[Discussion] Paul Davies says that scientific discovery does not make the cosm os seem increasingly pointless

[Paksoy, Hb]

Paul Davies says that scientific discovery does not make the cosmos seem
increasingly pointless 

Universal truths 

Thursday January 23, 2003
The Guardian 

In a famous conclusion to his popular cosmology book The First Three
Minutes, the physicist Steven Weinberg wrote: "The more the universe appears
comprehensible, the more it also appears pointless." This comment echoes the
sentiment of many contemporary scientists. Although they may wax lyrical
about the awesome beauty, majesty and subtlety of the natural world, they
nevertheless deny any point or purpose to the universe. 
A hundred years ago, the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell used
the second law of thermodynamics in a trenchant attack on theism. The second
law states, in effect, that the universe is dying, descending inexorably
into chaos as its reserves of useful energy are squandered. Russell
reflected on the "vast death of the solar system" that will follow when the
sun burns out in several billion years' time. 

Russell's position seems to be that if the universe is doomed, then physical
existence is ultimately pointless; even human life and endeavour is futile.
In recent years, the chemist Peter Atkins has developed this theme by tying
the second law directly to the purposeless motion of molecules. It is the
random agitation of molecules that drives, say, a gas to states of higher
and higher entropy, culminating in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium and
effective macroscopic inactivity. Atkins elevates this indisputable fact
about molecular motion to the status of a universal principle of
purposelessness, in which the aimless meanderings of molecules become
emblematic of the pointlessness of the universe. 

This argument assumes that entropy alone is an appropriate indicator of
cosmic change. The decision to focus on this quantity is a purely
ideological one. Russell and Atkins select entropy as the physical property
for discussion because it paints a bleak picture of a degenerating, indeed
doomed, universe. But there are other ways to describe cosmic evolution. 

There is good astronomical evidence that the universe began in a state of
almost total blandness. The richness and diversity of physical systems we
observe today have emerged through a long and complicated series of
self-organising and self-complexifying processes. Viewed this way, the
conspicuous story of the universe so far is one of unfolding enrichment, not
decay. There is nothing within science as such to compel one to favour
entropy over organised complexity in characterising the evolution of the
universe. 

Second, it is obviously wrong to claim that a system with a finite life span
cannot have a point. Individual human lives and cultures are subject to the
same strictures of the second law of thermodynamics, and are finite as a
result. Yet human beings and society have all sorts of goals and purposes.
To say there is no point to human life because we each will one day die is
clearly ridiculous. So the fact that the stars may not burn forever, or the
entire universe may eventually approach a state of thermodynamic equilibrium
(or even dark emptiness) has little bearing on whether or not the universe
has a point. 

Biologists have used the supposed lack of directionality in physical
processes in support of a philosophical position similar to Weinberg's.
Stephen Jay Gould liked to attack the Victorian notion of evolutionary
progress. He stresses that nature is blind, and so cannot look ahead to
anticipate solutions to evolutionary problems. Darwinism is based on purely
random accidental changes; some good, some bad. Gould says evolution is not
going anywhere, it is just exploring the vast space of biological
possibilities. He concludes that if evolution is blind, the universe as a
whole must be pointless. 

The evidence for the directionlessness of biological evolution is
scientifically less compelling than is the case for the second law of
thermodynamics. Taking the biosphere as a whole, its complexity has clearly
risen since life on Earth was restricted to a few microbes. The issue,
however, is whether this merely represents an undirected meandering through
random biological structures, or whether there is a systematic trend toward
greater complexity. 

The fossil record is ambiguous. Certainly some trends are discernible; the
ratio of brain mass to body mass escalated persistently during hominid
evolution. Some contemporary biologists, such as Simon Conway Morris of
Cambridge University, make a case that, at least within certain lineages,
there are trends towards greater complexity. So it is far from decided, even
among professional biologists, that the evolutionary record supports a
doctrine of biological chaos. 

