide mission into the outer atmosphere of the Sun.
Venus and the Sun combined can’t accelerate the Parker Solar Probe to the galaxy-escape velocity of 342 miles-per-second.
Minus gravity-assists, the fastest vehicles in development today by space-flight engineers will accelerate to speeds less than 27 miles-per-second — the escape velocity required to exit the solar-system. Without gravity assists that take years to rev-up, we humans can’t leave our own solar system, which is arguably the tiniest imaginable fraction of the Milky Way galaxy.
The good news is that life-forms in far-away solar systems face the same obstacles. If they are hostile, humans can be assured that they will have a difficult time getting here.
The bad news is that humans are trapped. The Milky Way Galaxy is a prison. We can’t escape, at least not yet; most likely, not ever. The escape velocity of the Milky Way Galaxy from Earth exceeds 340 miles-per-second — nearly three times the velocity that the Parker Solar Probe will be traveling when it is finally able to bury itself inside the Sun.
Blaise Pascal was a man who suffered terribly his entire life until he died at age 39 from a metastasized stomach cancer. His mother died when he was 3 years old; his father when he was 28.
For those who aren’t familiar with his life, let me point out that he was French, raised by his sisters, educated by his father, and very involved in the religious controversies of his time (1623-1662). He was an inventor and mathematician of the highest order. His sufferings — his physical ailments and psychological agonies — are legendary.
I won’t burden people with the details of his life — historians and biographers have written many books to help folks understand this tragic man, if anyone is interested. What I want to do is share, in English, some of the clever things he wrote during his short life and provide a link to his books, if anyone is interested in reading further.
Most of the quotations in this essay were first published some years after his death, gleaned from scraps of paper found among his personal belongings. Had they been published during his lifetime, he might have become even more controversial than he actually was. The added stress of additional criticism from contemporaries might have shortened his life even more.
Blaise Pascal had what modern people would call a negative attitude toward groups like the Jesuits and possibly the Catholic Church, which declared five tenets of his Calvinist-style religious order, the Jansenists, heresy when he was 30 years old and still grieving for his lost father. But mostly, he had a negative attitude toward other people and himself, all of whom he considered to be hopelessly wicked.
Sensitive individuals who suffer like Pascal did, it seems to me, find it more natural than others who live easier lives to think that the world is a hostile place populated by selfish and uncaring people in need of a savior.
Pascal is reported to have said, Sickness is the natural state of Christians. He spoke his dying words in a moment of sublime clarity amid a chaos of physical suffering. He whispered helplessly, May God never abandon me.
Pascal solved several previously intractable problems associated with cycloids.
Below are some samples of Pascal’s thoughts, which I found interesting and a little sad when first I read them many years ago. His ”pensees” seem to be his way of making sense of a world that held no comfortable place for him to lay his head; a world devoid of a mother’s touch to reassure him; a world lacking the medicines and psychological insights he needed to find the peace, freedom from pain, and the joy for living so many of us in the modern world freely pursue.
Blaise Pascal was oppressed by the heightened discernment of a brilliant mind smothered by relentless suffering. His intelligence (contemporaries called him a prodigy) enabled this sensitive man to articulate his suffering through the lens of Christian philosophy, which he adopted as his own.
Here are some of his thoughts:
Myself at twenty is no longer me.
Christian piety destroys the self. Human civility conceals and suppresses it.
It is a bad sign when someone is seen producing outward results as soon as he is converted.
Sleep, you say, is the image of death; for my part I say that it is rather the image of life.
We are standing on sand; the earth will be dissolved, and we will fall as we look up at the heavens.
Life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but mutual deception and flattery. No one talks about us in our presence as he would in our absence.
Man is nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy…. He does not want to be told the truth.
Each rung of fortune’s ladder which brings us up in the world takes us further from the truth, because people are more wary of offending those whose friendship is most useful and enmity most dangerous. A prince can be the laughing-stock of Europe and the only one to know nothing about it.
Is it not true that we hate the truth and those who tell it to us, and we want them to be deceived to our advantage, and want to be esteemed by them as other than we actually are?
It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and unwilling to recognize them, since this entails the further evil of deliberate self-delusion.
The most unreasonable things in the world become the most reasonable because men are so unbalanced. What could be less reasonable than to choose a ruler of a state the eldest son of a queen?
When we have heard only one side, we are always biased in its favor.
To the church: There is no need to be a theologian to see that their only heresy lies in the fact that they oppose you.
It is false zeal to preserve truth at the expense of charity.
Humiliations dispose us to be humble.
It is better not to fast and feel humiliated by it than to fast and be self-satisfied.
God can bring good out of evil, but without God we bring evil out of good.
God will create an inwardly pure Church, to confound…the inward impiety of the proud Pharisees. …. For, although they are not accepted by God, whom they cannot deceive, they are accepted by men, whom they do deceive.
We all act like God in passing judgments.
Do small things as if they were great, because of the majesty of Christ, who does them in us and lives our life; and great things as if they were small and easy, because of his almighty power.
They do both good works and bad to please the world and show that they are not wholly Christ’s, for they are ashamed to be.
Jesus was abandoned to face the wrath of God alone. Jesus is alone on earth, not merely with no one to feel and share his agony, but with no one even to know of it.
Silence is the worst form of persecution.
No one is allowed to write well anymore.
You brand my slightest deceptions as atrocious, while excusing them in yourselves as the [(way of your church)].
Would God have created the world in order to damn it? Would he ask so much of such feeble people?
Persecution is the clearest sign of piety.
Which is harder, to be born or to rise again? That what has never been should be, or that what has been should be once more?
All faith rests on miracles.
How happy I should be if…someone took pity on my foolishness, and was kind enough to save me from it in spite of myself.
We must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind.
You would soon have faith if you gave up a life of pleasure.
We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.
The proper function of power is to protect.
If everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.
Fear not, provided you are afraid, but if you are not afraid, be fearful.
God hides himself. He has left men to their blindness, from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ.
I marvel at the boldness with which these people presume to speak of God.
It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.
Who has more cause to fear hell, someone who does not know whether there is a hell, but is certain to be damned if there is, or someone who is completely convinced that there is a hell, and hopes to be saved if there is?
Truth is so obscure nowadays and untruth so well established that unless we love the truth we shall never recognize it.
