What we still don't know about the cosmos.

we have no idea how widespread in tells us is in the cosmos from our present knowledge the most complex things we know about in the universe are ourselves in particular our brains what remarkable is that atoms have assembled into entities which are somehow able to ponder their origins we have always been fascinated by our existence of all the wonders of creation life is the most mysterious and of all creatures we are the most special surely there has to be a reason religion offers a simple explanation God created everything and only God knows why we are here science came to a different conclusion it found no evidence for a grand plan yet recent discoveries have made scientists think again it seems ancient notions may be closer to the truth and science has ever imagined perhaps there is after all a creator and creation may not be what we think it is every religion has its own fantastic story to explain our creation from God making the universe in six days to an endless cycle of universes created from dead ones to the whole universe being created in a single divine breath and one idea underpins all these beliefs human beings have a special place in this universe we are here for a purpose but as science investigated our origins a creator became unnecessary and our special place less special historically we humans have undergone a series of demotions series of blows their ego first we sir talk for granted that everything was centered on us most most religions and mythologies sort of reflect that and then of course we realized that the world is much bigger than we thought we realize the word not the center of the universe we're just living on a spinning ball which is one planet among many and a solar system among many in the galaxy among many so you might think at that point we should hold this clique to myth collective suicide and depression when cosmologists investigated our creation they uncovered a process guided by the laws of physics in the beginning there was gas made of simple atoms over time stars transformed these elements into complex atoms as these heavier atoms spread throughout the universe they combined to create everything we can see this whole process was driven not by a creator but by fundamental physical laws the laws of nature among these laws were values for the speed of light the force of gravity and the charge carried by electrons the difference between a law of nature and a law the law of the land is that no matter what your political persuasion is we all bathe em whether we like it or not there's no exceptions to the laws of nature the precise values for the fundamental laws of nature were set at the very beginning of our universe in the Big Bang the rest was just mathematics the Big Bang was in a sense rather simple you can write down a rather short recipe from that you could in principle if you had a path from another computer work out what would happen and end up with something rather like our universe but could it really be that simple mathematics might explain how planets form but not everything surely the evolution of life was still mysterious still special you know people think that mathematics is complicated mathematics is the simple bit it's the stuff we can understand it's cats that are complicated and what is it in those little molecules and stuff that make up make one cat behave differently to another or that make a cat you know how did you define a cat no idea yet in 1970 John Conway showed that even though life may be baffling in its complexity their complexity arises from simple rules the evidence came from a game whose results were so unpredictable that they called it life life had the most basic of ingredients a board with a grid of squares filled with counters the fate of each counter was governed by rules unlike our universe there were just three I had this idea that if you had simple rules and but not too simple then probably things would complexity will just develop we tinkered with the rules and played around and hoped something interesting what happened and eventually we settled on a particular set of rules that we did they were some slightly modelled on real-life the three rules they arrived at where the equivalence of birth death and survival what would happen to any particular square depended on its neighbors an empty square with exactly three counters around it would give birth so a new counter is added to the board any counter with too few neighbors would die of isolation and be removed from the board a counter with too many neighbors would die of suffocation and also be removed and any counter with just two or three neighbors would survive staying exactly as it was with only these most basic rules unpredictable and complex patterns evolved the board seemed to produce creatures from nowhere creatures that crawl creatures that fired out smaller creatures pumps that look like a primitive heart creatures that spewed out an endless chain of offspring my little life game is surprising because from the simple rules one wouldn't find expect to find things that move in a sort of purposive manner and surprises that's a spurt what we call it life it mimics life together tiny extent like a little mini universe science dismantled the notion of life created with a purpose in this rational universe there's no need for a creator there's no design in life no design whatsoever it behaves interestingly just compared as a consequence of random behavior in this random universe there is no special purpose in our evolution we are simply the result of atoms time and mathematics yet some cosmologists still see a greater meaning in our existence they do not agree that we are coincidental to the universe the universe they argue is irrelevant without us if you look at the cosmos right sure we're small but suppose there were no life in the universe I wouldn't know this beautiful stuff out there be a complete waste if there were no in there to behold it I think so I think it's only life which gives any sort of meaning to the universe and particularly if we we turn out to be the only life and the observable universe it is called anthropic reasoning our creation is still driven by mathematics and the laws of nature but there is something mysterious indeed very special in the laws of nature themselves Oh it is called anthropic reasoning our creation is still driven by mathematics and the laws of nature but there is something mysterious indeed very special in the laws of nature themselves