Tag Archives: Universe

Clearing Up This Multiple Universe Thing (Maybe)

Posted on by

I haven’t been blogging much lately. It’s not that I have anything against blogging – I haven’t been doing much of anything lately, unless breathing and digesting count.

In another universe, however, I’ve been blogging up a storm while hiking through Alabama with Gwyneth Paltrow and Vladimir Putin. That’s what many physicists seem to believe anyway. (In that other universe, Vlad promised Gwyn and me that he’s going to stop interfering with Ukraine.) 

For example, Max Tegmark of M.I.T. has written a book that, according to the New York Times, suggests that he was almost hit by a truck while riding his bike in Stockholm, and the truck hit him, resulting in some slight injuries, and the truck really clobbered him, which meant he didn’t live to write the book he later wrote: 

He endured every possible outcome, happy and unhappy, that can befall a bicyclist who encounters a speeding truck. All of these happened, he argues, because everything that can happen does happen — in at least one of an infinite number of universes.

This extremely large set of parallel universes is called the “multiverse”. Our universe, the particular one that I’m experiencing now, in which I’m not pals with Gwyn and Vlad, is merely one universe among many – no more real than the others. 

Very smart people like Max Tegmark and Stephen Hawking accept the multiverse theory, which is also known as the “many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics”. They think this apparently crazy idea best explains the truly crazy stuff that happens at the quantum level of reality, like the double-slit experiment and the situation with Schrödinger’s cat. We’ll probably never know for sure, since verifying the existence of another universe is supposed to be impossible.   

Still, something has been bothering me since I read that article in the Times. When people talk about parallel universes, they usually talk about universes branching off from each other. What supposedly happens is that whenever there’s more than one possibility in a given universe, that universe somehow splits into two or more separate universes. You start out in one universe and get hit by a truck but in another universe you escape injury. In one universe, you order pork chops, in another you have a salad and in a third you go somewhere else to eat. The examples in these discussions are almost always familiar events or decisions, the kind of possibilities we can all relate to.

Physicists, however, don’t usually concern themselves with what people have for dinner. Quantum physics, in particular, concentrates on very small-scale events. Will an atom of carbon-14 decay or not? How frequently do quantum fluctuations (the so-called “appearance and disappearance of virtual particles”) occur? In theory, each of these small-scale, apparently random quantum events marks a divergence in the history of the universe. If an atom decays, the universe goes one way. If it doesn’t decay, the universe goes another way. According to the many-worlds theory, as it’s almost always explained, each event that could have happened differently results in the creation of separate universes.

Of course, since the universe is a very big place, there is room for lots of events to occur, especially the tiny, random ones. Here’s a quote from The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by the physicist Bryce DeWitt: 

This universe is constantly splitting into a stupendous number of branches, all resulting from the measurement-like interactions between its myriads of components. Moreover, every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, in every corner of the universe is splitting our local world into myriads of copies of itself [161].

Wow! Is it really possible that equally gigantic, almost exact replicas of the universe, with all its particles, planets, galaxies and so on, are springing into existence zillions of times a second, whenever a sub-atomic particle somewhere in the universe sneezes? And that those replicas immediately start replicating themselves? As that old TV commercial said, that’s one spicy meatball!

The effect seem way, way, way out of proportion to the cause. Where does all the energy come from to create fully-formed copies of previously existing universes? Assuming that these new universes immediately pop into existence, how do they get so big and so detailed so quickly? Or maybe universe creation takes a long “time”, but we don’t notice any breaks in the action because we keep coming into existence with our memories and instrument readings intact, as if nothing weird has happened (remember that you and I have lived through zillions of such universe creations – it’s not as if we’ve always lived in the nice, stable universe and everybody else is off living in copies).

I don’t know enough math or physics to criticize the many-worlds theory for real, but I was pleased to see that one of the things bothering me is a standard objection to the theory. From Wikipedia:

Conservation of energy is grossly violated if at every instant near-infinite amounts of new matter are generated to create the new universes.

To which, proponents of the theory are said to have two responses:

First, the law of conservation of energy says that energy is conserved within each universe. Hence, even if “new matter” were being generated to create new universes, this would not violate conservation of energy. (That doesn’t seem like a very good answer to me, since it amounts to saying, “It’s very strange that there’s an exception to this fundamental law, but that’s what happens”.)

