The future of science

Friedrich Nietzsche

With the loss of the impetus of Christianity, cyclical conceptions of history have resurfaced in the West. Let us see how Nietzsche expresses this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part III, 2.2), at the same time as predicting the replacement of man by the Superman, so he should have been immune to it:

And that spider creeping slowly in the moonlight, and that same moonlight, and you and I, standing before this door chatting about eternal things—must we not all have existed once before? And must we not come again and travel that path that stretches before us, that long and dreadful path? Won't we have to return eternally?

Twentieth-century atheist cosmologists often expressed a preference for a cyclic cosmology, which in their view would make God unnecessary to explain the existence of the universe. Although some of those theories (steady-state cosmology and the alternation of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch) are no longer in vogue, thanks to the data we now have about the origin and future of the universe, new theories continually emerge to replace them.

The Synthesis of Science and Faith in Western History

S.Augustin, by Louis Comfort Tiffany
Lightner Museum

By studying the history of science, one fact becomes evident: while other civilizations reached remarkable technical, mathematical, or astronomical heights, within European Christendom germinated a systematic, accelerated, and extraordinary scientific development, incomparable to that of any other civilization, past or present. Why this spectacular difference? The answer is not a matter of chance, but of worldview. Science and faith are not adversaries, but pieces of a puzzle designed with astonishing precision.

The supposed war between science and faith is a false diatribe fueled by nineteenth-century prejudices. While science deals with the material and experimental world, philosophy and faith deal with being and purpose. The error of scientists like Stephen Hawking was to declare that philosophy is dead and then, immediately afterward, propose theories (such as model realism or the multiverse) that are philosophical speculations.

George Ellis and the multiverse

George Ellis

George Ellis is a South African cosmologist who rose to fame almost half a century ago when he wrote a book together with Stephen Hawking (The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, 1973), today considered a classic.

In an earlier post in this blog, published in November 2014, I mentioned that there are six independent theories about the multiverse, almost all of them incompatible with each other. In a recent article titled Theory Confirmation and Multiverses published in the book Why Trust a Theory?, edited by Radin Dardashti, Richard David and Karim Thébault (Cambridge University Press, 2019), George Ellis updates the different multiverse theories. He does not mention six, as I did five years ago, but nine, although he has left out one of the six I mentioned in my post (Smolin’s), perhaps because this theory has been abandoned in the meantime. The nine theories are: