Today’s Post

The posts up until now have summarized Teilhard’s unique perspective on the transformative concept of evolution, leading up to the next phase in this blog: approaching the subject of God through the insights of science.  As a starting place for this phase, this post briefly addresses the ‘framing of the universe’ as understood by science.

Understanding Everything

Science proclaims its intuition that the universe is ultimately not only intelligible but unified, through its concept of the “Theory of Everything”, known as the ‘ToE’.

• Its intelligibility can be seen in the success of theoretical frameworks, models, that explain how it works
• Its unification can be seen in the increasing integration among the various models over the past two hundred years

The ToE essentially, when developed, will consist of a coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all the physical ‘framing’ of the universe.  At present, while science believes that it has identified all the forces through which the universe has evolved, and by which it is held together, its theoretical models still fall into two, un-integrated, representations:

• The Quantum Field Theory, which describes those forces, as addressed by the ‘Standard Model’: the atomic weak, strong, and electromagnetic forces; the actions of the very small
• The General Relativity Theory, which focuses on the force of gravity to understand the universe in regions of both large-scale and high-mass: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, etc.; the actions of the very large

For many years science has worked toward the goal of integrating these two models.  Such a meta-understanding of all universal forces would see the cosmos as framed by facets of a single, integrated and unified force.

The Cosmological Constants – Relating the Two Theories

In the April 2 Post, Human Evolution, Part 6: The Problem with Complexity, I referred to the Cosmological Constants as aspects of the universe that, had they different values, would have resulted in a universe vastly different from our own.  Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and President of the Royal Society, theorizes that there are six mathematical constants that determine the ‘framing’ of the universe.  Had any one of them been even slightly different, scientific consensus holds that the universe would not have proceeded from the ‘big bang’ at all: it would have been still born.

These six constants are all expressed as ratios between the elemental and formative forces, the ‘framing’ of the universe, as understood by the two theories introduced above.  While these ratios do not require that the two theories agree, they do give examples of how the forces addressed by the theories are in balance.  For example:

ε, the measure of nuclear binding force, has a value of 0.007. If it had a value of 0.006 there would be no other elements: hydrogen could not fuse into helium and the stars could not have cooked up carbon, iron, complex chemistry and, ultimately, us. Had it been a smidgen higher, at 0.008, protons would have fused in the big bang, leaving no hydrogen to fuel future stars, and the formation of the heavier atoms through the force of gravity would not have occurred.

Q, the ratio between the ‘rest mass’ energy of matter and the force of gravity, has the size of one part in 100,000. Were it only a bit smaller, star formation would be slow and the raw material for future planets would not survive to form planetary systems. Were it bigger, stars would collapse swiftly into black holes and the surviving gas would blister the universe with gamma rays.

A similar type of relationship occurs in each of the other four constants, but all identify relationships necessary for the universe to exist as it does, and for evolution to proceed as science has described it.

Entropy

The six constants are an expression of the critical and delicate balance that exists among the elemental forces which frame our universe.  Science also postulates another characteristic of the matter-energy combinations that come into play.  It postulates that each time energy is ‘put to work’, not all of the energy is transferred from the inflictor to the receptor, as from the hammer to the nail.  Each such ‘activation of energy’ comes with a small, infinitesimal, unquantifiable and unrecoverable loss.  In the equations of physics, this small loss is indicated by inclusion of a triangle above the equals sign.  The term that physics uses for this small, permanent loss is ‘entropy’.  The ultimate perspective that emerges from this small loss is that over a very long period of time we can expect the candle of the universe to burn itself out.

So, the combination of the six cosmological constants plus the postulation of ‘entropy’ can be seen to be critical to the framing that underlies our universe, even if it does not carry into an understanding of living things.

Not quite, as we shall see.

A ‘Theory of Matter’?

Even the most aggressive concept of the ToE, even by the best forecast of science, even if the two theories can be brought together in a single integrated model, it will still fall well short of the “Everything” hoped to be encompassed by it.

The ToE, while claiming to address ‘everything’ actually only focusses on the realm of physics.  Effectively, from the perspective of evolution, from the viewpoint that the universe is in the process of evolving from one thing to another, it only addresses the phase of ‘pre-life’.

It is left to the theory of Natural Selection, so goes the mantra of science, to explain how the building blocks of matter produced by the first phase go on to produce new products in the second.  This mantra also goes on to attempt to apply Natural Selection as the underlying process of the third phase, that of conscious life.

However, as we have seen in previous posts, understanding how evolution succeeds in producing consciousness requires an understanding of the phenomenon of ‘complexity’.  Including this phenomenon in the universal framing will extend the ToE from a ‘Theory of Matter’ to a true ‘Theory of Everything’.

The Next Post

Having seen how science “frames” the universe (although omitting conscious life from its structure), the next post will address the coherence that the universal ‘frame’ takes on when the phenomenon of complexity is added.