“Yet I have left me seven thousand.” I love these worshippers who are unknown to the world, and even to the prophets.
We never love anyone, only their qualities.
Must one kill to destroy evildoers? That is making two evildoers in place of one. Overcome evil with good.
We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
As I write down my thought it sometimes escapes me, but that reminds me of my weakness, which I am always forgetting….
Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.
It is a fearful blindness to lead an evil life while believing in God.
Pascal’s death mask.
That’s enough for now.
Blaise, I pray you have found the happiness in Heaven that eluded you on Earth.
In an earlier article, Sensing the Universe, we asked the question: What exactly is the Universe? Most folks seem to agree that brains process the input of senses to create a useful but completely false view — a hallucination, really — of reality.
For one thing, sensations in minds of colors like yellow impart no knowledge whatsoever of the electromagnetic radiation that triggers the color experience.
Colors do not exist in the physical universe at all, right? Color is an illusion that brains conjure to help make certain choices — to enhance survival strategies, probably. Colors exist inside minds, nowhere else, I argued.
Readers can revisit the earlier essay if they want to better understand this follow-on, which is going to push everyone a few steps farther.
NOTE TO READERS:December 4, 2019: This essay is one of the longest on the site. To help readers navigate, The Editors asked Billy Lee to add links to important subtopics. Don’t forget to click or tap the up arrow on the lower right-side of the page to return to top.
Is the universe able to exist apart from conscious life?
Does anything exist apart from conscious experience?
Is it possible to know what exists in a Universe where conscious life is completely absent?
What consequences follow should all answers turn out to be, “no”?
How can this be?
The terms conscious life and consciousnessdeserve to be defined. For now, it’s better to leave the terms undefined except to say that anyone who reads this essay and believes they understand at least parts of it probably qualifies as conscious life.
As for Consciousness, it doesn’t necessarily require life, does it? How about intelligence? The simplest definition of Consciousness might be awareness. Most scientists and engineers agree that machines can be made aware when they are built right.
But this essay goes further. It suggests that neither machines nor biology are required to generate either awareness or conscious life.
Is there anyone reading this essay who believes I’m right?
Consciousness is likely to be a fundamental and basic property of reality.
It’s true.
Consciousness might be the most fundamental and basic property of the universe. Many philosophers of science agree. Every thinking person in their gut feels on some level that reality is ultimately immaterial, don’t they?
I think so.
Can something bubble forth from nothing?
These lead-off questions are important.
Why?
Imagine it was demonstrated either by direct experiment or mathematical deduction that — apart from consciousness — the universecould not exist.
Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem has dazzled mathematicians since 1931. Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote in a preface to his Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that any formal system based on mathematics (which he believed the universe was) ”…must spew forth truths — inadvertently but inexorably — about its own properties, and … become self-aware…”
What if Hofstadter was right, or at least partly right? What might be some implications?
Well, to begin, it seems necessary that consciousness must exist first before the universe can get going; or at least exist in the same spacetime to give the universe meaning.
What else might logically follow?
Well, again, if consciousness exists first (or concurrently), it must have always existed. Otherwise, the conclusion must be that consciousness bubbles-up from nothing. Human logic seems to require that something not bubble-forth from nothing.
Said another way, if something cannot exist apart from a conscious observer, then consciousness exists forward and backward in spacetime, forever — even if it turns out that the physical universe does not.
Consciousness might have mysterious and not yet understood properties — eternal and fundamental. And it might not be confined to awareness alone. To precede a physical universe, consciousness might have attributes related to causation. A long lineage of quantum physicists bends toward the view that particles don’t emerge from fields in the absence of measurements by conscious observers.
Erwin Schrödinger, the physicist of yesteryear who wrote the quantum wave equation, believed that consciousness existed independently of human beings. Consciousness in his view had a singular quality about it.
No matter how divided the mind, or how schizophrenic an individual, or how many personalities someone might display during their lifetime, consciousness seems always to be singular, Schrödinger wrote. It didn’t manifest itself in pairs or sets or multiples.
Subatomic particles are imaginary constructs invented by scientists to explain the results of experiments. No one understands what quantum objects are or what they ”look” like. Science has yet to reveal the underlying secrets of reality. It cannot explain how life began. It is not yet able to locate consciousness, or explain why it works the way it does.
Consciousness always has the same familiar qualia as it did in childhood. Even when an individual transforms and grows, learns new skills, gathers knowledge, and is reborn a dozen times — physically and psychologically in life’s many stages of metamorphosis and regeneration — consciousness feels the same. The aura doesn’t change.
To Schrödinger, consciousness was unique, singular, stable, unchanging, and consistent from one human being to another and over any one individual’s lifetime. The quality of consciousness had an invariance about it that seemed atypical for biologically driven attributes.
Consciousness, to Schrödinger, was something people shared, even plugged into, much like people today plug their televisions into a cable outlet.
To Schrödinger, consciousness had to be a phenomenon that lay outside the brain, not inside, as many of his contemporaries insisted. People were simply guessing wrong about consciousness, he said.
It wasn’t the first time. Ancient people once thought the center of consciousness lived inside the heart — until surgeons of the Spanish Inquisition discovered it didn’t.
Consciousness, to Schrödinger, was something people shared, even plugged into, much like folks today plug their televisions into a cable outlet. He attributed his insight to passages read from the Upanishads of ancient India.
Erwin believed that consciousness was an absolute and fundamental feature of the universe; something basic and simple; simpler even than an electron or quark, for example. It could not be accounted for in terms of anything else; certainly not in physical terms of something like what would become the Standard Model, for example.
I mention this view now to let readers know that ideas which might seem strange (and disturbing to some) are coming to anyone who gathers enough courage to read on.
Now might be the time to mention that many animals act like they are conscious. Self-awareness — measured by recognizing oneself in a mirror — might not bea reliable test of awareness in animals. Recognition of self in a mirror is a test of intelligence, which is something different.
Most scientists today seem to believe consciousness is a property of brains, not the universe itself.
Anyway, the prevailing view of science in the 21st century is to take a physical view of the universe and conclude that conscious life arises from physical processes on Earth, certainly, and perhaps many other places in the cosmos yet undiscovered. Since conscious life is assumed to be complex — more complex than particles and forces — consciousness must have developed after the physical universe, not before, most scientists reason.
