Chapter 7: The Wise Universe

Within the material universe, we do not find chaos, but law and order, and a wisdom, far beyond the grasp of human scientists. It is ruled by laws, which the Creator has written in a mathematical language. And this mathematical language man has not invented. He has only found it. It has been there already long before him.- Why is that?

Paul Davies, British/Australian Professor for theoretical Physics (and an evolutionist), says about the wisdom, found in nature: "Perhaps the greatest scientific discovery of all time is that nature is written in mathematical code. We do not know the reason for this, but it is the single most important fact that enables us to understand, control and predict the outcome of physical processes. Once we have cracked the code for some particular physical system, we can read nature like a book. The realization that at a fundamental level the laws of nature are written in mathematical code dawned only slowly on mankind." (1985:51).

"Things which may appear very complicated or unsystematic on the surface can turn out to be expressions of very simple mathematical relationships once the code is broken. When the physicist explores the world of nature, he may encounter what at first seems to be very involved, or even random behaviour. Later, with the help of proper mathematical theory, that behaviour can turn out to be a manifestation of disarmingly simple mathematics." (1985:51, 52).

"Nature is beautiful. We don’t know why this is so. But experience teaches us that beauty implies utility. Successful theories are always beautiful theories. They are beautiful not because they are successful, but because of their inherent symmetry and mathematical economy. ... Mathematics is a language, the language of nature. If you can’t speak a language you can’t understand the beauty of its poetry." - Davies, P. (1985:68, 69).

A Cosmic Plan

What scientific proof is there, that the material universe is a rational universe that it has been made according to a cosmic plan?

Prof. Paul Davies: Physicists "are sufficiently impressed by the way that the laws of nature hang together that they feel compelled to believe that there is something behind it all; in a pithy phrase of Fred Hoyle, ‘The universe is a put-up job.’ ... Every advance in fundamental physics seems to uncover yet another facet of order. The very success of the scientific method depends upon the fact that the physical world operates according to rational principles, which can therefore be discerned through rational inquiry. Logically, the universe does not have to be this way.

"We could conceive of a cosmos where chaos reigns. In place of the orderly and regimented behaviour of matter and energy one would have arbitrary and haphazard activity. Stable structures like atoms and people or stars could not exist. The real world is not this way. It is ordered and complex. Is that not itself an astonishing fact at which to marvel?" (1985:223).

The Harmony of Nature

What have scientists found out about the harmony in nature? How do they explain it?

Prof. Paul Davies: "In addition to its unity and order, physicists are deeply impressed by the unexpected harmony and coherence of nature. ... We don’t find, for example, that the laws of gravity conflict with those of electromagnetism or solid state physics. In many cases this consistency is not at all manifest, and is revealed only by careful analysis. A beautiful example close to my own area of research concerns the second law of thermodynamics. ... The second law governs the way in which energy and matter can be exchanged between systems in an ordered way, and effectively forbids us from using the same quantity of energy over and over again for a useful purpose such as to run a machine. In a nutshell, the second law states that disorder can never spontaneously give rise to order." (1985:224, 225).

A galaxy and its rotating parts, drawn schematically. Stars encircle the galaxy’s center of gravity, with spin 1, while turning around their own axis with spin ½. Planets encircle their star with spin 1, while turning around their own axis with spin ½. Down to the atomic and subatomic level: wheels are turning within wheels, like in a high-precision watch. Panck’s quantum of action ħ and ½ ħ do control the whole universe, with a precision of more than 1 : 10¹²⁰.

The wise Universe.

The universe is intelligent. It is wise. It knows about physical laws and natural constants. And it is able to work with them. A human physicist must first study physics for many years, before he is able to understand and to apply these physical laws. - Why does the universe know something, which a human being first has to learn? What further proof is there, that the universe is wise?

Prof. Paul Davies: "Who cannot fail to be struck by the ingenuity of the natural world? Nature is astonishing clever in the way it gets things to work. The entire superforce saga is a classical example of ingenious mechanism. Consider the business of gauge symmetries and of getting forces out of the need to maintain symmetry under general gauge transformations. A less ingenious Mother Nature would just have put the forces in ‘by hand’.

"Then contemplate the unification of the forces. How clever and elegant for all the forces needed to make our complex and interesting world to be generated out of just one superforce. Again, nature could have chosen the more brutish method of just giving us four straight forces. As if all this wasn’t enough! The fact that the whole gauge-field structure is mathematically precisely what is needed to describe the world in terms of the pure geometry of eleven dimensions - itself a unique structure with unexpected and most specific mathematical properties - seems like a miracle." (1985:232).

