A short article that will burn your brain, but is certainly a worth read.
Why the universe just doesn’t add up
By Lee Smolin
Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once told me: in physics there are ideas that everyone believes, but no one has demonstrated. One such belief is the mathematical universe. Physics, computer science and psychology are dominated by its ideology.
It assumes a timeless reality, captured by the identification of the history of the universe with a mathematical object. Let us call that object “U”, and assert that every true fact about the universe is mirrored in a property of U. This means time is unreal, as causal relations between things that happen in the world are equivalent to logically deducible implications that hold timelessly between their mathematical mirrors.
This vision of reality has radical implications. A mathematical universe would support the “strong artificial-intelligence” hypothesis, which holds that human beings are equivalent to programmable computers – a paradigm that, despite decades of failure, influences everything from neuroscience to software design. It implies the future is determined, so human will, imagination and agency are illusions. And it suggests that science’s goal is the discovery of the mathematical object, U – a goal that has not produced progress in physics in four decades.
This failure is due to the inability of the mathematical-universe paradigm to answer two simple questions: if the universe is identical to a solution, U, of an equation that represents the true laws of nature, then why are those the laws? And what picked the solution, U, out of an infinitude of solutions? Attempts to answer these questions have inevitably led to the reducto ad absurdum of applying the anthropic principle to fantasies that our universe is one of infinitely many unobservable universes: a position that cannot lead to any falsifiable predictions and so leads to the self-destruction of science.
Pace Feynman, it is easy to disprove the mathematical-universe hypothesis. Simply exhibit one property of the natural world that is not shared by any mathematical object. And here is one: in the real world, it is always some present moment, and then another. Mathematical objects, being timeless, do not have moments.
I propose we develop a conception of nature contrary to the mathematical universe, based on taking time and its passage through a succession of present moments to be real and fundamental. According to this conception, all that is real is real within a present moment so that nothing stands outside of time.
Thus the answer to the “why these laws?” question is that our universe and its laws are the results of a long process of evolution. Because it makes hypotheses about the past, this conception can lead to hypotheses that are falsifiable by real observations. Two examples of research based on ideas of evolving laws that are checkable by experiment are cosmological natural selection and the principle of precedence. These teach us that while mathematics will continue to be a useful tool, conceiving of a universe only partly representable by mathematical modelling leads to more scientific progress than embracing the mathematical universe.
A non-mathematical universe evolving today is also more conducive to human aspirations. As there is no timeless mathematical object that captures all the truth about the world, the future need not be determined. Humans have evolved the organ of imagination that makes the invention of novelty as effortless as play. So human will and agency are not illusions – they can be as real as atoms. We are free to believe in our innate human capacity to invent novel solutions to our most pressing problems.
Lee Smolin is a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Ontario. His book Time Reborn (HMH) is out now
via Wired
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