This Theory is Brought to You By the Letter M

The lynchpin of the book The Grand Design, its purpose and goal, is to present what is being described as M-Theory.  M-Theory isn't just one thing, but is rather the combination of a series of assumptions about quantum mechanics, a latticework of existing subatomic theory.  While there's plenty of complexity to it, perhaps the most striking thing is that neither Hawking nor Mlodinow seem to have any idea what the "M" in "M-Theory" stands for.  They suggest "Master Theory," and a few others...but it's a bit unsatisfying.  Here's your theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything, and you can't even tell us what that letter stands for?  Humph.

Perhaps it stands for Monkey Boy.  Or Mork.  Or Methuselah.  Or Maneschevitz.  Menudo?  Or Auntie Em. 

I asked my father-in-law about this over dinner last night.  He's a plasma physicist, meaning he explores the high energy matter that comprises stars.   His take on the mysterious "M" was that it came from the term "m-brane," with the "brane" being not the thing in your noggin, but a concept from a variant on subatomic string theory.  A "brane" is a bit like a rolled-out or flattened-out string, which would help, if we really knew what "strings" were.  As for the "m?"  Errr.  He wasn't sure quite what that meant.

Fiddle.

This is a bit of a bummer, because going into the book, I thought I knew.  I was just working under the assumption that the "M" in "M-Theory"  was a reference to the most revolutionary concept in M-Theory: the idea that our observable universe, the space-time continuum in which we find ourselves, is only one of a functionally infinite array of spacetimes.  It isn't a universe.  It's a capital M Multiverse. 

It's that new framework that theology has to address, because it does have some pretty profound implications, and poses some pretty significant challenges.

Hawking: Reality is Dead

As I've continued to dig my way through The Grand Design, I'm finding it quite readable.  It's thoughtful, witty, and written in a breezy style.  Heck, they even have pictures.  And we love the pretty pictures.  Much of the science presented is familiar territory, as Hawking/Mlodinow talk about the history of scientific thought and cosmology.  It's good meaty stuff, laying out the evolution of physics from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Relativistic to...well...whatever M-Theory is about.

When the book gets to quantum physics, though, it surfaces several interestingly...cough...postmodern reality of the nature of the universe.  Pity that philosophy is dead, though.  Bummer about that.

One interesting observation of quantum physics is that there is no objectively observable reality to the foundational building blocks of the universe.  It's not that quarks and Z particles and the strange schtuff that forms our atoms aren't somehow there.  They simply can't be observed, not in the same way that we observe the larger structures of the universe.  Making a meaningful statement about the position and energy of a subatomic particle is impossible.  This has nothing to do with subjectivism or observer bias.  It's woven into the nature of existence.  To observe something requires that we interact with it, and if we interact with it, then we change it.   Our relationship with the universe by necessity changes the universe.

Where Hawking and Mlodinow take this is interesting.  The Grand Design explicitly rejects both the objectivism and realism of classical science as the most effective ways to describe the nature of our universe.   Yeah, you can make some predictions about the actions of the larger structures through simple observation.  But when push comes to shove, existence is considerably more intricate and complex than can be accounted for by observational or experimental science.  More arcane and esoteric arts are required to understand its true nature.

The faithful, who've know this for pretty much ever, might at this point raise our hands and say, well, yeah.  Welcome to the party.  What kept you?

Hawking: Philosophy is Dead

As I begin my meander through Stephen Hawking's controversial and fascinating new book, the first thing I encounter, right there on the very first page, is an interesting proposition.  Hawking notes that humankind has all sorts of questions about meaning.

"How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves?  How does the universe behave?  What is the nature of reality?  Where did this all come from?  Did the universe need a creator?"

And then, he drops it:

"Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead."

I have two responses to this rather impressively broad assertion.  First, it's completely wrong.  Second, it's totally correct.  How can that be?  Well, there are two different clauses in that sentence.  Let's look at the second one first.

The statement that philosophy is dead is zigzackly precisely right.  Philosophy has clearly and incontrovertibly left the building.

The era in which philosophical thought had anything meaningful or transforming to say about purpose or truth or being began its demise with Descartes.  It was Cartesian thinking that marked the transition from philosophy as ontology (meaning the exploration of being) to philosophy as epistemology (meaning philosophy as the exploration of the means by which we know what we know.)  Once philosophical discourse turned away from questions of cosmology and broader meaning, and turned inward towards an exploration of the rational frameworks upon which it was constructed, it wandered off muttering incoherently to itself, chainsmoking Gauloises until it slowly withered and died.  Are there important things to learn in the fossilized remains of those thoughts?  Sure.  There's still tremendous value in some of those ancient human insights.  But they aren't living. 

