Baby Bear's universe

The idea of Intelligent Design is pretty flimsy, at least when it comes to biology.  The argument boils down to something the ID proponents call irreducible complexity -- that there are some features in organisms that are simply too complex, requiring too many interlocking parts, to have evolved through natural selection.  The problem is, the ones most commonly cited, such as the vertebrate eye, have been explained pretty thoroughly, with nothing needed but a good understanding of genetics, biochemistry, and physiology to comprehend how they evolved.  The best takedown of biological ID remains Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker, which absolutely shreds the arguments of ID proponents like Michael Behe.  (Yes, I know Dawkins has recently made statements indicating that he holds some fairly repulsive opinions; I never said he was a nice guy, but there's no doubt that his writings on evolutionary biology are on-point.)

While biological ID isn't worth much, there's a curious idea from physics that has even the reputable scientists wondering.  It has to do with the number of parameters (by some estimates, around thirty of them) in the Standard Model of Particle Physics and the Theories of Relativity that don't appear to be derivable from first principles; in other words, we know of no compelling reason why they are the values they are, and those values are only known empirically.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cush, Standard Model of Elementary Particles, CC BY 3.0]

More eye-opening is the fact that for most of them, if they held any other values -- in some cases, off by only a couple of percent either way -- the universe would be uninhabitable.

Here are a few examples:

• The degree of anisotropy (unevenness in density) of the cosmic microwave background radiation.  This is thought to reflect the "clumpiness" of matter in the early universe, which amounts to about one part in ten thousand.  If it was only a little bigger -- one part in a thousand -- the mutual attraction of those larger clumps of matter would have triggered early gravitational collapse, and the universe would now be composed almost entirely of supermassive black holes.  Only a little smaller -- one part in a hundred thousand -- and there would have been insufficient gravitational attraction to form stars, and the universe would be a thin, cold fog of primordial hydrogen and helium.

• The fact that electrons have a spin of one-half, making them fermions.  Fermions have an odd property; two can't occupy the same quantum mechanical state, something called the Pauli Exclusion Principle.  (Bosons, such as photons, don't have that restriction, and can pass right through one another.)  This feature is why electrons exist in orbitals in atoms.  If they had integer spin, there would be no such thing as chemistry.

• The masses of the various subatomic particles.  To take only one example, if the quarks that make up protons and neutrons were much heavier, the strong nuclear force would all but evaporate -- meaning that the nuclei of atoms would fly apart.  (Well, more accurately, they never would have formed in the first place.)

• The value of the fine-structure constant, which is about 1/137 (it's a dimensionless number, so it doesn't matter what units you use).  This constant determines, among other things, the relative strength of the electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces.  Any larger, and atoms would collapse; any smaller, and they would break apart into their fundamental particles.

• The value of the gravitational constant G.  It's about 6.67 x 10^-11 meters cubed per kilogram per second -- i.e., a really tiny number, meaning gravity is an extremely weak force.  If G was larger, stars would burn through their hydrogen fuel much faster, and it's doubtful they'd live long enough for planets to have time to evolve intelligent life.  If G was smaller, there wouldn't be enough gravitational pull to initiate fusion in the first place.  No fusion = no stars.

• The flatness of the universe.  While space near massive objects is curved as per the General Theory of Relativity, its overall shape is apparently Euclidean.  Its makeup -- around 5% conventional matter and energy, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy -- is exactly what you'd need to generate a flat universe.

• The imbalance between matter and antimatter.  There appears to be no reason why, at the Big Bang, there weren't exactly equal numbers of matter and antimatter particles created.  But in fact -- and fortunately for us -- there was a very slight imbalance favoring matter.  The estimate is that there was about one extra unpaired matter particle out of every one hundred million pairs, so when the pairs underwent mutual annihilation, those few extra particles were left over.  The survivors became the matter we have today; without that tiny imbalance, the entire universe today would be filled with nothing but photons.

• The cosmological constant -- a repulsive force exerted by space itself (which is the origin of dark energy).  This is the most amazing one, because for a long time, physicists thought the cosmological constant was exactly zero; Einstein looked upon his introduction of a nonzero cosmological constant as an inexcusable fudge factor in his equations, and called his attempt to shoehorn it in as his "greatest blunder."  In fact, recent studies show that the cosmological constant does exist, but it's so close to zero that it's hard to imagine -- it's about a decimal point, followed by 121 zeroes, followed by a 3 (as expressed in Planck units).  But if it was exactly zero, the universe would have collapsed by now -- and any bigger than it is, and the expansion of space would have overwhelmed gravity and torn apart matter completely!