"Just as miraculous is not only what nature has given but what it has left out. The four forces are just enough to build a world of modest complexity. Without gravity, not only would there be now galaxies, stars, or planets, but the universe could not have even come into being, for the very notion of the expanding universe, and the big bang as the origin of spacetime, is rooted in gravity." (1985:232).

"Without electromagnetism there would be no atoms, no chemistry or biology, and no heat or light from the sun. If there were no strong nuclear force then nuclei could not exist, and so again there would be no atoms or molecules, no chemistry or biology, nor would the sun and stars be able to generate heat and light from nuclear energy. Even the weak force plays a crucial role in shaping the universe. If it did not exist, the nuclear reactions in the sun and stars could not proceed, and supernovae would probably not occur, and the vital life-giving heavy elements would therefore be unable to permeate the universe. Life might well be impossible. When we remember that these four very different types of force, each one vital for generating the complex structures that make our universe so active and interesting, all derive from a single, simple superforce, the ingenuity of it all literally boggles the mind." (1985:232, 233).

"What is equally remarkable is that although all four forces are necessary for a complex and interesting world, nature has not decided to ‘play it safe’ and throw in a couple more for good measure. This astonishing economy - just enough to do the job and no more - prompted the British mathematical physicist Euan Squires to ask, ‘Do we live in the simplest possible interesting world?’ Squires concluded that a universe which permits some sort of chemistry, and hence life, could not be constructed from sources and fields of a simpler nature than those we actually perceive." - Davies, P. (1985:233).

Do you know still more examples?

Prof. Paul Davies: "Physics is full of such examples of ingenuity and subtlety, and one could fill volumes discussing them. One final illustration will, I hope, suffice to also illustrate the themes of unity, order, and harmony. Fundamental to the notion of an orderly world is some degree of permanence. If the whole world changed erratically from instant to instant, chaos would reign. We want to be confident that the parked car stays parked, that the furniture stays put when arranged, that the Earth does not shoot off into stellar space, and so on. The property of matter ‘staying put’ is so basic to our experience that we rarely question it. The world would be horrific indeed if bodies flew off of their own accord, without any motivating agency." (1985:233).

Inorganic matter is made up of particles, and at the same time, also of waves? What does that prove?

Prof. Paul Davies: "This unity of principle between waves and particles is suggestive of a deep harmony in nature concerning motion. By the way in which nature achieves the straightline motion of the material body is brilliantly ingenious. At the quantum level a particle does not follow a precise trajectory at all, certainly not a straight line. Instead, its motion is fuzzy and chaotic. How can we build the orderly straight-line motion of a macroscopic body out of a chaotic quantum behaviour of its component atoms?

"Here nature seems to turn a sin into a virtue. - A quantum particle gets from A to B by ‘feeling out’ all possible paths simultaneously; remember how the single photon somehow goes through both slits in the Young’s interference experiment. More generally, we can imagine a particle such as an electron exploring all the various convulted paths that connect this point of departure with its point of arrival. By principle of democracy, each path contributes equally to the total wave that represents the electron, and which encodes the probability that it will arrive at a certain destination." (1985:234).

How does that work?

Prof. Paul Davies: "It is at this stage that the vital wave nature of the electron plays a part. ... when waves are superimposed, ‘interference’ results. If the waves are in step, they will re-enforce, if they are out of step they will cancel. When a large collection of waves are superimposed in a random way, the effect is wholesale cancellation. This is precisely what happens with all the convoluted paths followed by the electron. The waves associated with those paths essentially annihilate each other by destructive interference. The only paths for which this does not occur are those where all the waves just happen to be in phase with each other, and hence re-enforce rather than cancel.

"Exact enhancement only occurs along the straight-line path, and to a limited extend in the paths close to it. Hence the particle most probably follows the shortest route available. The degree to which a particle is likely to wander in an inditerminate way from the straight and narrow is determined by its mass. For an electron, the motion is highly erratic and ill-defined, but a heavier particle is less adventurous. In the limit of a large body such as a billiard ball, deviations from a straight-line path are infinitesimal. In this way the well-defined, straight-line trajectory of classical mechanics is recovered. Thus, the origin of the orderly behaviour of macroscopic bodies may be found in the quantum physics that ultimately underly them." - Davies, P. (1985:234, 235).

Design in Nature

How do scientists react, when they find planning or design in nature?

