The Pearl of Great Price

All I know is where the cosmos is right now. Not at the beginning. Not at the end. But somewhere in the middle, two minutes after a most remarkable turn of events. (The Story of Everything, Chap. 25)

I'm dead-drop certain of one thing. Everyone agrees on it. Theists and atheists do. So do those who believe the universe has an outside, and those who don't. Also on board: those who endorse a strong version of the anthropic principle, those who endorse a weak version, and those who refer to it as the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP). Even Goldilocks would say okay.

Here's that one thing: the universe did produce an observer. It produced its own scientists, philosophers, theologians, poets, and storytellers. And, in cosmic time, it did it moments ago.

Right now we treat this indisputable fact like an old slipper. We're comfortable with it. We're used to it. We take it for granted. The wow factor disappeared millennia ago. We're not astonished by what is truly astonishing:

The man pointed down the coastline. "Look at all the sand on this beach. Suppose we came across a grain of sand, a single grain, that talked. How improbable would that be? How improbable that it existed? How improbable that we found it? One grain of sand is not the center of anything. But when one starts to talk, you've got to listen."

No slipper there. This character from The Story of Everything is not wowed by 400 billion galaxies (and counting), not by the trillions of stars they contain, not by God-knows-how-many planets. The universe is a veritable Sahara of sand, but he's astonished by just one grain. And with good reason.

It's almost impossible for us to get into this man's shoes and see the way he does. We carry too much history. For thousands of years, all we have known is the talking. We cannot, in fact, remember not talking. But only recently have we glimpsed all the sand. Of course we're astonished by the wrong thing.

So how can we put the sand in its place? How can we flip figure and ground? Here's a way of starting:

(1) Appreciate how out of place our talking is. I remember the first time I found sea shells embedded in sandstone in the middle of a southern Indiana field. I chipped a few out just to remember the eerie strangeness of it all. How in the world did they get there? Talkers circling a nondescript star are equally out of place. How did they get there?

(2) Appreciate how recent the talking is. On a scale where the age of the universe becomes one year, it began two minutes ago. All the stars and planets and galaxies aren't new. This bit of talking is. And it began--literally--right under our noses.

(3) Sell everything in your Story for this little grain. It's the pearl of great price. It's the rock-hard evidence. Forget about beginnings you weren't there for. Forget about endings you have no way of knowing. What was it like, this dawn of observing, of narrating?

"What's it like for a planet to wake up? And to do it for the first time?" That was the hard part, the impossible part, the man said--to picture the first time. "I can't imagine a first awakening. I've tried to do it, but I cannot. It's not like getting up in the morning. When you get up in the morning, you put on history, like clothes. Every day. But the first time . . . ."

I welcome the cloud that covers the beginning and the end of Everything. I'm happy, at the end of my life, to be in the middle. But I'm left in a quandary. What do I tell my grandchildren? It has to be something they will love, as I loved what I was taught as a child, but I don't yet know what it is. I honestly don't.

P.S. This is the last article in the Goldilocks-enigma series. I will be taking time off to prepare another series on journeys. In the meantime, I will post some thoughts on your latest set of comments.

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N=1

I'm not a know-it-all, the Story realized that night on the cliff. I'm just a Story of Everything. (The Story of Everything, Chap. 21)

It's been fun guessing, but now it's time to nail the story down. We have here a universe that produced its own observer. It produced its own speaker, of that we can be sure, and it did so using hydrogen and a few other elements. Strange to our ear--why would hydrogen lead to a story?--but that's what happened.

The anthropic principle in cosmology, a.k.a. the Goldilocks enigma, gets you thinking about all that could or would have been. If X had been a little slower or Y a little stronger or just one number different, the universe would have ____ (FILL IN THE BLANK) ____. It reminds me of the years I spent listening to people tell the story of their lives. They would finish those "ifs" with everything from "I could have been a millionaire today" to "I wouldn't be talking to you today."

Coulda. Woulda. We're all Monday morning quarterbacks, but let's face it: we've got the life we've got and we've got the universe we've got--the one with the observer. That universe arose from what cosmologists call a singularity. N=1. There is no evidence for any other universes and it is proving impossible to test for their existence. There are regions in our own that we will never know about. They're retreating from us with ever increasing speed.1 So whether you talk about "other universes" or "unobservable regions" in our own, you're saying the same thing. You're saying "beyond our knowledge." N=1.

A life needs limits, and so does a story, and so, I suspect, does a cosmological theory. If N=infinity, there are no limits, no constraints. In a life, that means dissipation, and I think it does in a story as well. If everything is possible, then nothing is possible. Science has always felt constrained by evidence. Let's wait for the evidence to tell us that N=2 or 3 or more.

If we accept that N=1, certain things follow. There is no point in talking about "observer selection" effects in universes. There is nothing to select from. There is no point in calculating the odds behind our unlikely emergence. As the philosopher C. S. Peirce stated, "in reference to a single case considered in itself, probability can have no meaning." Indeed, if N=1, the anthropic principle (and the Goldilocks enigma) may have to be shown the door. They may be saying nothing more than, "If the universe were different, it would be different."

What becomes of God if N=1? What becomes of the one who presumably "designed" or "tuned" this cosmos? If you read the fine print in the fine-tuning argument, you'll discover a few key words. The values of the physical constants that shape our universe are arbitrary. They were free to be set. Someone had to dial up a number--to choose 186,282.397 for the speed of light, for example. There's also an assumption that the values are independent of each other, so that setting one doesn't automatically set the others.

But, according to cosmologist Paul Davies, a deeper understanding of the laws of the cosmos may show that these values aren't arbitrary at all. They may not be free and independent. In that case, the God who assigned the numbers will turn out to be, not a God-of-the-gaps, but a God-of-just-one-gap, the very first. He will be a symbol of our ignorance, and we will wonder, with Einstein, if an actual God had any choice when he created this universe. Another limit to our knowing.

Limits give a story a border of darkness, a blessed constraint without which we could not speak. Let's embrace that border. The other guys in the other universes can spin their own tales. Let's stick to the one we've got. N=1.

1. See "The End of Cosmology?" in the current issue of Scientific American for a discussion of the impact of an accelerating expansion on our ability to know the universe.

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