Whence the Universe

  I guess I'm not cut out for metaphysics.  Either I'm not sufficiently sophisticated to understand metaphysical arguments, which generally fly over my head, or I'm especially allergic to the sophistry that I detect in most of them.

  I'm particularly puzzled by metaphysical discourses on the age-old question of why there is something rather than nothing—that is, why the universe actually exists—which William James called the darkest question in all philosophy.  There are many recent writings about this conundrum, two of which underlie my musings today.  The first, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss, attempts to give a scientific answer.  The second, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by science writer Jim Holt, explores various physical and metaphysical answers that have emerged over the eons.

  I discussed Krauss' book in a previous posting.  Although its title may sound metaphysical, it is not, but rather is based on sound science as far as our understanding of the cosmos can now take us.  Krauss adduces theoretical and experimental evidence to assert that our universe was spawned from an eternal multiverse, which continually gives birth to universes like ours in big bangs.  Each new universe arises as a spontaneous eruption of particle-antiparticle pairs from the quantum froth that is known to pervade space; and each might develop its own set of physical laws as it unfolds from its primal fireball.  I refer you to the latter half of my previous posting for additional details.

  This cosmology, mind-blowing as it may seem, satisfies my senses of simplicity, order and coherence.  An eternal, steady-state multiverse that continually engenders new universes removes the perennial bafflers: "What happened before our big bang?" and "What first cause started it all?".  Before our own big bang, the multiverse had always been starting new universes.  And a first cause isn't needed for a process that has been going on eternally, because there is no first instant.

  But "it has always been and will always be" is not as entrancing to some of my readers as it is to me. They ask, "Why does the multiverse exist at all?"  In answer, most scientists throughout the ages have agreed with Bertrand Russell's dictum, "I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all."  Adolf Grünbaum, a professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, goes deeper by pointing to unstated premises behind the question: not only that everything needs an explanation, but that a priori the preferred state of the multiverse is its nonexistence, not its existence, so that an explanation is needed to explain why it indeed exists.  But why should not the preferred state be its actual state of existence, no explanation needed?

  Despite my satisfaction with the cosmology Krauss describes, I decided to read Holt's book, which explores sundry other physical and metaphysical models proposed throughout history, most of them metaphysical.  It starts annoyingly, however,  with a prologue that plunges one into the fuzzy argumentation that I associate with all of metaphysics.  I reproduce it here in its entirety:

A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives

Suppose there were nothing.  Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something.  If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted.  If everything were permitted, nothing would be forbidden.  So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden.  Thus nothing is self-forbidding.

Therefore, there must be something.  QED.

  This argument is at best semantic confusion, at worst casuistry. The verbal shenanigans arise from the conflation of two meanings of the word "nothing": the antonym of the word everything, i.e., no thing; and the state of nothingness, i.e., the nonexistence of the universe, which is a thing.  In the fourth sentence, then, if "everything were permitted," so too would a nonexistent universe be permitted; it is one possibility among all possibilities (every thing) for the universe.  Likewise, if "nothing would be forbidden," then a nonexistent universe couldn't be forbidden as a possibility.  The paradox that Holt seeks thus vanishes.

  Even if Holt was not purposefully being sophistic here, but was just poking a bit a fun at the fogginess of some metaphysical argumentation, he still has done a disservice to his readers, who will either swallow the paradox uncritically, or have to spend time resolving it, as I did.  He compounds the offense by using "nothing" in both meanings indiscriminately until some 45 pages later in the book, when he finally distinguishes them in the context of the sentence "Nothing is greater than God."  (Try reading that sentence using each of the two meanings—totally opposite statements!)  Not a good introduction to his tome.

  The book proper starts by summarizing various answers to Why is there something rather than nothing? given by savants over the centuries.  To me, most of them partake of the sort of fuzziness that disqualifies me as a metaphysicist.  For example: Something exists because it is on the whole better than nothingness.  Something exists because it was created out of nothingness by an omnipotent creator, which because of its omnipotence created itself.  Nothingness can't exist because it is literally unthinkable—for, after trying to imagine a universe with nothing in it, space itself, a thing, would be left—so nothingness must be impossible.  Something exists because the single nothingness state counts as an infinitesimal fraction of all the possible somethingness states; so, probabilistically speaking, the nothingness state has no real chance of occurring.  This summary provides a backdrop for the rest of the book, which explores current thinking about the question.

  To my mind, most of the current thinking Holt presents is metaphysical blather.  For instance: "Math creates Matter, Matter creates Mind, and Mind creates Math—the three worlds mutually support one another, hovering in midair over the abyss of Nothingness."  Or "The world is nothing but a flux of pure differences, without any underlying substance."  Or it "consists of an infinite number of infinite minds."   The exegeses of these assertions and others like it don't add any clarity to them.

  To be sure, Holt doesn't avoid scientific explanations, including the very cosmology that Krauss describes.  But he is largely unconvinced by them, saying, "The universe comprises everything that physically exists.  A scientific explanation must involve some sort of physical cause.  But any physical cause is part of the universe to be explained.  Thus any purely scientific explanation … is doomed to be circular." 

  Thus, Holt isn't satisfied, as I am, with Krauss' eternal, causeless multiverse.  He indeed asks, "Why this eternal, causeless multiverse rather than another?"  I imagine a dialog with him: I would suggest that the multiverse we actually live in is what probability theorists call ergodic—a time-shifted version of every other instantiation of the multiverse except the nonexistent one—so we are reduced to a simple dichotomy between the one existent multiverse and a posited nonexistent one (and hence to Russell's and Grünbaum's comments).  He would then ask, "Why this time shift and not another?"  Exasperatedly, I would be forced to use a response he attributes to Sidney Morgenbesser, the late Columbia University philosopher:  "Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied!"

