The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang

6 | The World Is an Intricate Machine

❍ 6 THE WORLD IS AN INTRICATE MACHINE Napoleon: Monsieur Laplace, why wasn’t the Creator mentioned in your book Celestial Mechanics? Laplace: Sir, I have no need for that hypothesis. –anonymous account he ground-breaking scientific achievements of Kepler, Galileo , Descartes, Newton, and many others during the seventeenth century triggered a deep revision of the Western conception of the cosmos. Gone was the walled-in Universe of the Dark Ages, shattered by Newton’s arguments for an infinite Universe as the only possible realm of an infinitely powerful God. Gone was the power of religious dogmatism to dictate scientific truth. And gone were the days when pure scholastic speculation could substitute for a science based on the interplay between experimentation and theory. The rational foundation for the emerging new science built during the seventeenth century was expanded into a magnificent structure during the eighteenth. The physical world was reduced to pointlike masses moving under the influences of forces, as dictated by Newton’s three laws of motion and by his law of universal gravitation . Built within this mechanistic approach to nature was a strict determinism: If we knew the positions and velocities of the objects in a given system (say, the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon) at a certain moment in time, using Newton’s laws we could, in principle, predict the positions of the objects at any moment in time, both past T and future! By the late eighteenth century, Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1729–1827) was very successful in explaining most motions in the solar system, while other Frenchmen such as Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) and Joseph-Louis de Lagrange (1736–1813) had distilled Newtonian mechanics into powerful new mathematical formulism, rendering it applicable to a much wider range of complicated systems. The Universe was reduced to a giant clockwork mechanism, an intricate, but understandable, machine. The inflated confidence in this strict determinism can be best illustrated by the belief held by Laplace and others that if a “supermind ” could know the positions and velocities of all entities in the Universe at a given time, then it could predict the future of all things forever. Every movement, every thought, every surprise, good or bad, would be known to this giant intelligence. Destiny was perfectly predictable, the consequence of rigid mechanical laws. In this machinelike world there was no room for free will. And, as Laplace proudly announced to Napoleon, there was no room for God either. Of course, even for an eighteenth-century person blissfully ignorant of quantum mechanics, there were several problems with this argument. Laplace probably meant his assertion more as an allegory than as a serious metaphysical statement.* However, it certainly captures the spirit of the times. As we make the transition into the nineteenth century, rapid technological innovation emerges as the glorious heir to this scienti fic tradition, fueling the Industrial Revolution and bringing the belief in the mechanistic approach to nature to an almost euphoric state. By then physics was broadening to include the study of heat and electricity, which, together with Newtonian mechanics, eventually formed the so-called classical worldview. Carried away by their success, several physicists, most notably Scotland’s Lord Kelvin, boasted by 1900 that most of the work in physics had been completed, only minor details being left for future generations. However, for theories, as for people, the danger of *For example, it would be impossible for an intelligence to locate all entities at once, as it takes time to measure their positions—unless this intelligence were omnipresent and omnipotent, concepts Laplace wouldn’t have liked very much. 150 THE CLASSICAL ERA success is overexposure. As technology progressed, so did the quality of laboratory experiments, allowing scientists to probe deeper and deeper into the nature of physical phenomena. Unpleasant surprises started to crop up, becoming more numerous as the century advanced, which combined to dramatically expose the limitations of classical physics. By the time of Lord Kelvin’s death in 1907, contrary to his expectations, a radically new conceptual foundation for physics was painfully emerging that would eventually lead to the birth of a brand-new cosmology. THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS Having mastered the principles of how the Universe operates within Newtonian physics, scientists found themselves increasingly preoccupied with how those principles arose. What could be the role of a Creator in a mechanistic universe? For...