Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Rig Veda (1500 – 1200 BC)
In the last couple of postings, I have talked about the laws of nature and our human relationship to them. But where do the laws of nature come from? We know where our human laws come from: the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (1790 BC), the Roman Justinian Code (sixth century), Islamic Sharia (sixth century), Chinese Tang Code (seventh century), English laws for land ownership (eleventh century), American laws for compulsory education (nineteenth century). Human laws originate with human institutions and individual human beings. And they can be changed at any time by human beings. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Homes wrote that:
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
But the “laws of nature,” as understood by scientists, are quite different. They are not based on human experience of lived lives. The are based on experiment with the non-human world. And they cannot be changed. They have existed always, and they are assumed to hold true everywhere in our universe. So, where did they come from?
This question is at once nonsensical and profound. Can we even ask such a question? Should we take the laws of nature, such as the pendulum equation discussed in my posting of March 30, as givens, inevitable aspects of existence? We will call such investigations, “questions of origins.”
The history of science has shown that many questions of origins – once assumed to lie beyond the scope of science, or even so embedded within the fabric of existence as not to be pondered at all – have not only been pondered but answered. For example: Where do the stars in the sky come from? Some ancient mythologies had fanciful explanations for the origin of stars. But, for the most part, the question was not even asked. Stars were simply assumed to be part of the world. In the twentieth century, however, physicists and astronomers have been able to determine where stars came from: condensations of diffuse gas clouds, compressed into giant balls under their own gravity until the density and temperature at their centers are high enough to start nuclear reactions, making light and heat. According to the Big Bang model, there was a time in the past when there were no stars, only diffuse gas spread out through the cosmos.
The question: “From whence came the laws of nature” is the ultimate origins question. It is related to the question of the origin of the universe as a whole. If you are a theist (believer in God), then there is the same compelling answer to both origin questions: God. For the meaning of God, I will adopt the understanding of most religions: an all knowing, all powerful, infinite being, able to act with intentionality and existing outside the physical universe. On the other hand, if you are an atheist, these are two separate questions, and the answer to the first question is not so straightforward.
Every culture has had its origin story. I’d like to mention a few before we move on to a scientific consideration of the question. The oldest recorded story of creation is the Sumerian Enuma Elish (1900 – 1600 BC).
It tells how in the Beginning, before sky or ground, there was only Apsu, the sweet waters, and Ti’amat, the salt waters. In time, these stretched into the giant ring of the horizon.
When above the heaven had not yet been named
And below the earth had not yet been named
When Apsu primevel, their begetter,
Mummu and Ti’amat, she who gave birth to them all,
Still mingled their waters together
And no pasture land had been formed
And not even a reed marsh was to be seen
When non of the other gods has been brought into being
When they had not yet been called by their names
And their destinies had not yet been fixed
At that time were the gods created within them.
The gods seethed in disorganized chaos inside the body of Ti’amat. At some point, the hero of the story is born, Marduk, a god of storm and thunder. Marduk does battle with Ti’amat and her army. When he triumphs, Marduk crushes her skull, drains her arteries, and with his axe cuts her body in two. Half of the body he lifts up to form the sky, the other half remains to form the water and earth. In this way, Marduk has brought order to the world. One might conjecture that if the ancient Sumerians had a concept of “laws of nature,” such laws would have originated with Marduk’s action, or perhaps they were envisioned by Apsu, the prime mover.
The ancient Babylonians and Sumerians based much of their civilization on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, so it is natural that their genesis myths would involve water. Water also plays a fundamental role in the ancient Indian (Hindu) story of creation, the Rig Veda (1500 BC)
Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?
Then there were neither death nor immortality,
nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.
Note that the “One” (ā́nīd avātáṃ is the transliteration of the Sanskrit) existed before everything else. Presumably, the “One” would have created the laws of nature, governing how the world should proceed.
The illustration at the right shows the ancient Egyptian’s view of Creation. The picture comes from the Book of the Dead of Khensumose (1075 – 945 BC). The sun rises in three stages and appears above the horizon of the primeaval mound (the circle), which is surrounded by water. Two goddesses are in charge of pouring the water. The primeval mound has 8 divinities, figures hoeing the soil, symbolizing the first acts of creation. Before creation, only the god Nu (watery One) exists. According to ancient Egyptian texts, Nu came “before the sky evolved, before the earth evolved, before people evolved, before the gods were born, before death evolved.”
In the Judeao-Christian traditions, of course, the world was also created by the one God: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep . . . ” Most Christian and Jewish theological thinkers would say, either explicitly or implicitly, that the laws of nature were fashioned by God.
