Rational Irrationalism

Quantum Mechanics and the Big Bang

The reviewer for the Dallas Morning News must have been having a bad hair day.  He or she declared that Leon Lederman's The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) was "the funniest book about physics ever written."  If that were true, physics must be world's apart from sophisticated humour.  Closer to the truth is Lederman's penchant for geeky humour, which often falls flat and is overdone.  Hardly humorous, unless the author was engaged in self-parody, which would be another matter entirely. 

But, humour aside, as a book about particle physics, Lederman's The God Particle is pretty good.  It covers all the usual "stuff".  The micro-world of the atom is counter-intuitive and abnormal (as far as our human experience is concerned).  Federman writes

So forget about normal; expect shock, disbelief.  Niels Bohr, one of the founders, said that anyone who isn't shocked by quantum theory doesn't understand it.  Richard Feynman asserted that no one understands quantum theory.  (Op cit., p. 143f)

 The overwhelming impression for the non-specialist lay reader is of extreme complexity in the micro-world of matter.
  The "standard model" started out, with Rutherford, proposing that the atom consisted of two components (a nucleus, plus electrons).  Today, says Lederman, we have in the atom

 6 quarks, 6 leptons, 12 gauge bosons and, if you want to be mean, you can count the antiparticles and the colours, because quarks come in three shaded (count 60)  But who's counting. (Op cit., p. 63.)

It is possible that behind all this complexity will be found a "pristine symmetry" which will reduce it all to some more fundamental, more simple, more basic particles.  This is supposed to be the Higg's boson, recently claimed to have been discovered by the CERN collider in Switzerland. 

In addition, the behaviour of sub-atomic particles can turn out to be weird.  Quantum mechanics, says Federman, has problems:

This issue has to do with the wave function and what it means.  In spite of the great practical and intellectual success of quantum theory, we cannot be sure we know what the theory means  Our uneasiness may be intrinsic to the mind of man, or it may be that some genius will eventually come up with a conceptual scheme that makes everyone happy.  If it makes you queasy, don't worry.  You're in good company.  Quantum theory has made many physicists unhappy, including Planck, Einstein, de Broglie, and Schrodinger. (Ibid., p. 185.)

At the end of his book, Federman contemplates the Big Bang.  It is unknowable.  It is the materialist's idolatrous substitute for the Creator God.  But the ultimate creator is the eternal laws of physics.  This is not a paradox; it is evading the question and clutching at straws.

We can try to imagine the pre-Big Bang universe: timeless, featureless, but in some unimaginable way beholden to the laws of physics . . . .

It is comforting to visualise the disappearance of space and time as we run the universe backward toward the beginning.  What happens as space and time tend toward zero is that the equations we use to explain the universe break down and become meaningless.  At this point we are just plumb out of science.  Perhaps it is just as well that space and time cease to have meaning; it gives us the possibility that the vanishing of the concept takes place smoothly.  What remains?  What remains must be the laws of physics.  (Ibid., p. 402.  Emphasis, ours)

The necessity of eternal laws of physics, as here propounded by Lederman, is not an antinomy (an apparent contradiction between two equally valid principles).  To propose that laws eternally exist in a void of meaningless nothingness is irrational--pure and simple.