Primordial chaos may precede the Universe, and all its objects and its laws—up to the basic constituents of matter and the laws of physics. Or mathematics itself. All of these "timeless" realities may turn out to be contingent— the result of an evolutionary process.
The evolutionary cosmology proposed by Roberto Mangabeira Unger
and Lee Smolin in
The Singular
Universe and the Reality of Time
(2015) is a high bid for the preeminence of cosmology as the ground and
basis of science, over against physics. This amounts to an overthrowing
of the Newtonian paradigm as it has been unwittingly perpetuated by the
"new" physics of the twentieth century. Both Newtonian and Einsteinian
physics assume a body of laws of nature, and of basic constituents of
nature, which is eternal, outside time, preexisting change and
ruling it. The preeminence of time and evolution (and of cosmology)
above physics would lead us, instead, to assume the preeminence of
change, and to admit the variability both of the laws of physics, at
least in the crucial cosmogonic events, and of the basic constituents
of nature. We may thus speak of
an
emerging evolutionary paradigm in physics and cosmology.
Note that Darwin's theory of biological evolution scrapped the notion
of eternal kinds in Nature at the level of biological species, but it
did not apply behyond its intended scope, living beings. Laplace's
cosmology and Lyell's geology likewise showed that astronomical bodies
may be subject to history and evolution. They did not however deny the
eternity of such kinds of natural "bodies" as the elementary particles,
however conceived, nor to the basic laws of their interaction.
Unger and Smolin raise the stakes, arguing that radical and universal
evolutionism leaves no place "outside time" for any such laws or kinds
to reside. Everything is subject to time, and therefore even the basic
principles of order, not to mention the elementary constituents of
nature, are historical and contingent, the product of evolution, rather
than the visible script of a transcendental catalogue of kinds.
The Singular Universe and the Reality
of Time
is an important volume in the philosophy of science, and I warmly
encourage its reading. Its reconceptualization has far-reaching
consequences for our current notions of science, of natural laws and
phenomena, of physics and of mathematics—even mathematics, yes, because
nothing escapes this radical overhauling of the role of time.
Mathematical realities are by definition outside time. In Unger and
Smolin's view, this would make them into a technique for dealing with
the world from a certain perspective, and would demote mathematics from
its current ambitious position as "God's grammar" or as the privileged
key to the structure of the universe. Mathematics, instead, may be a
misleading cognitive instrument when applied beyond its proper scope—an
example would be the use of the mathematical notion of infinity in
conceptualizing and representing cosmological critical events such as
the Big Bang or black holes. Such extreme events would be
misrepresented by a mathematical fiction such as infinity, giving rise
to the current notion of Singularity—which according to Unger and
Smolin is mistaken, and involves scientific research in unresolvable
paradoxes as well as unnecessarily limiting the scope of scientific
research.
But I digress. I wanted to quote a passage of Unger and Smolin's book
and show the way it compares to some more classical conceptions in
cosmology, which (leaving out the creationist implications) may lead to
a reassessment of the classical paradigm in some of its radical
evolutionary implications.
Here, in pre-scientific and
pre-philosophical language, is an account of the relation between the
present universe and the early universe. This account accords with what
we know about the history of the universe. It suggests why the
mutability and the stability of the laws of nature may be a feature of
this history. It shows how the same processes that give rise to the
stability may also produce the mutability.
The mutability of the laws of nature ceases to
contradict their stability, and begins to complement it, once we place
both the stability and the mutability in the context of a historical
view. It is only when we treat the stability and the mutability of the
laws of nature without regard to the historical character of the
universe that they appear to contradict each other.
Imagine the present, cooled-down universe, in
comparison to the universe in its fiery and formative stage, as a
living corpse: with limited kinetic energy, temperature, and degrees of
freedom, with an established structure, and with enduring
regularities—the laws of nature. Yet there was a time, of extreme
density and temperature, when the distinction between states of affairs
and regularities was unclear (a time that can be described alternately
as one of law-giving or of lawlessness), when the present division of
nature into well-defined constituents was not yet established, and when
the phenomena were excited to much higher degrees of freedom than those
enjoyed by the living corpse. The unexplained values of the
dimensionless constants or parameters of nature may have their origins
in the process by which this formative moment gave rise to the ensuing
regularities and structures.
This rudimentary account—a stylized
interpretation of certain central features of the history of the
universe, such as contemporary cosmology represents it—distinguishes
between relatively brief and formative moments of extreme density,
kinetic energy, and temperature and the relatively long periods,
subsequent to these moments, of lesser density, kinetic energy, and
temperature, in which a universe is worked out. We have increasing
reason to think that these formative moments of extreme density and
temperature, resulting in a new universe, recur. (Roberto Mangabeira
Unger, in Unger and Smolin 2015, 267-68)
Compare now a classical account, ultimately deriving from Greek
cosmology, via Lucretius, as assimilated and retold (with the
creationist additions which I am now asking to mentally delete) by the
Christian tradition in which the universe is not eternal and
everything in Nature has an
origin—even the basic ingredients of nature, even the most basic laws
and regularities. In Abraham Cowley's epic
Davideis
(c. 1640) we find an excursus on the role of music (read Pythagorean
harmony, law or proportion) in the Universe. To my mind it reads, in
some respects, like a versification of the previous passage from
Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
Tell
me, O Muse (for thou or none canst tell
The mystic powers that in blest numbers dwell,
Thou their great nature knowst, nor is it fit
This noblest gem of thine own crown to omit),
Tell me from whence these heavenly charms arise;
Teach the dull world t'admire what they despise.
As first a various unformed hint we find
Rise in some godlike poet's fertile mind,
Till all the parts and words their places take,
And with just marches verse and music make,
Such was God's poem, this world's new essay;
So wild and rude in its first draught it lay;
Th' ungoverned parts no correspondence knew,
And artless war from thwarting motions grew;
Till they to number and fixed rules were brought
By the eternal mind's poetic thought.
Water and air he for the tenor chose,
Earth made the base, the treble flame arose;
To th' active moon a quick brisk stroke he gave,
To Saturn's string a touch more soft and grave.
The motions straight and round and swift and slow
And short and long were mixed and woven so,
Did in such artful figures smoothly fall,
As made this decent measured dance of all.
And this is music: sounds that charm our ears
Are but one dressing that rich science wears.
Though no man hear't, though no man it rehearse,
Yet will there still be music in my verse.
We find here an account of Chaos preceding not just the present objects
and forms in the universe, but preceding order and law itself. Laws, in
Cowley's view (mentally bar, I insist, the "Godlike creative mind"
designing the creation) are emergent—they are produced in the course of
creative evolution, just as the
"elements" themselves. Note that while Cowley's view may seem naively
creationist from the standopoint of twentieth century science, science
under this paradigm might seem equally naive in assuming that its own
elements (e.g. "iron", "carbon", "protons", "quarks") and its own laws
("the speed of light", "the law of gravitation") as well as any
regularities, might be basic preexisting conditions and constants,
exempt from emergence and evolution, rather than created and emergent
(i.e. contingent) productions themselves, the result of the "chaotic"
interaction of "thwarting motions".
I already compared Cowley's passage to the cosmological account
presented in Andrew Lange's Segre Lecture,
"How
Did the Universe Begin".
That is, we are not dealing here with matters of specific wording and
mere coincidence, but with a persistently returning perspective on the
nature of the universe, of order and of its necessary change—an
evolutionary perspective which will keep returning because it reflects
some of our deepest insights about the universe and its transcience.
