In War of the Worldviews, Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow (perhaps best known for co-authoring The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking) debate, through dueling essays, the question of whether a spiritual consciousness should play a part in our current scientific worldview. Mr. Mlodinow adopts the staunch materialistic standpoint, constantly arguing that only what can tested, weighed and measured is real. According to him, this invisible spiritual element, advanced by Mr. Chopra, is simply an illusion; a nice thought without scientific credibility. Taking out his ruler and compass, Mr. Mlodinow finds he cannot measure “consciousness” and therefore concludes it does not exist. One of Mr. Mlodinow’s often repeated attacks in his essays is that metaphysics and philosophy are worthless, too malleable, and of no use for science. What is real is what we see, and what we see is a world independent of our brains. Who needs metaphysics? He...
...
The multiverse — the notion that our universe is simply one among trillions— is currently in vogue in modern cosmology. The multiverse is the subject of the best-selling books, The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, and The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene, as well as others by popular science writers, John Barrow and John Gribbin. It is the topic of numerous articles in the leading scientific magazines, and has even caught the attention of The Wall Street Journal, which has published an excerpt from The Grand Design, interviewed Brian Greene on the topic, and published John Gribbin’s review of The Hidden Reality. As is so often the case, the difficulty is in determining whether this latest cosmological theory warrants our attention. The answer is yes. To begin with, the multiverse is important because it is the product of today’s scientific thought leaders, which is to say...
...
As widely reported, Stephen Hawking announced in a recent interview with the Guardian newspaper that there is no heaven, and that any such notion is simply a fairly tale. At the same time Mr. Hawking holds this negative thought in his mind, he also concludes that the body is a machine, the brain is a decaying computer, the universe mysteriously arose from background vibrations, and our universe is simply one of roughly 10500 other ones. The only distinguishing feature of our universe is that it just so happens to possess exactly the right conditions and physical laws to support life. The other 10500 – 1 universes are not so lucky. So Mr. Hawking, like so many materialists, trades a world of hope for one of dire speculation. What evidence does Mr. Hawking have for the multiverse? None. What evidence does he have for universes popping out of...
...
The mind calls out for a third theory to unify all of physics, and for a simple reason, Nature is in an obvious sense “unified. . . But in both quantum theory and general relativity, we encounter predictions of physically sensible quantities becoming infinite. This is likely the way that nature punishes impudent theorists who dare to break her unity. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics In The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin presents a powerful critique of the state of modern physics. http://www.thetroublewithphysics.com/ The cause of the “trouble with physics” is that the two leading theories of physics— quantum theory and the general theory of relativity (i.e., gravity) — are mutually incompatible. The standard explanation for this incompatibility is that quantum physics, with its wave-particle duality and uncertainty principle, governs the world of the very small, while gravity, which by definition is proportional to mass, governs the...
...
The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos is the new book by Brian Greene, the best-selling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. Hidden Reality describes nine different ways modern scientists reach the theoretical conclusion that there is actually more than one universe out there. According to the multiverse concept, there is anywhere from 10500 to an infinity of other universes, in dimensions we cannot see and in regions of space we will never encounter. To his credit, Professor Greene acknowledges that “the subject of parallel universes is highly speculative. No experiment or observation has established that any version of the idea is realize in nature.” (p. 8). He’s “laid out a general prescription for how a multiverse proposal might be testable, but at our current level of understanding none of the mutliverse theories we’ve encountered yet meet the...
...