The mystery of the cosmological constant

Alexander Friedmann
(Александр Фридман)

This post completes a previous post with a similar title:

The problem of the cosmological constant.

First of all, we should define three different concepts that could be closely related:

1. Vacuum energy: due to the constant appearance of pairs of particles and antiparticles that immediately mutually disintegrate, so they are undetectable through direct experimentation. Their appearance is a consequence of the uncertainty principle: ΔE×Δt<ħ/2, which implies that a particle with energy ΔE can appear spontaneously during a time Δt<ħ/(2ΔE), which is smaller for larger ΔE. Thus, a virtual electron would last less than 4×10^-21 seconds. A proton, whose mass is 1837 times greater, would last 1837 times less. By applying quantum field theory to all the known particles, the energy of the vacuum can be estimated.
2. The cosmological constant: introduced by Einstein in his cosmological equation, which in the format devised by Alexander Friedman is expressed as follows: The symbol Λ is the cosmological constant. Einstein proposed a negative value, to compensate for a cosmic expansion, in which he initially did not believe. Today it is thought to be positive, which would explain the accelerated expansion of the universe discovered in 1998.

3. Dark energy: an unknown agent that would cause the accelerated expansion of the universe.

They bark, therefore we ride

Illustration by Gustavo Doré

In September 2003, reading the book On the Will in Nature (1836) by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, I found the following words in page 40 of its Spanish translation by Alianza Editorial:

…according to those verses by Goethe: “The dog would like to come with us from the stable: the echo of its barking proves that we are riding.”

I immediately thought that this phrase must be the origin of the Spanish proverb they bark, therefore we ride, which used to be attributed to Don Quixote. Since I didn’t remember having read it there, just in case, I found a digitalized version of Don Quixote and looked up the phrase in question. It was not there. Next I did a Google search of the phrase, which came up with about sixty references, all of which stated that it was a phrase from Don Quixote. I also looked for the German translation of Goethe’s phrase as quoted by Schopenhauer, and got five references to Goethe’s poem Kläffer (Barker, 1808). Therefore, at that time the information used by Google to search for that phrase in Spanish was totally wrong, while the information written in German was correct, although less abundant.

Pope Francis, Technocracy and Artificial Intelligence

The last Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Francis, entitled Laudate Deum and published on October 4, 2023, dedicates a chapter to the technocratic paradigm that has been imposed throughout the world, to which the following definition applies: a certain way of understanding human life and activity [that] has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us. It refers mainly to the degradation of the environment in relation to climate change of anthropogenic origin, although the phrase used can be interpreted broadly, since there are many more ways to degrade the environment, in addition to releasing gases into the atmosphere.

But it doesn't stop there. The next paragraph says this:

21. In recent years, we have been able to confirm this diagnosis, even as we have witnessed a new advance of the above paradigm. Artificial intelligence and the latest technological innovations start with the notion of a human being with no limits, whose abilities and possibilities can be infinitely expanded thanks to technology. In this way, the technocratic paradigm monstrously feeds upon itself.

Chance, design and artificial life

In previous posts in this blog I have mentioned my experiments on artificial life: the simulation in a computer of processes similar to those that take place in living beings. Artificial life should not be confused with synthetic life: construction of artificial living beings in the laboratory.

One of the most used tools in artificial life (and in other related fields) are genetic algorithms, which simulate biological evolution within the computer, and make it act on the entities that are the subjects of the research. In these experiments, a mixture of chance and necessity (the title of Monod’s book mentioned in the previous post) is used. Chance is usually applied with a pseudo-random number generator that modifies the operation of the rest of the algorithm, which represents necessity.