Prof. Paul Davies: "A common reaction among physicists to remarkable discoveries of the sort discussed above is a mixture of delight at the subtlety and elegance of nature, and of stupefication: ‘I would never have thought of doing it that way.’ If nature is so ‘clever’ that it can exploit mechanisms that amaze us with their ingenuity, is it not persuasive evidence for the existence of intelligent design behind the physical universe? If the world’s finest minds can unravel only with difficulty the deeper workings of nature, how could it be supposed that those workings are merely a mindless accident, a product of blind chance?"

"Once again, the crossword puzzle analogy is appropriate here. Uncovering the laws of physics resembles completing a crossword in a number of ways. Nature provides us with ‘clues’, often cryptic, and the solutions to the puzzle usually involve subtleties. The laws are not manifest in a casual inspection of the world. Rather, they are hidden behind the more obvious activity and can be discovered only by digging beneath the surface.

"The laws of atomic and nuclear physics would never be apparent without special technology and carefully designed experiments. Nature confronts us with something like the cryptic clues of a crossword. Solving the clues requires considerable ingenuity, practice, and inspiration, for the answers are rarely obvious. When several ‘clues’ have been solved, a pattern begins to emerge. As in a crossword, where the words interlock in a consistent and orderly arrangement, so the laws of nature interlock consistently, and we then begin to discern the remarkable orderliness of nature... The world is a conjunction of physical mechanisms. This conjunction does not lead to a haphazard jumble of effects, as might be so easy, but to a carefully organized harmony.

"In the case of the crossword, it would never occur to us to suppose that the words just happened to fall into a consistent interlocking pattern by accident, that the subtlety and ingenuity of the clues are merely brute facts of no significance, or the product of our own minds attempting to make sense of meaningless information. Yet one frequently encounters precisely these arguments concerning the miracle of nature, which is overwhelmingly more subtle and ingenious than any crossword. If, then, we do not doubt that the order, consistency, and harmony of a crossword imply that the puzzle is the product of an ingenious, inventive mind, why are such doubts voiced in the case of the universe? Why is the evidence of design so compelling in one case but not in the other?" - Davies, P. (1985:236).

How can one find out now, if there are design and order in a physical system?

Prof. Paul Davies: "There are objective ways of determining the existence of order in a physical system. The order of living organisms, for example, is clearly no figment of our imagination. When it comes to fundamental physics, the laws of nature find expression in mathematical structures which are often known to mathematicians well in advance of their application to the real world. The mathematical description is not simply invented to give a tidy description of nature. Often the fit between the world and a particular mathematical structure comes as a complete surprise. The mathematical order emerges as the physical system is analysed." (1985:237).

Could you give an example?

Prof. Paul Davies: "A good example is provided by the eleven-dimensional description of the forces of nature. The mathematical ‘miracle’ that the same laws, which govern the forces, can be expressed in terms of some previously obscure geometrical properties of a multidimensional space must be considered amazing. The order that is being revealed here has not been imposed, but has emerged from lengthy mathematical analysis.

"No physicist would seriously believe that his subject matter was in fact a disorderly and meaningless mess, and that the laws of physics represented no real advance of our understanding. It would be ludicrous to suppose that all science is merely an artificial invention of the mind bearing no more relationship to reality than the constellation of Pisces bears to the real fish." - Davies, P. (1985:237).

Physical Laws and Order

Where do we find order within the universe? And what does this order have to do with the laws of physics?

Prof. Paul Davies: "... there is the order involved in symmetry and simplicity. This sort of order can be both spatial and temporal. A good example of the former is provided by the crystal lattice. In a crystal the atoms lock together in a regular array forming a simple geometrical pattern with a high degree of symmetry. This underlying atomic pattern is reflected in the symmetric shapes that the crystals tend to display, such as the cubic shapes of salt crystals. It is this atomic symmetry that is ultimately responsible for the regular shapes of snowflakes. A second example of spatial order is the arrangement of the solar system, in which nearly spherical planets revolve in nearly circular orbits around a nearly spherical sun." (1985:240).

What causes this order within the crystal lattice of the atom?

Prof. Paul Davies: "In both of these examples we can trace the origin of the spatial order to symmetries in the underlying laws of physics which control the system concerned. Many physical systems have stable states which display a high degree of symmetry and simplicity. Of course, we still have to explain how the systems get into such states in the first place. One reason is that complicated states tend to be unstable. The lowest energy state of the hydrogen atom, for example, is spherically symmetric, whereas most of the excited states are not.