In all religious and mythological traditions that envision the creation of the universe at a finite time in the past, a prime mover was usually responsible: either the One or Apsu or Nu or Allah or God. That prime mover would plausibly have created whatever laws governed the universe. A creation was necessary because there was once Nothingness. On the other hand, a universe that has existed forever, with no beginning, does not have a creation event and thus does not require a Creator or prime mover. In which case it is less obvious where the laws of nature come from. For example, Buddhism holds that the universe has gone through an infinite number of cyles in the past. I once asked a prominent Buddhist monk by the name of Yos Hut Khemacaro what did Buddhism say about the origin of the universe. He replied “We aren’t interested in that question.”
Aristotle proposed that the universe is eternal, without beginning or end. One of Aristotle’s arguments for eternity is that every change proceeds from something to something else. So, each thing had something else before it, like an egg leading to a chicken. Thus, there always had to exist something for something else to come out of it.
The great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138 – 1204) rejected Aristotle’s reasoning. Maimonides argued that even though we see material causal chains in the world as we know it, with each thing being produced by something before it, we should not necessarily assume that material chain applies to the universe as a whole. [Maimonides] In fact, Maimonides said that there were no logical or scientific arguments whatsoever that could prove a Creation, in either finite time or infinite time, or the existence of a Creator. A commitment to such ideas, said Maimonides, would have to be made on the basis of faith alone.
Most modern scientists do not believe in God. A study by Elaine Howard Ecklund, a professor of sociology at Rice University, found that approximately of 25% of scientists at elite American universities believe in the existence of God, as compared to about 85% in the general American public. As I mentioned earlier, for most scientists the question of the origin of the laws of nature then becomes more perplexing. There are varying points of view.
The late Bristish physicist Stephen Hawking proposed a theory of the origin of the universe in which an origin does not exist – at least an origin in time. Hawking, and almost all physicists, accept the Big Bang model, which holds that about 14 billion years ago the entire observable universe was compressed into a region smaller than an atom. (There is a great deal of evidence to support this view.) According to Hawking, time did not exist before the Big Bang. Time emerged. Advocates of this hypothesis believe that the universe materialized literally out of nothing, at a tiny but finite size, and expanded thereafter. Such things are possible in quantum physics. But time didn’t exist at that time. There were no moments prior to the moment of smallest size because there was no “prior.” Likewise, there was no “creation” of the universe, since that concept implies action in time. As Stephen Hawking describes it, “the universe was neither created nor destroyed. It would just BE.” Such notions as existence and being in the absence of time are not fathomable within our limited human experience. We don’t even have language to describe them. Nearly every sentence we utter has some notion of “before” and “after.” But Hawking used the laws of quantum mechanics to calculate his mathematical description of the non origin of the universe (what Hawking calls the “no-boundary proposal.”)
So, I ask: Where did those quantum laws come from? Alex Vilenkin, professor of physics at Tufts University and a pioneer in theoretical cosmology, says: “No cause is required to create a universe from quantum tunneling, But the laws of physics should be there.” Yes, Professor Vilenkin, and where did they come from?
Sean Carroll, a leading theoretical cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, had this reply to my question:
I tend to think that the laws of nature are just brute facts, lacking any deeper explanation. It’s hard to imagine otherwise, honestly. We might imagine some selection principle that chooses our laws from some set of possible laws, but then that selection principle would be a brute fact.
I can certainly envision extremely different laws of physics, without relativity and quantum mechanics. I have no trouble imagining universes without relativity, causality, space, time, any of that. The universe could have been a discrete system with random correlations between degrees of freedom at different lattice sites. Or the universe could have been a simple harmonic oscillator [weight bouncing on a spring] or it could just have been a single point. It could have been teleological rather than Laplacian. There could be more than one dimension of time, or no time dimension at all, or a fractal number of time dimensions. I don’t think we should let our familiarity with the actual way the world works blind us to the very large space of possibilities.
Carroll seems to be saying not only that lots of different laws are possible, perhaps in other universes, but also that the laws in our universe simply are what they are, “brute facts,” perhaps even accidents.
When I posed this question to Sir Martin Rees, one of the world’s leading astrophysicists and Astronomer Royal of England, he responded that he could imagine many different kinds of universes. It would just depend on how much complexity you wanted:
As regards your question, are you limiting yourself to universes in which some kind of complexity could emerge? Otherwise you could have an infinite universe with zero gravity filled with perfectly elastic billiard balls obeying Newton’s law! But if you have charged particles, you probably need quantum theory. I’d be glad to think more if you make the problem harder!