Science takes the view that complexity evolves from simplicity; it has a direction similar to the arrow of time. Consciousness — invisible; never observed; undiscoverable; lacking any physical attribute that can be measured; indescribable; unknowable except to the individual who experiences it — is assumed to have evolved from physical objects and forces, which can be observed and measured, discovered and manipulated.
The legendary scientist, Francis Crick, who described the DNA molecule, suggested that the Claustrum might be the structure that brings the brain into the state called ”consciousness.” No one knows if he was right, because experiments to find out would be lethal, not to mention unethical and illegal.
Consciousness is like a ghost who inhabits complex life forms on Earth — the holistic result of a grand evolution in the complexity of physical brains. Consciousness is a feature of the brain, science insists; it lies inside the brain though it cannot be found there.
Some have suggested that a structure called the claustrumcouldplay a role. It is an assemblage of mostly identical neurons that looks like a potato-chip embedded in the brains of some animals, including humans. From it run connections to many important structures.
But the function of the claustrum remains a mystery. It might orchestrate the firing of neurons to flip the switch to consciousness. Then again, it might not. No one knows what it does.
Another possible candidate for the fabrication of consciousness is the micro-scaffolding, called microtubules, which support the internal structure of many kinds of cells. They permeate the interiors of soma cells and the root-like structures of brain neurons called dendrites.
NOTE from the EDITORS: This 13-minute video is a somewhat technical explanation of microtubules; interplay with neurons starts at 10:30.
Both Stuart Hameroff — an MD and emeritus professor for anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona — and Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose — physicist, mathematician, and collaborator of the late Stephen Hawking — are promoting the notion that quantum properties of microtubules inside nerve cells of the brain and heart are the drivers for electrical dynamics of nervous-systems in people and other organisms.
These quantum level structures enable the simplest one-celled organisms — which lack neurons but are scaffolded by microtubules — to perform the neural functions of life.
Penrose and Hameroff are making a claim that the putative quantum behavior of microtubules, which are orders of magnitude smaller than neurons, might enable the subjective feeling of awareness and control that conscious life seems to share.
Some have argued like Schrödinger — see essay What is Life? — that some kind of structures (perhaps micro-tubules) might exist and function like quantum sensors to detect and interact with conjectured proto-consciousness, which is likely to be quantum in nature and foundational to a physical universe like ours.
The putative quantum nature of the brain is a reason why some theorists think entanglement and superposition explain much of the unusual behavior of conscious life.
Other scientists have stepped forward to label as absurd any notion that consciousness is quantum in nature or an intrinsic property of the universe; a few have ridiculed Dr. Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, for aiding and abetting what seems to them like quackery.
But not all.
Erwin Schrödinger believed consciousness was a fundamental property of the universe.
Consciousness is not, in contemporary consensus, a phenomenon that lies outside the brain (like light), which can be experienced by a life-form once it achieves a certain level of physical development.
Eyes, for example, evolve to detect a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation, which — though pervasive within the universe — is unknowable to life-forms who lack sense organs for vision.
The consensus of modern science seems to be that consciousness is not an intrinsic phenomenon of the universe that can be detected (or imbibed, to use a better word) by physical organisms after they attain a high level of biological complexity.
Most scientists would argue that a physical universe can teem with activity unobserved for billions of years. The universe may not exist for conscious life to observe until the universe creates it through an ageless process of evolution.
At the point when the universe manufactures conscious life, it acquires for itself a history and a definition determined by the life it brought forth, which now observes it. This idea seems reasonable until one understands that some of the most brilliant philosophers, many fluent in mathematics and sciences, disagree.
One popular opponent of this view is Australian David Chalmers who argues that consciousness is a fundamental requirement for a physical universe like our own; it predates life-forms such as humans.
Even a hard-headed scientist like Erwin Schrödinger, who gave the world the mathematics of the quantum wave function, imagined that quantum structures in the brain, should they exist, serve simply to connect (or entangle) the living to universal consciousness, which resides somewhere, somehow, outside brains, where it operates as the, perhaps, fundamental, intrinsic, and foundational property of the cosmos.
The smartest people who ever lived disagree about the nature of conscious life.
Why wouldn’t they?
None understand anything at all about what everyone calls the “hard problem.”
Matter and antimatter are in theory produced in a one-to-one ratio, which ought to ensure their mutual destruction. But if matter and antimatter emerge within spherical volumes, then their ratio must depend on the irrational number, π. The graininess of space determines to what decimal-place π rounds-off, which determines whether the ratio permits a little more or a little less matter than antimatter. In our universe the ratio may have gone positive and stayed that way for a long time. SOURCE: The Billy Lee Conjecture. To balance positive-matter and keep the universe in a zero-sum configuration, negative energies (like gravity) result, according to the late Stephen Hawking. Recall that energy and matter are equivalent per Einstein’s equation, . Energy and massless particles like photons of light are equivalent based on their frequencies; Einstein included this feature in his less familiar but expanded equation . These equivalencies are clues that might enable someone to properly explain how the universe works on large scales and small.
Virtual Particles
It might be worthwhile to pause a moment to examine another phenomenon about which physicists are in actual agreement. Taking a more wide-angled view of the universe should make conscious-life easier to think about and understand.
Because when anyone thinks about it — really thinks about it — what could be more unlikely than something dead — like a singularity that goes bang — bringing forth something that is not only alive but also conscious?
One popular explanation is that of science writer, Timothy Ferris, who wrote in a recent National Geographic article, ”Space looks empty when the fields languish near their minimum energy levels. But when the fields are excited, space comes alive with visible matter and energy.”
In other words, the apparent vacuum of space is an illusion that misleads observers about an underlying and hidden reality that includes pervasive fields of energy permeating all of space.
The positive and negative values of matter, energies, and forces of the entire universe sum to zero, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote. But quantum uncertainties at every Planck-sized point in space oscillate about zero between positive and negative values. At this moment countless fluctuations across the vast expanse of space are skewing the balance — perhaps temporarily — into the structure of space and time, matter and forces, scientists observe.
My question is this: what is it that skews the balance of quantum fluctuations into a universe where humans can live in and observe? What brought the universe with its array of unlikely settings and its many arbitrary but exquisitely fine-tuned constants into the precise configuration required for the emergence of conscious life?
