THINK ABOUT NATURE

By: Lee Smolin

T
he main question position, which is quite different from the
I'm asking ones that I had originally, and quite surprising
myself, the even to me. But let me get to it bit by bit. Let
question that puts me build up the questions and the problems
everything together, is that arise.
how to do cosmology; how to make a theory of
One way to start is what I call "physics in a
the universe as a whole system. This is said to
box" or, theories of small isolated systems.
be the golden age of cosmology and it is from
The way we've learned to do this is to make an
an observational point of view, but from a
accounting or an itinerary—a listing of the
theoretical point of view it's almost a
possible states of a system. How can a
disaster. It's crazy the kind of ideas that we
possible system be? What are the possible
find ourselves thinking about. And I find
configurations? What were the possible
myself wanting to go back to basics—to basic
states? If it's a glass of Coca Cola, what are
ideas and basic principles—and understand
the possible positions and states of all the
how we describe the world in a physical
atoms in the glass? Once we know that, we
theory.
ask, how do the
What's the role of mathematics? Why does states change? And
mathematics come into physics? What's the the metaphor here—
nature of time? These two things are very which comes from
related since mathematical description is atomism that comes
from Democritus and Lucretius—is that
supposed to be outside of time. And I've come
physics is nothing but atoms moving in a void
to a long evolution since the late 80's to a
and the atoms never
change. The atoms
have properties like
mass and charge that
never change in time.
The void—which is space in the old days never
changed in time—was fixed and they moved
according to laws, which were originally given
by or tried to be given by Descartes and
Galileo, given by Newton much more
successfully.
And up until the modern era, where we
describe them in quantum mechanics, the laws
also never changed. The laws lets us predict
where the positions of the atoms will be at a
later time, if we know the positions of all the
atoms at a given moment. That's how we do
physics and I call that the Newtonian
Paradigm because it was invented by Newton.
And behind the Newtonian Paradigm is the
idea that the laws of nature are timeless;
they act on the system, so to speak, from
outside the system and they evolve from the
past to the present to the future. If you know

