"There is still a difference between something and nothing — but it is purely geometrical, and there is nothing behind the geometry," Martin Gardner said recently. That's a radical position, but maybe it's necessary. How else can one answer the radical (in the sense of "root") question: why is there anything in the universe?

The best non-mystical candidates for a solution start with mathematics, mind, and meaning:

• Information theory — for example, John Archibald Wheeler's proposal to derive "It from Bit", that is, build real-world entities from zeroes and ones, seeing our world of matter, energy, and spacetime as ultimately a computational process
• Self awareness — identifying the key driving force behind the laws of Nature as the need to evolve conscious beings (without which nothing would exist to ask such questions); in various forms this is sometimes called the "Anthropic Principle"
• Levels of interpretation — as explored by Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach) in his musings on "Strange Loops, Or Tangled Hierarchies" ... the emergence of meaning from multi-level processes which curl back and talk about themselves when understood in different ways

(Well, perhaps "non-mystical" is a bit too strong a term for some of the above!)

A final tack, suggested by Robert Nozick (Philosophical Explanations), is to question the question itself, and to ask "Why should we be surprised at the existence of something?" Why do our prejudices suggest that nothingness is the more natural state of affairs?

(the Martin Gardner quote above appears in "From This Angle, Geometry Rules the Universe" by K. C. Cole, Los Angeles Times (4 Nov 1999); elsewhere it is attributed to his Mathematical Magic Show (1977) collection of Scientific American "Mathematical Games" columns; cf. No Concepts At All (22 Feb 2001), ApprovedMethods (12 Nov 2005), ...)

Monday, January 17, 2000 at 07:44:08 (EST) = 2000-01-17

TopicScience - TopicPhilosophy

(correlates: ApprovedMethods, NothingnessShowsThrough, No Concepts At All, ...)