It's a stuffy, hazy, humid night tonight, the kind where sudden storms can rise up, rumble and rain, and be gone in minutes. I look to the western horizon, not much of a horizon here in the city, but at least to the west, from whence storms come. I block out the harsh fluorescent lights to see the sky more clearly, looking for weather. I wait for flashes of heat lightning at the horizon. I scan the weather radar online, looking for promising blobs of color heading my way. There are many of them, but not near me. I look out at the sky above the black trees again. The katydids chirp, the crickets sing, the air conditioners drone, but there is no thunder, and the sky is just a cloudy darkness, grey with reflected city lights. I want lightning, Nature's high energy physics right here on earth. But there is none here tonight. Maybe tomorrow night, there will be lightning and plasma and ozone and an electrical storm. There are not many nights like this in a year. The summer is so very brief.

Studying logarithms brings me again to one of those Heavy Philosophical Questions which fascinate me the way they do many other people who do math and science. Namely, why does the world as we know it follow mathematical patterns? Why is math so good at describing the universe and predicting its (at least non-quantum) features and events? There is even math for describing chaos and randomness.

There seem to be some very basic patterns that repeat to build up reality: multiplying, multiplying by oneself, periodicity, nesting complexity (like Russian dolls, one thing within another thing), proportionality, etc. Does the Universe HAVE to be that way? Could intelligence have evolved in a chaotic, fluid universe where things did not follow predictable patterns?

It brings me to an idea I found while reading the work of some theoretical physicist somewhere, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. He suggested (in the scenario of multiple universes that is so trendy nowadays) that universes that have order will survive longer than universes which do not have order. Chaos dissipates, order builds, at least for the time it takes to make a coherent universe in which intelligence can evolve. I wish I knew which physics guy said this. Perhaps it was Murray Gell-Mann.

I am told, by one of my Friendly Scientists, that this is related to what is known as the "weak anthropic principle," which states that the universe could have had other patterns and other physical laws, but we would not have evolved there to see them. So the reason our universe follows the patterns it does, is because we evolved within those patterns and our physical beings are evolved to work within the laws as they exist in this universe. We can see it, and make mathematics to explain it, because we're already part of it, and are formed by it.

A similar idea is proposed by Lee Smolin, whom I wrote about earlier this year. He says that zillions of universes are "created," each with different parameters, but only a few of them have the conditions necessary to evolve matter and stars, let alone living things. There is, by his reckoning, a whole "ecology" of universes, in which a kind of "natural selection" takes place. Each universe starts with a different set of physical parameters. Some of them have no coherence or stability, and disappear quickly. Others persist for a while, until some factor in their allotment of laws and constants overwhelms them and they also collapse. But others, whose conditions are more favorable, will develop stars, galaxies, and the re-cycling process that allows the precursor elements of organic life to develop. These "clusters" of universes will last longer, and within those clusters, one or two of them will survive long enough to develop life. And then within that lucky portion, the life that survives will develop intelligence, and collectively live long enough to build a society in which theoretical physicists can wonder about the anthropic principle.

Posted at 2:16 am | link