And so on and so forth.  The degree of fine-tuning that seems to be required to set all these independent parameters so that the conditions are juuuuuust right for our existence (to borrow a phrase from Baby Bear) strikes a lot of people, even some diehard rationalist physicists, as mighty peculiar.  As cosmologist Fred Hoyle put it, "It looks very much as if a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology."

The idea that some Master Architect twiddled the knobs on the various constants in physics, setting them exactly as needed for the production of matter and ultimately ourselves, is called the Strong Anthropic Principle.  It sets a lot of people's teeth on edge -- it's a little too much like the medieval idea of humanity's centrality in the universe, something that was at the heart of the resistance to Copernicus's heliocentric model.  It seems like all science has done since then is to move us farther from the center -- first, the Earth orbits the Sun; then, the stars themselves are suns, and our own Sun is only a smallish and rather ordinary one; then, the Sun and planets aren't central to the galaxy; and finally, our own galaxy is only one of billions.

Now, suddenly, the fine-tuning argument has seemingly thrust us back into a central position.  However small a piece of the cosmos we actually represent, was it all set this way for our benefit?

In his book The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind answers this with a resounding "no."  His argument, which is sometimes called the Weak Anthropic Principle, looks at the recent advances in string theory, inflation, and cosmology, and suggests that the apparent fine-tuning is because the cosmos we're familiar with is only one pocket universe in a (much) larger "landscape," where the process of dropping into a lower energy state triggers not only expansion, but sets the values of the various physical parameters.  Afterward, each of those bubbles is then governed by its own physics.  Most would be inhospitable to life; a great many probably don't have atoms heavier than helium.  Some probably have very short life spans, collapsing almost immediately after formation.  And the models suggest that the number of different possible configurations -- different settings on the knobs, if you will -- might be as many as ten to the five-hundredth power.

That's a one followed by five hundred zeroes.

Susskind suggests that we live in this more-or-less friendly one not because the constants were selected by a deity with us in mind, but because if our universe's constants had any other value, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.  It might be extremely unlikely that a universe would have exactly these settings, but if you have that many universes to choose from, they're going to show up that way somewhere.

We only exist because this particular universe is the one that got the values right on the nose.

While I think this makes better sense than the Master Architect idea of the Strong Anthropic Principle -- and I certainly don't want to pretend I could argue the point with a physicist of Susskind's caliber -- I have to admit feeling a twinge of discomfort still.  Having all of those parameters line up so perfectly just seems like too much of coincidence to swallow.  It does occur to me that in my earlier statement, that the constants aren't derivable from first principles, I should amend that by adding "as far as we understand at the moment."  After all, the geocentric model, and a lot of other discredited ideas, were discarded not because they overestimated our importance, but because we got better data and used it to assemble a more accurate theory.  It may be that some of these parameters are actually constrained -- they couldn't have any other value than the one they do -- we just haven't figured out why yet.

After all, that's my main criticism of Intelligent Design in biology; it boils down to the argument from incredulity -- I can't imagine how this could have happened, so it must be that God did it.

That said, the best models of physics we now have don't give us any clue of why the thirty-odd free parameters in the Standard Model are what they are, so for now, the Weak Anthropic Principle is the best we can do, at least as far as scientific approaches go.  That we live in a Baby Bear universe is no more mysterious than why you find fish in a lake and not in a sand dune.  Our hospitable surroundings are merely good fortune -- a lucky break that was not shared in the other ten-to-the-five-hundredth-power universes (minus one) out there in the cosmic landscape.

****************************************

The asymmetrical universe

I'm currently reading the 2006 book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, by the brilliant theoretical physicist Lisa Randall.  As you might imagine from the title, it's a provocative and mind-blowing read.  And although it's written for laypeople, with most of the abstruse mathematics removed -- theoretical physics is, honestly, 99% math -- I must admit that a good chunk of it is going so far over my head that it doesn't even ruffle my hair.

The rest, though, is way cool.

The heart of the book is the consideration of superstring theory as a model for the way the universe is built.  The idea -- at least at the level I understand it -- is that the fundamental building block of matter and energy is the string, a one-dimensional structure that can either be open-ended or a closed loop, and the various manifestations we see (particles, for instance) are the different vibrational modes of those strings.  But deeply embedded in this model is the idea that the universe has fundamental symmetries, which unify seemingly disparate forces and allow you to make predictions about what exists but is as yet undiscovered based upon what might be necessary to complete the symmetry of the theory.

