If you’ve read Voltaire’s Candide, you know the famous expression “This is the best of all possible worlds.” In the novel Voltaire is taking to task the optimists of his time, presenting some of the most humorous and absurd situations for Pangloss and Candide. Strangely, after all the water that has flowed under the intellectual bridge, we’re apparently very close to using a version of the same philosophy in String Theory Landscape.* Is it a new take on an old idea?
I might be misreading the string theory landscapers, but it seems to me that their message is that this universe reveals the anthropic principle in its so-called fine-tuning for life. Apparently, if any of the four fundamental forces were just a tiny bit different (we’re talking lots of zeroes to the right of a decimal point), then the universe couldn’t hold together, atoms couldn’t form, and you couldn’t exist. Little changes annihilate us and our universe.
So, maybe this is the “best of all possible worlds.” At least, it appears to be the “best world” for us. But the argument is a bit specious. How could we possibly know? String Theory Landscape tells us that there are many possible worlds. We happen to live in the only one that could engender us. The anthropic principle is a bit circular, isn’t it? We exist because the universe favors our existence, and because we are the universe conscious of itself, we ascribe its anthropic character to the fine-tuning that produced us.
Yes, this is, in fact, the best of all possible physical worlds as far as we’re concerned. It’s our real world; all the others are hypothetical. Even if they exist as String Theory Landscape suggests, their nature is, for us personally, merely a guess.
A multiverse is not really a new concept if the eighteenth-century philosophical optimists considered “the best of all possible worlds.” Obviously, other worlds, whether or not they exist, are “possible.” Maybe the string theorists are telling us that “probable” is an appropriate term. But so what? They can’t even run an experiment that proves strings exist even if their arguments seem mathematically irrefutable, and they can’t go to another universe. When they want to show you others exist, they point to the WMAP and COBE images that show some sort of pattern they ascribe to bubble universes or branes bumping. “Look closely, now. See that temperature fluctuation of a zillionth of a degree? That’s where our universe touched another.” Their image proof is like someone’s showing you a black-and-blue mark on his skin and saying, “This is where she hit me.” If you suspect there might be another possible, but unknown, explanation, would you accept that explanation prima facie?
Yeah. I know. I’m simplifying. But maybe seeing the patterns the physicists suggest is like seeing patterns in a Jackson Pollock painting that are supposedly fractals. However, there’s a reason I make such a comparison. We can’t change the physical nature of our world. Gravity is what it is, and the other fundamental forces are what they are. This is the world in which we live. It’s never going to be different for us. That means we need to see what we can, as opposed to what we cannot, change. Typically, that means human change.
How do we individually make the human world the best of all possible human worlds? We’ve been struggling with that long before Confucius and Siddhartha, long before Christ and Mohammed, and long before the western philosophers began philosophizing and a myriad of others designed their utopian universes. We’ve had some successes, but we still face the same problems the eighteenth-century optimists faced, all those problems wrapped up in two questions: Why is there evil? And Why do bad things happen to good people?
It is the Landscape of Humanity that ultimately concerns everyone. Sure, it’s nice to speculate that somewhere “out there” there’s another you living another kind of life, maybe a lazy and rich one on a tranquil sea of hypothetically cool liquid gold. Hypotheticals aside, you don’t have a speculative life. You—all of us—have only this one, and it’s not practice.
*Popular accounts can be found at Nadis, Steve. When Universes Collide. Discover .December 2012 Issue. Online at http://discovermagazine.com/2012/dec/29-when-universes-collide and at
Zyga, Lisa. Scientists find first evidence that many universes exist. Phys.org. December 17, 2010, online at https://phys.org/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-universes.html In the so-called “bubble collision” no one has explained why the bubbles limited their penetration, but here’s a speculation. If you try to push a beach ball into a pool, you will find the resistance of all those hydrogen bonds makes the effort very difficult. Is it possible that the dimensions of one universe act like the hydrogen bonds to resist the complete penetration of the “beach ball” neighboring universe? Just thinkin. Or maybe, the supposed collision spots seen on the WMAP image are no different from the shapes we see in cumulus clouds on a lazy summer afternoon. “I see an elephant.” “Looks like a ballerina to me.”
