The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not. St. Augustine, Confessions
You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place, your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage. John von Newuann, to Claude Shannon
Sweet is by convention, bitter by convention, hot by convention, cold by convention, color by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void. Democritus
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. Hector Berlioz
Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. Stephen Toulmin
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Thoughts on reading Sean Carroll, particularly his "From Eternity to Here." (2016)
December, 2022
In the interest of full disclosure I'll put out front that I am decidedly not of the same mind as scientists when it comes to empiricism. I have my own ideas about the proper place of science and its methods and they do not comport with that which is commonly accepted in today's world. I am skeptical about any claim of any kind as to the nature of the Real. To my way of thinking the predominate feature of the phenomenal Universe is silence. (According to the ancient Rabbis of Israel the likely reason for this is that God, having created man, found it necessary to "withdraw", in order to make room for his creation.) That needs to be respected and it might be true that it follows that the reason for that silence, if opened, might reveal an alternative to empirical approaches, to so called scientific proofs, that one might find overwhelmingly obvious. In short our methods, while disclaiming anthropocentrism, are yet just that...in so many words. Scientists, and their progenitors, are, some more obviously than others, difficult if not impossible to pry apart from their theories. That is what a real search for Truth, for Beauty even, entails at its very heart. This requires surrender not clinging to dogma, orthodoxy.
Obviously I will not be able to do justice to Carroll's work. Lack the capacity. Furthermore, and quite bluntly, science, I'm led to conclude - not from reading Carroll's book, or any scientific work, but through philosophical studies - is nothing but religion dressed up in esoteric formulas, theories, equations. So, if you are bound to faith in science, you won't like what follows. My interest is in unbinding and is characterized by an individual cupping his hands to receive that which is given, not in grasping at that which merely moves beyond. There are many ways of being in the world, beginning with the primitive and moving through phases - science is one - and culminating, perhaps, in the one true path. I don't know the way and claim its not truly knowable anyway. Understanding, however, is a bit different.
Science generalizes from small samples to the whole universe. For instance, Einstein's field equation(s) of General Relativity which purport to tell us that spacetime is a single "thing" and that it "controls" how bodies, energy, all the stuff in it, behaves, moves, and evolves while the same things determine the features of spacetime.
Rμν − ½Rgμν = 8πGTμν
For what its worth this is exactly how Carroll renders Einstein's field equation of general relativity. Searches for this on-line find the same except the value following the equal sign is shown divided by 4 to the 4th power. I don't know why and besides its beyond the scope of this report to get into the depths of this. Honestly, I don't have the expertise necessary to give a complete exegesis of the equation but will note its not really "one" equation it is a series of 16, of which this particular rendition is, I suppose, just enough to get started, a summary, if you like. These are differential equations measurimg rates of change and in one case, I understand, the rate of change of the rate of change.
Having said that I would make this further contribution for a little clarity:
"Einstein assumed that the universe was static and unchanging. He thought this was true because that was what astronomers at the time thought they saw when they looked out into their telescopes. A static universe would be unstable if gravity was only attractive. Every piece of matter would attract to every other and any slight imbalance in distribution would force the whole thing to eventually contract down into itself. Einstein added the cosmological constant to his equations (technically, he subtracted it from the scalar curvature) to hold back gravity so that his equations would have a solution that agreed with the static model."
What this means is not having obtained the results he wanted Albert Einstein rewrote the formula such that it's solution was more to his liking, prejudice. There was an orthodoxy, a scientific dogma he sought to accommodate. Science's immediate predecessor, religion, would burn offenders of the church's dogma at the stake. Science has moved beyond such extreme measures. Now there are more subtle punishments, ruined careers, and such. Carroll cites some of these in passing. Also noted are those scientists in the Elmer Gantry mold who delight in making headline getting claims about their discoveries, theories. Niehls Bohr comes to mind. These don't hesitate a nano second to speculate but, to illustrate their dogma, a carry over from religion, they never consider that which they axiomatically reject, namely an agency, a creator, sustainer, destroyer; a qualitative immanence.