Second, conservation of energy is not violated since the energy of each branch has to be weighted by its probability, according to the standard formula for the conservation of energy in quantum theory. This results in the total energy of the multiverse being conserved. (Which seems to mean that if there’s a 50/50 chance of some atom decaying, each new universe has half as much energy as the last one. Wouldn’t that eventually result in new universes having no energy at all?)

So it was with some relief that I turned to a helpful website called “Ask a Mathematician”. It should really be called “Ask a Mathematician or Physicist”. because it’s apparently a mathematician and a physicist answering questions, most of which have to do with physics (they don’t identify themselves, they just answer questions). A few years ago, they got this question:

According to the Many Worlds Interpretation, every event creates new universes. Where does the energy and matter for the new universes come from?

Here’s some of the physicist’s (rearranged) answer:

If you go online (or read some kind of book or something), you generally find the Many Worlds Interpretation presented as the universe “splitting”. Something along the lines of “everything that can happen will, just in different universes”. Supposedly, every time any kind of quantum event happens that could have one of several results (which is essentially every moment for every thing, which is plenty) the entire freaking universe splits into many universes. But, the universe contains a lot of energy….So, whence does this energy come?

[However,] there is no new energy or matter (or even new universes)…The universe doesn’t split or spawn new universes…. The universe doesn’t branch so much as it meanders and intertwines….If you want a picture to work with, rather than thinking about the universe as an ever-branching tree, think of it as an intertwining (albeit, very complex) rope.

The many (like: many, many) different versions of the universe branch apart, and come together all over the place. That is: one event can certainly lead to several outcomes, but in the same way, several causes can lead to the same event.  Everything that could happen will happen (given the present) and everything that could have happened did happen (given the present)….

A particle comes along with some amount of energy. When it has a choice of two paths it takes both.  The energy of the particle is divided in proportion to the probability of the path taken.  So, for example, a 50% chance of each path means equal division of the energy and matter of the particle.  Before the fork all of the energy is on one path, and afterwards, despite the fact that the particle is behaving as though it’s in two places, the same amount of energy is present, just spread out.

So, while it’s fun to talk about “other quantum realities” and “different universes”, it’s more accurate to say that everything is happening in one universe. One, stunningly complex, weirdly put together, entirely counter-intuitive universe.

Clear? Despite the standard explanation, we’re all living in the same universe, but it’s a universe that has lots of its contents in strange, probabilistic quantum states. Since these various states (like when a photon is 50% likely to be here and 50% likely to be there) are equally real, they can be thought of as parts of different universes, but that’s just a manner of speaking.

Whether or not this way of understanding the multiple universe theory is correct (is it, since Max Tegmark apparently suggests otherwise?), it makes me feel better. For one thing, it’s less mind-boggling. Big branching universes seem both implausible and terribly wasteful. Secondly, I think there’s zero probability that one of me is hiking through Alabama with Gwyneth and Vladimir (while wearing a blue shirt, and a red shirt, and a green shirt, and no shirt, etc. etc.) while also breathing and digesting here in the Garden State.

(Note, however, that if the universe is infinite in time and space and configured a certain way, it’s possible, maybe even a sure thing, that everything that isn’t contradictory happens over and over again. But that’s something to wonder about another day.)

How the Universe Got Big

Posted on by

A team of radio astronomers, working in Antarctica, where the air is clear and dry, have found the first direct evidence for the theory of cosmic inflation. That’s the theory about the origin of the universe first stated by the physicist Alan Guth in 1980.

Here’s some background from an article Guth wrote in 1997 for Beam Line, the magazine of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory):

Although it is called the “Big Bang theory,” it is not really the theory of a bang at all. It is only the theory of the aftermath of a bang. It elegantly describes how the early Universe expanded and cooled, and how matter clumped to form galaxies and stars. But the theory says nothing about the underlying physics of the primordial explosion. It gives not even a clue about what banged, what caused it to bang, or what happened before it banged. The inflationary universe theory, on the other hand, is a description of the bang itself, and provides plausible answers to these questions and more.

Guth explains that in order for the universe we observe to have begun with a Big Bang, the early universe must have been extremely uniform and have had a precise density. However:

The classical form of the Big Bang theory requires us to postulate, without explanation, that the primordial fireball filled space from the beginning. The temperature was the same everywhere by assumption, not as a consequence of any physical process….

