July 12, 2010
The God of Physicists
Link to Cosmology and Music post
Quotes of Einstein on God
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2007/04/einstein_and_the_mind_of_god.html
We Physicists Are the Only Scientists Who Can Say the Word “God” and Not Blush – Michio Kaku
“As you know, I work in something called String Theory which makes the statement that we are reading the mind of God. It’s based on music or little vibrating strings thus giving us particles that we see in nature. The laws of chemistry that we struggled with in high school would be the melodies that you can play on these vibrating strings. The Universe would be a symphony of these vibrating strings and the mind of God that Einstein wrote about at length would be cosmic music resonating through this nirvana… through this 11 dimensional hyperspace—that would be the mind of God. We physicists are the only scientists who can say the word “God” and not blush.The fact of the matter is that we are dealing with the cosmic questions of existence and meaning. Thomas Huxley, the great biologist of the last century said that the question of all questions for science and religion is to determine our true place and our true role in the Universe. For both science and religion it is the same question.
However, there has essentially been a divorce in the last century or so between that of science and the Humanists and I think that it’s very sad that we don’t speak the same language anymore.”
Alan Watts Animated – Prickles and Goo, I, Appling Peopling, Music and Life
BigThink.com Michio Kaku:
“The “mind of God” is a phrase of Einstein’s, who used it to refer to an ultimate understanding of the universe and its laws, and stated his desire to achieve that understanding through science. The supercollider is a “Genesis Machine” that will re-create, on a microscopic scale, perhaps the most glorious event in the history of the universe–its birth–and take us one step closer to fulfilling Einstein’s goal – and mine.”
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“Today the LHC may have the potential to explain the origin of all four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Physicists believe that at the beginning of time there was a single superforce that unified these fundamental forces. Finding it could be the crowning achievement in the history of science.
Through the LHC, we hope to finally prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which is the only particle yet to be observed by the Standard Model. There is a hypothetical, ever-present quantum field that is supposedly responsible for giving particles their masses; this field would answer the basic question of why particles have the masses they do or why they have any mass at all. According to CERN, “The answer may be the so-called Higgs mechanism. According to the theory of the Higgs mechanism, the whole of space is filled with a ‘Higgs field,’ and by interacting with this field, particles acquire their masses. Particles that interact intensely with the Higgs field are heavy, while those that have feeble interactions are light. The Higgs field has at least one new particle associated with it, the Higgs boson. If such a particle exists, experiments at the LHC will be able to detect it.”
Ultimately, what we want to get out of the Large Hadron Collider is something so fantastic, it could rewrite science entirely. We want to create something called sparticles (super-particles) that represent the next set of vibrations of the superstring. We are now on the verge of being able to detect signals from the eleventh dimension—signals from hyperspace. In the eleventh dimension, these four forces just melt together into one gorgeous theory that—if understood and proven—will allow us to “read the mind of God.”
From Universe to Multiverse – Micho Kaku
String Theory, M-theory, Parallel Worlds Pt. 1
BigThink.com Michio Kaku:
“The “multiverse” idea—once thought to be so crazy it only belonged on late night television—has now become the dominant theory in all of cosmology. The idea now dominates conversations in science circles and it seems you cannot avoid the theory of the multiverse.Einstein first gave us the idea that the universe is a soap bubble of some sort and we reside on the skin of this expanding bubble. This observation of an expanding bubble is now one of the greatest experimental achievements of the last century. Now imagine if you run the videotape backwards, the bubble would shrink and eventually become small enough to put in your coat pocket. If this “bang” happened once, it can happen again, again and again. This concept is mind boggling, that idea that entire universes are being created as you are reading this very blog entry.
When speaking about the multiverse, I’m often asked questions about the different kinds of universes that can form as a result of extra dimensions, string theory or even chaotic inflation for example. These are in some sense different kinds of universes but for me personally, it’s very aesthetically pleasing. This all goes back to my childhood with my parents being Buddhist. In Buddhism, you believe in nirvana and timelessness with no beginning and no end. As a child I went to Sunday school where I learned about arks, great floods and the instant of creation when God said, “Let there be Light”. So, all my life I’ve had these two competing paradigms in my head. With the multiverse idea, we have the beautiful melding of these two ideas. The reason being is that we do have this nirvana, this timelessness, this eleven dimensional hyperspace, this arena of string theory. But we also have bubbles that form all the time, almost like a bubble bath. Sometimes the bubbles expand rapidly giving us universes, combine with other bubbles and sometimes even pop. This continual creation, the idea of a multiverse is very pleasing to me because I can now meld Buddhist nirvana with Judeo-Christian epistemology.
We have this arena of eleven-dimensional hyperspace and within it these bubbles start to expand and they vibrate. In string theory we of course have the music of strings which gives us the particles we see in nature. This is also pleasing to me because Einstein spent the last three decades of his life trying to read the mind of God and he asked himself “What are God’s thoughts?” Well, believe it or not, for the first time we now have a candidate for the mind of God. The mind of God, according to this multiverse picture, is cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace. When I say “God,” I’m talking about the God of Spinoza, not necessarily the personal God that answers prayers and feeds the sick. I’m speaking metaphorically about the God of both harmony and beauty. In other words, as I have stated time and time again, it didn’t have to be this way: our Universe could have been random, chaotic and ugly. And I find it absolutely staggering that we can summarize all the laws of physics going back 2,000 years to the Greeks on a single sheet of paper. The goal of string theory is to, of course, have it in an equation no more than an inch long. In the beginning, there was not light but rather there was the one-inch equation which then drives the gears of the entire Universe. This is the Holy Grail.“