Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story Read Online Free
Author: Jim Holt
Tags: Fiction, thriller, science, Crime, Mystery, Retail, Literature, USA, Philosophy, Amazon.com, 21st Century, Religious Studies, v.5, Scientism, American Literature
power to ordain certain physical parameters of the universe he ushers into being. He could determine, for example, what the numerical ratio of the electron’s mass to the proton’s will be. Such numbers, called the constants of nature, look utterly arbitrary to us: there is no apparent reason why they should take the value they do rather than some other value. (Why, for instance, is the strength of gravity in our universe determined by a number with the digits “6673”?) But the creator, by fixing certain values for these constants, could write a subtle message into the very structure of the universe. And, as Linde pointed out with evident relish, such a message would be legible only to physicists.
Was he joking?
“You might take this as a joke,” he said. “But perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may furnish the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird, so far from perfect. On the evidence, our universe wasn’t created by a divine being. It was created by a physicist hacker!”
From a philosophical perspective, Linde’s little story underscores the danger of assuming that the creative force behind our universe, if there is one, must correspond to the traditional image of God: omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benevolent, and so on. Even if the cause of our universe is an intelligent being, it could well be a painfully incompetent and fallible one, the kind that might flub the cosmogenic task by producing a thoroughly mediocre creation. Of course, orthodox believers can always respond to a scenario like Linde’s by saying, “Okay, but who created the physicist hacker?” Let’s hope it’s not hackers all the way up.
Interlude
The Arithmetic of Nothingness
M athematics has a name for nothing, and that is “zero.” It is notable that the root of zero is a Hindu word: sunya , meaning “void” or “emptiness.” For it was among Hindu mathematicians that our notion of zero arose.
To the Greeks and Romans, the very idea of zero was inconceivable—how could a nothing be a something? Lacking a symbol for it in their number systems, they could not take advantage of convenient “positional” notation (in which, for example, 307 stands for 3 hundreds, no tens, and 7 ones). That’s one reason why multiplying with roman numerals is hell.
The idea of emptiness was familiar to Indian mathematicians from Buddhist philosophy. They had no difficulty with an abstract symbol that signified nothing. Their notation was transmitted westward to Europe during the Middle Ages by Arab scholars—hence our “arabic numerals.” The Hindu sunya became the Arabic sifr , which shows up in English in both the words “zero” and “cipher.”
Although European mathematicians welcomed zero as a notational device, they were at first chary of the concept behind it. Zero was initially regarded more as a punctuation mark than as a number in its own right. But it soon began to take on greater reality. Oddly enough, the rise of commerce had something to do with this. When double-entry bookkeeping was invented in Italy around 1340, zero came to be viewed as a natural dividing point between credits and debits.
Whether discovered or invented, zero was clearly a number to be reckoned with. Philosophical doubts about its nature receded before the virtuoso calculations of mathematicians such as Fibonacci and Fermat. Zero was a gift to algebraists when it came to solving equations: if the equation could be put in the form ab = 0, then one could deduce that either a = 0 or b = 0.
As for the origin of the numeral “0,” that has eluded historians of antiquity. On one theory, now discredited by scholars, the numeral comes from the first letter of the Greek word for “nothing,” ouden. On another theory, admittedly fanciful, its form derives from the circular impression left by a counting chip in the sand—the presence of an absence.
Suppose we let 0 stand for Nothing and 1 stand for Something. Then we get a sort of toy
Was he joking?
“You might take this as a joke,” he said. “But perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may furnish the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird, so far from perfect. On the evidence, our universe wasn’t created by a divine being. It was created by a physicist hacker!”
From a philosophical perspective, Linde’s little story underscores the danger of assuming that the creative force behind our universe, if there is one, must correspond to the traditional image of God: omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benevolent, and so on. Even if the cause of our universe is an intelligent being, it could well be a painfully incompetent and fallible one, the kind that might flub the cosmogenic task by producing a thoroughly mediocre creation. Of course, orthodox believers can always respond to a scenario like Linde’s by saying, “Okay, but who created the physicist hacker?” Let’s hope it’s not hackers all the way up.
Interlude
The Arithmetic of Nothingness
M athematics has a name for nothing, and that is “zero.” It is notable that the root of zero is a Hindu word: sunya , meaning “void” or “emptiness.” For it was among Hindu mathematicians that our notion of zero arose.
To the Greeks and Romans, the very idea of zero was inconceivable—how could a nothing be a something? Lacking a symbol for it in their number systems, they could not take advantage of convenient “positional” notation (in which, for example, 307 stands for 3 hundreds, no tens, and 7 ones). That’s one reason why multiplying with roman numerals is hell.
The idea of emptiness was familiar to Indian mathematicians from Buddhist philosophy. They had no difficulty with an abstract symbol that signified nothing. Their notation was transmitted westward to Europe during the Middle Ages by Arab scholars—hence our “arabic numerals.” The Hindu sunya became the Arabic sifr , which shows up in English in both the words “zero” and “cipher.”
Although European mathematicians welcomed zero as a notational device, they were at first chary of the concept behind it. Zero was initially regarded more as a punctuation mark than as a number in its own right. But it soon began to take on greater reality. Oddly enough, the rise of commerce had something to do with this. When double-entry bookkeeping was invented in Italy around 1340, zero came to be viewed as a natural dividing point between credits and debits.
Whether discovered or invented, zero was clearly a number to be reckoned with. Philosophical doubts about its nature receded before the virtuoso calculations of mathematicians such as Fibonacci and Fermat. Zero was a gift to algebraists when it came to solving equations: if the equation could be put in the form ab = 0, then one could deduce that either a = 0 or b = 0.
As for the origin of the numeral “0,” that has eluded historians of antiquity. On one theory, now discredited by scholars, the numeral comes from the first letter of the Greek word for “nothing,” ouden. On another theory, admittedly fanciful, its form derives from the circular impression left by a counting chip in the sand—the presence of an absence.
Suppose we let 0 stand for Nothing and 1 stand for Something. Then we get a sort of toy
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