  I'm afraid my prejudice against metaphysics won out in assessing Holt's book.  I learned nothing that diverted me from Krauss' cosmology.  Taking my lead from Grünbaum, I have to dismiss his fundamental question Why is there something rather than nothing? as a Scheinproblem, a pseudo-problem.

Muse, Interrupted

  I haven't sensed the presence of my Muse for over a week.  I assume that—since she is from Olympus and therefore European—she is taking the traditional European August holiday.  I hope that she will return to me in September, refreshed and inspirational.  Until then:

"The Emperor of All Maladies"

  After my wife Helen was diagnosed with cancer about 15 years ago, I found myself obsessively reading clinical and other literature about the disease.  I was trying to fathom what had befallen her, to understand what the doctors were saying, and to see if I could divine any courses of action that they may have ignored, including unconventional medicine.  By the time she died a year and a half later, after three operations and a course of chemotherapy, I'd concluded that no one, experts included, had a fundamental understanding of the root causes of the disease.  While effective therapies had been developed over the years, they seemed to have been derived through a helter-skelter process, mostly trial and error.  I couldn't perceive a coherent scientific theory underpinning oncology at the level, say, of our knowledge of how the immune system works.

  It turns out that I was both right and wrong: mostly right about the status of clinical oncology at the turn of the century, wrong about the status of oncological science, whose fruits were then rapidly multiplying in research labs but had not yet entered clinical use.  An excellent book chosen by my book club has brought me up to date: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.   It's a page-turner that deserves the Pulitzer Prize it won.  Mukherjee, a clinical and research oconologist with a splendid gift for writing, takes the reader from the earliest surviving written description of cancer (Egypt, 2500 BCE) through the present, using a mixture of historical cameos, personal clinical reminiscences, and science writing for the layperson.

  Most of the book is of necessity devoted to the past century or so, when "modern" methods have been employed in fighting cancer.  As Mukherjee describes the situation, the three regimes of medical treatment—surgery, radiation and chemotherapy—developed largely in isolation from one another, with each set of practitioners unwarrantedly convinced that their own techniques would ultimately lead to a "universal cure"  for a disease of infinite variety.  For many years, they took sometimes extreme paths in desperate attempts to achieve that end.

  For example, many surgeons by the mid-twentieth century would attack breast cancer by excisions of not only the breast but also the pectoral muscles, the axillary nodes, the chest wall and occasionally the ribs, parts of the sternum, the clavicle and the lymph nodes inside the chest, leaving the patient grossly maimed.  Similar excesses were devised by chemotherapists, who used megadoses of cocktails of ever more poisonous cytotoxins, which massively killed both cancerous and healthy cells indiscriminately, bringing patients to the verge of death, or even killing them.  Such drastic measures were later shown to have no benefits beyond regimens of much more limited scope, to which treatments reverted. 

  By the last decades of the twentieth century, although preventive measures like the campaign against smoking and the widespread use of screening to detect tumors at early stages were still yielding increasing benefits, the standard regimes of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy were encountering diminishing returns.  ­A more scientific and methodical oncology was needed to discover additional forms of treatment.  Fortunately, advances in genomics provided the basis for such a new approach, by explaining why cells can suddenly engage in runaway division rather than normal mitosis.

  A normal cell has genes that turn on when necessary to allow mitosis to occur, then turn off, stopping further cell division.  Such genes can become mutated into "oncogenes" by an environmental factor or an error in DNA transcription, with the result that they are no longer able to turn off, potentially allowing the cell to divide beyond control into tumors.  Other genes, called "anti-oncogenes," are control genes, programmed so that they normally will suppress oncogene-driven, runaway cell division.  When anti-oncogenes themselves suffer mutations, however, they can lose this capability.  It normally takes a "pathway" of mutations of several different proto-oncogenes and anti-oncogenes in a cell, over several years, before that cell finally becomes fully tumorous. 

  A large number of proto-oncogenes and anti-oncogenes have already been identified, and efforts have started on construction of a compendium of all such genes and an "atlas" of where they are typically located on the genome for various types of cancer.  The latter effort is complicated by the fact that apparently similar cancers in different people may have different maps of mutated genes.

  The great hope for the new scientific oncology, only minimally fulfilled thus far, is that after identifying which genes in a cancerous cell's genome are the culprits, specific directed agents that incapacitate just those genes can be applied, eliminating cancer cells but not healthy cells.  (This would be more akin to antibiotics directed against specific bacteria than to traditional chemotherapy, which kills cells unselectively.)  Some therapeutic drugs that disable specific cancer genes have indeed already been identified, and hopefully a full pharmacopeia of such drugs can be developed, each capable of attacking one or more cancer genes. 

  Substantial progress has been made.  In the past few years, comparison of the faulty genome of a cancer cell with the healthy genome of a normal cell from the same person has been achieved, in an attempt to identify the mutant genes that are responsible for the tumor.  (Generally, only a small subset of mutant genes are cancer-related, since other genes can also mutate as a tumor cell continues to divide.)  Then, if appropriate agents that incapacitate the cancer genes are known, they have been used.  So far only limited success has been achieved—the cancers, temporarily suppressed but ever wily, have regenerated themselves.  Perhaps it is the old problem that can occur with traditional treatments, of a few cells surviving the onslaught.  Perhaps a tumor has more than one type of cancerous cell in it.  Perhaps not all the cancer genes were detected.  Much more research clearly needs to be done.

  None the less, it seems to me, even as a layman, that oncology is now on the right track.    A rationally conceived, methodical plan, based on good science, is under way.  With any luck, many—maybe most—cancers will become fully curable over the next several decades, without the harmful side effects that many cancer therapies now have.  If that happened, it would truly be a millennial accomplishment of medical science, equivalent to the conquest of contagious diseases.