An Old Cowboy Stirs The Campfire Ashes, Smokes Some Jimson Weed, And Mulls Over Martin Heidegger’s Metaphysics, The Fluctuation Of The Vacuum, And A Fourth Law Of Thermodynamics
Lee Drummond
Center for Peripheral Studies
April 2024
An Old Cowboy . . .
Martin Heidegger’s “fundamental question of metaphysics”:
Why is there something rather than nothing?
— Introduction to Metaphysics
Whoa, hold on there Marty, all this Sein und Zeit stuff with Being, Being-in-the-World and all that back and forth wrapped up in interminable Teutonic sentences is just too dang hard to follow. And by the way, Marty, a heads-up: enough with that smart clicking of bootheels every time the voice of a certain Someone comes on the radio.
Why is there something rather than nothing? That head-scratcher begs the question in just the way René’s mis-directed cogito does. It posits the existence of a question-asking sapience, one that indulges itself by contemplating its non-existence. “I think” already says it all; it is superfluous to then claim existence.
Marty delivered his something-rather-than-nothing lecture in 1935 (Introduction to Metaphysics was not published until 1953). As he pondered his imponderable dead end question, some truly extraordinary developments were going on elsewhere in Europe. Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein were discovering that the thing-ness of something was not, well, all that thingy. Contrary to the schoolroom model – in use still? – of an atom with protons, neutrons, and electrons bouncing off each other like little billiard balls, those revolutionary thinkers began to describe them as blurs of energy, interacting fields rather than substances, that is to say, things. Perhaps even more disconcerting was the radically counterintuitive idea that those fuzzy puffs of energy exhibited quantum fluctuation: because a puff/particle’s location is indeterminate or random it can materialize anywhere, even in empty space, as a pair of virtual particles, a particle – antiparticle pair, and then promptly disappear. In short, space is never empty, rather, it is a bubbling froth of particle-antiparticle pairs. Aristotle got it right all those years ago and without benefit of differential equations: nature abhors a vacuum. Again, like René, Marty got things all turned around: nothingness is a fallacy, it is a derivative notion, a mental construct, a, yes, philosopher’s conceit. The universe doesn’t like it.
Another big problem with Marty’s formulation is its utter vagueness. “Something” covers way too much semiotic ground. It might refer to a universe-sized blob, perhaps an opaque quark-gluon soup that actually filled the expanding space of the new universe for a few microseconds following the Big Bang. But that undifferentiated blob of plasma soon became more interesting as embryonic stars, planets, and galaxies began to form as the plasma cooled. For the thirteen-plus billion years after that instant of time, it has been a universe of somethings, plural. In posing his heavy question, Marty didn’t distinguish between a blob-something and an infinite number of somethings. A better but still wrong-headed version of his fundamental question of metaphysics would have been:
Why are there so many somethings rather than nothing?
It is both tremendously important and puzzling that our world is filled with a great many somethings. Important because only a vast chain of physical and biological processes could have led to the emergence of a sapient being, us. The universe has been busy filling its ever-expanding void with an incredible diversity of somethings. And puzzling because that ever-increasing complexity runs counter to a fundamental aspect of the physical world: the phenomenon of entropy as set forth in the second law of thermodynamics.
“Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. A consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that certain processes are irreversible.”
— Wikipedia
Entropy is disorder, and the principle states that disorder always increases until the system under consideration loses all coherent form and dissolves into a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, or heat death. Over time stars burn through their fuel, their planets incinerated in the final red giant burst of the star, even atomic particles eventually die, everything ends in a cold, dark, lifeless void. Yes, an utterly depressing thought, like being locked up forever in a gallery showing a Mark Rothko exhibition.
Mark Rothko, 1960
The bleak thoughts engendered by the concept of entropy deeply affected some prominent physicists who pioneered the field. Physicist David Goodstein opens his important work on statistical mechanics as follows:
“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.”
— David Goldstein, States of Matter. 1975
https://www.eoht.info/page/Founders%20of%20thermodynamics%20and%20suicide
How is it possible that this fundamental law of physics describing a universe of ever-increasing disorder coincides with the burgeoning complexity we observe all around us? The inconsistency leads some to posit a fourth law of thermodynamics: increasing functional information.
“Physical laws — such as the laws of motion, gravity, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics — codify the general behavior of varied macroscopic natural systems across space and time. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cornell University’s Professor Jonathan Lunine, Dr. Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science and their colleagues propose that an additional, hitherto-unarticulated law is required to characterize familiar macroscopic phenomena of our complex, evolving Universe. In essence, the new ‘law of increasing functional information’ states that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity, and complexity. In other words, evolution is not limited to life on Earth, it also occurs in other massively complex systems, from planets and stars to atoms, minerals, and more.