[In addition] the initial values of the [universe’s] mass density and expansion rate are not predicted by the theory, but must be postulated. Unless we postulate that the mass density at one second just happened to have a value between 0.999999999999999 and 1.000000000000001 times the critical density [the boundary value between a universe that will expand forever and one that will eventually collapse], the Big Bang theory will not describe a universe that resembles the one in which we live…

Although the properties of the Big Bang are very special, we now know that the laws of physics provide a mechanism that produces exactly this sort of a bang. The mechanism is known as cosmic inflation.

The National Accelerator Laboratory issued a press release today:

Instead of the universe beginning as a rapidly expanding fireball, Guth theorized that the universe inflated extremely rapidly [faster than the speed of light] from a tiny piece of space and became exponentially larger in a fraction of a second.

For inflation to occur, the universe must have been in a state that allowed a sudden change to release enormous energy, creating an expanding universe almost from nothing. The process was apparently a kind of delayed phase transition, as when water is supercooled below its natural freezing point and then, because of some disturbance, suddenly freezes, generating heat.

However, as Guth immediately realized, certain predictions in his scenario contradicted observational data. In the early 1980s, Russian physicist Andrei Linde modified [the theory so that it] generated predictions that closely matched actual observations of the sky.

The new observations reported today are the first evidence of the existence of gravity waves. These are ripples in spacetime originally predicted by Albert Einstein. The radio astronomers working in Antarctica found traces of these ancient gravity waves by analyzing the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Andre Linde reacted to the news: “These results are a smoking gun for inflation, because alternative theories do not predict such a signal. This is something I have been hoping to see for 30 years.”

Future Nobel Prize-winner Alan Guth offered this summary in 1997:

While it may be too early to say that inflation is proved, I claim that the case for inflation is compelling. It is hard to even conceive of an alternative theory that could explain the basic features of the observed Universe. Not only does inflation produce just the kind of special bang that matches the observed Universe, but quantum fluctuations during inflation could have produced non-uniformities which served as the seeds of cosmic structure [in particular, the existence of galaxies].

Physicists doubted whether Guth’s theory would ever be proven. With today’s announcement, cosmic inflation is a big step closer to becoming settled science.

A Guide to Reality, Part 9

Posted on by

Alex Rosenberg begins chapter 4 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality by pointing out how wasteful biological processes are. For example, a frog or fish may lay thousands or even millions of eggs and only produce a few offspring. Many organisms go through an entire life cycle without having any offspring at all. In addition, 99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct, partly as the result of various prehistoric cataclysms (like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs).

Rosenberg says this is what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: “a lot of order relentlessly turned into entropy” [75]: 

Can any process produce entropy as fast as natural selection?… Build a lot of complicated devices out of simpler things and then destroy all of them except the few you need to build more such devices… [Adaptations] persistently get more complicated and so use even more energy to build and maintain themselves…. Any process competing with natural selection as the source of adaptations has to produce adaptations from non-adaptations and every one of the adaptations it produces will have to be rare, expensive and wasteful [77].

However, Rosenberg’s main thesis in this chapter is that it’s logically impossible to reconcile God and Darwin (although many have tried). He begins with the traditional idea that God is omniscient and omnipotent (aside from being unable to perform impossible tasks like creating a rock so heavy He or She can’t lift it). Rosenberg also assumes for the sake of argument that God intended to create us or something like us “in His image”.

So, assuming that God knows everything, can do anything, and wanted us to exist, how can we harmonize God and evolution? The common approach is to suggest that God used evolution to make us, either by kicking off the process long ago, knowing it would eventually lead to us, or by manipulating evolution at key points, with the same result. In other words, evolution is part of God’s plan.

A problem with this idea, as Rosenberg explains, is that natural selection is a matter of probabilities. That’s what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Mutations just happen. Organisms that might do very well never get the chance because of some random event (like being eaten while still in the nest). There is no guarantee that particular species will evolve. That’s what science tells us.

If God cooked the evolutionary books, therefore, interfering with the randomness of evolution, Darwin got it wrong. We didn’t evolve in the way the theory predicts. On the other hand, if God let evolution take its random course, He or She didn’t know what the result would be. Our evolution wasn’t planned. Either evolution is a random, probabilistic process or it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.