This search for underlying patterns in what we see around us drives a lot of theoretical physics.  And certainly there are times the approach pays off.  It was that mode of inquiry that allowed Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg to come up with electroweak theory, which showed that at high enough energy the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces act as a single force.  (It was later experimentally confirmed, and the three won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for the discovery.)  Carrying this approach to its extreme are people like Garrett Lisi, whose eight-dimensional model of particle physics (based upon a mathematical structure called a Lie group) tries to unify everything we know from experimental results into a symmetrical whole based upon it seeming to fit into a pattern that is "too beautiful not to be true."

The superstring model, too, makes predictions of particles and forces, largely based upon arguments of symmetry and symmetry breaking.  Each of the particles in the Standard Model should, the math tells us, have a "supersymmetric partner" -- each known fermion paired with a boson with the same charge and similar interactions, but a higher mass, and vice versa.

Experimental confirmation, of course, is the hill on which scientific theories live or die, and what the theorists need is hard evidence that these predicted particles exist.  Randall's book is peppered with optimistic statements such as the following:

In a few years, CERN will be the nexus of some of the most exciting physics results.  The Large Hadron Collider, which will be able to reach seven times the present energy of the Tevatron, will be located there, and any discoveries made at the LHC will almost inevitably be something qualitatively new.  Experiments at the LHC will seek -- and very likely find -- the as yet unknown physics that underlies the Standard Model.

Randall's book was published in 2006; the LHC came online in 2008.

And in the sixteen years since then, not a single particle has been found confirming superstring theory -- no superpartners, no Kaluza-Klein particles, nothing.  It did find the Higgs boson, which was a coup, but that was already predicted by the Standard Model, and didn't explain anything about the fundamental messiness of particle physics; why particles have the masses they do, forces have the strength they do, and (most vexing) why the extremely weak gravitational force seems to be irreconcilable with the other three.

This understandably bothers the absolute hell out of a lot of particle physicists.  It just seems like the most fundamental theory of everything should be a lot more elegant than it is, and that there should be some underlying beautiful mathematical logic to it all.  Instead, we have a model that works, but has a lot of what seem like arbitrary parameters.

But the fact is, every one of the efforts to get the Standard Model to fit into a more beautiful and elegant theoretical framework has failed.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in a brilliant but stinging takedown of the current approach that you really should watch in its entirety, puts it this way: "If you follow news about particle physics, then you know that it comes in three types.  It's either that they haven't found that thing they were looking for, or they've come up with something new to look for which they'll later report not having found, or it's something so boring you don't even finish reading the headline."  Her opinion is that the entire driving force behind it -- research to try to find a theory based on beautiful mathematics -- is misguided.  Maybe the actual universe simply is messy.  Maybe a lot of the parameters of physics, such as particle masses and the values of constants, truly are arbitrary (i.e., they don't arise from any deeper theoretical reason; they simply are what they're measured to be, and that's that).  In her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, she describes how this century-long quest to unify physics with some ultra-elegant model has generated very close to nothing in the way of results, and maybe we should accept that the untidy Standard Model is just the way things are.

Because there's one thing that's undeniable: the Standard Model works.  Just to give one recent example, a paper last year in Physical Review Letters described a set of experiments showing that a test of the Standard Model passed with a precision that beggars belief -- in this case, a measurement of the electron's magnetic moment that agreed with the predicted value to within 0.1 billionths of a percent.

This puts the Standard Model in the category of being one of the most thoroughly-tested and stunningly accurate models not only in all of physics, but in all of science.  As mind-blowingly bizarre as quantum mechanics is, there's no doubt that it has passed enough tests that in just about any other field, the experimenters and the theoreticians would be high-fiving each other and heading off to the pub for a celebratory pint of beer.  Instead, they keep at it, because so many of them feel that despite the unqualified successes of the Standard Model, there's something deeply unsatisfactory about it.  Hossenfelder explains that this is a completely wrong-headed approach; that real discoveries in the field were made when there was some necessary modification of the model that needed to be made, not just because you think the model isn't pretty enough:

If you look at past predictions in the foundations of physics which turned out to be correct, and which did not simply confirm an existing theory, you find it was those that made a necessary change to the theory.  The Higgs boson, for example, is necessary to make the Standard Model work.  Antiparticles, predicted by Dirac, are necessary to make quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity.  Neutrinos were necessary to explain observation [of beta radioactive decay].  Three generations of quarks were necessary to explain C-P violation.  And so on...  A good strategy is to focus on those changes that resolve an inconsistency with data, or an internal inconsistency.

And the truth is, when the model you already have is predicting with an accuracy of 0.1 billionths of a percent, there just aren't a lot of inconsistencies there to resolve.