Stephen Hawking, former British Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge; born January 8, 1942; died March 14, 2018. The Editors
As Stephen Hawking made plain to non-scientists in his book, The Grand Design, there’s really nothing here. Not when it’s added up. The values of matter and energy add to zero. He speculated that the odds against a universe configured like ours could be as high as 10 followed by 500 zeros to one.
The number is so large that it might as well be infinity. It’s not possible for most people to say a number this big using only the words billion or trillion. They have to say a billion times a billion 56 times in a row without losing track — probably impossible. Or they could say a trillion times a trillion 42 times — not much easier.
It turns out that the only sure way to create a universe with conscious life by pure chance is to start with a multiverse populated by a number of universes equal to 10 followed by 400 zeroes multiplied by the entire number of protons and neutrons that exist in the one universe we know about — this one. Take a deep breath.
According to Stephen Hawking, developing a reasonable chance for a universe with human-like life might require a multi-verse containing a large number of other universes. Hawking estimated that it is equal to the number of protons and neutrons in our own universe multiplied by 10 followed by 400 zeroes. (As a practical matter, the number is equivalent to an infinity.) Some theorize that a multi-verse might resemble a vast ocean of foam with each bubble being a unique universe with its own fundamental constants, number of dimensions, and physical laws.
As mentioned before, everything observed in the universe seems to be the result of quantum uncertainties that hover around and sum to zero, both on small scales and large. Can uncertainties around a zero-sum reality give rise to consciousness?
Is it really uncountable trillions upon uncountable trillions of universes in an unimaginably large multi-verse that makes the existence of conscious human beings inevitable? Or is there some other mechanism which has drawn a single universe suitable for life out of the quantum fires of non-existence?
It’s a simple question. If the concept of a multi-verse turns out to be fantasy, then what is left? One solution to consider is that some form of conscious-life, fundamental and eternal, skewed the numbers and somehow imagined the universe into existence by a process that seems thus far unknowable.
What else could it be?
Think about it.
Without an unimaginably large number of universes, it’s not really possible for physical laws to configure themselves by chance into a universe with conscious life. It’s not realistic. Stephen Hawking said the odds are overwhelmingly against it; the chance might as well be zero, he said.
Take another breath.
EDITOR’S NOTE: July 4, 2019: Billy Lee published an essay today describing Roger Penrose’s conjecture about the origins of the Universe called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) or ”Eon Theory.” Recently launched satellites are gathering supporting evidence but the conjecture has not yet been embraced by mainstream cosmologists. Click the links to learn more.
Stephen Wolfram, British computer scientist and physicist, born August 29, 1959.
Stephen Wolfram in his book, A New Kind of Science, argues that a simple sequence of iterative quantum events which repeat and branch out according to a simple set of rules could, given enough time, generate a complex universe. Discovering what these simple rules might be has so far proved daunting. Presumably, the rules and events for such a sequence would have natural origins and create many universes out of the quantum uncertainties present in natural sets of initial boundary conditions.
Who knows?
One thing is certain. If it is ever proved that multi-verses are fantasy — if it is demonstrated that our universe is the only universe — then the argument for a conscious-life which has somehow imagined everything into existence is strengthened.
But it can’t be confirmed unless scientists establish that the so-called big bounce does not happen. If cosmologists show that the universe is in fact a one time non-repeatable event, then the case for a universe-generating conscious-life will be compelling if for no other reason than that the odds against a spontaneous one-time creation of a universe with unique and unlikely parameters are infinite.
Sean M. Carroll, Cosmologist, California Institute of Technology, born October 5, 1966.
One cosmologist who has gone on record against the possibility of a big-bounce scenario is Sean Carroll of Caltech. He has said that there is enough dark energy to drive an infinite expansion of our universe into a kind of entropic death.
His assertion, if proven true, seems to strengthen the argument for proto-conscious-life except that he also said that the whole of reality is probably a multi-verse populated by the births of trillions upon trillions of Big Bang events — which weakens the argument.
It seems that a definitive answer to the question of whether we live in a multi-verse (or not) might be a key indicator for or against the presence of a fundamental and foundational consciousness in nature.
Paul J. Steinhardt of Princeton University; born December 25, 1952.
In 2013 a new theory was proposed that argues against a multiverse. It was proposed by Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University. His team’s idea is based on data gathered by the state-of-the-art Planck Satellite launched in 2003 to map the infrared cosmic background radiation.
The theory is ekpyrotic, or cyclic, and asserts that the universe beats like a heart, expanding and contracting in cycles with each cycle lasting perhaps a trillion years and repeating on and on forever.
Steinhardt was once a major advocate for the Big Bang theory and the mechanism of cosmic inflation. He had been a prominent proponent of the inevitable multi-verse that most versions of the Big Bang theory permit. He is now proposing an alternative scenario.
His latest theory has the advantage that it makes certain predictions that can be tested — unlike the mechanism of inflation required by the Big Bang theory, which can’t. In his new theory, every bounce of the universe resembles every other bounce and presumably generates similar constants, laws, and physics. If conscious-life is rare, most bounces will spawn a sterile universe.
If the idea is right, fine tuning of our universe would have to be the natural result of some underlying feature of reality not yet understood. In this model, consciousness can emerge, certainly, but is not necessarily fundamental, causative, shared, or even inevitable.
To my mind, this is the model of the universe that is the most compelling, the most incomprehensible, the most mind-blowing. Unlike all other theories, this one suggests that the universe might have no beginning and no end. It doesn’t change. It’s eternal. It beats with a familiar rhythm, the rhythm of our hearts, and it will never stop.
What is frustrating to me is that the ekpyrotic model doesn’t add insight into the question about conscious-life posed by my essay: Is consciousness a fundamental and necessary feature of physical reality?
Or is conscious life a rare accident that occurs inside a long path of infinite oscillations in a universe whose reason for being humans will never understand?
Editor’s Note:As of July 2017, studies of the cosmic background radiation have not revealed with high enough statistical precision the presence of primordial B-mode gravity waves — a discovery which, if confirmed statistically by high sigma, would undermine the ekpyrotic theory. Refinement of the search and examination of data continues. Right now, the ekpyrotic theory is hanging by a statistical thread.
