[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Tom Gilson. Today on ID the future, we have another great conversation between Steven C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture, and Discovery Institute senior fellow Michael Medvede, hosting him on the Michael Medved show. Much appreciation to them for the opportunity to rebroadcast it. Medved opened the show with some very brief comments on events that were current in the news the week they recorded it. We're going to pick it up right after that as he introduces the day's strange topic, strange in quotation marks, and.
[00:00:49] Speaker C: What it all means. Meanwhile, something else that we need to figure out is the madness of the multiverse. The number one movie in the country has been Doctor Strange and the madness of the multiverse. This reflects an interest in a phenomenon that serious scientists and philosophers and others have been speculating about for years and years, and somebody who's written about this and written about it very persuasively and insightfully, with all kinds of implications to that writing. What does the multiverse mean? How is it possible to have a different universe than the one that we inhabit? Not just a different planet, not just a different galaxy, but a different entire universe? How can there be more than one? That's a question that Steve Meyer addresses in his great book the Return of the God hypothesis, three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe. Doctor Meyer is a graduate with a PhD, of course, in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. He is a former geophysicist and college professor who now directs the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture right here in Seattle, with which I am proud to be a senior fellow. Steve? Okay, first of all, have you seen the Benedict Cumberbatch Marvel comics movie about Doctor Strange?
[00:02:21] Speaker D: I actually have not seen the movie. I've read extensively the plot summaries, and that was enough to spark me to write about it, because this has been such a popular concept percolating into movies and comic books, and it's coming from physics. And I, of course, have written about the physics of all of this. And I was intrigued with the title the madness of the multiverse, because a lot of the physicists actually think this is a kind of mad concept. It's certainly strange, and so I thought I'd weigh in.
[00:02:57] Speaker C: Okay. And I'm glad you did, and please don't waste your time seeing the movie. It's much more entertaining to have a conversation about the multiverse. This, I think, is one of the least entertaining of all the Marvel comics movies, which is a lot of movies, because they have their own separate universe there. Okay, so when did this idea. And you write about this in return of the God hypothesis, which is posted on our website, but when did this idea of the multiverse, the idea of these parallel realities, somewhere, somehow, when did that first become popular?
[00:03:37] Speaker D: Well, philosophers have been talking about it for a long time as an abstract possibility. It was first proposed as an exotic interpretation of quantum phenomena by a. A physicist named Hugh Everett in 1956. And this was known as the many worlds interpretation of the. What's called the collapse of the wave packet, or the collapse of the wave function. This derives from the physics of the very weird. In the very small domain where waves and particles are sort of interchangeable entities, that waves act like particles and particles like waves, and which particle is manifested depends upon what happens when the spreading quantum wave is observed. So there's a kind of a range of possibilities that are actualized by an observation. And Everett proposed that there wasn't just one particle actualized by an observation. Rather, all possible particles that could exist and with different momenta would exist in some possible world every time there was an observation made of. And then there were other versions of this parallel universe idea that came out of cosmology, a cosmological theory known as inflation, and finally string theory. There was an interpretation of string theory that also posited this. So the physicists have been postulating this idea as a kind of an exotic interpretation of some of the phenomena that we are aware of in physics. And then it started to percolate into popular culture, largely because of the marvel people with the comics first and now the movies.
[00:05:19] Speaker C: Okay, first of all, as I understand the real multiverse theory, it doesn't assume that each different multiverse doesn't have its own intelligent beings in it, does it?
[00:05:36] Speaker D: Well, it assumes that anything that exists in this world can exist in an infinite number of variations, in an infinite number of other universes, which is what's so odd about it. It's become popular, it's so exotic that a lot of physicists have rejected it out of hand. It's sort of. There's a phrase in physics and math called reifying the math. So if you have a mathematical equation that describes all the things that could be, some physicists have just come along and said, well, all those things that could be must be somewhere. And therefore, there must be these other universes where they existed. There might be alternate versions of ourselves as possibilities. Then they must exist, too. But that's so strange. And so exotic that most physicists initially rejected this out of hand. It's become popular because of another thing that physicists have been unable to explain, which is known as the fine tuning or the cosmological fine tuning of the universe.