I have to admit that I get the particle physicists' yearning for something deeper.  John Keats's famous line, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty; that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know" has a real resonance for me.  But at the same time, it's hard to argue Hossenfelder's logic.

Maybe the cosmos really is kind of a mess, with lots of arbitrary parameters and empirically-determined constants.  We may not like it, but as I've observed before, the universe is under no obligation to be structured in such a way as to make us comfortable.  Or, as my grandma put it -- more simply, but no less accurately -- "I've found that wishin' don't make it so."

****************************************

Beauty, truth, and the Standard Model

A couple of days ago, I was talking with my son about the Standard Model of Particle Physics (as one does).

The Standard Model is a theoretical framework that explains what is known about the (extremely) submicroscopic world, including three of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force), and classifies all known subatomic particles.

Many particle physicists, however, are strongly of the opinion that the model is flawed.  One issue is that one of the four fundamental forces -- gravitation -- has never been successfully incorporated into the model, despite eighty years of the best minds in science trying to do that.  The discovery of dark matter and dark energy -- or at least the effects thereof -- is also unaccounted for by the model.  Neither does it explain baryon asymmetry, the fact that there is so much more matter than antimatter in the observable universe.  Worst of all is that it leaves a lot of the quantities involved -- such as particle masses, relative strengths of forces, and so on -- as empirically-determined rather than proceeding organically from the theoretical underpinnings.

This bothers the absolute hell out of a lot of particle physicists.  They have come up with modification after modification to try to introduce new symmetries that would make it seem not quite so... well, arbitrary.  It just seems like the most fundamental theory of everything should be a lot more elegant than it is, and that there should be some underlying beautiful mathematical logic to it all.  The truth is, the Standard Model is messy.

Every one of those efforts to create a more beautiful and elegant model has failed.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in a brilliant but stinging takedown of the current approach that you really should watch in its entirety, puts it this way: "If you follow news about particle physics, then you know that it comes in three types.  It's either that they haven't found that thing they were looking for, or they've come up with something new to look for which they'll later report not having found, or it's something so boring you don't even finish reading the headline."  Her opinion is that the entire driving force behind it -- research to try to find a theory based on beautiful mathematics -- is misguided.  Maybe the actual universe simply is messy.  Maybe a lot of the parameters of physics, such as particle masses and the values of constants, truly are arbitrary (i.e., they don't arise from any deeper theoretical reason; they simply are what they're measured to be, and that's that).  In her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, she describes how this century-long quest to unify physics with some ultra-elegant model has generated very close to nothing in the way of results, and maybe we should accept that the untidy Standard Model is just the way things are.

Because there's one thing that's undeniable: the Standard Model works.  In fact, what generated this post (besides the conversation with my science-loving son) is a paper that appeared last week in Physical Review Letters about a set of experiments showing that the most recent tests of the Standard Model passed with a precision that beggars belief -- in this case, a measurement of the electron's magnetic moment which agreed with the predicted value to within 0.1 billionths of a percent.

This puts the Standard Model in the category of being one of the most thoroughly-tested and stunningly accurate models not only in all of physics, but in all of science.  As mind-blowingly bizarre as quantum mechanics is, there's no doubt that it has passed enough tests that in just about any other field, the experimenters and the theoreticians would be high-fiving each other and heading off to the pub for a celebratory pint of beer.  Instead, they keep at it, because so many of them feel that despite the unqualified successes of the Standard Model, there's something deeply unsatisfactory about it.  Hossenfelder explains that this is a completely wrong-headed approach; that real discoveries in the field were made when there was some necessary modification of the model that needed to be made, not just because you think the model isn't pretty enough:

If you look at past predictions in the foundations of physics which turned out to be correct, and which did not simply confirm an existing theory, you find it was those that made a necessary change to the theory.  The Higgs boson, for example, is necessary to make the Standard Model work.  Antiparticles, predicted by Dirac, are necessary to make quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity.  Neutrinos were necessary to explain observation [of beta radioactive decay].  Three generations of quarks were necessary to explain C-P violation.  And so on...  A good strategy is to focus on those changes that resolve an inconsistency with data, or an internal inconsistency.  

And the truth is, when the model you already have is predicting with an accuracy of 0.1 billionths of a percent, there just aren't a lot of inconsistencies there to resolve.

I have to admit that I get the particle physicists' yearning for something deeper.  John Keats's famous line, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty; that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know" has a real resonance for me.  But at the same time, it's hard to argue Hossenfelder's logic.