"Similarly, the equilibrium shape of a gravitating fluid body (without rotation) is a perfect sphere. We have seen how it is a universal low of nature that physical systems seek out their lowest energy states. If a system begins with excess energy (i.e. excited states) all sorts of mechanisms generally exist to rob it of this energy. For this reason, spatial order is a common feature in the world. It is important, however, to remember that it owes its origin to the spatial order already contained in the laws of physics. If, for example, the force of gravity were more complicated, and depended upon the orientation of two bodies as well as their separation, the planets would follow much more erratic orbits." - Davies, P. (1985:240).

Temporal Order

We have looked at the spatial order within the crystal lattice and its origin within the physical laws. What does one know now about the temporal order within inorganic matter?

Prof. Paul Davies: "This is exemplified by the regularity of many natural processes: the ticking of a clock, the vibrations of an atom, the pattern of day and night, summer and winter. Again, these regularities can be traced to the underlying laws of physics, which frequently permit simple periodic behaviour. Indeed, periodic motion, or oscillation, is perhaps the most widespread example of order in physics. Wavelike oscillations lie at the heart of all quantum motion; electromagnetic waves carry heat and light across the universe; planets, stars, and galaxies all involve objects moving on periodic orbits through space."

"In addition to the orderly motion of material bodies there is a deeper sort of temporal order in the world which is implicit in the very notion of the laws of nature, and which is often taken completely for granted. The fact that there are laws at all implies a certain consistency in the world from one moment to the next. At its most basic level this consistency is simply that the world continues to exist. Moreover, the laws do not change from epoch to epoch (they would not be regarded as laws if they did). The Earth follows an elliptical path around the sun today just as it has done for millions of years." (1985:241).

Where is this spatial and temporal order sitting within the inorganic matter of the physical universe? Why does it know about this spatial and temporal order?

Prof. Paul Davies: "Neither spatial nor temporal order is merely an incidental feature of the world; both are built into the underlying laws themselves. It is the laws which encapsulate the astonishing orderliness of the world, rather than the actual physical structures. These laws are doubly remarkable because they permit both the order of spatial and temporal simplicity and the order of complex organization." (1985:241).

The Intelligent Universe

Where else do we find intelligence and design in the physical universe? And from where have this intelligence and design come?

Prof. Paul Davies says under the heading "Is there a meaning behind existence?": "It is interesting to ask just how improbable it is that the laws of physics permit complex structures to exist. How finely must these laws be ‘tuned’?

"In a famous article in the journal Nature British astrophysicists Bernard Carr and Martin Rees concluded that the world is extraordinarily sensitive to even minute changes in the laws of physics, so that if the particular set of laws we have were to be altered in some way the universe would change beyond recognition.

"Carr and Rees found that the existence of complex structures seems to depend very sensitively on such numerical values that nature has assigned to the so-called fundamental constants, the numbers which determine the scale of physical phenomena. Among these constants are the speed of light, the masses of the various subatomic particles, and a number of ‘coupling’ constants, such as the elementary unit of charge, which determines how strong the various fields act on matter. The actual numerical values adopted by these quantities determine many of the gross features of the world, such as the sizes of the atoms, planets, and stars, the density of material in the universe, the lifetime of stars, and even the height of animals.

"Most of the complex structures observed in the universe are the product of a competition of balance between competing forces. Stars, for example, while superficially quiescent, are actually a battleground in the interplay between the four forces. Gravity tries to crush the stars. Electromagnetic energy fights against it by providing an internal pressure. The energy involved is released from the nuclear processes legislated by the weak and strong force. In these circumstances, where a tightly interlocking competition occurs, the structure of the system depends delicately on the strengths of the forces, or the numerical values of the fundamental constants.

"Astrophysicist Brandon Carr has studied the stellar battleground in detail, and he finds that there is an almost unbelievable delicacy in the balance between gravity and electromagnetism within a star. Calculations show that changes in the strength of either force by only one part in 10⁴⁰ would spell catastrophe for stars like the sun.

"Many other important physical structures are highly sensitive to minor alterations in the relative strengths of the forces. For example, a small percentage increase in the strength of the strong force would have caused all the hydrogen nuclei in the universe to have been consumed in the big bang, leaving a cosmos devoid of its most important stellar fuel. The sheer improbability that these felicitous concurrences could be the result of a series of exceptionally lucky accidents has prompted many scientists to agree with Hoyle’s pronouncement that ‘the universe is a put-up job’." (1985:242)

Why is there a universe with its laws and its order? What do you conclude from your work as a theoretical physicist?

Prof. Paul Davies: "The laws which enable the universe to come into being spontaneously seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us." (1985:243).