Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt Page A
Authors: Jim Holt
Tags: Fiction, thriller, science, Crime, Mystery, Retail, Literature, USA, Philosophy, Amazon.com, 21st Century, Religious Studies, v.5, Scientism, American Literature
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the law of mass-energy conservation. The total mass-energy of the universe today is M because (1) the total mass-energy of the universe yesterday was M and (2) mass-energy is neither created nor destroyed. Now your explanation is complete.
Or is it? It appears that there are two ways in which the universe could have been radically different. It could have had a different total mass-energy throughout its history—say, M' instead of M . And it could have had a different law governing that mass-energy: a law that, for example, might have allowed the mass-energy to cycle back and forth over time between a pair of values, M and M ˇ . (To return to the Bhagavad Gita example for a moment, that would be as if the text kept getting translated back and forth from Sanskrit to English to Sanskrit to English and so on.) We still have no explanation of why there is this law and this precise value. Both appear to be contingent. Nor do we (yet) have an explanation of why there should be any mass-energy at all, let alone a law governing it. An eternal world can still be a mysterious world.
But we knew this intuitively already. Even if something is causa sui , its existence can still seem arbitrary. And an entity needn’t be eternal to be self-caused. It could also trace out a circular path in time, looping around on itself so that it has no beginning and no end. Something of the sort can be found in the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time . The main character (played by Christopher Reeve) is given a gold watch by an old woman. He then travels back in time and gives the watch to the same woman when she was in her youth—the very watch that she will, some decades later, give to him. How did this watch come into being? In its entire existence, which spans only a few decades, it never sees the inside of a watch factory. It exists even though it has no creator. It seems to be causa sui . (Some physicists call an entity with such a circular history a jinn, since, like Aladdin’s genie, it seems to be self-conjuring.) The existence of this gold watch is as inexplicable as the existence of the poem “Kubla Khan” would be if I had gone back in time to the autumn of 1797 and dictated it to a grateful Coleridge, who then published it so that two centuries later I could learn it by heart.
Could anything be more of an affront to the Principle of Sufficient Reason than a self-composing poem or a self-conjuring watch? Could anything be less self-explanatory than an Oscillating Universe, eternally bellowing in and out like some cosmic accordion, or an Inflationary Multiverse, endlessly frothing away like a just-uncorked bottle of Veuve Clicquot? Why such an absurdly busy cosmos? Why any cosmos at all, whether finite or infinite?
Why not nothing?
Interlude
Night Thoughts at the Café de Flore
“ E t pour vous, monsieur? Du café? Une infusion? ”
The waiter posed the question in a tone of weary impatience. It was, after all, nearly closing time at the Café de Flore, on a late-winter night in Paris. The evening had been a hefty one, and I felt I needed something more fortifying than the options proposed. My companion, an aging but handsome voluptuary named Jimmy Douglas, suggested, as an alternative, a strongly alcoholic herbal concoction I had never heard of. It would, he insisted, buck up my liver.
It certainly seemed to have worked for him. Despite a life of riotous excess and free indulgence of his voracious and irregular appetites, Jimmy had remained preternaturally youthful. Friends called him Dorian Gray. (It perhaps helped that, as an heir to the Quaker Oats fortune, he did not have to toil for a living.) In the 1950s, he was the paramour of Barbara “poor little rich girl” Hutton, taking up with her after her fifty-three-day marriage to the international playboy/diplomat/polo-star Porfirio Rubirosa (a tough act to follow). In the 1960s, Jimmy threw a joint party for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in his grand apartment in the
Or is it? It appears that there are two ways in which the universe could have been radically different. It could have had a different total mass-energy throughout its history—say, M' instead of M . And it could have had a different law governing that mass-energy: a law that, for example, might have allowed the mass-energy to cycle back and forth over time between a pair of values, M and M ˇ . (To return to the Bhagavad Gita example for a moment, that would be as if the text kept getting translated back and forth from Sanskrit to English to Sanskrit to English and so on.) We still have no explanation of why there is this law and this precise value. Both appear to be contingent. Nor do we (yet) have an explanation of why there should be any mass-energy at all, let alone a law governing it. An eternal world can still be a mysterious world.
But we knew this intuitively already. Even if something is causa sui , its existence can still seem arbitrary. And an entity needn’t be eternal to be self-caused. It could also trace out a circular path in time, looping around on itself so that it has no beginning and no end. Something of the sort can be found in the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time . The main character (played by Christopher Reeve) is given a gold watch by an old woman. He then travels back in time and gives the watch to the same woman when she was in her youth—the very watch that she will, some decades later, give to him. How did this watch come into being? In its entire existence, which spans only a few decades, it never sees the inside of a watch factory. It exists even though it has no creator. It seems to be causa sui . (Some physicists call an entity with such a circular history a jinn, since, like Aladdin’s genie, it seems to be self-conjuring.) The existence of this gold watch is as inexplicable as the existence of the poem “Kubla Khan” would be if I had gone back in time to the autumn of 1797 and dictated it to a grateful Coleridge, who then published it so that two centuries later I could learn it by heart.
Could anything be more of an affront to the Principle of Sufficient Reason than a self-composing poem or a self-conjuring watch? Could anything be less self-explanatory than an Oscillating Universe, eternally bellowing in and out like some cosmic accordion, or an Inflationary Multiverse, endlessly frothing away like a just-uncorked bottle of Veuve Clicquot? Why such an absurdly busy cosmos? Why any cosmos at all, whether finite or infinite?
Why not nothing?
Interlude
Night Thoughts at the Café de Flore
“ E t pour vous, monsieur? Du café? Une infusion? ”
The waiter posed the question in a tone of weary impatience. It was, after all, nearly closing time at the Café de Flore, on a late-winter night in Paris. The evening had been a hefty one, and I felt I needed something more fortifying than the options proposed. My companion, an aging but handsome voluptuary named Jimmy Douglas, suggested, as an alternative, a strongly alcoholic herbal concoction I had never heard of. It would, he insisted, buck up my liver.
It certainly seemed to have worked for him. Despite a life of riotous excess and free indulgence of his voracious and irregular appetites, Jimmy had remained preternaturally youthful. Friends called him Dorian Gray. (It perhaps helped that, as an heir to the Quaker Oats fortune, he did not have to toil for a living.) In the 1950s, he was the paramour of Barbara “poor little rich girl” Hutton, taking up with her after her fifty-three-day marriage to the international playboy/diplomat/polo-star Porfirio Rubirosa (a tough act to follow). In the 1960s, Jimmy threw a joint party for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in his grand apartment in the
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