it looks in some respects as though our universe is rather special we know the universe allowed our emergence but it's quite easy to imagine a universe with slightly different properties in which neither we nor anything as complicated as us could exist we can imagine as it were turning the knobs which were set up at the time the Big Bang to determine how it expanded what he's made of and if we turn the knob very slightly we find that we would end up with the universe that would not be so propitious for the emergence of life take gravity perhaps the most familiar of the laws of nature its value determines how much things are attracted to each other from us being stuck to the earth to the earth circling our Sun to the Stars held in place in remote galaxies billions of light-years away just the tiniest adjustment to the value of gravity in a computer simulation of the Big Bang and our universe doesn't emerge at all for example if gravity were very strong then anything as big as ass would get crushed if there were no gravity at all then no stars would be able to form which they held together by gravity no can is either and the other laws are equally fine-tuned any sight adjustment to their value and we would never exist there is no known reason why these values should be set as they are yet they do seem to be fine-tuned to allow our creation to some of us not all the some of us it looks like we have to live with the idea that the constants of nature the laws of nature everything that we know about somehow was influenced by our own existence this is something which physicists hate the idea of most physicists want the world to be controlled by pure mathematics not by our own existence perhaps there is a rational explanation for why the laws of nature were set so precisely at the birth of our universe until we fully understand those first moments we should not assume any special reason for their values when we trace cosmic history back towards the so called Big Bang as we get closer to the very beginning we become more more uncertain that's because conditions then become more extreme we lose our foothold in experiment because conditions are more extreme than we can simulate or achieve in any experiment on earth so there are eight uncertainties for a while mainstream cosmologists would contend that once we understood better the underlying reason for the laws being set as they are fine-tuning would no longer seem so mystical and would once again fall within the realms of physics and mathematics the general view of this for most physicists is that these fine tunings are largely accidental that the constants of nature are determined by some mathematical principles which have nothing whatever to do with our existence impersonal mathematical and we were just incredibly lucky that that mathematics haven't forgive happen to give rise to a universe with all this kind of fine-tuning just precisely so and so the anthropic principle existed as an interesting but eccentric theory but then quite unexpectedly a completely new law of nature was discovered and our universe relied on this law being so precisely tuned that it seemed no rational theory would ever explain it our universe seems to be defined by a set of numbers which in some sense you're special if we had different numbers we would end up with a sterile universe people react to this seeming coincidence in a number of ways you could say it's the outcome of some kind of design or Providence we could say it's a brute Fang we have to accept because these numbers might be determined by some theory which we haven't yet discovered for a while it was possible to believe that the laws of nature were not so precisely sin is to require the hand and creator but then a completely new fundamental property of the universe was discovered an anti-gravity force present in space itself it is called the cosmological constant and when cosmologists calculated its effect on the evolution of the universe they realized it had to be very finely tuned indeed the fine tunings how far how fine-tuned are they most of them are 1% sort of things in other words of the things are 1% different everything is bad and the physicist could say maybe those are just luck on the other hand this cosmological constant is tuned to one part and 10 to the 120 120 decimal places nobody thinks that's accidental that is not a reasonable idea that something is tuned to 120 decimal places just by accident that's the most extreme example of fine-tuning no force in the history of cosmology has ever been discovered to be that finely tuned the cosmological constant needs to be set to one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion otherwise the universe would be so drastically different that it would be impossible for us to evolve that the cosmological constant arrived at such a tiny value by chance seem to be out of the question but the alternative explanation was also impossible to contemplate physicists did not want to accept the idea that the laws of nature might be controlled by by well the benevolence of nature there should be no reason why the luck should just have it that we can exist it's too much that it's a stretch it's much so far to stretch it seemed that hidden in the laws of nature was a value so precise that it was impossible to deny that our universe was designed but a designed universe requires the existence of a designer a notion that even the anthropic scientists did not want to entertain there are some people who love mystery and really enjoy not having all the answers and then there are other people who fear mystery you know uncertainty and just want all the answers and to get on with it they will be delighted if you give them a little book you know whether it be my little red one or some particular religious book that says this here's all the answers ok now go off to work don't worry about this anymore it's all taken care of many people find it a certain security and solace in that the scientists were between a rock and a hard place their own discoveries were pointing them towards an intelligent designer this is dislike of mixing religion into physics I think they were somewhat afraid that if it was admitted that the reason the world is the way it is has to do with our own existence but that could be hijacked by the creationists by the intelligent designers and of course what they would say is yes we always told you so there is a benevolent somebody way up high in the universe who created the universe exactly so that we