Discover <\/em>are cosmology and origins. November of this year featured \u201cLife before the Dinosaurs.\u201d In September it was \u201cHow the Earth Was Made.\u201d Nestled between those, in the October issue was \u201cOne Second after the Big Bang.\u201d In this article cosmologist Sean Carroll explains how he and his colleagues plan to travel back in time to 1\/10,000 of a second after the Big Bang.<\/p>\nCarroll appears genuinely awed by what he and his colleagues are doing. He begins by giving paleontologists a little jab, saying that no matter how many or what kind of bones they dig up, \u201cthey still can tell only a small part of the story of what life on Earth was like millions, or even thousands, of years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
In contrast, Carroll writes like a breathless groupie about what cosmologists are doing: it is \u201cparticularly amazing\u2026impressive detective work,\u201d which, \u201cwill surely go down as one of the most impressive accomplishments of the human intellect.\u201d<\/p>\n
All the superlatives aside, what they are doing is fascinating. The way they determine how far back they are looking has to do with finding \u201cartifacts that have remained largely intact over vast spans of time.\u201d And they have found light particles, or photons, which have \u201ctraveled undisturbed\u201d dating back to \u201c380,000 years after the Big Bang.\u201d They aren\u2019t content with that; they want to go further back, and they\u2019re pretty sure they\u2019ve found a way.<\/p>\n
A couple of cosmologists came up with predictions and called their theory Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. They can, and have, tested this theory, and it is holding up. On the basis of this, cosmologists have \u201cextrapolated our understanding back 13.7 billion years, to a few seconds after the universe began.\u201d To get to the 1\/10,000 second mark depends on their finding dark matter and then being able to test it as they have tested light.<\/p>\n
Nobody is sure what dark matter is, much less how to find some to study. Still, what they have done is impressive detective work indeed.<\/p>\n
My boy and I were talking about it, and I said to him, \u201cWhat was one second before that?\u201d He said, \u201cA singularity,\u201d but was quick to add that maybe it wasn\u2019t that. There are other ways to explain it.<\/p>\n
Some physicists posit the existence of many universes, or a multiverse, of which this is only one small part. That takes the pressure off of cosmologists to explain what was before the Big Bang, since the singularity would have to be, as Tim Maudlin, philosopher of physics at New York University explains, one of \u201clow entropy\u201d which is \u201cvery improbable or unlikely.\u201d<\/p>\n
This universe sprang from something that came before. Of course then there\u2019s the question of where that <\/em>came from, which I suppose we could follow back to Aristotle\u2019s unmoved mover, but scientists are loath to go there.<\/p>\nThat\u2019s the realm of philosophy, and no less a thinker than Stephen Hawking has declared that philosophy \u201chas not kept up with modern developments in science,\u201d and therefore, \u201cphilosophy is dead.\u201d I assume he believes theology to have been dead long enough as to not warrant mention.<\/p>\n
Maudlin explains in an Atlantic <\/em>interview: the multiverse theory exists in part to explain not only how our world began, but how it has come to be so uniquely tuned for supporting life. If there are many worlds operating by many different sets of physical laws, then eventually one is going to spring up to support life. Otherwise it appears to have been finely tuned by a genius.<\/p>\nHe is quick to warn against mistakenly assuming that there are only two options here, a multiverse, or intelligent design (a term he seems careful to avoid).<\/p>\n
If Sean Carroll and his colleagues find dark matter, and test it, and get back all the way to 1\/10,000 of a second after the Big Bang, it will truly be an amazing accomplishment. If they could go a split second further, to 1\/10,000 of a second before the Big Bang, now that would be something else.<\/p>\n
And it would open up a whole new world of questions. This is why science needs philosophy. As Maudlin said in the interview, \u201cThere is just too much we don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My boy is a bit of a science geek. He subscribes to Discover and Popular Science. They are both styled after the fashion of other pop magazines in an attempt to appeal to non-scientists (\u201cCold Fusion: A Special Investigation\u201d). Popular Science focuses on technology. The past year\u2019s issues have featured an invisible, invincible war ship, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1060,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[228,227,229,187],"class_list":["post-2091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vic-sizemore","tag-philosophy","tag-science","tag-the-big-bang","tag-the-creation"],"yoast_head":"\n
Science and the Death of Philosophy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My boy is a bit of a science geek. He subscribes to Discover and Popular Science. They are both styled after the fashion of other pop magazines in an\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/goodletters\/2012\/12\/science-and-the-death-of-philosophy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Science and the Death of Philosophy\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My boy is a bit of a science geek. He subscribes to Discover and Popular Science. 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<\/a>My boy is a bit of a science geek. He subscribes to Discover <\/em>and Popular Science. <\/em>They are both styled after the fashion of other pop magazines in an attempt to appeal to non-scientists (\u201cCold Fusion: A Special Investigation\u201d).<\/p>\n