That said I'd note this formula occupies the middle ground between Newtonian physics and Quantum leaving aside the very long time we wasted, so to speak, in geocentrism before it gave way to the heliocentric model. This kind of science is very speculative - I wish I had counted how many times Carroll fell back to "we don't know" statements or the like. Scientific theory is very much an unfinished work when it comes to, well, just about everything, but I'm concerned here, of course, with cosmology.
These various views are basically all mechanistic and none of them venture to risk saying what matter is, just how it behaves, that it works something like a machine; quantum theory being somewhat willing to leave that behind, focuses on waves or fields, but it still is called quantum "mechanics". But a wave or field is an ephemeral thing compared to solid bodies moving around in orbits. One can identify where such waves, fields might be found but only with limited precision. The thing about planets, and such, is that their place, path, can be identified with great precision, you know, good enough that we can fly a spaceship to the moon and land and return to earth.
Quantum mechanics is a step towards replacing Newtonian, classical physics which treats objects, masses, as definite in space time while quantum mechanics recognizes them as not so certain in their existence as to where they can be definitely said to be, especially at the micro level where they are wave functions rather than objects in the classical sense. So, yes, one can say with certain probability that a gross object can be found at so-and-so place but not so much with something like an electron which location is much less probable. We speak of electron clouds surrounding nuclei as a way of expressing this. Electrons can be said to be somewhere in that cloud. Think, how can one state precisely where a ripple on a pond is? It's there but its location is more ephemeral than say a tree along the street; though strictly they are both "waves" on the surface of reality. But this oscillation through spacetime for things on the atomic scale means location is not definite but still can be said to be with a certain probability here or there.
As we journey through the successive phases of our knowledge of science we realize these equations can't measure the Universe itself and are used instead to measure a small sample. Knowing how spacetime behaves in this sample along with that which is embedded therein, the bodies, their mass, energy, radiation, etc., we apply that to the Universe itself in the pattern "knowing this I know that."
Supposedly there are about a trillion stars in the Universe. (We count the number in a somewhat smaller area and apply that data to the whole, for instance.) The Universe is thought to be expanding at an increasing rate of speed. The "red shift" of very distant objects (supernova Ia stars) - these are exploding stars and are very bright so can be more readily observed at cosmological distances - is increasingly larger for these novae. That's how we know of the expansion. Note there's not enough explosive power from the "big bang" to account for this apparent acceleration. Gravity should slow the expansion down; so a mysterious force, "dark energy" is posited to account for the expansion of the Universe where one would think it would be impeded by gravitational attraction of all the mass. Dark energy, though thought to be rather weak - and which we haven't isolated, proved - provides just enough extra push to the explosive force from the big bang to account for the observed acceleration.
Dark energy. So, a mysterious force or agency, is assumed to account for an unknown, perhaps unknowable circumstance. True, its not "outside" the known universe as they tend to think a "divine creative force" would be, or is thought to be by their assumed religious antagonists. One wonders if they appreciate this irony. Dark energy is treated as a little understood constant that is used to account for an invisible magical force. They can make the numbers work so its plugged into their assumptions, theories. In religion, god is used as a constant in a similar sense, to account for the unknown, perhaps unknowable.
The big bang model assumes the universe began in an exquisitely ordered condition of the lowest entropy, hot and dense. Carroll calls this a singularity, infinitely dense, zero size - size would have no meaning, but he says zero timespace came into existence at that event. Of course time has a direction much different than spatial directions. Carroll points out that any direction in space is about the same. The direction of time is always away from the past for which there are many illustrations. He writes that while the earth orients us in space, the big bang orients us in time. (Pg. 32) You'll never walk down a beach and have a sand castle materialize out of the chaotic surroundings; you'll never separate an omelet back into an egg, or coffee with cream back into its individual constituents. This is what it means when entropy is said to increase, when the arrow ot time is always toward the future - at least that is the simplistic view. Entropy is a measure of the disordliness of things in a closed system and can be said to explain why we remember the past and not the future. And, of course, its based on the second law of thermodynamics. Carroll says this is science's most important law. It states that the entropy of an isolated system either remains constant or increases with time.
