Could all really come from nothing?

via NPR

The origin of the universe is one of the most difficult realities we ponder.

It bends our logic, straining the words we have to describe it. If one is to say the universe started at the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, the immediate reaction is: "But what came before that? What caused the Big Bang?"

This is the issue of the "first cause" — the cause at the beginning of the causal chain that caused all else but was itself not caused — that has plagued and inspired philosophers for millennia.

Before philosophy, religions across the globe dealt with the same issue by positing the existence of deities that are beyond the laws of cause and effect. By existing beyond space and time, deities are, by definition, immune to the shortcomings of being human. They can be the first cause.

Scientists tend to prefer other kinds of explanation about the world, including those that deal with issues of origins. But when it comes to the Big Bang, our theories hit a hard wall. Readers may enjoy this video featured in Aeon magazine, where philosopher Tim Maudlin from New York University addresses some of the difficulties.

Despite what physicists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss say, we are far from understanding the physics of the Big Bang. In fact, it isn't even clear that we can provide a complete scientific explanation of the origin of the universe.

Every scientific theory is built upon a set of concepts. For example, we use what we call the laws of nature, which are statements of regularities that we find in the behavior of physical systems, such as the conservation of momentum and energy. It's hard to imagine how to construct a theory of the origin of everything that doesn't make use of such laws. Yet, a theory describing the origin of the universe should, as a matter of principle, also explain the origin of the laws of nature.

Can we conceive of a science capable of doing that? There is no a priori reason we can't. However, current ideas about there being a multiverse, a collection of universes of which ours is one, will not help on this front. They still use a conceptual structure derivative of present-day physics.

What seems to be needed is a new way of depicting the laws of nature not as static truths about the world but as emerging behaviors that unfold and take hold as time elapses. Physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Mangabeira Unger hint at this in their book, but don't offer a working approach. (Who can blame them?)

Still, any explanation needs to start from something. How can we explain everything without appealing to something? Why the universe? It may be one of those questions that will keep tying us in knots for a very long time.

Physics and Crop-Circle Art

In the August 2011 edition of Physics World, Richard Taylor, director of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon, took on the subject of crop circles. Taylor suggested that crop-circle artists might be using GPS, lasers and microwaves to create elaborate crop-circle art.

No one can pinpoint the exact date that crop circles began to appear, but the documented cases of these huge patterns on Earth's surface – created by flattening a crop such as wheat, barley or rye – have substantially increased from the 1970s to current times. The patterns are also growing in complexity. According to Wikipedia, 26 countries reported some 10,000 crop circles in the last third of the 20th century. About 90% of those were located in southern England.

As the 21st century began, crop-circle designs have become more complex than ever. Some feature up to 2,000 different shapes. Mathematical analysis has revealed the use of construction lines, invisible to the eye, that govern pattern design, although exactly how crop circles are created remains mysterious. Stephen Hawking is quoted as saying that the patterns are either a hoax or are due to 'wind vortices'.

Here are some excerpts from the original article:

Construction Lines

Perhaps not surprisingly, most scientists have pre-
ferred to forgo stake-outs and instead analyse the pat-
terns left behind by these cunning artists. The
pioneering research published in 1996 in
Science News by Gerard Hawkins (who was then an
astronomer at Boston University, US) examined crop
circles formed during 1978–1988. The 25 formations
he analysed consisted of single circles, multiple circles
and circles with concentric rings. Yet even for these
primitive patterns, Hawkins found a hidden artistic lan-
guage: he discovered that all of the formations were
built using hidden “construction lines” that were used
at the design stage but did not appear in the final pat-
tern. Hawkins used these construction lines to demon-
strate that crop circles are much more than arbitrarily
sized and randomly positioned patterns in fields.
Instead, the construction lines dictate their relative
sizes and positions with precision and lead to some
highly exotic properties. In particular, ratios of various
diameters and areas within the designs were found to
cluster around the “diatonic ratios” for the white keys
on a piano. These ratios are the frequency ratios of
notes: “middle D” to C, for example, is 297/264 Hz =
9/8. The idea that crop formations possess a funda-
mental geometric harmony analogous to musical
chords has inspired musicians to use computer algo-
rithms to convert formations into melodies. The best-
known “translator” is Paul Vigay, and samples of his
music are available at http://bit.ly/lbUJQq.


Triple Julia


Even the preliminary stage of crop-circle construction
– mapping the proposed design – is not an easy task.
The appearance of the first Triple Julia formation in
July 1996 was pre-empted by a single Julia formation
several weeks earlier. This “warm-up” design took a
team of 11 surveyors five hours just to measure out, and
a surveying company later estimated that one of its
engineers would have required at least five days to map
out each of the three intertwining patterns. But once
their maps are complete, crop-circle artists face a still
more difficult problem: how do you imprint patterns in
crops that are a challenge even to draw on paper?
Traditional circle-makers employed “stompers”
(wooden planks attached to two hand-held ropes), string
and garden rollers, plus bar stools to allow artists to vault
over undisturbed crops. Despite their primitive appear-
ance, stompers are a surprisingly efficient tool for flat-
tening crops, especially when driven by skilled hands.
However, modern designs have evolved beyond the tra-
ditional requirement that stalks be flattened rather than
broken: formations now feature stalks that are carefully
sculpted to create intricate textures within the geome-
tries. For example, the stalks in each of the circles of the
Triple Julia pattern formed a spiral. Multiple layers of
bent stalks can also be woven together, creating shadowy 
textures that evolve over days in the sunlight due to
the stalks’ phototropic responses.

Radiation damage


Independent studies published in 1999 and in 2001 reported evidence
consistent with what you would expect to see if the
crops had been exposed to radiation during the forma-
tion of patterns. The patterns studied date back to the
mid-1990s, and include the original Triple Julia.
Figure 5 shows the results of an investigation of “pul-
vini”, the visco-elastic joints that occur along wheat
stalks. Eltjo Haselhoff, a medical physicist, found that
pulvini on bent stalks within a 9 m-wide circle were
elongated compared with undamaged crops in the
same field. Although several well-understood factors
can cause pulvini to swell, including gravitropism (the
directional growth of stalks in response to gravity) and
“lodging” (bending of stalks caused by wind or rain
damage), Haselhoff dismissed them based on the mag-
nitude of the increase, and its symmetric fall-off from
the circle’s centre to its edge.

So let me make sure I have this straight. A highly organized, secretive cabal of mathematically brilliant performance artists spread out over the world but mostly located in England are coordinating in their use of GPS, lasers, and microwave emitters to heat and sculpt crop stalks in patterns so complex that surveyors, engineers, and physicists are baffled by the accomplishment. Night after night they do so with expert precision, carving on their canvas pictures that most would have difficulty reproducing on paper. The world's most brilliant physicists have seriously advanced 'the wind' as an alternative theory of these patterns' appearances. None of the artists have broken rank and come forward about their involvement with this even though they would be instantly famous for doing so. And this here purported conspiracy is what comes to light when Occam's Razor slices deftly through the mystery? Occam's Razor, the principle of simplicity, "don't make more assumptions than you have to?"

I don't doubt that a good number of these cases are hoaxes, but if even one of them isn't, then there's a troubling conversation that needs to take place.

Read the original article here: http://pages.uoregon.edu/msiuo/taylor/human_response/CropCircles%28physicsworld%29.pdf