From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2003 - 21:41:17 EDT
My friend Howard asks for a science and religion topic. I hope this
qualifies. I have pondered the implications of a Scientific American
article which I read on the plane on the way back from the UK. The article
is Max T Tegmark, "Parallel Universes," Scientific American May 2003, p.
40-51.
The article notes that the region of the universe which we can observe, is
cT big, where c is the speed of light and T is the age of the universe. This
is approximately 10^26 meters away in all directions. Now, each second this
region grows by c meters bringing a part of the universe which was
previously unobservable within view. Thus this clearly implies that the
real universe is much larger than what we can see. And here is where the
issue gets interesting, at least to me.
Someone at a point in another region of space is equally limited in his view
of the universe. and if you place observers as in separate regions, as
illustrated by
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/parallel.bmp
each centered in his own universe equal in size to our own but only touching
our universe, you get regions of space which are causally disconnected from
each other which have a different arrangment of the matter. Each volume can
be termed a 'Hubble volume' Using quantum one can count the permutations of
matter which can occur in each of these Hubble volumes. It turns out that
the matter can be arranged in 2^(10^118)) different patterns. After that,
the patterns must repeat! That means that if the universe is bigger than
this many Hubble volumes, duplication of an entire Hubble volume occurs.
Thus, if our universe is duplicated, it means that there is another you and
another me out there in a galaxy far far away.
The universe doesn't have to be infinite for this to occur. It can be quite
finite, just extremely large. Thus one doesn't have to grant infinite power
or extent to the created universe. And this brings us to the theological
issue.
How would God be able to predetermine events in a universe based upon
quantum? As far as one can tell there are no hidden variables i.e. no
underlying rules which govern quantum events. They appear to be chance
related, unpredictable.
But if, the universe was rigged so that every possible permutation occurred,
then the universe is entirely predictable. Only the location in the greater
universe of a particular Hubble arrangement isn't predictable.
This is something most Christians probably won't like because it is a
trivial predeterminism, unless one considers that creating a universe that
big can't possibly be trivial. One thing I like about this view is that it
doesn't have to depend upon Hugh Everett's many world's hypothesis solution
to the collapse wave function.
Theologically, the objection, I suspect will be that it diminishes God.
Does it?
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