I might be misreading the string theory landscapers, but it seems to me that their message is that this universe reveals the anthropic principle in its so-called fine-tuning for life. Apparently, if any of the four fundamental forces were just a tiny bit different (we’re talking lots of zeroes to the right of a decimal point), then the universe couldn’t hold together, atoms couldn’t form, and you couldn’t exist. Little changes annihilate us and our universe.
So, maybe this is the “best of all possible worlds.” At least, it appears to be the “best world” for us. But the argument is a bit specious. How could we possibly know? String Theory Landscape tells us that there are many possible worlds. We happen to live in the only one that could engender us. The anthropic principle is a bit circular, isn’t it? We exist because the universe favors our existence, and because we are the universe conscious of itself, we ascribe its anthropic character to the fine-tuning that produced us.
Yes, this is, in fact, the best of all possible physical worlds as far as we’re concerned. It’s our real world; all the others are hypothetical. Even if they exist as String Theory Landscape suggests, their nature is, for us personally, merely a guess.
A multiverse is not really a new concept if the eighteenth-century philosophical optimists considered “the best of all possible worlds.” Obviously, other worlds, whether or not they exist, are “possible.” Maybe the string theorists are telling us that “probable” is an appropriate term. But so what? They can’t even run an experiment that proves strings exist even if their arguments seem mathematically irrefutable, and they can’t go to another universe. When they want to show you others exist, they point to the WMAP and COBE images that show some sort of pattern they ascribe to bubble universes or branes bumping. “Look closely, now. See that temperature fluctuation of a zillionth of a degree? That’s where our universe touched another.” Their image proof is like someone’s showing you a black-and-blue mark on his skin and saying, “This is where she hit me.” If you suspect there might be another possible, but unknown, explanation, would you accept that explanation prima facie?
Yeah. I know. I’m simplifying. But maybe seeing the patterns the physicists suggest is like seeing patterns in a Jackson Pollock painting that are supposedly fractals. However, there’s a reason I make such a comparison. We can’t change the physical nature of our world. Gravity is what it is, and the other fundamental forces are what they are. This is the world in which we live. It’s never going to be different for us. That means we need to see what we can, as opposed to what we cannot, change. Typically, that means human change.
How do we individually make the human world the best of all possible human worlds? We’ve been struggling with that long before Confucius and Siddhartha, long before Christ and Mohammed, and long before the western philosophers began philosophizing and a myriad of others designed their utopian universes. We’ve had some successes, but we still face the same problems the eighteenth-century optimists faced, all those problems wrapped up in two questions: Why is there evil? And Why do bad things happen to good people?
It is the Landscape of Humanity that ultimately concerns everyone. Sure, it’s nice to speculate that somewhere “out there” there’s another you living another kind of life, maybe a lazy and rich one on a tranquil sea of hypothetically cool liquid gold. Hypotheticals aside, you don’t have a speculative life. You—all of us—have only this one, and it’s not practice.
*Popular accounts can be found at Nadis, Steve. When Universes Collide. Discover .December 2012 Issue. Online at http://discovermagazine.com/2012/dec/29-when-universes-collide and at
Zyga, Lisa. Scientists find first evidence that many universes exist. Phys.org. December 17, 2010, online at https://phys.org/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-universes.html In the so-called “bubble collision” no one has explained why the bubbles limited their penetration, but here’s a speculation. If you try to push a beach ball into a pool, you will find the resistance of all those hydrogen bonds makes the effort very difficult. Is it possible that the dimensions of one universe act like the hydrogen bonds to resist the complete penetration of the “beach ball” neighboring universe? Just thinkin. Or maybe, the supposed collision spots seen on the WMAP image are no different from the shapes we see in cumulus clouds on a lazy summer afternoon. “I see an elephant.” “Looks like a ballerina to me.”
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