Maybe the cosmos really is kind of a mess, with lots of arbitrary parameters and empirically-determined constants.  We may not like it, but as I've observed before, the universe is under no obligation to be structured in such a way as to make us comfortable.  Or, as my grandma put it -- more simply, but no less accurately -- "I've found that wishin' don't make it so."

****************************************

The Higgs boson visits Atlantis

Well, the Higgs boson is apparently a reality, a finding that had one CERN researcher stating to reporters, "A lot of bets are going to be settled up today."  The likelihood that the particle observed in two separate experiments, CMS and ATLAS, was the Higgs was placed at 99.9999%, which seems like pretty good odds to me.  (Source)

The finding is a major vindication for the Standard Model, the theory that describes how particles interact, generating fields, forces, and a variety of other phenomena, and will surely be the springboard to launch a whole new set of experiments designed to expand what we know about physics.

Unfortunately, it has already been the springboard for a variety of Non-Standard Models by woo-woos who take the Higgs boson's nickname ("The God Particle") far too literally.  And it didn't help that within the past few weeks we have had announcements from two other fields, Mayan archaeology (the discovery of a text that allegedly confirms the calendar "end date" of December 21, 2012) and paleoclimatology/geology (a seafloor survey that describes the topography of "Doggerland," the land mass that spanned what is now the southern North Sea between Britain and Denmark when the sea level was lower, during the last ice age).

Maybe you'll see where this is going when I tell you that the media has already nicknamed Doggerland "Atlantis."  (Sources here and here)

So.  Yeah.  Higgs boson + Mayans + Atlantis = WHOA.  And if you add the Easter Island statues into the mix, we just have a coalescence of woo-woo-ness that makes you wonder why we don't just have a Celestial Convergence right here in our living rooms, just from reading about it.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will not be surprised that the assembly of these four unrelated topics together into some kind of Cosmic Hash is the brainchild of frequent flyer Diane Tessman, who has written about it here.  Ms. Tessman starts off with a little bit of self-congratulation:

It’s been a week of exciting, dynamic 2012 events! I made a prediction back in the early 1990s that archeological discoveries in the final phase of the Change Times would be landmark events that would answer long-unanswered questions.

I predicted that not only these landmarks were significant in themselves but they would be a catalyst for UFO disclosure, alien landings, and a change in reality-perception (level of consciousness) for all humankind.

Maybe my predictions expect too much to manifest from these pivotal archeological discoveries but this is not the time to be a skeptic, because after all, I was right about the astounding discoveries. We shall see about the rest of my predictions in the future.

Yup.  That we shall.

She then goes on to describe (1) how the discovery of mammoth bones, human artifacts, and terrestrial features like river beds on the North Sea floor shows that Atlantis is real, (2) the discovery that the Easter Island moai statues have bodies shows that UFOs are real, (3) the discovery of the new Mayan text shows that the whole Mayan prophecy nonsense is real, and (4) the discovery of the Higgs boson shows that God/Celestial Consciousness is real.  Or something like that.  With Diane Tessman, it's hard to tell, sometimes.  Here's what she had to say about the Higgs:

So, science has confirmed what spiritual people knew all along: There is a God Spark, a God particle. Of course many people feel “it” (he/she/it) is within us, not out there in the universe of physics. Truth might be, it is everywhere, just as sub-atomic particles are everywhere and just as consciousness itself is everywhere. The universe is consciousness!

Yup, I'm sure that's what the physicists at CERN are saying today.  "Wow, I'm glad we showed that the Higgs exists.  But after all, I felt it all around me, all the time, because, you know, consciousness.  And god.  And everything.  So we really didn't need to do that experiment, we could have just experienced the Higgs."

I get kind of hot under the collar when people who don't understand science hijack discoveries made by actual trained, working scientists for their own silly purposes.  It misleads, it muddies the water, and (worst) it cheapens the years of work done by the people who are some of the clearest thinkers in the world.  I'll be the first to admit that I understand only the vaguest, shallowest bits of the Standard Model and how the Higgs boson fits into it; but then, I don't go pontificating to my readers about what it all means as if I were a physicist.

Okay.  I should just calm down a little, because (after all) it's not like the scientists at CERN (or the geologists who are studying Doggerland, or any other working researchers) are losing much sleep over Ms. Tessman and her ilk.  So, I guess, let her have her spiritual quantum-physics-powered UFOs from Atlantis, or whatever the hell it is she believes in.  Me, I'm just going to have another cup of coffee and read some more press releases from the physicists, because however you interpret it, you have to admit that this stuff about the Higgs boson is pretty freakin' cool.