Originally published 8 October 1990
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
The words come from Steven Weinberg, a Nobel prize-winning physicist who has made important contributions to the Big Bang theory of creation. They appear near the end of his widely-read book The First Three Minutes.
Weinberg’s point is this: The more we understand about the origin of the universe and its evolution on the grandest scale, the more we realize that human life is the outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back 15 billion years to the earliest moments of creation. Our existence wasn’t built into the universe from the beginning; rather, we are a bit of cosmic spume tossed up on the shore of a tiny planet from a raging sea of chaos.
Is Weinberg’s gloomy impression of pointlessness shared by other cosmologists? A new book by Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer provides the fascinating answer.
Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists (Harvard University Press, 1990) contains interviews with 27 men and women who probe the furthest frontiers of knowledge. Lightman and Brawer want to know how these people became scientists, what were the early influences on their work, and how they react to the biggest cosmological questions of our time: Where did the universe come from? How does it evolve? Where is it going?
Knowing the rules
Almost every interview ends with the same question: “Do you agree with Weinberg’s remark about the pointlessness of the universe?
The first interview is with Fred Hoyle, one of the very few contemporary cosmologists who reject the Big Bang theory in favor of a steady state universe. Hoyle’s answer to the Big Why sets the tone for many of the answers that follow — caution and humility.
Hoyle insists that you have to know the rules before you can understand the game that’s being played. He uses Richard Feynman’s example of a child who watches two grandmasters play a game of chess. First the child has to figure out how the pieces move, but it’s still a long step from there to understanding the game, and a still greater step to being able to play a better game. We are still learning the rules of the universe, Hoyle implies, and it’s a long way from there to knowing what is the point or pointlessness of it all.
James Peebles of Princeton is a Big Bang advocate who has done much to win acceptance for that theory. He shares Hoyle’s reticence in the face of the Big Why. Asked about Weinberg’s remark, Pebbles answers: “I think [Weinberg] must have been feeling a little down that day, perhaps a little tired, a little discouraged, a fight with his wife. I remember being surprised to see it. I have never demanded that the universe explain to me why it’s doing what it’s doing.”
Edwin Turner is an astrophysicist and colleague of Peebles at Princeton. He is also a student of Eastern thought and refuses to divide the world into separate material and spiritual realms in the Western way. The world just is, he says, adding “Does the water mean to catch the reflection of the moon?”
Not all of the interviewed scientists back away from the Big Why. Some, like Sandra Faber, agree with Weinberg that from a human point of view the universe is emphatically pointless. Other profess what amounts to a religious conviction that there is a point to things. Allan Sandage, one of our greatest observational cosmologists, chooses faith in a purpose over pointless nihilism. He is inspired by the mysterious way the universe is tuned to allow our existence — but doubtful we will ever have an absolute answer.
The majority of these 27 scientists believe that asking about the point of the universe is itself pointless. The very concept of a meaning is too anthropomorphic, says Dennis Sciama, and Joseph Silk protests against any attempt to compress the grandeur and mystery of creation into a single phrase.
Say what?
And yes, Steven Weinberg is here among his colleagues, and, yes, he is asked for his reaction to his own remark. “I’ve gotten more comments about that sentence that about anything else I have written,” he says. Apparently, the question of a human meaning to the universe remains, even in the late 20th century, deeply important to the human psyche.
“I certainly meant roughly what I said,” says Weinberg, “but it didn’t come out exactly as I wanted it. If you say things are pointless, you have to ask, ‘Well, what point were you looking for?’ And that’s what’s needed…to be explained. What kind of point would have been there that might have made it not pointless.”
Uh, umm, thanks Steve.
Weinberg’s clarification of his original remark is not terribly helpful, and that is perhaps one lesson of Lightman and Brawer’s delightful book. Successful cosmologists are not necessarily enlightening philosophers. When it come to the Big Why, 27 of the world’s most brilliant mathematicians and physicists are just about as certain, uncertain, or simply befuddled as the rest of us.
