Cosmic ReligionThere is much that is appealing in this picture of things for the
agnostic or spiritually inclined. However, there are questions to
raise about it too. For example, remember Godel’s incomplete-
ness theorem. It says that no mathematical system of a certain
complexity can fully explain itself: you need some ingredients
from outside. That would seem to preclude the self-causing
system that Davies’ quantum cosmology requires, since the uni-
verse could never completely ‘understand’ itself. The causal loop
would be broken.
Alternatively, refl ect again on Wheeler’s observation, that
something has not really happened, it is not a phenomenon,
until it has been observed to happen. Does this imply that the
universe did not existence before human eyes turned to gaze
upon it, or at least the eyes of some other intelligent awareness?
That seems bogglingly counterintuitive. Some of that vertigo
might be lessened if you ask what counts as an observation: can
a machine observe or a bacterium or an interacting particle?
But if observation requires some kind of self-conscious entities,
with the implication that the universe did not really exist until
human beings or some other self-conscious animal evolved,
then it seems fair to ask what did we or they evolve from: a
shadowy, half-existing universe?
Another response to these conundrums is to develop notions
of backward causation, which in the strange world of quantum
physics may not be so strange. However, there is a feeling of the
blind leading the blind here: quantum physics can be interpreted
in a number of ways. How are we to decide which way is right?
And there is also the fact that so much in this option rests on
the nature of consciousness, about which science basically has no
idea. So we come to a fourth option for the meaning of physics.
New age physics
It’s the most overtly spiritual, and can be associated with the
New Age. Fritjof Capra is a seminal fi gure here. He begins his
book, The Tao of Physics, by describing a vision he had in the