3 Quarks Daily pointed me to a recent (9 Sept.) article by Marc Vernon (“a journalist, writer, and former Anglican priest”) titled “The Mirror of the Cosmos: Is cosmology a form of theology for a secular age?” He wonders how we can explain the popularity of cosmological books, like those of Paul Davies and Stephen Hawking.
So here’s a possibility. Cosmology is so popular, not just because of the science, but because it allows us to ask the big questions — where we come from, who we are, where we’re going. It’s metaphysics by other means.
He thinks “the most obvious example of “theophysics” concerns the so-called God particle,” the Higgs boson. Pausing here for a moment, this is clearly off-base. Yes, Nobel Laureate and ex-Fermilab director Leon Lederman christened the Higgs boson as the “God” particle in 1993. (CERN has a short writeup here; an authoritative technical summary of Higgs searches from the PDG in pdf is here.)
But the searching for the Higgs is not theology. It is searching for a particle our best current theories predict; this strategy has worked well in the past (see Alvarez on “bump hunting”). If one was looking for something to call “theophysics,” I would point you toward “Physical Eschatology” the “nascent discipline” of physicists theorizing about what the end of the universe (and after) will be like. (Better phrased: theorizing about what “end of the universe” could mean, see Dyson, 1979.)
Heading back to Veron’s piece, two things struck me. The first was that he puts cosmological “speculation” on the same plane as Scholastic “speculation” about the number of angels you can fit on the end of a pin. Whether or not Scholastics actually ever argued about that, Vernon must know the reference is pejorative. But, I was never under the impression that religion was about speculating at all. Depending on your religious orientation, religion seems to be about practice and belief. Whatever your thoughts on Hawking’s latest, people aren’t running out to become cosmologists, and believing what Hawking tells you is rather different from believing in (a) god. This is a sad brush with which to paint religion or cosmology.
So Vernon missed the mark in his physical and religious examples. What about his claim, above, that cosmology’s popularity is about asking and answering the big questions? This sounds on the right track. Many many scientists describe their motivations to become scientists as rooted in wonder at the origins of things, or a grand design. But why is this connected to religion?
Vernon’s questions are entirely anthropocentric: “where we come from, who we are, where we’re going.” And herein lies the problem. When applied to Cosmology, Vernon’s questions assume that we are part of the answer. There is an idea in Cosmology called theAnthropic Principle. Basically, the idea is that humanity’s existence can be used in physical arguments about the creation and evolution of the universe. The Templeton Foundation, at least, thought there was a strong enough connection to religion to award John Barrow their prize in 2006 (for work like this). But this is a controversial issue (see the Smolin-Susskind discussion here), and these minutiae can’t explain the broad public appeal of cosmology. I think Vernon’s questions are unnecessarily anthropocentric. I want to know about the universe, not about whether I am so important as to have somehow caused it to be the way it is. It was Vernon’s poor questions that led him to religion, not cosmology.
Cosmology’s appeal might be due to the lure of big questions, but these questions are bigger than we are.