could live I think physicists shrank at the idea of getting involved in such things some people say that this apparent fine-tuning of the universe is a brute fact you wouldn't be here to worry about the issue otherwise and that's the way things are others are bit more perplexed and invoke Providence or a creator to explain that things were set up with the aim of producing the complex universe some people are satisfied with a religious explanation whereas I think it is a scientific question which deserves to be addressed by cosmologists and cosmologists have found a solution to the fine-tuning problem it is simple and elegant but it requires a leap of faith as profound as any religious belief if our planet is not alone if it is one of billions of planets orbiting billions of stars in hundreds of billions of galaxies inside our universe could our universe also be one of many it may turn out that our concept of the universe as astronomers see it now is very restrictive one and what we have traditionally called our universe is one of many if there are other universes there laws of nature could all be set differently in their own being banks if there'd be many big bangs and if this is the second assumption the outcome of those big bangs were universe is governed by different physical laws then we could imagine that there would be one universe governed by any particular law we check care to envisage and therefore it would not be at all surprising if there should be one universe that was chilled if our laws of nature are only one set of values amongst a limitless possibility of others then the fine tuning of our universe once again falls within the laws of chance our law of gravity would be but one of trillions of different values for gravity the same goes for the cosmic constant for atomic charge even the numbers of dimensions suddenly amongst all the many possibilities it's not so surprising that at least one possesses the precise set of laws that allow human beings to evolve if you go into a clothes shop and as a large stock you're not surprised to find one suit that fits where as if there's only one suit you are surprised so many universe is governed by different laws would remove any reason for surprised at the apparent fine-tuning in our universe with one mighty intellectual bound cosmologists could once again happily accept that our universe suited our existence precisely without the need for a fine tuner a creator Martin Rees coined a new word to describe the idea if it turns out that there's more to reality than just a Big Bang or the aftermath of our Big Bang then we have to either redefine our universe or use another word and I've chosen the word multiverse to describe this whole ensemble of Big Bang's this whole ensemble of universes the concept of the multiverse saves the scientific universe at a straight we now have a natural mechanism to explain why there is all this diversity out there which in turn eliminates the need for the fine-tuning that some people might have liked the because it would say that there was a fine toner we don't need to find toner yet theoretically these other universes will always be beyond the scope of our telescopes so is the multiverse really a scientific solution one thing which people often object to when confronted with whole multiverse idea is I think saying this can't be science you know talking about all these things you can't see if I have a theory of involving entities that I can never touch never measure never observe that's not science then is it and I say quite to the contrary what makes good science is not whether you can see it or not but whether you can rule out the theory or not having raised the possibility of other universes cosmologists started to wonder what they might be like and as they wondered they found logic had set another trap the multiverse idea had set them on a path that led them back once again to a creator to avoid the conclusion that an intelligent force had had a hand in our creation cosmologists invoked the principle of multiple universes but what potential like those other universes hold for the evolution of complexity we have no idea how much Bharati our universes might display and since we have no contact with them all we can say is that there must be certain potential for complexity in those universes it's easy to imagine universes that would be less propitious for life than ours but of course we may not be in the optimal universe in a sense we can imagine universes that might be more vicious these of course will be potentialities far beyond the powers of our brains to conceive but we can't assume in this grander cosmos that there couldn't be other universes displaying more complexity in ours although we are completely cut off from these other universes it's not impossible that one day we might be able to prove their existence I think it's a question that we can't even address at the present I think we simply have to rely on the ingenuity of future their future generations of physicists or whatever they are call themselves at that time to to find their way into new ways of thinking about these things the atomic theory was put forward by by ancient Greeks two-and-a-half thousand years ago it took a couple of thousand years to verify it it would not surprise me if it takes some fraction of that kind of time before we really absolutely understand these ideas before we become totally comfortable with these ideas before we say these ideas are hard absolutely hard science but can we ever know what these other universes are like somewhere among this infinite collection there must be those similar to our own and some of them will be less evolved and others much more advanced we have some concept of how on earth life has evolved and has some simple beginnings led to creatures like ourselves whether it is the certain level of intelligence there seems to be a gradual increase in intelligence and human beings at some stage and surpassed other creatures but we have no idea how inevitable that was the four billion years of Darwinian evolution are now part of common culture but most people nonetheless tend to think that human beings are in some sense the culmination there's no particular reason to think that intelligence couldn't develop further astronomers know that our Sun is less than halfway through its life it'll be six billion years before the Sun flares up engulfing the inner planets vaporizing only life remains on earth but any life that remains at that time won't be humans