My guess is that a proponent of intelligent design or creationism would say “so much for evolution”. It doesn’t work exactly like the biologists say. So what? Or that God in His infinite wisdom can arrange things any way He wants. It’s all way beyond our understanding.

Personally, I don’t have any religious faith that needs to be reconciled with Darwinism. But what if you’re serious about reconciling your faith and your scientific views? Is there a good response to Rosenberg’s argument?

I think there is. My first reaction to Rosenberg’s argument in chapter 4 is that he seems to be ignoring something he discussed in chapter 2, namely, the “multiverse”. As Rosenberg pointed out, many theoretical physicists, perhaps most of them, think that our universe is just one among many, where “many” could be a truly vast number, even an infinite number. But if there really is a multiverse, it seems beyond question that people like us were certain to evolve in universes here or there, given enough time and randomness. God, being omniscient, could have initiated the multiverse knowing full well that people just like us would eventually exist in some of its parts. If anyone would, God would understand that if you roll the dice often enough, you’ll eventually get all the combinations.

Along with Rosenberg, we can accept the fact that evolution is a truly random process in our universe. It might even be a random process in every universe. But if there are enough universes around, pretty much everything will end up evolving somewhere or other many, many times. If that’s God’s plan, there is no conflict with the Second Law or the theory of evolution. God and Darwin can be reconciled.

My other reaction to Rosenberg’s argument is that he should take into account what physicists and many philosophers say about the nature of time. I have trouble with the idea, but the current scientific view of time is that all moments are equally real. Ours is a “block” universe in which there is no past, present or future; there is merely earlier and later. It isn’t clear to me at all how the universe can be probabilistic and physical events truly random if what’s going to happen is just as real as what did happen, but that’s what physicists believe. I guess it just means the past doesn’t fully determine the future at the quantum level, even though future events are just as real as past events. 

Anyway, if anyone can reconcile quantum indeterminacy and a block universe, it’s God. After all, according to the theologians, God is outside of time (whatever that means). God isn’t sitting around, waiting to see what happens. As Rosenberg says, God is “omnipresent”, which means there is nothing in space or time that is off-limits to God. Being omniscient as well, God knows the whole story. That should be especially easy for God if earlier and later events in the story are equally real.

For that reason, even if evolution is random and inherently unpredictable, God is fully informed. Every event, earlier or later, is right there in the history of the universe for God to know about. If what physics tells us is true, it’s a perfect setup for someone like God, being outside of time, to know how evolution eventually leads to people like us. Randomness prevails, Darwinism is correct and God knows the whole story anyway. If indeterminacy and the supposed nature of time are in harmony, so are physics, Darwin and God. 

Rosenberg ends chapter 4 with some remarks on purpose:

Scientism means that we have to be nihilists about the purpose of things in general, about the purpose of biological life in particular, and the purpose of human life as well….There isn’t any rhyme or reason to the universe. It’s just one damn thing after another. Real purpose has been ruled out by physics [92].

I don’t think he’s right about that, but to avoid repeating myself, we’re going to move on. In our next installment, we’ll consider chapter 5. It’s called “Morality: the Bad News” (the good news supposedly comes later).

A Guide to Reality, Part 7

Posted on by

In the final pages of chapter 2 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, Alex Rosenberg turns to some big, persistent questions he believes are now answered by physics.

– Where did the universe come from, how long ago, and where is it going?

Rosenberg accepts the standard view that the universe began with a “big bang” about 13.75 billion years ago (13.80 according to the latest Wikipedia update). The universe started out extremely hot and extremely dense and has been expanding ever since, creating spacetime, subatomic particles, the elements, stars and galaxies along the way. The expansion seems to be speeding up, but it’s not clear why.

Rosenberg gives the impression that the universe began as a tiny sphere, reaching the size of an orange in much less than a second. The physicist who answers questions at the “Ask a Physicist” website, however, says that the universe didn’t really explode from a tiny point, despite what every documentary and planetarium show implies. He says we should think of the early universe as being like an infinite, very hot, very dense rubber sheet that suddenly began to stretch (although he admits that it’s hard to picture something infinite becoming larger without doing the math). 

