Universe or multiverse?

In the posts in this blog I have often said that theories about the multiverse (there are many) are not science, but speculations, because it is impossible to design an experiment that demonstrates the existence or non-existence of these multiverses.

In an article published in May 2023 in the journal Springer Nature, entitled Is Everyone Probably Elsewhere?, the authors claim that it would at least be possible to distinguish between the following two hypotheses:

1. Our universe is unique, it does not belong to any multiverse.
2. Our universe belongs to some multiverse. Of course, we would have no idea what type of multiverse it would belong to.

Physics, Mathematics and Mathematical Physics

Eugene Wigner

Eugene Paul Wigner was a Hungarian physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for his contribution to the theory of the atomic nucleus and elementary particles. In a famous article published in 1960, Wigner said:

It is important to point out that the mathematical formulation of the physicist's often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena. (“The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13: 1-14).

Will the multiverse cause a change in the scientific paradigm?

Thomas Kuhn

I continue my comments on Man Ho Chan’s article, which reviews and refutes recent attempts to make multiverse theories scientific. In this post I’ll refer to those attempts that try to modify the current scientific paradigm to include the theories of the multiverse, so that they can be considered scientific. To do this, epistemological changes or scientific paradigm changes should be made.

According to Thomas Kuhn, there are five criteria that make it possible to evaluate the paradigmatic character of a theory:

1. Accuracy: Indicates whether the predictions of the theory agree with experimental data discovered after the theory is formulated. This criterion is similar to falsifiability in the Popper-style theory, and corresponds to what I have called in another post validation of the theory. It is clear that multiverse theories do not meet this criterion, since they do not make testable predictions.

Are the multiverse theories scientific?

Virgo galactic cumulus

In previous posts I have said that the theories of the multiverse (there are several, some of them contradictory to the others) are not scientific, because it’s not possible to prove them false, according to Karl Popper’s criterion: a theory is not scientific unless it can be proved false with an experiment.

A recent article by Man Ho Chan reviews and refutes various attempts to claim that multiverse theories are indeed scientific. Here I am going to speak about those that try to prove that the multiverse theories should be considered scientific without asking big changes to the current criteria. Carroll 2018 uses three main arguments to justify this:

Roger Penrose versus William Craig

Roger Penrose

I thank Plácido Doménech Espí for drawing my attention to this debate held in 2019 between Roger Penrose and William Craig, entitled The Universe: How did it get here & why are we part of it?

Roger Penrose rose to fame as a cosmologist in 1970 when he proved, with Stephen Hawking, a theorem stating that the application of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to the entire universe requires the existence of at least one singular point in the universe (a point where all the geodesics of the universe meet). In other words, the Big Bang.

In 1989, Penrose became one of the most famous scientific popularizers with The emperor’s new mind, a book with deep philosophical implications. Among other things, he proposed the following question, inspired by Gödel’s theorem: how is it possible that we can prove that a theorem is true, if it cannot be proved mathematically from a reasonable set of axioms? According to Penrose, this would indicate that human intelligence is qualitatively different from computing machines.

In 2004 he published a book of extremely hard popularization, The Road to Reality, which is full of equations, where he proposes a unification of Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics (a theory of quantum gravity). Then came his own cosmological theory, Conformal cyclical cosmology (CCC), according to which the universe did not begin with the Big Bang, which would only be the beginning of the current aeon, but there would be an infinite succession of previous eons, each beginning with a Big Bang and evolving to global heat death, when all that would remain in the entire universe would be photons. At that moment, (no one knows how) the entropy would suddenly drop to a minimum value again, to start a new cycle.

William Craig has proposed the kalam cosmological argument, which can be summarized thus:

1. Whatever begins to exist, has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

William Lane Craig

Craig argues that the Big Bang was the beginning of the existence of the universe, so there must be a cause for that existence: an uncaused Creator, existing without beginning, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, enormously powerful, and omniscient, to be the author of the abstract world. In other word: God.

In the debate, Penrose began by arguing that there are three components of reality: an abstract or Platonic world (mathematics); a physical world (the material world); and a mental world (the world of consciousness). In addition, he points out the existence of three mysteries, which refer to the relationships between these three worlds:

1. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Eugene Paul Wigner): Why does the abstract world describe so well the workings of the physical world?
2. The origin of consciousness: How can consciousness arise from the physical world?
3. The mind’s ability to understand the abstract world: Why can we understand mathematics and apply it to describe counterintuitive phenomena?

