Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,6
forth. Then I started thinking. The inflation theory says that a baby universe blows up like a balloon in the tiniest fraction of a second. Suppose the creator tried to write something on the surface of the balloon, like “PLEASE REMEMBER THAT I MADE YOU.” The inflationary expansion would make this message exponentially huge. The creatures in the new universe, living in a tiny corner of one letter, would never be able to read the whole message.”
But then Linde thought of another channel of communication between creator and creation—the only one possible, as far as he could tell. The creator, by manipulating the cosmic seed in the right way, would have the power to ordain certain physical parameters of the universe he ushers into being. He could determine, for example, what the numerical ratio of the electron’s mass to the proton’s will be. Such numbers, called the constants of nature, look utterly arbitrary to us: there is no apparent reason why they should take the value they do rather than some other value. (Why, for instance, is the strength of gravity in our universe determined by a number with the digits “6673”?) But the creator, by fixing certain values for these constants, could write a subtle message into the very structure of the universe. And, as Linde pointed out with evident relish, such a message would be legible only to physicists.
Was he joking?
“You might take this as a joke,” he said. “But perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may furnish the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird, so far from perfect. On the evidence, our universe wasn’t created by a divine being. It was created by a physicist hacker!”
From a philosophical perspective, Linde’s little story underscores the danger of assuming that the creative force behind our universe, if there is one, must correspond to the traditional image of God: omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benevolent, and so on. Even if the cause of our universe is an intelligent being, it could well be a painfully incompetent and fallible one, the kind that might flub the cosmogenic task by producing a thoroughly mediocre creation. Of course, orthodox believers can always respond to a scenario like Linde’s by saying, “Okay, but who created the physicist hacker?” Let’s hope it’s not hackers all the way up.
The crux of the mystery of existence, as I have said, is summed up in the question Why is there something rather than nothing? William James called this question “the darkest in all philosophy.” The British astrophysicist Sir Bernard Lovell observed that pondering it could “tear the individual’s mind asunder.” (Indeed, psychiatric patients have been known to be obsessed by it.) Arthur Lovejoy, who founded the academic field known as the History of Ideas, observed that the attempt to answer it “constitutes one of the most grandiose enterprises of the human intellect.” Like all deep incomprehensibilities, it lends an opening to jocularity. Some decades ago, when I put the question to the American philosopher Arthur Danto, he replied, with mock irritability, “Who says there’s not nothing?” (As will soon become apparent, this response is not entirely a joke.) A still better answer was supplied by Sidney Morgenbesser, late Columbia University philosopher and legendary wag. “Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?” a student asked him one day. To which Morgenbesser replied, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied!”
But the question cannot be laughed away. Each of us, as Martin Heidegger observed, is “grazed by its hidden power”:
The question looms in moments of great despair when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time… . The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.
Ignoring this question is a symptom of mental deficiency—so, at least, claimed the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “The lower a man is in an intellectual respect, the less puzzling and mysterious existence itself is to him,” Schopenhauer wrote. What raises man above other creatures is that he is conscious of his finitude; the prospect of death brings with it the conceivability of nothingness, the shock of nonbeing. If my own self, the