Editor’s Note July 4, 2019: Another theory gathering supportive evidence is the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology model (CCC) proposed by Roger Penrose. Click the link to learn more.
I want to veer back to the previous discussion about matter and antimatter for a moment. It seems that each precipitates equally out of the energy enriched dimensional fields of spacetime so that in a smooth, un-pixilated universe matter and antimatter should self-annihilate and sum to zero. (Refer to the Billy Lee Conjecture in a prior illustration.)
A universe whose space is smooth and continuous will not self-generate anything at all from such a process. It is the geometry of a spherical bubble within a pixilated space-time fabric that forces surplus in the production of either matter or antimatter.
The choice between the two is completely determined by the size of the pixels that make up the fabric of spacetime because pixilation of spacetime forces the normally irrational ratio of the surface area of a sphere to its diameter to collapse to a rational number, which necessarily warps the symmetry of the sphere. If matter is generated inside multi-dimensional bubbles, any reduction to rationality that compels symmetries to fail will force an excessive production of one of the two possible states of matter. It can’t be any other way.
Some physicists believe matter (and its equivalent, energy) is pixilated at the scale of the Planck constant, at least in this universe. Experiments are underway to find out if this idea is true. For now, scientists observe mathematical evidence for mysterious particles coming into and out of existence everywhere all the time. And it is matter particles which seem to completely dominate anti-matter.
To counterbalance this preponderance of positive matter, negative energy must emerge, which scientists like Isaac Newton called gravity.
Einstein showed that matter and energy are equivalent; they are two sides of the same coin. He treated gravitational energy as a deformation by mass in a mathematical fabric he referred to as spacetime. Massless phenomenon like photons of light held energy by means of their electro-magnetic field frequencies.
No one understands why quantum fluctuations occur. Some think it’s an illusion driven by the mathematics of quantum mechanics. Others think it’s real.
We know that this phenomenon of spontaneous creation of positive matter (or frequency) and negative energy is occurring, because conscious minds (scientists) observe its effects in their laboratories. No one understands the mechanism of quantum fluctuations enough to rule out the possibility, it seems to me, that our own minds — in collusion with the instruments we have invented and built — somehow create the impression — a kind of illusion, really — of phenomena that can occur only in the presence of a conscious mind.
Is it possible, for example, that inside the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), scientists are creating the particles they want to see in order to confirm their parochial notions of the universe? They sometimes seem to be using their conscious minds and the machines they have designed to fabricate new worlds so remote and so tiny that they will never be observed, not by any human, not even by themselves, except in their imaginations as they read through publications of the results of their experiments in science journals.
Atlas ”particle” detector at CERN. Notice tiny human worker at lower center for scale.
Are theses scientists creating particles in worlds that lie deep within the subterranean matrix of exotic materials and forces they have built and modeled within their labyrinth of super-computers — which exist only in their imaginations, but which they are able to confirm by employing thousands of researchers around the world to pour over hundreds-of-thousands of pages of machine and sensor-generated gibberish, from which they glean the unlikely patterns they marvel-over in their peer-reviewed scientific publications?
Are these human beings, these scientists, in the first stages of using pure consciousness to create universes — albeit tiny ones — in the mammoth laboratories of CERN?
Maybe not. It seems preposterous. But it is a conspiratorial perspective I couldn’t resist including in my essay. Sorry.
Sean Carroll, in his book about CERN, The Particle at the End of the Universe, describes in chapter-six subsections — Information Overload and Sharing Data — that the data-handling and sampling processes used at CERN could enable just such self-fulfilling validations to occur absent careful and conscientious oversight.
There may be another reason why experiments always seem to confirm the Standard Model of quantum physics and never contradict it. A strange symbiosis between the standard model of sub-atomic reality — as measured by synchrotrons, accelerators, colliders, etc. — and mathematics may actually exist in nature.
If true, no one need despair that gathering resources to build larger colliders and other instruments is not practical. Theoretical physicists can simply do math to discover new truths. They can trust — should an experiment ever be completed in some unimaginably resource-rich future — that their math-based conjectures will be confirmed in the same way as was the Higgs boson.
Nima Arkani-Hamed, American theoretical physicist; born April 5, 1972.
Absent larger colliders, the path forward, according to theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, is to keep the work of discovery inside the experimental constraints imposed by the knowledge already gathered, as theoreticians labor to develop new theories.
These constraints are already so restrictive and so reduce the number of paths to truth that it’s possible someone might find a route to understanding which is unique, sufficient and exclusive. If so, theorists could have confidence in the new theories though experimental verification might lie beyond any foreseeable technology of the future.
Anyway, the universe shouldn’t exist, it seems, except that people can imagine — under the influence of the uncertainty in the remote decimal place described earlier — that tiny differences in the ratio of matter to antimatter which emerged in the ancient past created an imbalance — temporarily, perhaps, but continuing for billions of years — which piled up to become enormous. As matter continued to pile up, so did the negative forces like gravity, which counterbalanced it.
One day, gravity (and perhaps other forces like the mysterious and long sought-for dark energy) might pull all the positive matter back into a little pile; pull it back behind the event-horizon of what Stephen Hawking calls a black-hole; pull it back into the unfathomable uncertainties of a blinking and unstable quantum singularity aching to explode.
Explode into what? Perhaps the next quantum eruption will spiral out into a new and completely strange universe of different-valued fundamental constants and a bizarre number of dimensions — a universe almost certainly unsuitable, this time around, for life.
Is it possible that such a process — driven by tiny uncertainties (or tolerances) in the natural quantum ratio of matter to antimatter within a rare configuration of fundamental constants and numbers of dimensions — could give rise to not just any universe but to one with an emergent conscious life as well?
Stephen Hawking has speculated that it can, but cautions that the odds against life are huge. He has speculated that an infinite number of universes — a multi-verse — is required to get a reasonable chance that a universe as unique and unusual as ours will appear.
Some believe the large scale structure of the universe resembles a collection of neurons, much like a human brain.
Modern science agrees with Hawking and has decided that this universe — the one we live in now — is probably only one of an infinite number of universes that make a multiverse. Our unique and unusual universe has, over billions of years, fabricated a transient conscious life which is, at this very moment, observing it.
