The Ultimate Mystery
I mentioned in Section 5.2 (The Goldilocks universe) that our Goldilocks universe has been cited as evidence for a Designer. Just when it seemed that an infinitude of mathematical structures could render our Goldilocks universes as unremarkable, demolishing the case for a Designer, we have had to abandon the idea of the other mathematical structures, leaving us without a secular explanation with which to refute the Intelligent Design claim.
At the end of the day, whichever path we choose to go down, the Designer route or the mathematical structure route, we shall be faced with the same question: “…and what caused that?”. If we could ever learn why mathematical structures similar to our multiverse are censored, then, even if we thought we understood the answer, that would raise more questions, the answers to which would raise yet more in turn. The same is true for the Designer route.
So the message to take from all this is that, yes, it seems that there is a higher reality beyond our own, and its nature, and its relationship with our own, could be the catalyst for speculation lasting far into our future. We might begin by exploring the root event common to all of the universes in the multiverse for clues to its structure (and maybe, as a byproduct of that investigation, discover ways to test the topology of our early universe which may then be used to support our controversial prediction that the universe is closed and finite.)
Finding in Step 5.3 (Who ordered that?) that our multiverse is unique is altogether a different matter – that came completely out of the blue. It does indeed seem as though mathematics has been interfered with – it is a preposterous idea! It reminds me of the wonderful ending in Carl Sagan’s only work of fiction, Contact (and if you don’t want me to spoil it for you, then you should skip the next two paragraphs). I recall a train journey that I shared with a religious colleague, telling him that the only “evidence” that would ever have a chance of converting me, an atheist, to agnosticism, would be something like the situation described in the last pages of Contact. He completely missed the point I was making, and so I might not do justice to Sagan’s lovely idea, but I’ll try.
In the book, Ellie Arroway detects a message sent by aliens, with whom she eventually makes further contact. They tell her that they know of a message hidden within one of the important numbers in mathematics, but that they haven’t found it yet. In the final pages, Ellie instructs her computer to calculate the digits in the number π in base 11 (instead of the familiar decimal base 10), and, very close to the beginning of this sequence of digits, there is a long string of 1’s and 0’s. The total number of 1’s and 0’s in this long string is the product of two prime numbers, and so the 1’s and 0’s can be printed out as a two-dimensional array on a sheet of paper. When the computer does this, what appears on the paper is a perfect circle!
Now, if you could calculate the digits in any irrational number in any base, you would eventually come across every possible sequence of digits, including the 1’s and 0’s that Ellie found making up the circle. What is remarkable, according to the story, is not that such a circle exists, but that it exists so early in the calculated sequence of digits. To insert such a sequence would be beyond even the powers of the Intelligent Designer, because this isn’t a matter of making fine adjustments to the constants of physics: it is meddling with mathematics and logic itself! It would be like fixing things so that 2 + 2 = 5¼ – it would be beyond all comprehension. It would be the ultimate cosmic joke!
Interestingly, the argument of the Designer camp and the argument from censoring alternative mathematical structures are, in a sense, the obverse of each other. The Designer camp points to the values of all the physical constants that had to be “just right”, and says that this is beyond any coincidence – the universe (quantum multiverse) must have been designed. The censoring argument gets rid of all the confounding “near miss” quantum multiverses, leaving our own quantum multiverse to stand alone. It is as though the Sculptor is confronted with a huge block of marble containing every potential shape hidden within it, and chips away at all the unwanted multiverse material like Michaelangelo removing all the superfluous stone to reveal his beautiful David! We discredited the case for the Designer by showing that our quantum multiverse is but one of an infinite number of differing multiverses, only to find that all of the others have been erased by the Sculptor!
How literally are we to take the Sculptor? By mischievously endowing the multiverse filter with a name that implies vision and intention, we short-circuited the discussion. The existence of a Designer was predicated upon what we perceive as our universe’s life-friendly conditions being the result of some cosmic choice, but, on the other hand, the existence of a multiverse filter was deduced from the purely objective observation that quantum outcomes in our universe conform to a pattern (the Born rule), uncontaminated by other multiverses.
Hence, discussion of our existence was relieved of its anthropocentric component, thus removing the pressure of identifying just what qualities in our universe make it so special that we feel impelled to account for its existence purely on the basis of those qualities. If we accept the objective argument that our quantum multiverse is unique, we are then free to contemplate just how unpalatable our unique multiverse might otherwise have been – no planets, no stars, no chemistry, nothing! We seem to have displaced the burden of choosing the Goldilocks definition of our multiverse from ourselves to the multiverse filter. In other words, while showing that our multiverse is unique in no way depends upon what human beings think is “just right”, nevertheless, it does seem remarkable that all the “bad” multiverses have been objectively filtered out! We may be forgiven for wondering if the filtering is not, after all, subjective!
This is as far as I can take you at the moment. To go any further without new arguments and observations to point the way would be to speculate too far. Do not feel frustrated that I am leaving you with a seemingly impenetrable enigma. Ultimately, there will be truths about the origin of our universe and quantum multiverse that we can no more prove in our universe than the truth of an undecidable proposition can be proved within the mathematical system that expresses it (think of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem). What we have done in this website is to see how the results of certain quantum experiments, when considered together, point to the likelihood of reality above our own – the very structure of the quantum multiverse – and to bring into sharp focus the boundaries and shape of the mystery that has eluded humankind throughout its brief time on Earth. This is at least a more honest approach than that which we inherited from the untold numbers of religions that inevitably evolved with self-awareness.
So in the end, have I been converted from atheism to agnosticism? Well, it’s hard to let go of a conviction that I have held ever since I became an adult. Of course, as you’ll have gathered from the above discussion, the agnosticism that I’m talking about here has nothing to do with the religions, ancient and latter-day, that have been passed down through the generations; rather, it is a recognition that the true account of our existence will never be fully understood. In the final analysis, our existence will always remain a mystery to us. What is important is not solving the mystery, but the journey we make in trying to understand it better. The journey will never end, but on the way, I hope we shall learn to acknowledge, and celebrate, and love that we are part of our universe, and our multiverse, and our higher reality, and, yes, part of the mystery, too.