Craig agreed with Penrose’s analysis, and added this consideration:

The abstract world cannot be the cause of the other two worlds, the physical and the mental, because it has no causal power and cannot make decisions. It is not clear that the physical world is the cause of the mental world: Penrose himself admits that this is a mystery. Can the mental world be the cause of the physical and the abstract worlds? It appears it can: we have the experience that our minds can produce physical changes through human intentionality. Could there not be an omniscient mind who is the author of the physical and the abstract worlds? That would solve the problem of the origin of the three worlds.

To this, Penrose could only reply that he does not like this idea (he declares himself an atheist) and would rather think that the abstract world is primordial, although he does not know how the other two worlds could proceed from the abstract world.

The second part of the discussion dealt with the fine-tuning problem. Craig indicated that there are three solutions to the problem:

1. Universal constants must have the value they have.
2. Our existence in such a fine-tuned universe may be due to chance in a multiverse.
3. Our universe has been designed by a Creator.

Penrose began by denying that fine-tuning is a fact, although he ultimately declared himself agnostic about this question. He proposed his CCC theory as an explanation of the origin of our universe. Craig pointed out that this theory is just another multiverse theory, in time rather than in space, (most multiverses are supposed to exist in space). Penrose, for whom this idea seemed to be new, embraced it happily and asserted that his theory has been experimentally confirmed, an assertion most current cosmologists would not accept.

My conclusion from this debate: Penrose was mostly on the defensive, and he was unable to offer one convincing argument in favor of his atheism.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Science, Faith and Atheism: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Science and Science Fiction: mutual influences in the 20th century

H.G. Wells

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Halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, the British H.G. Wells also practiced the literature of scientific prediction, although his predictions are usually longer-term than Verne's, more remote from the technique of his time, so very few have come to be carried out. We still don't have The Time Machine and can't see it anywhere near. We cannot make artificial men by vivisecting animals (The Island of Doctor Moreau). Nor can we make ourselves invisible (The invisible man). And fortunately the Martians have not invaded us (The War of the Worlds). In 1938, a radio dramatization of this novel by Orson Welles caused a mass panic in the United States. Despite the boom in science fiction at the time, the public was still as credulous as when it had been fooled a century earlier by the articles in the Sun.

Wells also wrote (of course) about a trip to the moon and populated our satellite with intelligent giant ants, although the procedure to make the trip is more imaginative than, and as impractical as Verne's. But his great scientific foresight success is the novel The World set free (1913), which not only anticipated the atomic bomb, but also influenced its practical realization, stimulating Leo Szilard's research on the neutron chain reaction. Although Wells also made a tremendous mistake in this novel, by predicting in 1913 that the First World War would start in 1956. But as he said a few years later: [I have] always been... a rather slow prophet. You can also see my review of this book in Goodreads.

The problem of no best world

The Auschwitz concentration camp

In 1993, William Rowe proposed an atheistic philosophical argument to prove that God does not exist. Although based on the problem of evil (like so many other atheistic arguments), it takes a somewhat different turn. For this reason it has been given a name, as in the title of this post. The argument can be summed up like this:

If God exists and has created the universe, he must have created the best of all possible worlds, from the moral point of view. But given a universe, it is always possible to devise a better world, which means that the best of all possible worlds does not exist. Furthermore, our universe contains a lot of evil and is far from being one of the best. Therefore God does not exist.

It is curious that, in response to this argument, some philosophers who are believers (such as Klaas Kraay and others) have tried to refute it using the theories of the multiverse, which were originally devised by atheistic thinkers to deal with the fine-tuning problem. According to these philosophers, the problem of no best world would be solved if God had created, not a universe, but a multiverse containing all the best possible worlds, perhaps in an infinite number. I don’t think this attempt has much future. It is easy to foresee that the same argument that applies to the universe can also be applied to the multiverse, so the problem would not have been solved, it would only have been moved to a higher level.

In my opinion, the problem of no best world is poorly posed, because (as is usual with atheistic arguments) it contains a logical fallacy: the straw man; and forgets a very important question: original sin. Let's look first at the straw man fallacy, which in this case should perhaps be called the straw god fallacy. What kind of god does Rowe's problem envision?

Rowe's god is not free. If he creates, he must create the best of all possible worlds. This god is totally determined by human reason.

Materialistic atheism is so obsessed with saving determinism that when they try to formulate an idea about God, in whom they don't believe, they can't escape their obsession and imagine him as a deterministic god, unable to act freely. But is that the God of the Christians?

