Office of Fluctuation Control

Bob and Ray (remember them?) used to interrupt their programs with bulletins from the “Office of Fluctuation Control.”  I miss those guys.  But that sort of silliness isn’t always contrived for the purpose of making people laugh.  One astrophysicist was approached by a little old lady following his lecture.  She said something to the effect of “Sonny, you’ve got it all wrong.  The world sits on the back of a turtle.”

Amused, he asked her what the turtle was sitting on, and she replied, “Another turtle, of course.”  He had hardly opened his mouth again when she said, “Save your breath, Sonny.  It’s turtles all the way down.”

Mark Vuletic, of the National Center for Science Education, has written, “Many modern physicists claim that things—perhaps even the entire universe–can indeed arise from nothing via natural processes.”  Take that, turtle lady!  Okay, now the question is who is sillier, the old lady or the scientist who came up with this?

Marilyn Prever, writing in Touchstone (Sept.-Oct. 2009), says one of the ideas Vuletic is alluding to is that of a “random quantum fluctuation, which has the advantage of being virtually [virtually?] nothing at all, and acting upon a new kind of nothingness, a vacuum that somehow has a structure.”  Uh, I don’t think nothingness even allows for a vacuum, which would have to mean vacant space, and it certainly doesn’t allow for a structure.  Such things violate the very concept of nothingness.  And if I understand cosmology a little bit, we’re talking about a universe that blew up out of a singularity, a point with no extension.  That appears to mean there was nothing (that word again) measurable there, and that time, space, matter, energy and physical law were created out of that nothingness.

Even the phrase “out of” doesn’t work very well here.

Serious philosophers still hold that the ultimate philosophical question, the ultimate first-order question, is “Why is there something and not nothing?”  I tried that on a Humanities class one day and a student gasped.  We were studying Paul Tillich, and I said, “Ah, she has peered into the abyss of nothingness.”  What gets me about doing that is that there isn’t even a place to imagine standing to contemplate that nothingness.  There is simply NOTHING to contemplate.

St. Thomas Aquinas was good at dealing with creation ex nihilo.

Oh, there’s the whole argument from the multiverse, that there may well be an infinite number of universes out there, and in that setting, given an infinite amount of time, that infinite number of monkeys banging away on an infinite number of—well, it used to be typewriters, but let’s say word processors—will indeed produce the complete works of Shakespeare.  Jorge Luis Borges dealt with something similar in “The Library of Babel.”  I wrote one of my more confusing articles on that story.  So in such a multiverse there will of course be a universe in which at least one world appears to be the result of intelligent design.  As Prever puts it, “Out the window go the Anthropic Principle and Fred Hoyle’s tornado-in-a-junkyard-producing-a Boeing-707 challenge.”

Need we point out that this only removes the question to another level?  We’re still left with a multiverse that exists mysteriously where there should be a nothingness so absolute that we’re forced to confront that greatest of questions again. Moreover, we must contemplate it in a form that involves WHY even an eternally existing multiverse would have in it the power to move things counter to entropy into ever greater complexity, probably in trillions of instances.

Going back to Tillich, I like his (admittedly incomplete) definition of God as Sein-Selbst, which has to be translated inadequately as Being-Itself.  God, he says, is the Ground of Being.  God does not exist, according to Tillich, but is.  This is an allowable philosophical distinction, incidentally.  Existence is limited by its need for conditions.  Being-Itself is not, and therefore is free to bring a multiverse into existence out of nothingness.

Prever says, “There is knowledge and there is knowledge, and then there is wisdom, and not all of it leaves traces in cloud chambers.”