An article explaining how one theory of quantum gravity is making some progress. I don't understand all the details, but we've had a lecture from Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara of Canada's Perimeter Institute on the subject (in 2003), and she did a nice job explaining it, even to a lay audience.
I had one of my undergrad students try out a research project to look for the effects of quantized spacetime--the speed of light would vary by wavelength. He sorted through gamma ray burst data from the Swift observatory and looked for delays of short wavelengths relative to long ones, as a function of redshift. Of course, he didn't find any (as we expected), but it was a fun proof-of-concept project.
Showing posts with label cosmology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cosmology. Show all posts
Monday, March 09, 2009
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
A thought on Intelligent Design
I posted a version of this in the comments over on Mark Shea's blog, and I think it's of general interest enough to repost it here:
I have a sympathy for Intelligent Design, but as a physicist, I think that the experimental evidence for this design can only come from looking at the fundamentals—the ultimate origins in cosmology and the nature of physical laws themselves.
This is only a suspicion of mine; I believe that, given the complexity of the interactions between the individual particles of matter, God can work directly in our world without our ever observing a violation of the natural laws. And with God knowing the future, He could arrange the intereactions needed for His purposes far in advance, so small changes have time to produce large effects.
So I doubt that we're going to look and find supernaturally-explained glitches in evolution.
On the other hand, the big-picture questions of "Why is the universe here at all?" and issues of "fine-tuning" for its habitability go back to the beginning of time and the moment of Creation itself. Science, physics in this case, necessarily works within the physical laws of nature. But the laws of nature are properties of the universe itself. So we are unable, even in principle, to use those laws to extrapolate backwards, past the moment the universe came into existence. Physics cannot answer the question, "What was there before the Universe?," unless it is to talk about our universe bubbling up out of another, pre-existing universe. But that only pushes the question back to the origin of that other universe.
What ultimately got the whole ball rolling, existence-wise? Physics will never be able to answer, because of the nature of science itself.
I have a sympathy for Intelligent Design, but as a physicist, I think that the experimental evidence for this design can only come from looking at the fundamentals—the ultimate origins in cosmology and the nature of physical laws themselves.
This is only a suspicion of mine; I believe that, given the complexity of the interactions between the individual particles of matter, God can work directly in our world without our ever observing a violation of the natural laws. And with God knowing the future, He could arrange the intereactions needed for His purposes far in advance, so small changes have time to produce large effects.
So I doubt that we're going to look and find supernaturally-explained glitches in evolution.
On the other hand, the big-picture questions of "Why is the universe here at all?" and issues of "fine-tuning" for its habitability go back to the beginning of time and the moment of Creation itself. Science, physics in this case, necessarily works within the physical laws of nature. But the laws of nature are properties of the universe itself. So we are unable, even in principle, to use those laws to extrapolate backwards, past the moment the universe came into existence. Physics cannot answer the question, "What was there before the Universe?," unless it is to talk about our universe bubbling up out of another, pre-existing universe. But that only pushes the question back to the origin of that other universe.
What ultimately got the whole ball rolling, existence-wise? Physics will never be able to answer, because of the nature of science itself.
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