[00:06:37] Speaker C: Well, you write about that in your book. We were just talking to Doctor Denton about his new book, the miracle of man, which is also about fine tuning that makes human beings possible.
What is that additional phenomenon you talk about as fine tuning that the multiverses are attempting to explain?
[00:07:00] Speaker D: That's an excellent question. That is really the thing that's made this whole speculative postulation so interesting. It turns out that since about the 1970s, sixties, physicists have been discovering that the fundamental parameters that are at work in our universe, the law of gravity, the law of electromagnetism, the other fundamental laws of physics, the masses of the elementary particles, the quarks and electrons and so on, the force that's driving the expansion of the universe, all these fundamental parameters are finely tuned. That is to say, they fall within very narrow ranges or tolerances, outside of which life in the universe would be completely impossible. Even basic chemistry would in many cases be impossible. And that has raised a question. And that is, why did all of these settings end up being just right? We appear to live in a kind of Goldilocks universe, where the fundamental forces are not too strong or not too weak. The masses of particles are not too light, not too heavy. The speed of light is not too fast, not too slow. Why is everything just right? And many physicists initially concluded that the most obvious answer to that question is that there is fine tuning because there was a fine tuner, that the universe appears to have been set up to allow for the possibility of life by an intelligent creator of some kind. Now, that's been also a very controversial opinion, and one that was not very well received by a lot of physicists of a more atheistic mindset. And so the go to explanation for the fine tuning has become none other than the multiverse.
[00:08:47] Speaker C: Okay, we will get back to the multiverse. And is there the same higher power, supposedly, that is governing each one of these different universes, or a whole array of them? We will get to that and more with Steve Meyer of Discovery Institute. 1850 517 76.
Medved. In my opinion, he's the most powerful man in the world. The Michael Medved show, just in the world, not the multiverse. What the heck is the multiverse? I'm speaking about that with the author of the best selling book return of the God hypothesis. Three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe. And I'm speaking to the mind behind the center for science and culture of Discovery Institute right here in Seattle, Doctor Steve Meyer. And, Steve, we're talking before about how the idea of multiverse, the idea of many different parallel universes, all of which could replicate some elements of the other.
One of the key differences between two of the universes that you see in the new Marvel movie with Doctor Strange is there's an alternate universe where they're in an alternate New York City, where red light means go and green light means stop.
That's the kind of level of difference, I take it we're talking about a more substantial level of difference than that.
[00:10:31] Speaker D: That small level of difference or any other one scientist is quipped that in the multiverse, there's a universe in which Mother Teresa is an axe murderer. And we could maybe go further and say there's a multiverse where Michael Medved is a supporter of AOC. I mean, it could be as different or as similar as you like, you know?
[00:10:52] Speaker C: Right. You can make it. Make it for yourself. Well, what is all that attempting to explain?
