I offered to do a write-up for the Bay Area Skeptics Newsletter.
Below is what I wrote. Someone didn’t approve of it. It was not used.
Physics or Metaphysics?
by Vincent Sauvé
Victor J. Stenger, Professor of physics, at the University of Hawaii, gave the Bay Area Skeptics a welcome lecture for our May meeting. The well-prepared lecture was based on his recent book The Unconscious Quantum, (Prometheus Books, 1995). The meeting was well attended and included some interesting questions and comments from the audience.
Stenger is one of the only authors out there to challenge the conclusions offered in a plethora of books on how the New Physics, quantum mechanics, and Big Bang cosmology lends support to metaphysics and the mystical.
Stenger challenges the ideas of those who have not stayed the course of modern Western science (and those who never knew it well). In his own words from the back jacket of his book:
For those who have read books that have linked modern science to God and other unknowable and nonsensible ideas, Stenger's book would be a good one to get.
For more than a decade now, gurus of the New Age and preachers of the New Christianity have been telling us that developments in twentieth-century physics and astronomy--quantum mechanics, big-bang cosmology, the so-called anthropic coincidences, and the new sciences of chaos and complexity--are leading toward a convergence of the differing views of the universe provided by the outer voices of science and the inner voices of ego. They proclaim that the discoveries of modern physics imply a central role for human consciousness, and for a universe created with humans in mind....Much of the literature of modern metaphysics...is written in a "gee whiz" fashion for a popular audience. That audience is duly impressed by the mysteries of quantum mechanics and eager to believe the implications drawn that human consciousness holds the key to reality and their personal immortality…
As science and critical thinking become increasingly watered down in our educational system, and opposing forces exploit the consequent public gullibility, the duty of every scientist is to speak out in protest. The antiscientists who pursue a political agenda, and the pseudoscientists who pursue the dollar, need to be fought at every turn. Scientists cannot continue to ignore these issues.
Yet, in this writer’s opinion Stenger is way too conservative in picking his targets. His baloney detector seems to be adjusted so as to leave highly speculative, unproven and nonfalsifiable ideas and hypotheses that are in fashion in mainstream science untouched. I suppose it is not his job in this project to be the theoretician's skeptic and critic. Yet, I would like to have seen more from a book subtitled: “Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology.”
Who is to say that much of ideas that are popular in modern physics and cosmology aren't also metaphysical nonsense? By this comment I mean the ideas and hypothesis that Stenger and his colleagues find acceptable without offering a hint that there are good grounds to be skeptical of such ideas. A book by Richard Morris, The Edges of Science: Crossing the Boundary from Physics to Metaphysics, (Prentice Hall Press, 1990) addresses how often popular hypothesis in modern physics and cosmology push the boundaries of science (and in my opinion push way past legitimate science).
A favored method for convincing the public of something in modern physics, even though all the while admitting that it is absurd, and that nature is therefore absurd, is to tell us that these theories have been tested to high precision and agree with experiment. Carl Sagan says as much on page 304 of his excellent new book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. And Richard Feynmann wrote “The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is--Absurd.”(1) And Stenger, for example, suggests absurd mathematical ideas (said to be derived from Einstein's general relativity) as an explanation, without any criticism, such as on page 221:
In his general theory of relativity published in 1916, Einstein showed that a universe totally empty of matter and radiation can still contain gravitational energy. This energy is stored in the curvature of space, sort of like the potential energy of a bent bow. The energy density of curved space is proportional to its curvature.And on page 222, he refers to “the equations of motion of an empty universe--no matter or radiation...” which sounds like poor metaphysics, not physics, to me. As is the case with us all, not everything Einstein said was correct, but nowhere in my studies of relativity theory have I read Einstein argue for spacetime curvature in an empty universe. On the contrary, Einstein wrote “According to the general theory of relativity, the geometrical properties of space are not independent, but they are determined by matter.”(2)
In a truly empty universe there will not be equations for anything. And besides there is not the least bit of evidence that the universe was ever empty. Every improvement in observational astronomy has revealed that the spatial and temporal distribution of galaxies is indicative of an infinite non-expanding universe. Big Bang cosmologists, through twistingly weird mathematical falsities, get around this by claiming that empty space expands! And that this is why we cannot see the earlier more compact universe in one direction of the sky! Hey fellas, instead of inventing these way-out ideas like expanding space, and our universe coming into being from a singularity--a region of zero volume... or a quantum fluctuation, or inflation, why not concentrate on finding another explanation for cosmic redshifts? This would be the parsimonious thing to do. Even Edwin Hubble was of the conclusion that “All of these data lead to the very simple conception of a sensibly infinite, homogeneous universe of which the observable region is an insignificant sample.”(3)
Furthermore, the 2.7K background radiation is no longer useful as a claim in support of the Big Bang since it has been shown that an infinite non-expanding universe would also have this radiation. In fact a recent paper shows that there were researchers who utilized measurements and or theoretical calculations that better predicted the 2.7K microwave temperature prior to Penzias and Wilson, and they did this without utilizing the Big Bang expanding universe hypothesis. (4)
Nature is sensible. But one has to realize that people can be creative to the point of absurdity. Our biases are often the problem. When the biases inherent in our religious culture tell us that the universe must have had a beginning, we get into building all sorts of theories that we believe are compatible with the laws of nature--but in reality make nature appear absurd. An example that everyone can agree with is of astronomers of many centuries ago. Because they (along with their culture) believed that the earth was at the center of the universe and was stationary, they observed that the planets had absurd back and forth (retrograde) motions in their paths across the sky. (Yesterday's New Physics-epicycles-were created to account for those observations.) Was nature in respect to the planets absurd then?
It is my belief that study, logic, and skepticism will reveal either
a sensible world or non-sensible people. If you tend to agree with
this last statement, and wish to explore this further, read Stenger's worthwhile
book, and then, as just a couple of suggestions, read "The new physics--Physical
or mathematical science?" by Robert L. Oldershaw, American Journal of
Physics, 56 (12), December 1988, pp. 1075-1081. This paper covers very
well the absurd ad hoc constructions that have been the norm of standard
particle physics and cosmology over the past three decades. And see
William C. Mitchell's book The Cult of the Big Bang: Was There A Bang?
(1995, Cosmic Sense Books, PO Box 3472, Carson City, Nevada 89702). Be
sure to get the second printing.
June 1, 1996
Vincent Sauvé
(1) Richard Feynmann, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
(Princeton University Press, 1985), page 10.
(2) Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1951), Chapter 32, p. 113.
(3) Edwin Hubble, “The Problem of the Expanding Universe,” American
Scientist, Vol. 30, No. 2, April 1942, pp. 98-115.
(4) A.K.T.Assis and M.C.D.Neves, “History
of 2.7 K Temperature Prior to Penzias and Wilson,” Apeiron,
Vol. 2, No. 3, 1995, pp. 79-84.