“This was a true collaboration between scientists and philosophers to address one of the most profound mysteries of the cosmos: why do complex systems, including life, evolve toward greater functional information over time?” Professor Lunine said.
Natural laws related to forces and motion, gravity, electromagnetism, and energy, for example, were described more than 150 years ago.
The new work postulates a ‘law of increasing functional information,’ which states that a system will evolve ‘if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions.’
The new law applies to systems that are formed from many different components, such as atoms, molecules or cells, that can be arranged and rearranged repeatedly, and are subject to natural processes that cause countless different arrangements to be formed — but in which only a small fraction of these configurations survive in a process called ‘selection for function.’
Regardless of whether the system is living or nonliving, when a novel configuration works well and function improves, evolution occurs.”
— “Scientists Unveil Nature’s Missing Evolutionary Law.” Oct 18, 2023, Science News
While this physical interpretation of existence is more uplifting than the grim Second Law and its proponents perhaps less prone to suicide, it returns us to Marty’s metaphysical problem with a vengeance. The universe is not only a vast plurality of somethings, but that plurality continuously increases in its complexity by creating novel configurations of elements, whether molecules, organisms, or societies. Why? That burning question seems to demand a profound philosophical answer, one Marty attempted to provide in Introduction to Metaphysics. Surely there is a reason, a cause? We badly want things to make sense. Here those pesky cosmologists throw another monkey wrench into the works. Rather than provide what we might construe as a rigorous, “scientific” answer, some make the audacious claim that the vast web of complexity that is the universe just happened. We may inhabit a virtual universe. If a virtual particle can just pop into existence in supposedly empty space, why not a virtual universe?
It is the ultimate affront to positivism, to any credo that asserts an underlying rationality to events:
“The universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.”
— Edward Tryon, as quoted in Guth, Alan H. (1997). The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins. New York: Basic Books.
On background,
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“In the early 1970s, most physicists believed that, within the boundaries of science, one could not speak about what came before the Big Bang. It was almost universally accepted that no scientist could explain why there is something and not nothing. This was the scientific climate as Tryon was settling into working at Hunter College. But soon after arriving he found himself in a writing project that he thought required him to do an exhaustive study of how modern science perceives our universe. In studying the many ways cosmologists see our universe, he thought he had discovered a totally new way that it might have come into existence. He then wrote his idea up as a scientific paper and tried to get it published. He submitted it to Physical Review Letters, but they rejected it. He then sent it to the British scientific journal Nature, hoping it might be accepted as a "letter to the editor". An editor from the journal did not just accept it, but decided to make it a feature article.
The paper appeared in Nature in December 1973, with the title: "Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?" It proposed the idea that our universe had originated from a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum. The cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin said of the paper: "Now, what Tryon was suggesting was that our entire universe, with its vast amount of matter, was a huge quantum fluctuation, which somehow failed to disappear for more than ten billion years." Physicist Alan Guth made this comment about the paper: "In his controversial two-page paper, Tryon advanced the startling proposal that on rare occasions, whole universes might materialize from the vacuum, and our universe may have begun this way." This was the first time any scientist had used science to try to explain how our universe may have originated from nothing.
In his paper, Tryon first deals with the idea of how our universe could have come from nothing and yet respect the laws of physics. Following the first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Tryon needed to assert that our universe could come from nothing without breaking this law of the conservation of energy. He theorized that all the positive energy from mass and all the negative energy from gravity cancel, giving a universe with zero energy. Tryon gives credit for learning this idea from the general relativist Peter Bergmann. The person who first proposed the idea that we might live in a universe with zero net energy because positive energy from mass cancels the negative energy from gravity was the physicist Richard C. Tolman. Because Tryon believed our universe has zero net energy, in his paper Tryon wrote: "If this be the case, then our Universe could have appeared from nowhere without violating any conservation laws."
Tryon then went on to describe how our universe could have come from a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum. He did this by simply applying the currently known scientific laws, including quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, to the era before our currently-known universe was present. Like many physicists he believed that a vacuum, or empty space, existed before our universe existed. According to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, an apparent vacuum with no matter can support vacuum fluctuations. At the quantum level, because of the uncertainty principle, the law of the conservation of energy can be broken for just a brief moment, causing virtual particles to pop in and out of existence. Tryon says virtual particles also existed in the vacuum that was here before our universe existed, and these quantum fluctuations from nothing (the vacuum) eventually led to one of these particles popping into existence and becoming our universe.”
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Yep, a real head-scratcher. The Old Cowboy takes a last toke of jimson weed and settles down for a night under the (virtual) stars.