Why Can We Understand the Universe?

Why Can We Understand the Universe?

Beginning in 1999, the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, has produced The 60-Second Lecture Series, a compilation of  lectures by various school faculty. One of these, The Knowable Universe,  inspired this post. The question raised by the lecture is: Why is the human mind capable of understanding this incredible universe of which we are a part." Einstein said, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible" by the human mind.[1] He pointed out that, "a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way." And, certainly, one would  expect a chaotic universe if the universe is a "one-and-done" creation. 

If, however, the world is not a one-and-done creation but is being continually created, some blueprint to guide the creation process and thus an underlying order would seem to be necessary.  The possibility now arises that, if the human mind is capable of understanding order, it may discover this order. That the universe is being continually created guided by an underlying order, and that the human mind is discovering this order is a necessary consequence of the way our universe is brought into being, in particular what time is and the way passage of time occurs.

As demonstrated in my book, At the Edge of Time [1] (see especially pages 77-79), our world is presented to us as frames of time similar to the way frames of a movie in our everyday world are presented. (This idea also has been suggested by physicists Paul Davies, Brian Greene, and Henry Margenau.[2].) Each frame is a new creation of our world.

A logical consequence of this premise of time presented in frames is that there can be no causal relationship between frames. Stated another way, the conditions of frame X can have no direct influence on what occurs in the next frame in the sequence, frame Y. Yet we know that our lives are not fragmented across time, that there is a carryover from one time period to the next. A likely explanation is that our universe is following a “cosmic blueprint” as it unfolds, as Paul Davies has suggested in his excellent book by the same name.[3]

And how can our universe follow a cosmic blueprint as it unfolds? The cosmic blueprint must be following a computer-like program, a set of executable instructions that produce an underlying order. And to the astonishment of scientists, we do understand this order. In an article widely accepted (and quoted) by both mathematicians and physicists, Eugene Wigner has called the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the discovery of this order “a miraculous gift … which we neither understand nor deserve.”[4] The scientific method is so remarkably successful at explaining our everyday world that it seems very likely that the organizing principle used by the mind to assemble and present to us our everyday world is the very rules of logic and mathematics we use in inductive reasoning.

Why, then, is the human mind capable of understanding our incredible universe? Because the organizing principle used by the mind to assemble and to present to us the script for our everyday lives appears to be the logic of inductive reasoning. Our everyday world is inherently logical in its structure—it cannot be other­wise—and it can therefore be understood by humans thinking logically. It goes without saying that the scientific method should be successful at explaining our world if the logic we use to understand that world is the logic used to present that world to us.

NOTES

1. Donald W. Jarrell, At the Edge of Time: Reality, Time, and Meaning in a Virtual Everyday World (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012, 2014.)

2. Paul Davies, “The Mysterious Flow of Time,” Scientific American, September 2002, 32-37, esp. p. 34; Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 238; and Henry Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality: A Philosophy of Modern Physics (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 155-159.

3. Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability To Order the Universe (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1988).

4. Eugene P. Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, Timothy Ferris (ed.) (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1991), 526-540, esp. 540.

Next post on a four-week schedule: March 11, 2016.




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