God’s game

What if the laws of physics keep changing with time? And by changing with time, I don't mean just a continuous evolution of fundamental constants (like what Dirac proposed). Here I consider a hypothetical situation where the universe is a game being played between its creator and the contained "intelligent" creations. In short I am going to take the anthropic principle to a ridiculous level. The laws of physics are the way they are because some one believed them to be that way and managed to convince others that they were so. Physicists be warned, only philosophers should consider the following seriously. (To me it is a joke).

In the beginning, only the earth existed, surrounded by a sphere called the sky, on which stars and the sun used to revolve daily, moving on projections of epicycles onto that sphere. When people started charting the stars and started discovering some patterns, the creator became more careful, lest it make mistakes in moving the planets on the sky. So it receded the sky to the edge of the solar system, set the earth and the planets in motion around the sun, and continued to rotate the shell of the fixed stars, till much later when the first parallax distance measurement experiment was about to be started. So on and so forth, more and more structure was added to the universe, as the capability of human astronomical observation grew.

Meanwhile people like Galileo and Newton observed patterns in the dynamics of the world, which the creator had probably been running till that point purely out of whim, and probably influenced by convenience. They came up with concepts of force, inertia etc, which seemed to the creator to be a reasonable way to run the world at the macroscopic scale, and so it adopted these propositions as actual laws of nature (It continued to run microscopic dynamics on whim, you see where this is going :) ). Better still, Newton thought he could explain planetary motion in terms of gravity … So it initialized gravity, and now the solar system could be left to evolve on its own in a self consistent way.

Same is the story of chemistry and quantum mechanics. Scientists started to find more and more patterns in the microscopic world, till they ended up with a mathematical model that well described the creators whim. When this model was perfected and tested, the creator let it loose on the universe. So it was with relativity, when Einstein proposed that the ether as proposed by earlier scientists was not required, and that a nice Minkowski metric on the spacetime could explain all its weird properties, the ether was gotten rid of, and the universe was made Lorentz covariant. Einstein kept giving god a tough time. General coordinate invariance also had to be introduced, and general relativity incorporated into the universe, because so many humans thought it was a beautiful theory, and the creator was forced to agree. The creator made the mistake of leaving behind redshifts in distant galaxies, and now consistent signatures of the big bang had to be created. Some errors in calculations on its part, led to the scientific community to finally conclude that there must be dark matter and dark energy. And then there was dark matter and dark energy!
In the twenthieth century poor god had to create a QED vacuum, an electroweak vacuum with a broken symmetry, a horribly complex, yet beautiful as ever, QCD vacuum. And fortunately these things did not outright contradict the laws having been imposed on the large scales. But we kept nitpicking, found mathematical inconsistencies, and launched into string theory. Poor god! It was bad enough having to keep track of so…o many 0D fundamental particles, but now it had to start doing dynamics of 1D fundamental objects?

These days the creator must be going mad. Every morning it must be rapidly reading through all the journals of physics, hoping someone comes up with a TOE (theory of everything), so that this game can be ended once and for all declaring us the winners, setting up these laws in the universe, so that it can finally retire and let the universe evolve on its own.

But what if we have reached a stalemate? What if its mathematically impossible (mathematics is assumed sacred here) to model god's disparate whims in one consistent framework? What if god has given up? Does there need to be a good theory of quantum gravity? :)

7 Responses to “God’s game”

  1. manish13 Says:

    The idea of laws changing with time, was something Feynman also pondered over. But he did not run himself wild, as somebody here did :) About stalemate situation, we definitely need an ‘ultra calculus’ to get things moving now, similar to the discovery of calculus by Newton and Libnitz – which thrusted scientific quest to an extraordinary pace.

  2. bhujyo Says:

    Wow! That’s cool!

    But I think that guy out there has given up long ago and waiting for someone to come up with a TOE. I dont know about the complexity of the mathematics or whether at all that is the reason got thought about peacefully relaxing for a while, but there is enough stuff to take care of a generation. They say there are some dark matter that contribute to the mass of the universe: these give gravitational jerks at times but are usually passive otherwise: their physical manifestation being the effects of huge gravitational lenses. dark Matter! God has quite a bit in store for the frontline string theorist!!

    By the way I wonder even if you have a TOE you need to give a lot of credit to the creator: The intelligent being wins only if he creates a new force: unless the creator has already resigned!!

  3. Sachin Sharma Says:

    Nice article on the evolution of principles of physics. However, I tend to think that the laws of physics are really not changing. It is only how the scientists are able to interpret them and put them into equations that can be understood by others. As long as the equations hold good to explain certain phenomena, they are valid. But the moment a condition comes when those equations are not valid, it is time to come up with another theory and another set of equations that could explain the new observations. For example, Newtonian mechanics was the established theory explaining laws of motion. However, it was found that the laws of motion do not apply to atomic partilces… electrons, protons, etc… This was the time quantum mechanics was invented. Laws of Physics do not change, only how we explain them to ourselves change over time.

  4. aswan korula Says:

    didnt godel already solve this question? i bleeve he sed anyone living inside a system, can never explain it fully by rules that are bound within the constraints of the system.

    faith is a stronger concept that truth it seems.

    i dunno, im just a dumbass navy guy.

  5. Ravishankar S Says:

    Well, Godel’s incompleteness theorem is a precise theorem about unprovability of statements in mathematical logic, applicable to mathematical systems with a certain consistency criterion. It is messy, if not pointless to extend this theorem in mathematics to a philosophy of the universe. It is certainly not yet a theorem in physics that we can’t understand everything about the universe. Nor am I saying that we eventually can … Anyway this little writeup was just for fun, kind of a transcript of a crazy discussion with a friend.
    But why the self-bashing? :)

  6. Ravishankar S Says:

    A decent writeup on Godel’s incompleteness theorems:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godels_incompleteness_theorem

  7. ravi Says:

    in many ways this writeup encompasses the inherent beauty of the divine subject called phy beneath its
    obvious humour.i am too small a kid to know abt qed or qcd,but neverthelessit was nice reading this stuff

Leave a Reply