When it comes to the biggest questions about the cosmos, physicists tend to avoid them or assert theories that have no real empirical basis. The Big Bang is a good example of this – a creation myth that physics will probably never be able to prove to be true. But neither are these theories simply equivalent to religious dogma, they lie in the undefined space between science and religion – not in conflict with science, but also not supported by it, argues Sabine Hossenfelder.
Many people have a bad start with physics in school. I did too. Physics seemed all about magnets, atoms, and balls rolling down inclined planes. I didn’t find it particularly engaging. And yet, today, I am a physicist.
At school, we only see one side of physics, but it has another. Physics is one of the best ways to make sense of our own existence: does the past still exist? Do copies of us live in other universes? Can the information be destroyed? Does science have limits? These are some examples of questions that physics helps us answer.
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The fact that most physicists are silent on these big questions has another drawback: it leaves the field open to those who confuse religion with science.
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Physicists don’t like to talk about this existential side of their research. I suspect it’s because historically, existential questions have been the domain of religion, and scientists want to keep their distance. But keeping this distance has a downside: it also distances science from humanity. This is probably part of the reason why scientists in general, and physicists in particular, are perceived as cold and technocratic. It seems physicists don’t care what the basic laws of nature mean for people. The fact that most physicists are silent on these big questions has another drawback: it leaves the field open to those who confuse religion with science.
A case where science mixes with religion is the beginning of our universe. Physicists have put forward many theories about it: a big bang, a big bounce, a collision of higher dimensional membranes, a string gas, a network, a 5-dimensional black hole, and many others – I I lost track. But the scientifically correct answer is, rather boringly, that we don’t know how the universe began. Indeed, there are good reasons to think that we will never know. But some physicists do not want to accept this answer. They fill their lack of knowledge with creation myths, written in the language of mathematics.
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These creation myths are not false, so it is not unscientific to believe in them. Rather, it’s that we can’t tell them apart with observations – not now, and most likely never. My friend and colleague Tim Palmer from the University of Oxford suggested calling these ideas “ascientific”: science cannot tell us whether they are right or wrong. Like the all-knowing, unobservable God hypothesis, ideas that our universe emerged from a black hole, or a collision of higher-dimensional membranes, or a network, are ascientific.
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Believing in the existence of unobservable universes is not in conflict with science; it is not unscientific. It’s pretty scientific
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I don’t mean that our theory of the cosmos has already reached its end point. We will definitely improve the current one further. For example, the new Webb Telescope collects data that can tell us how galaxies formed. Galaxies should form slowly and gradually if hypothetical dark matter exists. The competing theory is that dark matter is absent, but gravity doesn’t work as Einstein said, an idea known as modified gravity. If the latter is correct, galaxies would form much faster. The Webb telescope can help us distinguish one hypothesis from the other.
However, the formation of galaxies occurred a few hundred thousand years after the birth of the universe, so the Webb telescope will not solve the riddle of its origin for us. Eventually, the collection of data and the refinement of our theories will reach a limit. After that, we will have to choose a story based on something other than scientific evidence.
The idea that there are universes other than our own in a large “multiverse” is another scientific idea that has taken hold in physics. Some of these universes contain copies of our solar system, with a human civilization like ours. Indeed, they contain copies of all of us, although these copies may live out their lives in slightly different ways. Not just in one way, but in every possible way.
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Unlike the movies, however, the universes that physicists surmise cannot be visited. They are totally unobservable. It’s not just that we can’t see them with our own eyes, there are no sightings that could possibly confirm their presence, not even in principle. Why, then, do physicists believe in it? Because they have equations for these other universes, and they believe the math is reason enough to believe that what the math describes exists.
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In some cases, the physics raised questions that we might not even have thought of otherwise.
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Again, believing in the existence of unobservable universes is not in conflict with science; it is not unscientific. It’s rather ascientific. The same goes for believing they don’t exist. Science just doesn’t say anything about their existence, one way or another. So, are there other universes? We do not know.
Once I started thinking about it, I realized that physics opens our minds to many scientific ideas that we cannot refute or confirm. For example, the idea that the universe as a whole can think. It’s not that we have proof of it. But it’s consistent with everything we know, and we don’t have any evidence against it either. Or take the idea that one day we might be able to upload ourselves to a computer or create a universe. I can’t tell you it’s going to happen, but it doesn’t contradict what we know about the laws of nature. It is not unscientific to believe in it. It’s just ascientific.
In some cases, the physics raised questions that we might not even have thought of otherwise. Einstein’s theory of space and time, for example, makes it impossible to define a moment in time as special. For all we currently know, our experience of passing time is an artefact of our perception, not a fundamental property of nature. Without scrutinizing the calculations and proofs, we might not have thought of this, exactly because it contradicts our experience.
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Another existential question in the field of physics is whether information can get lost. This is why physicists are obsessed with the paradox of information loss in a black hole: because it seems that throwing information into a black hole might be the only way to destroy information forever. On this point, the jury is still out – physicists disagree on the answer, but most of them (myself included) currently believe that black holes probably cannot be destroyed.
When we try to answer the big questions of our existence, we have three options: science, philosophy and physics. Of these three, physics has made the most progress over the past century, and we have yet to fully understand what all of this means. Yes, physics is the subject that deals with magnets, atoms and balls rolling on inclined planes. But it is also much more than that.
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