One aspect of the big bang that’s always bothered me is its location. Physicists often imply that it didn’t have a location, since spacetime didn’t exist before the big bang occurred. Rosenberg, however, says there is a small region of space where the cosmic background radiation is more intense than anywhere else. He refers to this as “the source of the big bang”. The “Ask a Physicist” physicist says that the oldest light we can detect came from somewhere 46 billion light-years away, much further away than the 14 light-years we would expect from the age of the universe (the difference is the effect of cosmic expansion). So if there is a region of space some 46 billion light-years away that appears to have been the location of the big bang, I have dibs on running the first snack bar and gift shop.

– Where did the big bang come from?

Rosenberg favors one of the leading theories:

The best current theory suggests that our universe is just one universe in a “multiverse” – a vast number of universes, each bubbling up randomly out of the foam on the surface of the multiverse, like so many bubbles in the bathwater, each one the result of some totally random event.

Of course, I have no idea whether the multiverse theory is correct, but it doesn’t seem right to assume that whatever happens in the multiverse is totally random. Most physicists believe that events at the quantum level in our universe are random, but others think that there might be non-random causes underlying the quantum level. Even if quantum events in our universe are random, why assume randomness to be the rule in other universes or in the larger multiverse? Maybe randomness or apparent randomness is simply a feature of the universe we live in.

Rosenberg is certain that everything that happens at the quantum level in our universe, everything that happened in the pre-big bang universe, everything that happened before that in the multiverse, and even everything that is happening in the multiverse right now is fundamentally random. But this seems like conjecture on his part, especially since nobody knows what physical laws were in effect before the big bang or are in effect in the multiverse (if such a thing even exists). 

– Why is there something rather than nothing?

Some philosophers, scientists and theologians consider this to be the deepest question of all. According to Rosenberg, the answer is:

No reason at all. It’s just another quantum event. What science and scientism tell those who hanker for more is “Get over it!”

If Rosenberg is simply telling us what today’s best science has to say about the origin of all existence, he’s probably right. Either there has always been something (there never was a first cause or a prime mover) or one day something simply happened to pop into existence. Rosenberg’s project, however, is both to explain what science tells us and to convince us that scientism provides the answers we need to live without illusions (“the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything” and “science provides all the significant truths about reality”). I think it would be more rational to confess that we don’t know and may never know why there is something rather than nothing. Science might be the most reliable way to secure knowledge, but it hasn’t given us knowledge of everything.

– What is the purpose of the universe?

As should be expected by now, Rosenberg’s answer is short and to the point. There isn’t any purpose to the universe at all. He points out that physicists have been tremendously successful at explaining natural phenomena without resorting to purposes (what philosophers call “teleological” explanations). Smoke doesn’t rise because its purpose is to get higher. Rosenberg is sure that the universe wasn’t created as someone’s science experiment and we aren’t all living in some kind of enormous virtual reality contraption. He’s probably right, but it seems to me that he’s going beyond science here. The best that can be said in support of his position is that, according to the best science we have, the universe functions without purpose. Contemporary physicists don’t need to invoke purpose or purposes to explain what happens in the universe. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that future physicists will need to invoke purpose to explain why there is a universe, assuming that they are ever able to come up with an explanation at all.

– Why does the universe have the laws of nature and the physical parameters that make intelligent life possible?

It’s often pointed out that if the laws of nature or the basic physical parameters (like the charge on an electron) were slightly different, the stuff we’re made of couldn’t exist, so neither would we. Physicists have come up with different explanations for this fact of life (the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin offered a theory called “cosmological natural selection” in his book The Life of the Cosmos). Of course, some thinkers have concluded that God must have designed things this way to make a nice home for people like you and me. Having accepted the multiverse theory as the best theory we have, however, Rosenberg concludes that we’re just lucky. Given that a multitude of universes have arisen from the multiverse, it stands to reason that some of them are like ours. We won the cosmic lottery. 

Maybe he’s right (although some days I don’t feel like a winner). Personally, I’m reserving judgment.

Coming up in part 8: “How Physics Fakes Design”.

A Guide to Reality, Part 6

Posted on by

In the rest of chapter 2 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, Alex Rosenberg explains the second law of thermodynamics and briefly addresses some of humanity’s “persistent questions” (such as “does the universe have a purpose?”). His account of the second law is much less controversial than his answers to those big, long-standing questions.