A fleeting conscious life is discovering that the universe hovers in a state which from a matter/antimatter perspective could — if a preponderance of antimatter were produced (perhaps in an adjacent universe, if not this one — sum to zero someday like a popping soap bubble and cease to exist. When the observing conscious life is extinguished during this possible zero-sum resolution in the distant future, the result will be no universe, no life, no memory, nothing.
In any event, if antimatter doesn’t annihilate the universe, entropy might. (Entropy is the natural process of heat death, where all motion and information decay to zero over time.) Under this scenario, when the end comes, in the far distant future, it will be said (were there anyone around who could say it): the universe never happened. It will become a vanishing blip on the screen of reality, because no one will remain to remember it.
Then again, the negative forces of gravity and dark energy might restore the zero balance required by quantum non-existence to pull together all positive matter into an uncertain quantum singularity called the Big Crunch. A new universe with new parameters and constants might then emerge after the singularity undergoes a quantum fluctuation.
Maybe the universe cycles endlessly, contracting and expanding like a beating heart, which some have characterized as aBig Bounce. During some expansions conscious-life emerges; in most others, though, it does not.
Another theory of a possible catastrophic scenario has recently emerged after scientists determined the mass of the Higgs ”particle” at CERN in March, 2013. It turns out its value might permit the Higgs field to someday (no one knows when) undergo a spontaneous phase transition.
A phase transition would change the value of many of the fine-tuned constants and forces that shape the chemistry and biology of the cosmos. A phase transition in the Higgs field would certainly be catastrophic for life. It would be as if the universe was a block of ice for billions of years and in one short spasm turned to steam.
In any event, a Higgs field phase-transition would obliterate all knowledge of the universe. All history of the existence of a missing universe from the recent (or ancient) past would be lost — unable to be reconstructed, detected or proved. The universe didn’t exist; it never existed. In fact, it could not have existed.
One dynamic that no one talks about is a mass of parallel universes stacked like pancakes on all sides of our own. The mass that lies outside our own universe might be dense enough to transmit a gravitational tug that is pulling our universe apart like an expanding soap bubble in a field of foam.
This external mass might drive an expansion that provides the energy that forces galaxies to rotate at their far reaches faster than physicists think they should. Mass outside our universe could transform the metrics of our own space-time to initiate someday the phase transformation in the Higgs field that would follow a runaway expansion — an expansion that ends in nothingness, like a soap bubble popping on a grand scale.
The consequence of zero-sum, under which matter and antimatter, like popping soap bubbles, add to nothing;
or entropy, where all the material and information in the universe decline and decay by cooling and freezing to a motionless absolute zero;
or the big crunch, where negative forces pull positive matter into a quantum singularity which fluctuates into one of an almost infinite number of new realities;
or an endlessly repeating big bounce, where the universe contracts and expands like a beating heart that is driven by a set of fundamental constants that never really change — though the history of every bounce is erased by the bounce that follows;
or an inevitable phase transition in the Higgs field which vaporizes the cosmos into a state of virtual non-existence…
…means, logically, and in the perfect hindsight of an imaginary observer billions (or, perhaps, trillions) of years from now, that the probability there ever was a universe of matter populated by conscious-life might actually be zero.
A long time from now, the universe may disappear, either from the natural process of entropy, or an increase in the generation of antimatter, or both. Then again, it could morph into something unrecognizable and hostile to life through the mechanism of the Big Crunch. It might endlessly regenerate copies of itself through a cycle called the BigBounce where conscious-life almost never develops. Another possibility: a spontaneous Higgs Field phase transition, which vaporizes the universe where we live, perhaps driven by forces that live outside in a field of universes we will never see.
Yes, scientists say, under every scenario they can imagine, the universe in which humans now live will cease to exist. Conscious-life will disappear. No one will be left to argue about it. All the evidence will point to a universe that never happened.
Of course, no one will hear the evidence. In the universe that doesn’t exist, and even in an existing universe where conscious-life cannot or does not emerge, there is no reality, there is no evidence, no information, no history.
EDITORS NOTE: July 4, 2019:Based on the recent theory by Roger Penrose it may not necessarily be science-fiction to imagine that intelligent life might communicate across successive universes using the cosmic background radiation as a kind of writing tablet. As crazy as the idea sounds, evidence gathered by recent satellites is making a statistical case for Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.
These views, as I understand them, reflect the most popular ideas in modern science about the universe and conscious-life. They make sense. But these views reek with futility and despair. And, despite sensibility, they fail to answer a basic question: how can this be?
This graphic shows what scientists think happened, not why or how.
How is it that random fluctuations in the aether (for lack of a better term) generated something on the scale and immensity of a universe; perhaps an infinity of universes; and gave birth to conscious life?
The mere existence of a universe (and its conscious life) emanating from uncertain and random fluctuations in the vast nothingness of nothing seems ludicrous on its face. We can’t make sense of it; not in any way that permits us to exhale, throw out our arms and say, ahhhh… so that’s how it works.
We are missing a piece of the puzzle. It seems that modern science has led us into a tunnel that has no light at its end.
Like the radiation that stimulates our brains to create the brilliant colors we see inside our heads, consciousness may pour into us from out there.
What is anyone to make of all this? On the one hand, there is a consensus among contemporary scientists who believe consciousness results from the way brains are hard-wired. Throw in enough parallel electrical circuits to reach a threshold, add in sufficient hormonal feedback loops, and, voila! — consciousness. One problem, though: no one has done it; not yet.
On the other hand, we hear the echoes of the voice of one of the fathers of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger, calling from the shadows of recent history. He says, No! Brains are detectors, imbibers, of a consciousness that lives outside ourselves and is, in fact, a fundamental and foundational feature of reality. Like the mysterious electromagnetic radiation that pours into our skulls to excite our brains into conjuring up the brilliant colors we see inside our heads, consciousness pours into us from out there.
Like the unseen and as yet undiscovered dark matter and dark energy that many scientists believe together shape the universe and drive its expansion, consciousness remains elusive of attempts to discover it. Perhaps scientists aren’t looking hard enough or in the right places.
Then again, maybe dark matter doesn’t exist and will never be found, if alternative theories like MoND (modified Newtonian dynamics) prove true. It might be that the shape of galaxies and the accelerating expansion of space are instead the evidence of parallel universes that stack like pancakes against our own universe to add the elusive gravitational forces necessary to both constrain the galaxies and drive the expansion of space. Who knows?
