Lee Smolin - The Life of the Cosmos

Smolin starts off well enough. He indicates that what is to come in the book is "frank speculation" and "a fantasy" in the Prologue on page 6. But then, for some reason, he turns his fantasy into a "theory" later on and seems convinced that it is far more than a speculative fantasy. Scientists should know better than to use a term like 'theory' when they really mean conjecture, speculation, and/or fantasy. He backs off, finally, in the Epilogue by stating that his views are "neither strongly supported by the evidence (or actually the lack thereof) nor widely embraced by my colleagues." (p. 297)

But before moving on to what else is wrong (and good) about the content of this book, let me take a minute to point out a few annoying "features." The text is horribly small. A normal-sized font may have doubled the length of an already lengthy book, but at least it would have been more readable. The book is also filled with typos. Generally they are of the wrong word or missing word variety as if the only proofreading that was done was a computerized spell check. Perhaps the publisher/type-setter, rather than the author, should be blamed for these kinds of errors. Finally, and this one is actually more content related, an editor is badly needed. Smolin rambles on and on and on... Although it didn't take me a year to read the entire work, it sure felt like it! At times, Smolin is clear and concise, but most of the time the opposite is the case.

Now back to the central case the book tries to make (although the latter half seems to stray widely from this focus). Smolin's assertion is that the universe is a product of cumulative natural selection similar to the biology of life on this planet. How do universes reproduce you may ask? By producing black holes is Smolin's answer. Unfortunately, we don't really know (nor can we know) if our universe formed out of another universe's black hole; nor do we know if the black holes in our universe give rise to other universes (as Smolin finally admits on page 258 when he says that "we do not know what happens inside a black hole"--let alone whether it becomes another universe). Because one begins and ends in a singularity doesn't mean they are the same thing on the other side (assuming there even is another side) of the singularity. Smolin doesn't dwell on this aspect (or many of the main skepticisms that his arguments will raise in the minds of most).

His next point is that like begets like; our universe must have come from a similar universe and those our universe is producing via black holes must be identical or very similar to ours in the basic physics. Why would black holes produce universes similar to the ones they came from? There is no DNA or signature that we know of to pass on. It seems to me that if (and that is a BIG if) black holes create a new universe outside our universe the new universes would vary widely.

The only proof Smolin has come up with (given the complete lack of evidence surrounding what lies on the other side of a singularity) is that our universe has many black holes in it. Indeed, he feels that the universe's properties are finely tuned (naturally) to produce the maximum number of black holes that any universe could produce. That may, or may not, be the case, but even if it is, so what? Nothing is really proven if we live in a black hole prone universe. Organisms aren't all at the optimal level of DNA structure or even reproduction. In fact, none are. Cumulative natural selection can only work with what a creature has inherited. Because of this limitation, less than maximum fitness is the norm. Why should we expect a universe built on the same processes to be any different? And many individual organisms who don't reproduce are still alive. So even if our universe didn't produce any black holes Smolin's theory could still be correct. In other words, there is no way to falsify his hypothesis.

I'm going to take one of Smolin's quotes out of context here as it sums up my view of his theory so well.

"A great part of the art of physics is the talent to ignore details and proceed by analogy." (p. 132)

The discussion of the anthropic principle and the numerical values that matter and energy have is always interesting, if not amusing. For instance, Smolin states on page 76 that "the world has much more structure than it would were the parameters to take more typical values." What in the hell are more "typical values?!?!" Has Smolin visited other universes to find out that ours is atypical? ;) Champions of anthropic reasoning and the 'amazing' values our universe runs on that allow for life and structure, as we know it, to exist should only be shocked and looking for explanations if our universe contained values that didn't allow for life, planets, galaxies, etc. as we know them yet they/we still existed. Now that would be a true miracle! The good part of Smolin's discussion of this topic is that he doesn't use it as many people do, to use circular reasoning to postulate or 'prove' god(s). Rather, he uses it for his theory which is that universes that produce many black holes also have properties that allow for the things exhibited in our world.

The Life of the Cosmos turns out to be more of a philosophical treatise than a cosmological theory from a physics professor. Some of this philosophy discussion is interesting, but other portions were either over my head or not of interest to me. I found the idea that the history of cosmology, even within the realm of science, to be based on Judeo-Christian notions (i.e., an absolute being outside of the Universe and hence the quest for a unique unified theory that unambiguously predicts the values of all the parameters) new and fascinating. (This topic is discussed in many places including page 264.) Here is one such philosophical quote which I will reproduce almost in its entirety:

I would like to set... the new search for knowledge, which is based in the understanding that the world is a network of relations, that what was once thought to be absolute is always subject to evolution and renegotiation, that the complete truth about the world is not graspable as any single point of view, but only resides in the totality of several or many distinct views. We understand now that there is no meaning to being at rest, and hence no sense for stasis; this new understanding of knowledge might be said to be imbued with the freedom of the principle of inertia and grounded not in space but only in relations. And these develop not in absolute time but only in succession, in progression. (p. 298)