[Mb-civic] Across the Megaverse,,,

[Jim Burns]

Some fascinating stuff--and an interesting angle, on intelligent
design....

     
'THE COSMIC LANDSCAPE,' BY LEONARD SUSSKIND
Across the Megaverse  
Review by COREY S. POWELL
Published: January 15, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/books/review/15powell.html?8bu&emc=bu 

Physicists are not like ordinary people, and string theorists are not
like ordinary physicists. Even compared with their peers, crafters of
the arcane model of reality that is string theory think in terms of
sweeping explanations of nature's design. Leonard Susskind, a founder of
the theory and one of its leading practitioners, brazenly lays out this
no-boundaries attitude on the first page of his new book. His research,
he declares, "touches not only on current paradigm shifts in physics and
cosmology, but also on the profound cultural questions that are rocking
our social and political landscape: can science explain the
extraordinary fact that the universe appears to be uncannily, nay,
spectacularly, well designed for our own existence?" 
 
What troubles Susskind is an intelligent design argument considerably
more vexing than the anti-evolution grumblings recently on trial in
Dover, Pa. Biologists can point to unambiguous evidence that evolution
truly does happen and that it can account for many otherwise
inexplicable aspects of how organisms function. 
For those who take a more cosmic perspective, however, the appearance of
design is not so simply refuted. If gravity were slightly stronger than
it is, for instance, stars would burn out quickly and collapse into
black holes; if gravity were a touch weaker, stars would never have
formed in the first place. The same holds true for pretty much every
fundamental property of the forces and particles that make up the
universe. Change any one of them and life would not be possible. To the
creationist, this cosmic comity is evidence of the glory of God. To the
scientist, it is an embarrassing reminder of our ignorance about the
origin of physical law.

Until recently, most physicists took it on faith that as they refined
their theories and upgraded their experiments they would eventually
expose a set of underlying rules requiring the universe to be this way
and this way only. In "A Brief History of Time," Stephen Hawking
recalled Albert Einstein's question "How much choice did God have in
constructing the universe?" before replying that, judging from the
latest ideas in physics, God "had no freedom at all." Like many leading
physicists at the time, Hawking believed that scientists were closing in
on nature's essential rules - the ones that even God must obey - and
that string theory was leading them on a likely path to enlightenment.

Although string theory resists translation into ordinary language, its
central conceit boils down to this: All the different particles and
forces in the universe are composed of wriggling strands of energy whose
properties depend solely on the mode of their vibration. 

Understand the properties of those strands, the thinking once went, and
you will understand why the universe is the way it is. Recent work, most
notably by Joseph Polchinski of the University of California, Santa
Barbara, has dashed that hope. The latest version of string theory (now
rechristened M-theory for reasons that even the founder of M-theory
cannot explain) does not yield a single model of physics. Rather, it
yields a gargantuan number of models: about 10500, give or take a few
trillion.

Not one to despair over lemons, Susskind finds lemonade in that
insane-sounding result. He proposes that those 10500 possibilities
represent not a flaw in string theory but a profound insight into the
nature of reality. Each potential model, he suggests, corresponds to an
actual place - another universe as real as our own. In the spirit of
kooky science and good science fiction, he coins new names to go with
these new possibilities. He calls the enormous range of environments
governed by all the possible laws of physics the "Landscape." The
near-infinite collection of pocket universes described by those various
laws becomes the "megaverse."

Susskind eagerly embraces the megaverse interpretation because it offers
a way to blow right through the intelligent design challenge. If every
type of universe exists, there is no need to invoke God (or an unknown
master theory of physics) to explain why one of them ended up like ours.
Furthermore, it is inevitable that we would find ourselves in a universe
well suited to life, since life can arise only in those types of
universes. This circular-sounding argument - that the universe we
inhabit is fine-tuned for human biology because otherwise we would not
be here to see it - is known as the Anthropic Principle and is reviled
by many cosmologists as a piece of vacuous sophistry. But if ours is
just one of a near-infinite variety of universes, the Anthropic
Principle starts to sound more reasonable, akin to saying that we find
ourselves on Earth rather than on Jupiter because Earth has the mild
temperatures and liquid water needed for our kind of life. 

Although Susskind's title and central motivation 
are drawn from this fascinating debate over design, most of "The Cosmic
Landscape" is structured not around philosophy but around the
nuts-and-bolts concepts of modern particle physics. Here Susskind's long
years as a theorist and lecturer at Stanford University prove a mixed
blessing. He is a good-humored and enthusiastic tour guide but he
clearly does not know how baffling he sounds much of the time. He coaxes
the reader along with rhetorical questions and charmingly corny
allegories. Still, this isn't much help when it comes to material like
"Let's suppose that the Calabi Yau manifold has a topology that is rich
enough to allow 500 distinct doughnut holes through which the fluxes
wind. The flux through each hole must be an integer, so a string of 500
integers has to be specified." Um, is this going to be on the exam? 
Susskind's insider perspective also lends an air of smugness to the
whole affair. He falls prey to the common error of Whig history:
interpreting past events as if they were inevitable stepping stones to
the present. He allows remarkably little doubt about string theory
considering that it has, as yet, not a whit of observational support.
"As much as I would very much like to balance things by explaining the
opposing side, I simply can't find that other side," he writes in his
concluding chapter.

Such braggadocio begs for an anthropic question of its own. Humans have
been around in more or less their present form for about 150,000 years;
detailed stories of the origin of the world run as far back as the first
written languages and surely existed in oral form much earlier still.
How likely is it that this generation, right now, is the lucky one that
has discovered the final answer? 

I'm not a physicist, but if I were putting money on the table, I
wouldn't take those odds.

Corey S. Powell is a senior editor at Discover magazine and author of
"God in the Equation: How Einstein Transformed Religion."

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times