The second law of thermodynamics is usually summed up, somewhat inaccurately, as “entropy or disorder always increases”. Rosenberg, however, begins with this description:

The second law tells us that in any region of space left to itself, differences in the amount of energy will very, very, very probably even out until the whole region is uniform in energy, in temperature, in disorder…. In our universe, the arrangement of everything goes from more improbable distributions (with more useful energy) to less improbable ones (with less useful energy). And the same goes for any self-contained part of the universe (28-31).

In other words, everything that somehow became organized will eventually fall apart (which is one reason why long-abandoned houses invariably look worse than occupied ones). An organized system is unlikely. Energy must be applied to create it and, without further energy being added to the system, it will sooner or later revert to the much more likely state of being disorganized.

Consider, for example, the atoms and molecules that make up the Eiffel Tower. It’s much less likely that they ended up being arranged in that shape than if they were randomly spread around here and there:

The most probable distribution of energy and disorder in the universe is the completely even distribution of everything….[That] is the state toward which, according to the second law, everything is moving, some places slower, some places faster, but almost inexorably. This evening-out of things – from molecules to galaxies – from less probable to more probable distributions is the rule of the universe (31).

Increasing disorder isn’t completely guaranteed, however, which is why Rosenberg says “almost inexorably”. As he explains, the second law merely means that the tendency toward disorder is extremely, extremely probable. For example, when you pour cream in your coffee, the two liquids quickly mix together. But there is nothing in the laws of physics that prohibits the cream from spelling “Good Morning” when you drop it in.

So why are there so many unlikely, highly-organized clumps of matter around (like us)? Despite what some evolution-deniers think, these clumps aren’t counterexamples to the second law. Nor are they bizarre but permissible, random bits of organization:

These are regions of the universe in which the maintenance of order is being paid for by using much more energy to produce [and maintain] the orderly things than the amount of order they produce or store. Each region of local order is part of a bigger region in which there is almost always a net increase in entropy…. Most biological order is preserved for long periods, but at the cost of vast increases in disorder elsewhere (32).

Physicists believe that the universe began in a state of incredibly extreme heat and density. Rosenberg says that this primordial state was both highly unlikely and highly organized, although “organized” might not be the best word.

If everything in the pre-Big Bang universe was evenly distributed (unlike all the molecules in the neighborhood of, for example, the Eiffel Tower), it seems odd to say that it was organized at all. It’s not as if there was some cold, thinly-populated, disorganized space different from the hot, dense stuff, waiting to be filled up. The dense stuff that existed at that point was All There Was. Unless it had some internal structure, we might as well say it wasn’t organized at all. At any rate, the universe as a whole has been falling apart (moving toward perfect equilibrium) ever since the Big Bang, despite the fact that here and there stars and galaxies eventually came to be.

Somewhat controversially, Rosenberg suggests that the second law also explains why time appears to have a “direction”:

Hard to believe, but the second law is where the direction of time, its asymmetry, comes from. It cannot come from anywhere else in physics. By process of elimination, the time order of events from earlier to later is a consequence of the second law…. None of the basic laws of physics [allow us to tell which way is past and which way is future] except for one: the second law of thermodynamics. It makes a difference between earlier times and later times: the later it gets, the more disorder, or entropy, there is (33-35).

On the other hand, another philosopher, Adrian Bardon, argues in A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time that the second law can’t explain the apparent direction of time. The second law is merely probabilistic, as Rosenberg admits. Increasing entropy is extremely, extremely likely, but not absolutely guaranteed, even for the universe as a whole. But the direction of time, if it’s real, is supposed to be unchanging, not probabilistic. Bardon concludes that the direction of time can’t be the same as the one-way, thermodynamic “direction” suggested by the second law. He thinks the fact that these two “directions” appear to go the same way is just a striking coincidence.

This brings us to Rosenberg’s brief answers to a few of those big, persistent questions. This post being so long already, however, I’ll end for now with a brief summary of his conclusions:

Where did the Big Bang come from? We don’t know, but the best current theory is that it randomly emerged from the “multiverse”. Our universe is just one of many.

Well, why is there a “multiverse” then? There’s no reason for it to exist. It just does. Get over it already!

But isn’t there some purpose to the universe? No, there isn’t any purpose to it at all.

But why then does the universe have the physical laws and parameters that allow intelligent life to exist? Given the vast number of universes popping into existence, it shouldn’t be a surprise that some of them end up being like this one. Somebody had to get a winning ticket in the cosmic lottery. It happened to be us.

In our next installment: Oh, really?