Ludwig Boltzmann's formula for entropy is S = K log W and he defined it as "a measure of the number of particular microscopic arrangements of atoms that appear indistinguishable from a macroscopic perspective." Further, "in an isolated system entropy tends to increase, because there are more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy."
Before the big bang there is no frame of reference. In fact it makes no sense to say "before". "At" the (infinitely?) exquisitely low entropy of the primordial egg, singularity, or whatnot, to spacetime emergence with the big bang - only then does "before" or "after" or "at" have a context in which to make sense. Only then is there a "then". Otherwise its from the standpoint of nowhen/nowhere. Its claimed the primordial egg whence the big bang is the lowest possible entropy, the highest possible order.
So, as John Archibald Wheeler noted, "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." Clever physicist, John Wheeler.
So the Universe goes from beginnings of very high order, like an egg, and proceeds to increasing disorder; and that disorder as it progresses is said to gain momentum. Interesting. Sort of like the birth of anything at all, isn't it? First the egg, then the incubation, then the birth, then the dissolution. "If you're not busy being born, you're busy dieing." the poet says. (Dylan) So, they invoke a chicken to illustrate the process but Carroll and cohorts are careful to be somewhat dismissive of any idea or principle construed as anthropic which I question because, after all, people - and chickens (fowlthropic?) - are made of atoms and such just like the rest of the observable universe.
Entropy increases eternally and it all ends with nothing but dead stars, galaxies, in a uniform distribution of high entropy, heat death for all that is. This seems to ignore the observation that everything that is is cyclical, a single exception being made for the whole thing taken as one. The final end is meaningless, purposeless, cold, lonely, Carroll writes. We might as well never have been.
Parity. Is the low entropy of the boundary condition of the big bang in parity with the high entropy of a dead universe? Were there a "big crunch" instead would that also be parity? This question comes to mind, but the answer is unknown.
Layers of complexity keep getting piled on while assuming averages of these states are adequate to their extrapolation to the whole. So they add complexities then simplify them to make them easy to work with, plug into their equations. After awhile the bewilderment grows into necessitating a kind of omniscience on the part of reaching an understanding. They claim this power at the same time admitting unknowns; they claim god like status where the deity is a statistician finagling the way through a mechanistic milieu. Mass and energy and all the various components are treated as things, manipulated like a game of marbles. Its called "physics" for a reason
One other thing to note early on would be science's attitude towards consciousness. Carroll thinks it is emergent. Carroll is especially hostile to the idea of a God outside the Universe and purports to be an atheist. This writer agrees with Carroll that its a primitive and unhelpful idea that "he" is outside; this notion dates back to Aristotle and before. This writer subscribes to the notion that Christianity errs in following the Aristotelian ideas surrounding the corruption of the world below compared to the perfection of the incorruptible regions above - heaven. I'd rather think of the divine creative force as immanent in nature. Carroll seems to give some credence to this notion.
Carroll brings Buddhist cosmology, if their is such a thing, to the table. He doesn't attribute this to Buddhism but it sounds like what I understand the Buddha said - I don't know which Buddha, however. Any how he (Buddha) made the claim that our experience of the world is separated into exquisitely brief slices of time; the world arises anew in each and they are not really connected in the way one would commonly think; this Buddha is said to have made the claim that nothing endures. Carroll puts that:
"So the world exists, and what is more, the world happens, again and again. In that sense, the world is like the different frames of a film reel - a film whose camera view includes the entire universe. (There are also, as far as we can tell, an infinite number of frames, infinitesimally separated."
Carroll continues, substituting a view not from nowhere but from nowhen: "...when looking down from nowhen ...we don't see anything changing with time, because we are outside of time ourselves. Instead, we see all history at once - past, present, and future. It's like thinking of space and time as a book, which we could in principle open to any passage, [and view any page at random] rather than as a movie, where we are forced to watch events in sequence..."