it'll be life at least a different from us as we are from bacteria because this as much time thought future evolution on earth and Beyond before the Sun dies as there has been to get from a simplest organisms to us so our future in this universe can tell us something about life in other more advanced universes so what is the future for intelligence so our future in this universe can tell us something about life in other more advanced universes so what is the future for intelligence I think we have the most complex nervous system on earth related to debts we may consider us as the most intelligent species on earth maybe in the universe at least our universe that could be have you started with a chimpanzee library and it's tripled in in size over a period of three to three million years you will wonder where it is any expansion possible Michael Hoffman has studied the structure of our brain and asked would a larger brain increase intelligence we did a study by comparing brain structures in in primates starting with a very small relatively primitive primates up to human beings what you can do then is to extrapolate these findings to creatures which even have a larger brain and weird to our surprise offer a particular brain size something strange happens there is some maximum in intelligence and processing power and cognitive abilities but beyond that point you find a decrease in number of structures in the brain it will go along with a decrease in processing power and information processing and therefore also with intelligence it seems that as the organ of intelligence the brain has reached its limit if it becomes bigger communication between the different parts of the brain slow down and it actually becomes less efficient so it can't be hardly be better than we do it now let's effect the conclusion of all these calculations we can't change the technology of our brain in a way we are prisoners of our ancestors million years ago as far as the evolution of the brain is concerned so unless nature invents a new way for organic intelligence to evolve it seems that in this universe intelligence has reached its potential but some scientists see organic intelligence as only the first stage in evolution and the next stage they believe now has already begun for the first three or nearly four billion years the driving force of increasing complexity on earth was evolution natural selection sexual selection but in recent times in the last few thousand years it's not evolution any longer but it's our cultural development that has taken over and now this has been formalized into scientific and technical and medical development that's where the action is right now if we become more intelligent it is because we will learn to use technology or maybe medicine to enhance our own intellectual capacities and that might happen within a matter of decades in all these different ways human beings will use their technical ingenuity to change and modify their own nature and that's the transhuman phase of our development which were just beginning to enter at the dawn of this new millennium technology already infiltrates almost every aspect of our lives but philosophers like Nick Bostrom believe that technology could gradually replace our lives and that the change will be almost imperceptible a lot of people might choose to change to different medium computational hardware medium where you wouldn't suffer aging where your processes of thinking could be speeded up enormously where you could transport yourself at the speed of light that's information pattern where you could make copies backup copies of yourselves you would start by replacing a small bit of the brain may be single nurse'll with a computer processor that would do the same thing and then it could replace larger and larger parts and eventually you would consist of silicon and that sounds really scary and bad but if at no point in this process you notice any difference and if you ended up with just the same mental life as you had before then you might think it doesn't really matter so much whether I made of silicon or carbon what's inside my skull or indeed what I have is all or my whole mental life is implemented on a computer but what matters rather is what you think and feel and do and how you relate to others technology could take intelligence beyond the natural capacity of our biological brains through technology our universe could evolve super intelligence the concept of super intelligence roughly means any kind of intellect that vastly outstrips anything that's possible for humans to do it would just be a really clever human it would be a large by a huge amount superior tasks that would it be a confusion about whether it really was very smart or not it would be on a completely different level we obviously can't conceive of what a superintelligence might be able to achieve any more than a dog can appreciate quantum mechanics but we can at least quantify things by thinking about computers we can think about the processing power of computers and the kind of calculations they can do the degree of complex that they can simulate we know that over a few decades computers are evolved of being able to simulate only very simple patterns to be able to create virtual worlds as it were we've quite a lot of detail in them and if the computers in this new era are powerful enough they will be able to simulate the events at the very start of our universe to test the underlying principle that set our laws of nature so precisely to play with the parameters of creation to see what might evolve if that trend were to continue then we can imagine computers which would be able to simulate worlds perhaps even as complicated as one we think we're living in of course this raises philosophical question could we ourselves be in such a simulation could what we think is the universe be some sort of vault of heaven rather than the real thing in a multiverse there would almost certainly be beings that have evolved intelligence way beyond ours with the power to run immensely complicated simulations our whole universe could be one of those simulations so where does that leave us in a sense we could be ourselves the creations within this simulation I suppose in cutting themselves free from the possibility of our universe being the work of a creator of God logic has taken science back to where it started could our super intelligence be the god we have always imagined

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Published: Mon Apr 25 2011