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the state any time, you can predict the state
at any other time. So this is the framework
for doing physics and it's been very
successful. And I'm not challenging its
success within the proper domain—small parts
of the universe.
The problem that I've identified—that I think
is at the root of a lot of the spinning of our
wheels and confusion of contemporary physics
and cosmology—is that you can't just take
this method of doing science and scale it up to
the universe as a whole. When you do, you run
into questions that you can't answer. You end
up with fallacies; you end up saying silly things.
One reason is that, on a cosmological scale,
the questions that we want to understand are
not just what are the laws, but why are these
the laws rather than other laws? Where do
the laws come from? What makes the laws
what they are? And if the laws are input to
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the method, the method will never explain the
laws because they're input.
Also, given the state of the universe of the
system at one time, we use the laws to predict
the state at a later time. But what was the
cause of the state that we started with that
initial time? Well, it was something in the past
so we have to evolve from further into the
past. And what was the reason for that past
state? Well, that was something further and
further in the past. So we end up at the Big
Bang. It ends up that any explanation for why
are we sitting in this room—why is the earth
in orbit around the sun where it is now—any
question of detail that we want to ask about
the universe ends up being pushed back using
the laws to the initial conditions of the Big
Bang.
And then we end up with wondering, why were
those initial conditions chosen? Why that
particular set of initial conditions? Now we're
using a different language. We're not talking
about particles and Newton's laws, we're
talking about quantum field theory. But the
question is the same; what chose the initial
conditions? And since the initial conditions are
input to this method that Newton developed,
it can't be explained within that method. So if
we want to ask cosmological questions, if we
want to really explain everything, we need to
apply a different method. We need to have a
different starting point. And the search for
that different method has been the central
point in my thinking since the early 90's.
Now some of this is not new. The American
philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce,
identified this issue that I've just mentioned
in the late 19th century. However, his thinking
has not influenced most physicists. Indeed, I
was thinking about laws evolving before I read
Charles Sanders Peirce. But something that he
said encapsulates what I think is a very
important conclusion that I came to through a
painful route. And other people have more
recently come to it, which is that the only way
to explain how the laws of nature might have
been selected is if there's a dynamical
process by which laws can change and evolve in
time. And so I've been searching to try to
identify and make hypotheses about that
process where the laws must have changed
and evolved in time because the situation
we're in is: Either we become kind of mystics,
well, just those are the laws full stop, or we
have to explain the laws. And if we want to
explain the laws, there needs to be some
history, some process of evolution, some
dynamics by which laws change.
This is for some people a very surprising idea
and it still is a surprising idea in spite of the
fact that I've been thinking about it since the
late 80's, but if you look back, there are
precedents: Dirac, you can find in his writings,
a place where Dirac says the laws must have
been different earlier in the universe than
now; they must have changed. Even Feynman
has … I found a video online where Feynman
has a great way…and I wish I could do a
Feynman Brooklyn accent, it sort of goes:
"Here are the laws we say; here are the laws,
but how do they get to be that way in time?
Maybe physics really has a historical
component. " Because you see, he's saying
physics is different from the other subjects.
There is no historical component to physics as
there is to biology, genealogy, astrophysics,
and so forth. But Feynman ends up saying,
"Maybe there is a historical component." And
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then in the conversation his interviewer says,
"But how do you do it?" And Feynman goes,
"Oh, no, it's much too hard, I can't think
about that."
So having said that, it's very audacious to say
I've been trying to think about that since the
late 80's.
It's worth mentioning what got me started
thinking about evolving laws and that was a
comment that my friend Andy Strominger said
about string theory. Andy is one of the
important string theorists in the United
States. Andy had just written a paper, I think
in about '88, in which he had uncovered
evidence for the existence of a vast number
of string theories. So originally, there were
five and maybe that was not so bad, they
could be unified. And then there were
hundreds of ways and then there were
hundreds of thousands of ways to curl up the
extra dimensions. And then Andy identified
another way to make a string theory that
would make vast numbers. And he said to me
it's not even going to be worthwhile trying to
connect this theory to experiment because
whatever comes out of an experiment, there is
going to be a version that would match that.
And it took a lot of people a long time until
the early 2000s to catch up to that. But I was
really struck by that conversation and then
went away and wondered about this. How could
you have a theory that accounts for the
selection of laws from a vast catalogue of
possible laws? And not only that, there are
some mysteries about why the laws are what
they are because they seem to be very special
in certain ways. One way they're very special
is that they seem to be chosen in such a way
that it leads to a universe with an enormous
amount of structure. With structure on every
scale, from molecules and biological molecules,
to biological systems themselves, to all the
rich variety of structures on the earth and
the other planets, to the rich structures of
galaxies, to clusters of galaxies on this vast
array of scales.
The universe is not boring on any scale you look at it. It's very connection to our own, you can't verify those hypotheses. But if you're
structured. Why? And there turned out to be two connected reasons. making hypotheses about how our universe evolved from past universes,
One of them is that the laws are very special. One way they're very you're making hypotheses about things that happened in our past and
special is that they have parameters in them, that take values which we there can be consequences that you can verify. So through this I came to
don't know the reasons for. These are things like the masses of the the idea that laws must have evolved in time. And that was the idea of
different elementary particles, the electrons, the neutrinos, the quarks, cosmology and natural selection.
the strengths of the fundamental forces. I am talking about thirty
numbers that we just put into theory from experiment. And then we have
a model—the standard model—that works very well. But we don't
understand why those numbers are what they are. So I started to
imagine a scenario where the numbers could change in some violent
events. Maybe the Big Bang was not the first moment in time, maybe it
was a violent event where our universe grew out of some previous
universe and maybe those numbers altered the way that when a new
individual is born the genes are different than the parents.

And I started to play with that idea and began to see how you could use
the principles of natural selection to make predictions about our present
universe. These predictions test the scenario that the laws has evolved in
a particular way. A thing that I understood from that, because there was
already speculation about multi-universes and our universe being one of a
vast number of other universes and there was already the use of the
anthropic principle to pick out our world. But I realized you can't do
science assuming that our universe is one of a vast array of other
universes because we can't observe any properties of them. And I've
been making this argument forever and it doesn't seem to penetrate to
some people that science is not a fantasy story. It's not a Harry Potter
story about magical things that might be true. Science is about what you
can verify—hypotheses that you can test and verify. If you're making
hypotheses about many universes that exist simultaneous to us with no