Recently, some cosmologists have attempted a catch-all argument for cosmic
pointlessness by invoking the multiverse concept. This is based on the
theory that our universe is but a small component in a vast assemblage of
universes. The universes may co-exist in parallel, so that they are
physically disconnected, or they may connect to each other in remote regions
of space or through "wormholes". Universes may differ in both their physical
laws and initial conditions, in such a way that all conceivable laws and
conditions are represented in a universe somewhere. The overwhelming
majority of the universes would go unseen because their laws and conditions
would not be conducive to the emergence of life and conscious beings. Only
in a tiny subset where, purely by chance, things fell out just right, would
observers arise to marvel over the ingeniously contrived appearance of their
universe. 

The relevance of the multiverse to cosmic pointlessness is easily grasped.
If anyone should discover some aspect of nature that hinted at a deep
underlying purpose, then this superficially amazing fact could be shrugged
aside as a random accident that is observed by us only because that very
same accident is a necessary prerequisite for the existence of life. There
are many peculiar aspects of the laws of nature that, had they been slightly
different, would have precluded the existence of life. 

The multiverse explanation for the apparently contrived ingenuity of the
universe suffers from a number of problems. In most versions, the existence
of the other universes cannot be verified or falsified, so its status as a
scientific theory is questionable. Second, if the bio-friendliness of the
natural world were the result of randomness, we might expect the observed
universe to be minimally rather than optimally bio-friendly. But the degree
of bio-friendliness we observe in the universe is far in excess of what is
needed to give rise to a few observers to act as cosmic selectors. 

Cosmic pointlessness has also been argued on philosophical grounds on the
basis that the very concept of a "point" or "purpose" cannot be applied to a
system like the universe because it makes sense only in the context of human
activity. Some years ago, I took part in a BBC television debate with Hugh
Montefiore, then Bishop of Birmingham, and the atheist Oxford philosopher AJ
Ayer. Montefiore declared that without God all human life would be
meaningless. Ayer countered that humans alone imbue their lives with
meaning. "But then life would have no ultimate meaning," objected the
bishop. "I don't know what ultimate meaning means!" cried Ayer. His
objection, of course, is that such concepts as meaning, purpose and having a
point are human categories that make good sense in the context of human
society, but are, at best, metaphors when applied to non-living systems. 

However, scientists have long been guilty of projecting on to nature
categories that are rooted in human society. The Greeks built a cosmological
scheme based on musical harmony and geometrical regularities, because
musical and geometrical instruments were the current technological marvels.
Newton's universe was a gigantic clockwork mechanism. Russell's was an
imperfect heat engine - a sort of Victorian industrial contraption writ
large and running out of fuel. 

Today, it is fashionable to describe the universe as a gigantic computer.
Information theory, which stems from the realm of human discourse, is
routinely applied to physical problems in thermodynamics, biology and
quantum mechanics. All these designations capture in some imperfect way what
the universe is about. It is not a clockwork mechanism or an information
processor, but it does have mechanistic and informational properties. Living
organisms have goals and purposes, and I see no reason why we may not use
the organism as a metaphor for the universe, as did Aristotle two-and-a-half
millennia ago. 

I am not suggesting that the universe is alive, only that it may share with
living organisms certain properties in the same way a machine has
interlocking parts, a finite fuel supply, etc. So I contend that the
universe may have purpose-like or point-like properties, alongside
mechanistic and computational properties. 

The universe is ordered in a meaningful way, and scientists seek reasons for
why things are the way they are. If the universe as a whole is pointless,
then it exists without reason. In other words, it is ultimately arbitrary
and absurd. We are then invited to contemplate a state of affairs in which
all scientific chains of reasoning are grounded in absurdity. The order of
the world would have no foundation and its breathtaking rationality would
have to spring, miraculously, from absurdity. 

So Weinberg's dictum is turned neatly on its head: the more the universe
seems pointless, the more it also seems incomprehensible. 

· Paul Davies is at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie
University. His latest book is How to Build a Time Machine. He delivers his
Michael Faraday Prize lecture, The Origin of Life, at The Royal Society on
January 27