Can Science Explain Creation?
by Marcelo Gleiser
August 19, 2010
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/08/18/129289331/can-science-explain-creation...During the twentieth century, the question of origins received renewed attention. If, as Einstein’s general relativity has shown, space-time is plastic, and if, as quantum mechanics has shown, there is a fundamental limitation as observers try to extract information about the material world, it follows that, as we attempt to combine quantum mechanics with relativity, the very structure of space and time must be reinterpreted. In particular, within the framework of the big bang theory, as we travel backwards in time, we must understand how quantum gravity will confront the existence of a classical singularity: the problem of the first cause enters the quantum realm.
Models of quantum cosmology, creative and elegant as they are, do not solve the problem of the first cause. Neither do superstring cosmologies, that is, models of the origin of the universe inspired by superstring theories. Any scientific description of natural phenomena which lies beyond the empirically tested must, by construction, rely on a series of unproved assumptions. In the case of quantum cosmology, we use certain physical laws—such as the law of conservation of energy-momentum and of charge—well beyond their currently known limit of validity. In other words, we are using a theoretical framework that relies on the general theory of relativity and on quantum mechanics well beyond the scales where these theories are known to work.
This is not, as some readers may think, a surmountable problem, that will go away as we discover more and more of the natural world and extend the validity of our physical models to higher and higher energies. It is also not “business as usual,” in the sense that science naturally progresses as we continually strive to test theories beyond their limits of validity. Here, the question is of a different nature;
there is a fundamental limitation in trying to construct a physical theory based on notions of causation and of quantum indeterminacy to deal with the first cause.
Every equation embodies an implicit conceptual structure. Science needs a scaffolding, a structure upon which to operate.
It cannot explain the first cause because it cannot explain itself. It’s not enough to say that all is encapsulated in the multiverse, this hypothetical collection of all potential universes, including ours. The question of where did the multiverse come from will always remain. Even if a consistent model of the origin of the universe is formulated one day, it will still be a scientific model of creation, unable to explain its own structure.
The first cause is an a priori limitation of any rational explanation of reality. It may be an unanswerable question about nature.
Locked