[00:10:58] Speaker D: Well, there are various things that the multiverse was invoked to explain, but the reason it's become really popular in physics is that it has become a go to atheistic explanation for the fine tuning, as we were saying before the break. And the way that works is like this. Yes, the proponent of the multiverse acknowledges the probability of getting all these physical parameters just right. To allow for a life conducive universe is infinitesimally small. But if we can imagine that there are an infinite number of other universes out there, then inevitably, the right combination of factors would have had to have arisen somewhere. That sounds logical on its face. But even the multiverse proponents have acknowledged there's a problem with that, and that is that if these other universes are causally disconnected from our own, if they are literally separate universes, then whatever happens in another universe has no effect on anything that happens in this universe, including whatever the process was that gave rise the probability of the process that gave rise to the different fine tuning parameters here in this universe. So, in virtue of that, the multiverse proponents have additionally advocated that there must be some kind of a universe generating mechanism that allows them to portray our universe as the lucky winner of a great cosmic lottery, where this universe generating mechanism is spitting out different universes one by one across a vast stretch of time. So, eventually, yes, there is a process that would produce the lucky winner, but that's where the real rub comes in because it turns out that the various universe generating mechanisms that have been proposed, some based on string theory, some based on something called inflationary cosmology, themselves, require prior, unexplained fine tuning in order to generate new universes. And so we end up going back right where we started, with the ultimate fine tuning that's responsible for all the different universes and a universe like ours popping out of that universe generating machine as being something that's unexplained. And yet we know from experience the one thing that does account for fine tuning, where we are talking about something like an incredibly improbable array of parameters that all collectively result in some advantageous outcome.
Whenever we see fine tuning, whether it's with a french recipe or an internal combustion engine, it's always the result of an intelligent agent. So, given that the multiverse doesn't ultimately explain the fine tuning, we're back to where we started with the need for a fine tuner.
[00:13:48] Speaker C: Okay, when you start talking about a universe generating machine, you know, I'm thinking of Sherman and Mister Peabody from the old rocky and friends. A universe generating machines, surprisingly, and there's no such thing as a coincidence, there literally is just now a news story that came down the line. The headline is, NASA says something strange is happening with our universe. And the subheading is, observations also showed other galaxies are moving away from our Milky way faster than thought.
And then another headline. It says, ghostly unseen mirror world might be cause of cosmic controversy with Hubble constant.
Okay, is this something that the Hubble space telescope and the other space telescope they just launched and is really confirming? I mean, would they have any way of perceiving the impact of an alternate universe?
[00:14:54] Speaker D: They don't really have any way of detecting an alternative universe, although there have been some very indirect sort of tests or observations, potential observations, proposed. What you're just describing with the evidence that the galaxies are moving away from us even faster than previously thought, is really only relevant to our universe. But it's an incredibly exciting find, because it suggests that not only is the universe expanding outward from a cosmic beginning, but because of the rate of the acceleration of those distant galaxies, we now know that there's really no possibility of a future re collapse, and therefore an infinite oscillation of expansions and contractions that some physicists proposed might still rescue the idea of an infinite universe in time, that we might have been expanding and contracting for an infinitely long time, and therefore, there wouldn't need to be the postulation of a beginning. But in fact, that new evidence is providing additional support for the idea that there is one great expansion occurring faster than we thought, outward from an initial beginning or singularity, which marks the creation of the universe itself.
[00:16:05] Speaker C: And what that means to people is sometime in the next several billion years, it's unlikely that the whole thing comes crashing down.
Is that right?
[00:16:18] Speaker D: Right. It means no recollapse. Which was because of the similarity of the new cosmological model, new over the last hundred years, the idea that the universe has a definite beginning and that it is expanding outward from that beginning point. Because of the similarity of that view to the view of the book of Genesis and to the obvious, and also the obvious theistic implications of the idea of a beginning to the material universe, of matter, space, time, and energy.
Many physicists have looked for alternative models that would restore the idea of an infinite universe, and the oscillating universe was one of those ideas. But now that we know that the universe is expanding as rapidly as it is, it's expanding too rapidly to allow for a gravitational re collapse, therefore indicating that yes, indeed, there was a beginning, we won't have an infinite cycle of expansions and contractions.
[00:17:08] Speaker C: Steve Meyer his book information posted our website, the Return of the God hypothesis eager for you to return, my friend.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: We've been listening to Stephen C. Meyer talking about the origin of the universe and intelligent design with Michael Medved on the Michael Medved show. We appreciate your listening with us to this great content. We're convinced these topics are important, so we'd be grateful if you'd passed the word along to a friend. Just send them to idthefuture.com and thank you for doing that. Until next time. For id the future, I'm Tom gilson.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