What science aims at is a theory of everything. Thing. Is key here; materialistic. Now science does not purport to tell what matter is, just how it behaves. Carroll seems, in his epilogue, to make a concession, however small, to the notion that something is missing in the methods of science when he mentions natural theology. Further, he has left Caltech and now is on the faculty of John's Hopkins university in Maryland as a professor of "Natural Philosophy, hearkening back to the days before science and philosophy split into distinct disciplines... I've always been interdisciplinary, between physics and philosophy and other things, and also always had an interest in reaching out to wider audiences. But there was inevitably tension with what I was supposed to be doing as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. My predilections don’t fit comfortably with the academic insistence on putting everyone into a silo and encouraging them to stay there." From his blog post, here. (His web site is here.) So, he left Caltech because, partially because, I guess, he wanted freedom to explore more widely the mindscape beyond physics and cosmology. I think he is a good man and appreciate this insight into his thinking. But I also appreciate that its tantalizing, and you get drawn in, attracted to the notion, as a scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, you might be the special one that actually puts forth a theory of everything that conflates Newtonian (classical) physics, special and general relativity of Einstein, and quantum physics and string theory and explain the arrow of time as it relates to the big bang, the death of Universe, in short, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. One who pays scant attention to all this might be forgiven for thinking we are on the cusp of such a discovery. Reading "From Eternity to Here" leaves one with the opposite notion - we've hardly begun this exciting discovery of a theory that explains all that is. We are also led to understand that the community of scientists have unshakeable faith in their enterprise and will some day achieve their aims.
But. What if the universe, what if being, existence, reality does not care or even take note of your prognostications? What does that leave you with? It leaves you with nothing. Which might be a something nothing but also might teach one that the discovery itself is the meaning and purpose that seems to elude us.
I certainly don't know and live with the realization that I actually can't know. One question that seems to point to a contradiction in the science is how can it be said that the earliest universe was characterized by extremely low entropy. (S inflation ≈ 1012 ) is the formula Carroll gives for the entropy at the inception of the big bang, the birth of the universe. But if the big bang did not happen at a place nor a time - these have no meaning, space and time being products of the big bang - how can it be said what entropy was when there was no spacetime? I don't think there can be entropy without spacetime. Take any condition you like, it depends on there being a place and a time, a framework.
Why multiverse and not universe? Carroll writes a lot about these; and others, too. Personal, speculative. "Creator" was not sure of outcome, so plant many seeds, allow several potentialities to eventuate in order to pick the best of the several. Or, is it like Darwin's natural selection at work? Also, Carroll is careful to say many scientists don't like this theory of a multiverse - he calls it, rather, a prediction, because its not falsifiable - it makes no predictions than can be proven/disproven. He also says the formulae can be tested and that science is a messy business.
The conundrums never cease. Carroll writes about opposing theories, for instance, quantum gravity could allow that "time never begins but stretches for all eternity". This contradicts the second law of thermodynamics which has time dependent on entropy increasing. Personally, again. I'd speculate, posit, that time is not quantitative but qualitative so its meaningless to say it begins, ends, is eternal. Perhaps Time can be better understood as being like, for instance, beauty, or truth, or liberty and other emergent phenomena. Maybe, going back to Democritus, time is by convention. At any rate we're not there yet though cosmologists seem to think a full theory of quantum gravity would be the Rosetta stone to this end. Final thought. If time is eternal why should we be surprised that a final theory of everything, a grand unifying theory, is attainable at all? Meaning, the discovery, the search is itself eternal.
