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The Big Lab ExperimentWas our universe created by design?

By Jim HoltPosted Wednesday, May 19, 2004, at 10:59 AM ET

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty Was our universe created? That is, was it brought into being by an entity with a mind? This is a question I began pondering after my recent inquiry into the end of the universe. (For some reason, cosmic mysteries are best contemplated in pairs.) It is the fundamental issue that separates religious believers, ranging from Deists to Gnostics to Southern Baptists, from nonbelievers. To many atheists, the very idea that our world could have been created by a conscious being seems downright nutty. How could anyone, even a god, "make" a universe?

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To get a better understanding of this matter, I thought it might be wise to consult the man who has done more than anyone else to explain how our universe got going. His name is Andrei Linde, and he is a physicist at Stanford University. (He's also an artist and an acrobat, but never mind.) In the early 1980s, the then-thirtysomething Linde came up with a novel theory of the Big Bang that answered three vexing questions: What banged? Why did it bang? And what was going on before it banged? Linde's theory, called "chaotic inflation," explained the shape of space and how galaxies were formed. It also predicted the exact pattern of background radiation from the Big Bang that was observed by the COBE satellite in the 1990s. Linde has been amply honored for his achievement, most recently by being awarded the 2004 Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation (along with Alan Guth, another pioneer of the theory of cosmic inflation).

Among the many curious implications of Linde's theory, one stands out for our present purposes: It doesn't take all that much to create a universe. Resources on a cosmic scale are not required. It might even be possible for someone in a not terribly advanced civilization to cook up a new universe in a laboratory. Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our universe came into being?

"When I invented chaotic inflation theory, I found that the only thing you needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter," Linde told me in his Russian-accented English when I reached him by phone at Stanford. "That's enough to create a small chunk of vacuum that blows up into the billions and billions of galaxies we see around us. It looks like cheating, but that's how the inflation theory works—all the matter in the universe gets created from the negative energy of the gravitational field. So, what's to stop us from creating a universe in a lab? We would be like gods!"

Linde, it should be said, is famous for his mock-gloomy manner, and these words were laced with irony. But he insisted that this genesis-in-a-lab scenario was feasible, at least in principle. "What my theoretical argument shows—and Alan Guth and others who have looked at this matter have come to the same conclusion—is that we can't rule out the possibility that our own universe was created in a lab by someone in another universe who just felt like doing it."

It struck me that there was a hitch in this scheme. If you started off a Big Bang in a lab, wouldn't the baby universe you created expand into your own universe, killing people and crushing buildings and so forth? Linde assured me that there was no such danger. "The new universe would expand into itself," he said. "Its space would be so curved that it would look as tiny as an elementary particle. In fact, it might end up disappearing altogether from the world of its creator."

But why bother making a universe if it's going to run away from you? Wouldn't you want to have some power over how your creation unfolded, some way of making sure the beings that evolved in it turned out well? Linde's picture was as unsatisfying as Voltaire's idea of a creator who established our universe but then took no further interest in it or its creatures.

"You've got a point," Linde said. "At first I imagined that the creator might be able to send information into the new universe—to teach its creatures how to behave, to help them discover what the laws of nature are, and so forth. Then I started thinking. The inflation theory says that a baby universe blows up very quickly, like a balloon, in the tiniest fraction of a second. Suppose the creator tried to write something on it surface, like 'Please remember I created you.' The inflationary expansion would make this message exponentially huge. The creatures in the new universe, living in a little corner of one letter, would never be able to read the whole thing."

But then Linde thought of another channel of communication between creator and creation—the only one possible, as far as he could tell. The creator, by manipulating the cosmic seed in the right way, has the power to ordain certain physical parameters of the universe he ushers into being. So says the theory. He can determine, for example, what the numerical ratio of the electron's mass to the proton's will be. Such ratios, called constants of nature, look like arbitrary numbers to us: There is no obvious reason they should take one value rather than another. (Why, for instance, is the strength of gravity in our universe determined by a number with the digits 6673?) But the creator, by fixing certain values for these dozens of constants, could write a subtle message into the very structure of the universe. And, as Linde hastened to point out, such a message would be legible only to physicists.

"You might take this all as a joke," he said, "but perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may be the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird. On the evidence, our universe was created not by a divine being, but by a physicist hacker."