It might be that MoND and the gravitational tug of parallel universes work together to produce the odd cosmology astronomers are observing with today’s modern space sensors. Constructing a successful model of the universe which incorporates the reasonable conjectures of MoND might depend on a collaborative summation of forces that occur both inside and outside of our own universe.
What the universe is and how it really works is not yet understood by the scientists who line up for funding before governments and universities; not even close.
What if life-forms are connected in some way to a Conscious-Life who brought the physical universe into existence?
In any event, under the stimulation of consciousness, all seem to know on some level deep inside that they are alive and aware and connected, somehow. They feel a certain common awe when they look up into the night sky and see the universe that birthed them; folks seem to sense a Conscious-Life who stands behind it all; who knows and cares about them; who shares with them the glorious experience of the universe. It’s the religious experience that every culture on the earth has in common.
What if this experience is real? What if we are connected in some way to a fundamental and eternal Conscious-Life who brought the physical universe we know into existence, perhaps through pure thought like we imagined earlier the scientists at CERN might be learning to do?
Is this a question worth exploring?
Does consciousness come first or last?
Is an answer within our grasp that will satisfy our yearning for truth and certainty? Or is it a dispute that will never be settled?
Tobias Dantzig, the Latvian author of Number (one ofAlbert Einstein’s favorite books), once claimed, …from the standpoint of logic either hypothesis is tenable, and from the standpoint of experience neither is demonstrable.
Can he be right? Will the arguments between hard-headed scientists and stubborn philosophers last forever?
I don’t think so. Scoffers may say no, the dispute is already settled. Schrödinger was wrong. And if he wasn’t wrong, could anyone detect the difference? Does it matter at all if consciousness lives inside our heads, or if brains draw consciousness from the universe outside?
I believe the issue can be settled. And it is important. The stakes for humans are enormous. In religion, philosophy, politics, and government what people do, the way they live, their planning for the future; the ways they choose to live out their lives and organize their societies, humans seem to be grounding every decision, every action, every moral choice they make on an assumption that each person creates inside themselves a unique view of reality, which will die when they do.
But what if they are wrong?
What if we learned that consciousness doesn’t die?
What if we learned that, though our bodies may someday die, consciousness never dies; the feature of our existence which imparted the sensation of awareness was something our bodies fed on during their brief lives to give them meaning?
What if our kids and grandkids, our friends and neighbors, even our enemies, and all those that came before us and will someday come after us imbibe alike from this same life-enhancing pool of awareness?
What if all life-forms, sufficiently developed, drink from an ocean of Conscious-Life everywhere in the universe?
What if we learn it isn’t our bodies that make us feel alive?
It is instead a fundamental and basic feature of the universe, a sea of consciousness from which we all drink while our bodies live.
What are the consequences should we learn that, though our bodies and brains may decay to dust,the awareness that makes us feel alive never does?
What if we learn we are conscious-life and always will be?
Billy Lee
Addendum by the Editorial Board, 16 September 2018: Michael Egnor is not a public person; his biography on Wikipedia is hopelessly incomplete. Nevertheless, he has performed a number of neurosurgeries, apparently, where outcomes ran counter to popular theories about how the brain and consciousness work.
On September 14 Michael Egnor published in Christianity Today a non-scientific article where he wrote about his clinical experience. Billy Lee strongly argued against publishing a link to his article, but The Editorial Board, unanimously overruled.
Seen through the prism of Billy Lee’s essay, we agree that the article contains clues that readers might find helpful despite the surgeon’s biases — one or two of which Billy Lee might characterize as kind of silly. Here is the link: More Than Material Minds. The Editors
I hope by now you’ve read my article, Scale. It hints at something odd about the Universe.
Saturn back-lit by the Sun. Earth is the tiny dot inside the artist’s circle to the left of the gas giant. In this pic Earth is 900 million miles or so into the page behind Saturn. Click pic to enlarge in new window.
When looking up into the night sky people sense the vast distances between the objects they see. But when looking down at the ground they experience something different. It seems that objects are solid, without internal structure.
No one can know by looking that solid objects are made of tiny molecules separated from each other by tiny gaps. Even sophisticated instruments like microscopes provide experimenters with no chance of seeing any molecules. Molecules are too small.
This algae is a single cell composed of many billions of molecules.
Think about it. No one has ever seen a molecule.
No one.
Computers have created pictures based on programming rules and data from sensors to provide an idea of what molecules might look like — if molecules lived in the world at human scales and reacted to sensors and probes the way people do. But, of course, they don’t.
Model of a single porin molecule. These molecules stack to create tunnels for passage of smaller molecules through cell membranes. Each molecule is made from hundreds of atoms.
Few professors emphasize to kids in freshman chemistry, as far as I know, that they are learning the rules from models of molecules which have been invented — fabricated — to help make sense of lab experiments done on substances that are able to be touched by hands and seen with unaided eyes.
Worse, visual models can never be realistic when applied to the objects scientists call atoms. Atoms are what molecules are made from. They must be completely fanciful. It’s true. Scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs) have been used since 1981 to “feel” the forces of atoms with “nano” probes. Based on plots of these forces, pictures of atoms that look like stacked billiard balls are generated by computer algorithms.
Whatever it is that atoms are, they aren’t resolvable with light, which is what brains use to view and imagine things. The constituents of atoms are quantum objects that don’t behave like anything familiar to ordinary life. Everything folks think they know about atoms is made-up by scientists who are struggling to make sense of the way substances behave under every set of experimental circumstances imaginable.
Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) provided data to an IBM computer, which constructed this image of a benzene molecule. This technology cannot resolve the structure of the individual atoms, which impart to the molecule its geometric shape and electrical properties.
Scientists have invented models of atoms, which are made from protons, neutrons and electrons (that whirl inside s, p, d, f & g orbitals) — whatever — to aid their thinking. No one examines an atom to see if it looks like its model, because they can’t.
Whatever it is scientists are modeling can’t be seen by eyes or microscopes. If the model helps scientists predict what will happen in experiments, they are OK with it. Physicist Stephen Hawking calls it model-dependent realism. The models are good enough.