The God of Christianity is completely different. The main thing is that He is love, as said in the first letter of John, which implies that he is free, that he is not determined, for love without freedom has no meaning. The god Rowe envisions in his problem of no best world is not our God. If he proves that that god does not exist, we agree. In fact, Rowe's god closely approximates the god of philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Christian philosophy concluded long ago that this god is not our God, although this approach may have provided in its time a rational approximation to monotheism.

The second difficulty with Rowe's argument is more subtle. How can we compare worlds, to find whether one is better than another? There must be some criterion. Rowe seems to think that this criterion is given by the amount of moral evil in each world. But this criterion is very dangerous. It could lead us to the conclusion that the best of all possible worlds is one where life does not exist, an empty universe, with no moral evil at all. What could move God to create such universe?

In fact, if things are pushed to the extreme in this way, it could be argued that the best of all possible worlds is the world that does not exist. If God is a Perfect Being, God alone is more perfect than God plus a created universe that by definition must be imperfect.

Mark Twain

If God wanted to create a universe, it seems logical to think that He would choose one similar to ours, where intelligent beings can exist, image of God, capable of loving and being loved. Those intelligent beings should be free, because what interest could God have in creating a universe of automata? Once this is admitted, it is inevitable that any created universe that we can imagine will contain moral evil, for a free being can decide to do evil rather than good. That is what I meant when I said that in posing his problem Rowe has forgotten original sin. If we consider what I have said, God is not to blame for the moral evil in the universe, as implicitly implied by Rowe: we are. As usual, Rowe is looking for a scapegoat, and as usual, he finds it in God, according to Mark Twain's famous phrase:

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is Providence. (Notebook, 1898).

In fact, the problem of no best world is ill-posed, since it is impossible to compare different imaginary worlds and classify them according to the moral evil they contain, if that evil comes from the freedom of created individuals, as an inescapable consequence of the fact of they are free. That is why I don’t think it appropriate to try to solve a problem that does not really exist, by resorting to multiverse theories that have probably nothing to do with reality.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Science, Faith and Atheism: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

The Game of Life and the multiverse

John Horton Conway

As I said in the previous post in this blog, The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by John Conway. Let's see how it works, in a little more detail:

This cellular automaton acts on a potentially infinite two-dimensional space, divided into square cells. In each cell there is a simple automaton, or if you want, a program with two states that we can call alive and dead, or 1 and 0. The program in each cell takes as input its own state and the states of its eight neighbors. If it is alive (i.e. in state 1) and two or three of its neighbors are alive, in the next instant it will still be alive. If it is dead (in state 0) and exactly three of its neighbors are alive, in the next instant it will become alive. In any other case, it will become dead. Let's look at a figure to make it clearer:

The theological multiverse

In other posts in this blog (see one of the thematic threads at the end of this post) I have talked about various theories of multiverses and asserted that none of them is scientific, as it is impossible to prove that they are false. In fact, I doubt if they can even be considered philosophical. I consider them imaginative fantasies: science fiction, rather than science.

The funny thing is that the idea of the multiverse is not new. I’ve mentioned before that its first appearance in science fiction was in a novel by Clifford Simak (Cosmic Engineers, 1950) that develops a short story published in 1939 by the same author.

But Simak’s novel also has precedents; quite old, by the way. Chapter 21, verse 1 of Revelation, a book written towards the end of the first century, says this:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more. 

A new heaven and a new earth. What is this talking about? Obviously about another universe, where we are supposed to go, after our death. It seems, therefore, that in the Christian vision of the cosmos, God has made at least two universes: ours, and another one for the next life. This would be the theological multiverse, a name I’ve just invented.

When physicists talk about other universes, they often give free rein to their imagination. I’ll do the same.

The second universe would have its own time, independent of ours. If we want them to be related somehow, I’d say that the two axes of time are orthogonal (perpendicular to each other). Christ (God incarnated as a man), in his death, leaves our time and passes through to the other time. On his way, he captures all the human beings that have ever existed or will exist, and drags them to the other universe. We all reach the other universe at the initial moment of its own time. We all arrive at the same time. No one must wait for anyone in the next life.