Yeah, I know, there are still departments of philosophy.  There are still people racking up pointless student debt to study postmodern semiotics so they can spend their post-graduate career waiting tables at some funky little vegan place.  But the Western tradition of philosophy, the one that began with the Greek Eliatics in the 300s BCE, that way of approaching the world no longer is a culturally relevant or living tradition.   Hear the angry protestations from the vibrant philosophical community?  Neither did I.  So score one for Hawking et al.

The first part of that statement, though, is waaaay wrong.  Even if you're not a Christian, and not a theist, it's wrong.  Philosophy certainly attempted to answer those questions, but it was joined by...and often intermingled with...faith.  Human beings explored the nature of reality not just through the rationally constructed systems of philosophy but more notably through the ecstasies of faith.  Human beings came into transforming encounters with the Numinous, and struggled to put words and frameworks around it as they grasped at what can't be grasped.   Across all human cultures, they told from those experiences the defining stories of their mythopoetics.   Faith has always been the primary way humankind has tried to answer that subset of questions.  So saying "traditionally, these are questions for philosophy" is just plain incorrect.

I wonder, honestly, if in some early iteration of this work that sentence didn't make the more provocative statement:  "Traditionally, these are questions for religion, but religion is dead."   Perhaps such a statement was deemed too inflammatory.  Who knows.  But it is clear, particularly from some of the argumentation that follows, that the authors know the case it is making does not have to contend with philosophy as a competing worldview.  It is faith, and the practitioners of faith, who really have to wrestle with this stuff. 

Further up and further in...

The Grand Design

A few weeks ago, the religious interwebs were a-hum with chatter about a proclamation by theoretical cosmologist Stephen Hawking that the universe could easily have blorted itself into being without any help from a creator.  There was much tut-tutting, from both the lumpenproletariat of Christianity and Episcopalians.  Of course you need God, cried Christianity!  Laws may be one thing, but there must causality beyond simple mechanics.  God gives both being and purpose, proclaimed the voice of the church, and Hawking just doesn't get it!

Well, no, actually.

In responding thusly to Hawking, I'm afraid it is the church that has entirely missed the point.  We're having the wrong argument.  We're standing in a room, talking to ourselves, and have failed to engage Hawking in any meaningful way.

What is most notable about what Hawking has to say is not that he doubts that God is necessary as a first cause or Aristotelian Unmoved Mover of our spacetime.  There are plenty of scientists and atheistic folk who've been doing this for years.  What his book is doing is far more radical.  It's challenging the conventional understanding of the universe.

Those of us Jesus People who aren't taking huge brain-choking hits off the Young Earth Creationist Bong typically understand the universe as having come into being with the Big Bang, that inexplicable surge of Something into Nothing.  There are many sentient Christians who have no difficulty adapting their faith to this prevailing cosmology, seeing how easily and elegantly this meshes with our Biblical stories of creation.  We see God at work behind that glorious, impossible event.

In the early days of modern astronomy, though, there were two competing views of the suddenly-very-much larger universe.  A significant group of early scientists held...based on available observations...that the universe was solid-state, permanent, and never-changing.   The universe had never been created.  It had simply always been.  From the standpoint of the narrative of Christian faith, this solid-state cosmology was completely and totally at odds with the idea of God as creator.  It was a major conceptual threat, for had it been proven to be true, the whole narrative of Biblical faith wouldn't even have worked as metaphor.  The two positions were conceptually irreconcilable.

As it happened, though, further and more accurate observations showed that the vast panoply of stars and galaxies had not always been there, and that they instead Banged out Bigly Billions and Billions of years Before.  So...the universe had arisen from nothing, or at least out of a state of being that was inherently not empirically observable and thus beyond the reach of science.

We theists, as the kids say these days, was down wit' dat.

But the proposed unified theory that Hawking is presenting represents a significant shift in cosmology.  The "M-theory" proposed by Hawking and others suggests, from the findings of quantum physics, that our spacetime is but one of a potentially infinite array of spacetimes.  This is a sea change in the way that we understand existence and the nature of being.

Clearly, Hawking and his co-author Cal-Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow feel that this theory renders God irrelevant.  But they're theoretical physicists.  Theology ain't their thing.  They do not, as my wife's rabbi might say, know from faith.

So for the next few blog posts, I'm going to read through The Grand Design and muse over M-Theory.  Is it, in fact, a threat to Christian faith and/or the belief in God in the same way that a solid-state spacetime would have been?  Or is it a cosmology that believing and sentient Christians can integrate authentically into our faith, in the same way that we've had no trouble integrating Big Bang theory?

Further up and further in...