Artist rendering of quarks. It is impossible to see quarks or to know what they really are. They were invented by physicists to help make sense of experiments done in particle colliders, which show that protons, for example, cannot be fundamental, but must have (thus far) unobservable internal structures, which in the case of protons are most realistically modeled by two ”up” quarks and one ”down”. Quarks have color as well, to help explain their interactions with gluons — which carry the ”strong force”.
During the past fifty years or so experiments have revealed new layers of complexity, which older models of the atom don’t address. So scientists have devised new models to help them reason more clearly about the strange events they were observing.
Scientists invented more structures and more “particles” — quarks being the best known — to explain and simplify the fantastic results of recent experiments.
Before the idea of the quark, scientists struggled with the complexity of a theory that included hundreds of particles. Frustrated physicists referred to the complexity as the “particle zoo.” After the theory of quarks was accepted, the number of particles in the “standard model” dropped to seventeen.
Periodic optical lattice potentials for atoms. At a certain ‘magic wavelength’ of the trapping light one finds identical polarizabilities for ground state atoms and Rydberg atoms (see the inset), such that the trapping strength no longer depends on the internal atomic state. (Excuse me, but anyone who understands what they just read is a genius, a mad scientist, or both.)
Some current models of the subatomic world postulate point-size masses immersed in vast volumes of interstitial space. These models reflect the mathematics used to build them, but are probably not helpful for understanding what is really going on.
John Wheeler, the theoretical physicist who coined the terms worm-hole and quantum-foam, said this about the very small: …every item of the physical world has at bottom — a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation…
At the smallest scale anyone can realistically work with — the scale of molecules — the structure of matter is dense. The space between molecules in a lattice is not much larger than the size of the molecules.
The force fields inside the molecular lattice are powerful — powerful enough to make the lattice impermeable. Vast volumes of empty space don’t exist within. Matter and energy seem to be working together in a kind of soup of symbiotic equivalence.
Atlas particle detector at CERN. See human inside for scale. Are they kidding? This monster machine detects so-called ”particles” that cannot be seen by humans, even with microscopes.
It might be reasonable to expect that at smaller scales, forces and fields take over. Matter, as folks usually think of it, is gone. Fields (whatever they might really be) predominate. When fields interact with detectors, the detectors provide data as if they interacted with massive particles immersed in vast volumes of empty space.
It might be an illusion that leads people to miss an underlying reality of smaller scales — descent into the abyss of small scales reveals regions of disproportionately less space, not more. The stairway to smaller scales may lead to densities of force/energy and limitations of space/time like those found in black holes.
In a typical black hole — a hundred million may inhabit the Milky Way Galaxy — a typical event horizon might have a circumference of thirty miles. Its diameter could measure millions of miles. Dimensions like these violate the Euclidean rules of geometry everyone expects. According to the rules, a spheroidal event horizon with a thirty mile circumference can’t measure more than ten miles across.
A diameter of millions of miles for an object with a thirty mile circumference seems crazy at first, until the implications of relativity are examined, which demand that the volume of space and span of time within a black hole be densely distorted and wildly warped.
A black hole contains within its volume the energy-equivalent of all the matter of the collapsed and vanished star that formed it plus all the energy-equivalent of any other matter that may have fallen into it. It is a region mostly devoid of matter — it is energy rich but matter impoverished — analogous perhaps to those tiny spaces some think might exist within and between atoms and inside the sub-atomic realms of ordinary matter.
Said plainly, whatever exists at tiny scales is not understood, but maybe knowledge about black holes can provide insights. I think so. The problem: knowledge about black holes is speculation based on mathematics; unless we are already living inside a black hole, no one can experimentally verify the ideas of smart and talented people like Stephen Hawking, for example.
The problem of understanding the very small is serious. The most advanced particle detector humans can afford to build blows up protons to examine their debris field. The detector “looks at” debris that measures about 1/100th the size of the protons it smashes. Accelerators — like the one at CERN — can’t “see” anything smaller.
From these tiny pieces of accelerator-trash theories of nature are fashioned. The inability to resolve the super small stuff is a problem. No one can see quarks, for example. Scientists at the ALICE Lab at CERN hope to fashion a “work around” by using the nuclei of iron atoms to make progress in the coming years.
To examine debris at Planck scales — which would answer everyone’s questions — requires a resolution many trillions of times greater than CERN can deliver. Such a machine would have to be much larger than the one at CERN. It would have to be larger than the solar system. In fact, it would have to be larger than the Milky Way Galaxy. Even then, the uncertainty principle guarantees that such a machine could not remove all the quantum fuzziness from whatever images it might create.
Nima Arkani-Hamed, theoretical physicist, born April 5, 1972
According to IAS theoretical physicist, Nima Arkani-Hamed, it might be possible to burrow down to an understanding of the very small by using pure thought — as long as it is consistent with the mathematics that is already known for sure about quantum physics and relativity theory. The problem is, no one will ever be able to confirm the new models by doing an experiment.
The good news, Nema says, is that constraints imposed by knowledge already confirmed may so reduce the number of paths to truth that somebody might find a way that is unique, sufficient, and exclusive. If so, folks can have confidence in it, though experimental verification may lie well beyond the reach of technology.
But again, fundamental problems — like trying to observe an intact, whole atom — remain. No technology of any kind exists that will permit anyone to observe an entire atom at once and resolve its parts.
Physicists are reduced to using what they learn from observing atomic-scale debris to help fashion, in their imaginations, what such an entity might “look” like. No one will ever have the holistic satisfaction of holding an atom in their experimental hands, observing it, and pushing on its quantum-endowed components to see what happens.
Artist rendering of an alchemy research laboratory.
Where does it all lead? At this stage in its history, science is struggling to figure out what’s happening.
In the USA, (where the big money is) science seems to serve the military and companies struggling to create products that capture the imagination and pocketbooks of a buying public. For the moment at least, science is preoccupied with serving better those who pay for its services.
But someday — hopefully soon — scientists may refocus their considerable talents on the questions that really matter most to people:
Where are we? What, exactly, is this place? Is anyone in charge?
. Energy and massless particles like photons of light are equivalent based on their frequencies; Einstein included this feature in his less familiar but expanded equation 
. These equivalencies are clues that might enable someone to properly explain how the universe works on large scales and small. 