Linde's theory gives scientific muscle to the notion of a universe created by an intelligent being. It might be congenial to Gnostics, who believe that the material world was fashioned not by a benevolent supreme being but by an evil demiurge. More orthodox believers, on the other hand, will seek refuge in the question, "But who created the physicist hacker?" Let's hope it's not hackers all the way up.

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Jim Holt writes the "Egghead" column for Slate. He also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.Photograph of the ring galaxy on Slate's home page by Reuters.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

…The point made that the creator of our universe is "not a divine being," but a "physicist hacker" from another universe attempts, through its language, to make the reality of the Creator more mundane, more secular. That is to say, "Never mind that this being created the universe; it's no better than anyone else could do on its own world." This interpretation does a disservice not only to mundane hackers and religious devotees, it also impugns the dignity of physics.

No one doubts that if there is a Creator of the universe, he's a whiz with physics. Let's not get in the habit of labeling gods, hackers, or physicists as commonplace dullards with nothing better to do with their time. They're quite often the opposite. Frankly, Linde's theory simply makes the creation of the universe easy to understand; not the Creator…

--swordwriter

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The Physicist Hacker makes a wonderful candidate for Creator of the Universe. It seems obvious that the Physicist Hacker: 1) is not omnipotent, immortal, omniscient, infinitely good-wise-loving, or otherwise deserving of being worshipped; 2) might not have any way of predicting, understanding, or influencing the development of the universe after the big bang; and 3) could not focus on billions of beings in some lonely corner of said universe, read their minds, monitor their actions, and (according to some set of standards) send them to either of two conveniently maintained parallel universes (heaven and hell) upon their death. Thus, the argument that the premise of a created universe warrants belief in any particular religion is more clearly shown as comical and ludicrous (and pathetic). To this atheist, at least, the point is not that the universe could not have been created by a sentient being, but that such a being would not necessarily be any better or worse than you or I (or even be able to carry a tune).

We don't have to care whether there are hackers all the way up, because we only get one universe anyhow. Besides, the unstated premise of that question is that all universes are alike. Unless there is some theoretical reason why a universe created via "chaotic inflation" can only be created by someone in a universe created in the same way there is no reason to assume it is so. Maybe our universe was created by someone living in a universe with a perfectly straightforward origin. For that matter, maybe our Physicist Hacker lived in a universe created by an honest to God deity that only cared about creatures in its own universe. Or maybe it is hackers all the way up.

--CheckEnclosed

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…What is most interesting to me is that Linde's chaotic inflation variant on the basic model predicts an eternally existing, self-reproducing inflationary fractal universe. To wit, we could very easily live in a multiverse that keeps on spitting out new versions of itself, using (a perhaps infinitely small amount of) matter in one universe to seed an infinite number of children which themselves can seed other universes. And there is really no way in knowing if we are the primogenital universe or merely a link in an infinite chain.

While there is some limited comfort that the multiverse will go on forever, our own universe – like each and every individual universe in the chain – is doomed to either burn out into entropic iciness or collapse back into the singularity from which it sprang. And as Mr. Holt points out, each universe would be literally inaccessible to the others, just as dimensions in different gauge groups are in superstring theory. Even worse, chaotic inflation predicts that the laws of physics could operate differently in different universes, mutating through random changes as each universe evolves from another.

Moreover, there is a trick of semantics going on here with the cosmologists that is both as comforting and apropos of nothing as any believer's creed. Proving that the multiverse could/has been going on for an awfully long time up to this point and could/will go on forever from this point is not quite the same thing as definitively demonstrating that it is "eternally existing." The question in which Mr. Holt assures us that the religious will seek refuge – so who/what provided the original seed for the multiverse? – is also the one from which empiricists will turn in frustration as an unanswerable major pain in the ass…

…In our search for knowledge, we are so desperately driven by our need to find meaning in our own existence and the universe that contains us that we sometimes forget that knowledge is not only the means to an end but holds value in its own right. In this case, I think the most useful conclusion we can draw from what we have learned so far about our own universe's beginnings is that we have moved closer neither to proving nor disproving the case for an intelligent creator but rather simply confirmed – with greater precision – exactly how much we do not know and how complicated figuring it all out is likely to be…

--The_Bell

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(5/20)

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