In Carroll's epilogue to the book he gets philosophical. This makes a beautiful contrast to all that went before. Nature is universal; what happens here happens everywhere. "The entire universe is in a glass of wine." He quotes Richard Feynman. And, finally "True understanding leads you to places you didn't know you wanted to go." That is the heritage of the great men of science, Tycho Brae, Johannes Kepler, Nicholas Copernicus, and my favorite, Eratosthenes of Cyrene who having taken note of the sun's light shining straight down a well on the summer solstice coupled with the angle of the sun's shadow in nearby Alexandria used that difference in angle to derive the Earth's circumference. I'm awestruck by that and Carroll's work, too. Reverence is in order.
G.V. Desani (and here) was my mentor. I'd like to bring his studies to bear here as a contrast in my thoughts on Sean Carroll's work, indeed, on Science itself, as, one may term it, a mode of being. In particular I have in mind his experience with so called "Nadi" writers, ancient "seers" - that would be an Indian, more particularly, a Hindu phenomenon. Desani wrote about this in an essay, here; there are other writings of his that impinge on the Nadi Texts, but I'll concentrate on the one cited. First citation in that piece, on page 17* he defines science:
"One uses the word "science" mostly for that body of
knowledge which is gathered empirically from nature and by
observing man: and for that body of knowledge which is
found to be of service to man. According to this definition,the knowledge acquired through revelation (religious knowledge, for example) or intuitively divined knowledge (anything at all, including the mystical) would not be termed "science". There is an obvious conflict between the view of "reality" afforded by each of these sources of knowledge.
"If the above definition of "science" is accepted, then, for
all practical purposes, the Law of Causality (the relation of cause --"antecedent" -- and effect -- "consequent") must be accepted as scientifically valid. A thing, an event, is caused. A tree is from a seed: water boils from heat. For all practical purposes, all perceived consequences or effects are from antecedents or causes. That is -- in the sense in which we use the word science -- an accepted law of science."
In this article Desani confronts events he has experienced that contradict the Law of Causality. According to Desani the writers of the Nadi texts are humans who have overheard, had dictated to them, non-human, great beings; I suppose it would be correct to call them divine entities. They have perfect knowledge of all past and future and it has been demonstrated to Desani's satisfaction as outlined in his linked piece by that name. I'm not inclined to lay out his thoughts on the subject at this juncture but its clear that they couldn't run more counter to science and its methods, theories, equations. So, there is another world view antithetical to anything most of us have ever been exposed to. It deserves consideration and, in my opinion, is no more fantastic, unlikely, than the scientific claim that experience depends on affirmation by a conscious being for its being, or that observing photons actually determines how they behave, and mabye cats, too.
So, I'll leave it at that with this final thought. The immanence of a divine creative spirit, force, is as a quality, faculty, attribute, rather than a "person". Is consciousness a similar phenomenon, and if so can it be said that it is an emergent phenomenon, or is it immanent, too? Is it a "built in" quality that necessarily emerges? Is it always true that said emergence occurs along with the various concomitants of consciousness? Does Truth (a concomitant of consciousness) play a role in the Real? Perhaps it's a mere random fluctation. How would one know? Wrong question! It is what it is. You wouldn't know, you couldn't. Forbidden knowledge. The Real is no more accessible than the speed of light. You - one - can imagine -dream? - but it is ever just beyond one's grasp. So. Only mystery remains, only unsolved, unsolvable, puzzles. And you thought this would be easy. That is, just relax and it will come to you. Well! Not so fast, there. It's intended to be obscure, impossible, unsearchable. "G_d" withdrew to make room for man. Screaming conclusion: That withdrawal makes of man, sentient life anywhere/anywhen, co-creator. Put slightly differently, "G_d" descends into matter in order to (re-)emerge a fully self realized being. There's a bit of natural philosophy for you.
*The name of the .pdf is NADI_SHASTRI_3_GVD.PDF. A search of the site does not find it but its there, as of this writing, under the heading "Articles, Lectures, & Academic Papers" at: "The Nādi Shāstra," based on the first six columns of " 'Very High' and 'Very Low' ", The Illustrated Weekly of India and likely developed for inclusion in Desani's planned Rissala. This is a compilation of several of Desani's pieces about this subject.