Again, it seems that in Rees’ view, the laws that we have are simply accidents.
Finally, Margaret Geller, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a pioneer in mapping the distribution of galaxies in the nearby universe, had this to say:
We observe or experiment with nature and make a representative mathematical model that works. We test the picture, but there is no a priori reason for it to work broadly. It is remarkable that the rules and laws we find apply at every place and every time in the universe. That we can find these models and use them to make testable predictions is a testament to the reach of the human mind. Science is in essence a grand consistency argument. We make observations, synthesize them into a mathematical model, and then we test, test, test everywhere and everywhen. In my view science is a practical way of trying to understand and predict the behavior of nature, a vision of science that is perhaps less romantic than the grand idea that there is some ultimate theory of everything.
I imagine myself asking Dr. Geller: Where does this “remarkability” come from, that our models of nature seem to apply so broadly? Why is that so? In other words, why is nature lawful? Whether the laws we discover are “ultimate,” or whether they are just approximate models, the question remains: Why do they work so well? Where does that lawfulness and rationality and logic and predictability come from? True, the particular laws in our universe might be just accidents, but why should there be laws at all? Could it be that an unlawful universe would involve a self contradiction?
I am sort of left without an answer to my question. But then again, I did not expect an answer. Many of the most profound questions do not have answers. We ponder them and puzzle over them. They provoke our imagination and stimulate our creativity. But we do not answer them.
And I am reminded of something written by the great German poet Ranier Maria Rilke, whose advice to a young poet could have been given to all of us:
We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
Notes
“Then even nothingness was not, nor existence . . . ” Rig Veda 10:129 in The Wonder That Was India, by Arthur Llewellyn Basham (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1954) pgs. 247-8
“the life of the law . . . ” The Common Law (1881), by Oliver Wendell Holmes, lecture I.
“When above the heaven had not yet been named . . . ” Enuma Elish, Tablet I, in The Babylonian Genesis, translated from the Akkadian by Alexander Heidel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). Pg. 18
“before the sky evolved . . ” “The Celestial Realm,” by James P. Allen in Ancient Egypt, ed, David P. Silverman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) pgs. 120-121
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth . . ” Genesis 1: 1-2.
For Maimonides’ thinking, see The Guide by the Perplexed (1204) by Moses Maimonides, trans. M. Friedlander (New York: Dover, 1956)
Scientists who believe in God: Elaine Howard Ecklund, Science vs. Religion: What Scientists
General Americans who believe in God: 2018 Gallup Poll, https://news.gallup.com/poll/268205/americans-believe-god.aspx
“the universe was neither created nor destroyed,” Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books, New York, 1988), pg. 136
“No cause is required to create . . . ” Vilenkin interview with me on July 7, 2015
“I tend to think that the laws of nature are just brute facts,” Carroll email to me on March 30, 2020
“As regards your question . . . ” Rees email to me on March 31, 2020
“We observe or experiment with nature . . . ” Geller email to me on April 2, 2020
“We should try to love the questions themselves . . . ” Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. By M.D. Herter Norton (New York: WW Norton, 1934), pg 35
Readings:
Theories of the Universe, ed. Milton K. Munitz (New York: the Free Press, 1957)
“The Accidental Universe,” by Alan Lightman, Harper’s, December 2011
“What Came Before the Big Bang?” by Alan Lightman, Harper’s, December 17, 2015
“Does God Exist?” by Alan Lightman, Salon, October 2, 2011
I LOVE your wide-ranging literature, my reading is like that.
–I cannot imagine/ accept something measurable coming from nothing but need that prior, super-natural Being ( noun & verb at once).
–Would we discover different mathematical & natural laws if we were not mostly- symmetrical bipeds with top and bottom, front and back, right and left?
You tell us that the laws just seem to be, to have no explanation, but also that humans have often made this precise mistake. Shouldn’t we then anticipate a future, deeper understanding?
Certainly, a deeper understanding of the laws may come in the future. Thanks for your comment
Allen, I love your ability to keep asking questions that don’t get to your point. My point is the question is more important than the answer. Ones lines of questions follows one ability to comprehend. All good answers lead to better questions. The best questions come from the best minds. The answers only lead in some direction one may look for an answer. But I have discovered an answer no one has though of in 2 unknown equations that I can prove are true. It has taken me forty years to discover. Would love to correspond, and share.
Thank you for your comment Paul. Yes, the most profound questions don’t have answers.