Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt Page B
Authors: Jim Holt
Tags: Fiction, thriller, science, Crime, Mystery, Retail, Literature, USA, Philosophy, Amazon.com, 21st Century, Religious Studies, v.5, Scientism, American Literature
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a starless night sky, inspiring a sort of pleasurable terror in the adventurous thinker who contemplates it.
There is a final, and rather more esoteric virtue that nothingness possesses. It has to do with entropy . The concept of entropy is among the most fundamental in science. It explains why some changes are irreversible and why time has a direction, an “arrow” pointing from past to future. The notion of entropy arose in the nineteenth century from the study of steam engines, and originally concerned the flow of heat. Soon, however, entropy was rethought along more abstract lines, as a measure of the disorder or randomness of a system. In the twentieth century, entropy became still more abstract, merging with the idea of pure information. (When Claude Shannon was laying the foundations of information theory, he was advised by John von Neumann that if he used “entropy” in his theory he’d never lose a debate, since nobody really understands what it means.)
Everything has an entropy. The entropy of our universe, considered a closed system, is always increasing, as things move from order to disorder. That is the second law of thermodynamics. And what about Nothingness? Can it be assigned an entropy? The computation is not hard. If a system—anything from a cup of coffee to a possible world—can exist in N different states, its maximum entropy equals log( N ). The Null World, being perfectly simple, has only a single state. So its maximum entropy is log(1) = 0—which also happens to equal its minimum entropy!
So Nothingness, in addition to being the simplest, the least arbitrary, and the most symmetrical of all possible realities, also has the nicest entropy profile. Its maximum entropy equals its minimum entropy equals zero. No wonder Leonardo da Vinci was moved to exclaim, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, “ Among the great things which are found among us, the existence of Nothing is the greatest.”
But if Nothingness is so great, why didn’t it prevail over Being in the reality sweepstakes? The virtues of the Null World are manifold and undeniable when you think about them, but they only serve to make the mystery of existence all the more mysterious.
Or so it seemed to me until, one day back in 2006, I received in the mail a wholly unexpected letter that announced, “There is no mystery of existence.”
4
THE GREAT REJECTIONIST
T he letter bearing the news that “there is no mystery of existence,” though unexpected, did not exactly come out of the blue. A week earlier, the New York Times had published a review I had written of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion . In the review, I had suggested that the question Why is there something rather than nothing? might be the theist’s final bulwark against the encroachments of science. “ If there is an ultimate explanation for our contingent and perishable world,” I had observed, “it would seemingly have to appeal to something that is both necessary and imperishable, which one might label ‘God.’ ” And this observation had touched a nerve in my correspondent, a man called Adolf Grünbaum.
The name was hardly unknown to me. In the philosophical world, Adolf Grünbaum is a man of immense stature. He is arguably the greatest living philosopher of science. In the 1950s, Grünbaum became famous as the foremost thinker about the subtleties of space and time. Three decades later, he achieved a wider degree of fame—and some notoriety—by launching a sustained and powerful attack on Freudian psychoanalysis. This brought down on him the wrath of much of the psychoanalytic world and landed him on the front page of the science section of the New York Times .
All of this I did know about the man. What I hadn’t been aware of was Grünbaum’s implacable hostility to religious belief. He was particularly irked, it seemed, by cosmic mystery-mongering as a strategy for shoring up belief in a supernatural creator. As far as he was concerned, the
There is a final, and rather more esoteric virtue that nothingness possesses. It has to do with entropy . The concept of entropy is among the most fundamental in science. It explains why some changes are irreversible and why time has a direction, an “arrow” pointing from past to future. The notion of entropy arose in the nineteenth century from the study of steam engines, and originally concerned the flow of heat. Soon, however, entropy was rethought along more abstract lines, as a measure of the disorder or randomness of a system. In the twentieth century, entropy became still more abstract, merging with the idea of pure information. (When Claude Shannon was laying the foundations of information theory, he was advised by John von Neumann that if he used “entropy” in his theory he’d never lose a debate, since nobody really understands what it means.)
Everything has an entropy. The entropy of our universe, considered a closed system, is always increasing, as things move from order to disorder. That is the second law of thermodynamics. And what about Nothingness? Can it be assigned an entropy? The computation is not hard. If a system—anything from a cup of coffee to a possible world—can exist in N different states, its maximum entropy equals log( N ). The Null World, being perfectly simple, has only a single state. So its maximum entropy is log(1) = 0—which also happens to equal its minimum entropy!
So Nothingness, in addition to being the simplest, the least arbitrary, and the most symmetrical of all possible realities, also has the nicest entropy profile. Its maximum entropy equals its minimum entropy equals zero. No wonder Leonardo da Vinci was moved to exclaim, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, “ Among the great things which are found among us, the existence of Nothing is the greatest.”
But if Nothingness is so great, why didn’t it prevail over Being in the reality sweepstakes? The virtues of the Null World are manifold and undeniable when you think about them, but they only serve to make the mystery of existence all the more mysterious.
Or so it seemed to me until, one day back in 2006, I received in the mail a wholly unexpected letter that announced, “There is no mystery of existence.”
4
THE GREAT REJECTIONIST
T he letter bearing the news that “there is no mystery of existence,” though unexpected, did not exactly come out of the blue. A week earlier, the New York Times had published a review I had written of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion . In the review, I had suggested that the question Why is there something rather than nothing? might be the theist’s final bulwark against the encroachments of science. “ If there is an ultimate explanation for our contingent and perishable world,” I had observed, “it would seemingly have to appeal to something that is both necessary and imperishable, which one might label ‘God.’ ” And this observation had touched a nerve in my correspondent, a man called Adolf Grünbaum.
The name was hardly unknown to me. In the philosophical world, Adolf Grünbaum is a man of immense stature. He is arguably the greatest living philosopher of science. In the 1950s, Grünbaum became famous as the foremost thinker about the subtleties of space and time. Three decades later, he achieved a wider degree of fame—and some notoriety—by launching a sustained and powerful attack on Freudian psychoanalysis. This brought down on him the wrath of much of the psychoanalytic world and landed him on the front page of the science section of the New York Times .
All of this I did know about the man. What I hadn’t been aware of was Grünbaum’s implacable hostility to religious belief. He was particularly irked, it seemed, by cosmic mystery-mongering as a strategy for shoring up belief in a supernatural creator. As far as he was concerned, the
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