What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology

What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology - Ross Andersen - Technology - The Atlantic

in order to explain the evolution of the universe, that state had to be a very low entropy state, and  there's a line of thought that says that anything that is very low entropy is in some sense very improbable or unlikely. And if you carry that line of  thought forward, you then say "Well gee, you're telling me the universe began in some extremely unlikely or improbable state" and you wonder is there  any explanation for that. Is there any principle that you can use to account for the big bang state?

One that's becoming more and more prevalent in the  physics community is the idea that the big bang state itself arose out of some previous condition, and that therefore there might be an explanation of  it in terms of the previously existing dynamics by which it came about

One common strategy for thinking about this is to suggest that what we used to call the whole universe is just a small part of everything there is, and  that we live in a kind of bubble universe, a small region of something much larger. And the beginning of this region, what we call the big bang, came  about by some physical process, from something before it, and that we happen to find ourselves in this region because this is a region that can support  life.

quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a  tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world.

Quantum  mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking  for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong

One example of philosophy of cosmology that seems to have trickled out to the layman is the idea of fine tuning - the notion that in the set of all  possible physics, the subset that permits the evolution of life is very small, and that from this it is possible to conclude that the universe is  either one of a large number of universes, a multiverse, or that perhaps some agent has fine tuned the universe with the expectation that it  generate life.

It's not as clear how you even make judgments like that about the likelihood of the various  constants of nature (an so on) that are usually referred to in the fine tuning argument.

What they want to argue is that this arises naturally from an  analysis of the fundamental physics, that the fundamental physics, quite apart from any cosmological considerations, will give you a mechanism by which  these worlds will be produced, and a mechanism by which different worlds will have different constants, or different laws, and so on.  If that's  true, then if there are enough of these worlds, it will be likely that some of them have the right combination of constants to permit life.

Physicists think that at the end of the day there should be one complete equation to describe all physics, because any two physical systems  interact and physics has to tell them what to do. And physicists generally like to have only a few constants, or parameters of nature.

What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed  intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general  case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that  the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/what-happened-before-the-big-bang-the-new-philosophy-of-cosmology/251608/