I will add two additional considerations:

• Some atheist cosmologists cling to the various theories of the multiverse to safeguard their atheism. They seem to believe that, if the multiverse were proven to exist, this would show that God does not exist. I can’t see why. If God has created a universe, what can prevent him from creating two, one hundred or one hundred thousand? The discovery of a multiverse would do nothing but expand our field of vision, pointing out that there are more levels in the universe than are dreamt of in our philosophy, paraphrasing what Hamlet told Horatio. But this has happened before: Until the beginning of the 20th century, it was believed that the universe consisted just in the nearby stars. Later it was discovered that these stars make a galaxy, and that there are billions of galaxies, separated by huge empty spaces. This enormous increase in the size of the universe posed no problem for the faith of believers. If it were discovered that there is a multiverse (in other words: that the universe is even larger and more complex than we thought) it won’t be a problem either.
• I’d never dare to present my theory, described in this article, as if it were science. As things stand just now, none of the theories of the multiverse is science. There are several, most of them incompatible with the others. If an unexpected scientific advance were ever to take place, proving that one of them were true, that theory would become science. Just now there are no signs that such thing can happen. As for my theory, I am afraid we won't know whether it is true until after our death.

The same post in Spanish 

Thematic Thread on Multiverse and Fine Tuning: Previous Next

Thematic Thread on Science, Faith and Atheism: Previous Next

The problem with hierarchical multiverses

Lee Smolin

In an earlier post in this blog I mentioned a list of theories about multiverses, independent and often mutually contradictory, prepared by George Ellis, the cosmologist. These multiverses can be divided into two large groups:

• Non-hierarchical multiverses: such as the chaotic inflationary multiverse, where each universe is supposed to be a bubble that has stopped its inflationary growth, amid a permanent and total inflationary environment.
• Hierarchical multiverses: like Smolin's (which Ellis does not mention) and the multiverse of universe simulations (in other words: that we live in a simulation). In this post I speak exclusively about this type of multiverses, which share a property that, in my opinion, makes them implausible, if not impossible.

Harry Potter and the multiverse

In the previous post in this blog, I discussed the current absence of great men in many fields of human activity; in particular, in science. Shortly after writing that post, an interview with Sabine Hossenfelder in a major Spanish newspaper (La Vanguardia) made me see that I’m not alone in denouncing the crisis of science, at least in the field of theoretical physics, which includes theories about the multiverse, about which, a few weeks ago, I published another post.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist. She has lately become news by publishing a book: Lost in Maths: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018), where she asserts that theoretical physics has progressed practically nothing in the last 60 years, and advocates dedicating public funds to research the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, rather than squandering them on colossal particle accelerators or in research on baseless lucubration, such as string theory and multiverses.

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:

Interview with Manuel Alfonseca in a Spanish Newspaper

On February 23, 2018, a Spanish Newspaper (La Opinión, El Correo de Zamora) published this interview with me, performed by Ana Arias, which I am now translating into English. The interview was re-published a few days later (March 10) in the website ReligionEnLibertad (ReligionInFreedom). This is the translation of the interview:

He took an interest in science since he was quite small, as he says. At age 16 he wrote a book of zoology in two volumes that was never published. Anyway, whenever he has to consult information about some little known animal, he consults his book. "And I can find almost everything there," he adds. Now, at 71, he is an honorary professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

He believes in science. And also in God. Under the sponsorship of the Caja Rural Foundation and the Science-Religion University Forum held yesterday at the University College, Manuel Alfonseca gave a lecture about The Faith of Contemporary Atheist Scientists.

What is the faith of those scientists?

That God does not exist.

Mistakes in popular science in the media: Stephen Hawking didn’t discover everything

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking has been in the last decades a scientific icon for the media. His painful personal situation turned him into a celebrity who inevitably attracts attention. Therefore, the media have a tendency to exaggerate his scientific work, attributing to him achievements that weren’t his, which he would be the first to repudiate, if he were still among us.

For example, on the occasion of his death, the following headlines appeared in several media:

•         AlDiaNews.com: Stephen Hawking, author of the Big Bang theory dies at 76

•         ElTiempoHoy: Creador de la teoría del Big Bang y los agujeros negros: fallece Stephen Hawking a los 76 años. (Creator of Big Bang’s theory and black hole theory: Stephen Hawking dies at 76).

•         Gizmodo Univisión: Del Big Bang a la Teoría del Todo: el increíble legado científico de Stephen Hawking (From the Big Bang to the Theory of Everything: Stephen Hawking’s incredible legacy).

What’s a scientific theory

Karl Popper

Although it is fashionable to assert that Karl Popper’s theories about the evolution of science are outdated, his definition of what is a scientific theory is unassailable:

A theory is scientific if and only if it is possible to design an experiment that proves that this theory is false.

A paradigmatic case is the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen designed an experiment that could prove this theory false. A few months later, Niels Bohr published another article in the same magazine, in answer to the previous article. Almost 30 years later, as I explained in another post in this blog, the EPR experiment, which up to that point had been mental, could be carried out and confirmed Bohr’s predictions, rather than Einstein’s. As this theory was able to resist an attempt to prove it false, it must be considered a scientific theory.

Of course, this success of the theory does not imply that it should automatically be considered correct or true. Scientific theories (always according to Popper) never become so. This theory has successfully withstood an attempt to prove it false, but the next attempt could do it.

Is physics losing touch with reality?

In his famous posthumous book The Discarded Image, published in 1964, a few months after his death, C.S. Lewis shows he is ahead of his time by predicting a situation that today, when it has become usual in physics, gives a rather bad forecast for the future of this science. Let’s look at a relevant quote:

The mathematics are now the nearest to the reality we can get. Anything imaginable, even anything that can be manipulated by ordinary (that is, non-mathematical) conceptions, far from being a further truth to which mathematics were the avenue, is a mere analogy, a concession to our weakness. Without a parable, modern physics speaks not to the multitudes. Even among themselves, when they attempt to verbalise their findings, the scientists begin to speak of this as ‘making models’... Sometimes [the models] illustrate this or that aspect of [reality] by an analogy. Sometimes, they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the sayings of the mystics... By accepting [an expression such as] the ‘curvature of space’ we are not ‘knowing’ or enjoying ‘truth’ in the fashion that was once thought to be possible.

Happy anniversary

Tomorrow August 12th is the second anniversary of the opening of this blog on popular science. The Spanish version of the blog appeared a little earlier, on January 15th 2014. In these two years I have published over 100 articles, usually one per week, although I have interrupted publication during the summer, and slowed it somewhat in Christmas.

In this anniversary I want to take stock of what has been done so far, and the goals I imposed myself when I started this activity. The decision on whether I have achieved any of these goals is left open to the consideration and critical judgment of the readers.

Anthropic and supranthropic properties

In a previous post I wrote about the fine tuning problem, based on the verification that many of the properties of the universe seem designed to make our existence possible. In other words: those properties verify the anthropic principle, another way of saying that the universe must fulfill all the conditions needed for our existence, since we are here. On the other hand, the mediocrity principle states that the anthropic conditions of the universe should be the necessary minimum to make our existence possible.

Robin James Spivey has lately published a book titled Aqueous solution, where he asserts that certain properties of the cosmos are supranthropic (they go beyond the anthropic principle) because they are not required for our existence, but their presence guarantees our long-range survival. According to Spivey, those properties are an inkling of design stronger than the anthropic properties, as the mediocrity principle opposes their presence.

The fine tuning problem

In two previous posts I dealt with the relation between the multiverse theories and the problem of fine tuning, noting that those theories do not solve the problem. This third post describes briefly what is the fine tuning problem.

Brandon Carter

In 1973 Brandon Carter formulated the anthropic principle, a name later deplored by its author, because it may be prone to misunderstandings. This principle is simply the verification that the universe must fulfill all the conditions necessary for our existence, since we are here.

Over a decade later, John Barrow and Frank Tipler published a book entitled The anthropic cosmological principle, which offered a stronger version of the anthropic principle, posing that the values of many of the universal constants are critical and minor variations would make life impossible. This finding raises the fine tuning problem, based on the analysis of the possible effects of changing the values of those constants. In other words, the universe seems designed to make life possible. Let’s look at a few examples:

The multiverse does not solve the fine tuning problem

Atheists use the multiverse theories to escape the need to accept God’s existence as the cause of a universe which seems to have been designed to make life possible (fine tuning). While they do this, they are contradicting one of their most beloved arguments against God’s existence, which they have been using since the nineteenth century. This one:

The theist hypothesis offers an explanation for the origin of the world based on two entities: God and the universe.

The atheist hypothesis only needs a single entity: the universe.

Ergo Occam’s razor favors the atheistic explanation.

As it is well known, the lex parsimoniae, also called Occam’s razor, one of the fundaments of the scientific method, asserts that, between two competitive theories, we must prefer that one with the fewest entities (or assumptions).

But the current situation is quite the opposite. The alternative to the theist hypothesis is no longer a single entity, the universe, but rather many (between 10⁵⁰⁰ and an infinity of universes). The previous argument must therefore be re-written thus: