Beyond Natural

By John McCormick

There are three mysteries still unsolved despite years of scientific research - the appearance of the universe; from nothing? The appearance of life, from chemicals mixing accidentally? The ghostly appearance of a crucified man on the linen of the Shroud of Turin, done by a beyond-brilliant anonymous artist and expert anatomist?

• Language: English
• Publisher: John McCormick
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005464325

John McCormick

John McCormick grew up in Napa and is descended from five generations of Napa Valley residents. He received his bachelor's in engineering from the University of California-Berkeley and his master's in history from Harvard University. After a career in technology in Silicon Valley, he and his wife now own a small business in Lafayette, California.

Book preview

Chapter 1

UNIVERSE

1. Around the time of World War 1, it was commonly accepted that there was this Earth, a few other planets, moons, meteors, clouds, and one big galaxy of stars. These made up the universe, and always had.

2. The universe was infinite, changeless, balanced; it had always existed, it was eternal. Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation suggested a static universe.

3. A static universe, but changing within; Laplace, Hutton, Lyell and Sedgwick described an earth slowly altering and transforming its landscape times through slow gradual processes over millions of years. Interesting, thought young Darwin, when Lyell and Sedgwick showed him the evidence in strata and sedimentary rocks.

4. As with the earth, so with life; though evidence was vanishingly thin as to life’s origin.

5. When geology revealed that life had not existed for eternity, but came long after earth’s first appearance, a theory that anything can happen had strong appeal particularly so when evidence is thin. As one scientist consolingly put it, Time is in fact the hero of the plot…The impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain . One only has to wait; time itself performs miracles.

6. Ah! Infinity! Where things can happen that don't .

7. Whether the universe was eternal or not, the world believed that the universe had no traceable beginning.

8. That was about to change.

Eternity Begins to Crumble

9. In 1905, Albert Einstein had formed his Theory of Special Relativity. It was a coherent, intelligent theory describing a universe that had always existed; and much as Isaac Newton had described it; steady, changeless, eternal; a universe dominated by gravity but gravitationally balanced rather than stable.

10. From 1907 until 1915, Einstein extended his Special Theory of Relativity to the universe. In so extending, he realised that matter could shrink uncontrollably under its own gravitational force; that is, the universe would collapse on itself.

There were many who disagreed with relativity and 28 written opinions were published in a book, Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein (One Hundred Authors Against Einstein].

11. When the guns of World War 1 erupted; at a time when scientists, predominantly astronomers, were considering repeated observations that described a growing, expanding universe, and not a static, constant one, Einstein had snagged his coat in a paradigm, a model, of an unchanging universe.

12. Einstein now theorised an additional ingredient to his equations, a Cosmological Constant ; a term representing a force which partly accounts for the expansion of the universe.

This new ingredient was a work of imagination which he seems to have considered sounded scarcely more than sheer fiction, for he provided an explanatory requirement for the constant; …we admittedly had to introduce an extension …which is not justified by our actual knowledge of gravitation…The term is necessary only for the purpose of making possible a quasi-static distribution of matter, as required by the fact of the small velocities of the stars.

13. Cosmologists, cosmogonists, and physicists grudgingly accepted this constant; they had assumed, without much discussion, that the universe was stable. But adding additional or arbitrary terms to a theory is not something that scientists find appealing and others considered it to be a stop-gap solution, fated to be replaced. Moreover, others were impressed with Einstein’s relativity as it stood and had expended effort and time verifying his original theory to their personal satisfaction.

14. In August 1914, U.S. astronomer, Vesto Slipher, presented spectrographs to the American Astronomical Society showing movement of galaxies; observations that clearly implied an expanding universe. He received a standing ovation.

15. An expanding universe had troubling consequences for the concept of an eternal universe. A universe that was growing pointed toward a universe that was once smaller; at any rate, not static.

16. In 1922, physicist and mathematician, Alexander Friedmann derived his Friedmann Equations from Einstein's equations. Among three scenarios, one indicated that the universe might be expanding at a rate calculable by the equations; in other words, it may not be static. However, he wrote, But all these scenarios must be considered as curiosities which cannot be presently supported by solid astronomical experimental data .

17. In 1927, physicist and astronomer, Georges Lemaître published a solution hypothesising that the universe was expanding. In 1931, he declared that the expansion was from an initial point, an immensely hot and immensely dense singularity, expanding and cooling.

Many physicists thought Lemaître’s fireball origin far-fetched and the theory fell from consideration for some years, there being no discernible avenue to find some evidence of this. Einstein resisted Friedmann’s and Lemaître’s conclusions of an expanding universe, a universe implying a beginning, though he accepted the mathematics. The world divided into camps:

• The universe is static.

• The universe is active and growing.

18. The question now was; did observable, testable, evidence exist which could point towards which theory was more likely?

Evidence is not proof. Evidence is what may have some use in proving something — things observed, heard, calculated, experienced … ; such as paper trails, or lipstick where it should not be.

19. In 1924, the astronomer Edwin Hubble, working with teamster/electrician turned astronomer, Milton Humanson, stunned many by declaring, in The New York Times , that there was more to the universe than the Milky Way. [Ignore error in the spelling of Hubble’s name. ] He stated in effect, Those clouds, those spiral nebulae, are not mist, nor whirling clouds but stellar systems like our Milky Way.

Why, the people said, there must be a hundred of them.

Thousands, they thought, of stellar systems.

Maybe hundreds of thousands.

20. Astounding as it was, this news did not affect the prevailing philosophical proposition of an eternal, stable universe; the discovery only signified that the universe was appreciably bigger than people had imagined. It was still stable and eternal, but whether the universe had a beginning or not was considered inconsequential to daily life; an attitude comparable to Sherlock Holmes’ indifference to the earth’s solar orbit, " What the deuce is it to me? he interrupted impatiently; you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon, it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

21. Hubble was not finished. In 1929, he announced a further dramatic discovery which sat all down to think again. Hubble had noticed, as others before him had also reported, that light coming from the galaxies shifted towards the red end of the light spectrum. This led to a conclusion that galaxies were flying apart from each other at great speed, and that the universe was therefore definitely, provably, growing in size. Expanding.

22. In effect, Hubble had spoken once more and had declared, I can say that the universe is getting bigger all the time, even as we speak, and the galaxies further out appear to be moving away faster than those closer in. And not moving away slowly but at tremendous velocity.

23. An astounding discovery such as this was not accepted without enquiring whether others could see what Hubble saw. Others did; others had. No matter how it was interpreted, it indicated that the universe was unquestionably not static, but getting bigger.

24. Discovery provoked the question; is it not logical to assume that if the universe is getting bigger, then, the early universe must have been smaller?

25. The proposition swelled; if the universe was smaller yesterday than it is today, then it must have been smaller the day before and so on, until a point when the universe began is reached. And therefore, logically, so the notion grew, the universe must have had a beginning.

26. Others put it differently, though with a similar conclusion; the universe expands and its energy and matter thin out. Earlier, then, the universe was smaller while matter and energy were denser. With increased density came a higher temperature, something known to everyone who ever handled a bicycle pump.

Hypothesizing known laws backwards, and assuming they continually apply, science deduces an earliest point where the energy densities and temperatures are so high that no known laws will describe the changes of state now assumed to occur.

Einstein’s Relativity equations, logic, mathematics, and physics, further reasonably indicated that on one singular ‘yesterday’, over thirteen and a half billion years ago, the universe was contained in an infinitely small, infinitely dense, and immensely hot region of space. Into, putting it differently, a dimensionless point in infinitely small space, when elapsed time approached zero; a point described as arriving at a singularity.

5.39 × 10-44 seconds before that, the Big Bang occurred.

Big Bang

27. When that happened, it was a point, a point when the history of the universe began, a point when there was no ‘yesterday’; a point when there was not even a ‘ten minutes’ ago.

28. The Standard Model of Cosmology states in effect that until this singularity appeared there was no space, no time, no matter, and no energy. No space, no time, no matter and no energy is a very reasonable description of nothing .

The Standard Model of Cosmology is basically the Big Bang model; in this model, the expansion of the Universe is accelerating and the age of the Universe is 13.8 billion years.

29. This instantaneous appearance of everything from nothing drew the scientific world’s attention to a hypothesis that evidence may now exist which suggested that something beyond-natural had happened, simply because there was no obvious natural cause for something appearing out of nothing. There is no evidence that the Big Bang had been a transition between different physical states, like steam condensing to water.

30. One ‘something’ which appeared from nothing was matter . As the universe continued to expand and cool, the intense energy transformed into elementary particles. These particles began to combine and clump under the influence of gravity, forming the first stars and galaxies. Over billions of years, stars fused lighter elements into heavier ones and with stars exploding, produced the remainder of inert matter.

31. It was inevitable that a very great number, and not exclusively scientists, found this restatement of an ancient point of origin jolting and unappealing.

32. One celebrated scientist spoke for many when he wrote that the idea of a beyond-natural creation of the universe was repugnant ; that it was philosophically unacceptable ; that a universe with a beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless it is looked on as super-natural.

He was supported by the celebrated editor of Nature, John Maddox, who contributed an article, headed, ‘Down with the Big Bang’, Apart from being philosophically unacceptable, the Big Bang is an over-simple view of how the Universe began, and it is unlikely to survive the decade ahead. Maddox, as a trenchant materialist, opposed any beyond-natural imputations.

33. The philosophical unacceptability referred to is the break in continuity of causation ; that is, A caused B, B caused C, C caused D etc.; but what caused A? Science desires continuity; as Einstein observed, the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation .

Universal causation is a principle of philosophy, and science. It assumes that every event or phenomenon in the universe is caused or determined by previous factors - every effect has a prior cause and every causative action has a predictable effect – ‘predictable’ because there is a fundamental regularity in the universe.

Philosophers and scientists are not alone in seeking causation; the whole human race has a sense of cause and effect. Even infants ask where they came from.

34. Dislike of a universe sprouting from nothing has been maintained to modern times; one writer expresses it so: the concept of an eternal universe feels more acceptable than the concept of a transient universe that springs into being suddenly, and afterwards fades slowly into darkness . For some, an eternal universe is comforting; a temporary one, however prolonged, is agitating.

35. An instantaneous appearance of a universe cannot rationally be suggested as some sort of religious stunt.

However, in Russia, that suggestion was dismissed as a piece of religiosity, at first.

Zhdanovism, the denunciation of western influence in the arts, had spread to Russian cosmology and science; not even a Nobel Laureate like Peter Kapitsa was free from criticism for a time. For the Russian government, evidence lay in the fact that Lemaître was a Jesuit priest, and that was enough.

As for Gamow; a Soviet-Ukrainian-American, theoretical physicist and developer of Lemaître’s Big Bang, well, he was an Americanised apostate, a former citizen of the USSR who had fled to the US.

36. The song has ended, but the melody lingers on. The instantaneous appearance of the universe was and still is unacceptable in the news/ entertainment media. There is a permanent market for theories which propose that, either there is a rational explanation for the universe appearing from nothing; or, if that pistol won’t fire, that this universe existed eternally but perhaps in different forms and therefore has no beginning as such.

37. A contest, to be fought out scientifically and philosophically, began for a natural origin of the universe; one that did not concede a beyond-natural cause.

38. Some scientists began to set aside what science had clearly pointed to in the Big Bang and now constructed mathematical models of a universe with an infinite past; alternatively, models of an infinite series of universes leading to this current universe. Each model has very substantial evidentiary difficulties.

Models - The hard fact about models is that, whatever the models represent, they are still theories and descriptions and speculations – they provide a general comprehension of systems and processes, but a model clock, for example, does not tell the time; if it did, it would be a real clock.

In the construction of models, assumptions are made and initial conditions identified. Flaws in the model, if any, are generally found in the assumptions, or in simplifications for the purpose of the model.

No matter how ingenious and tested the models may be, they have limits in representing reality. An example of this happened in 2023 when the James Webb Space Telescope reported finding ancient mature galaxies that were 3% of the age of the universe, when models had previously suggested that galaxies grew from small to large over much longer stretches of time.

39. A point when a colossal burst of heat flared, when time started, when space emerged, when energy, then matter, appeared, did call for enquiry. Plainly, evidence is there in the Big Bang that, at least, this universe is not eternal; that this universe had a beginning.

40. The issue eventually condensed to this; as materialism declares that everything, admitting no exceptions, has a natural cause, then materialism must describe a natural cause for the existence of this observable universe, a failure to do so leaves the possibility of a beyond-natural cause by failure to construct another explanation. For the proposition of an instantaneous flare of energy from nowhere, evidence began to accumulate.

Materialism is an ancient philosophy which became better known after Lyell, Hutton, and others published in the 18th century. It describes a world governed by natural laws, in all its aspects; everything, without exception, has a natural cause.

The root of the word materialism is matter. Matter, and its movement, explains all phenomena, including free will; because, at the base of all thought are movements of sub-atomic matter.

However, Bethe, Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, and other science high-achievers, conceive that that it is matter that does not exist at sub-atomic levels, But the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real. They form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of facts… As poet Richard Wilbur put it, Cloudy, cloudy, is the stuff of stones.

Sticking like barnacles to a boat is the dictionaries’ meaning of ‘materialism’ as an ism that tends to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. But as used herein, materialism has no meaning that connotes envy or greed; here it is the theory that nothing exists except matter and its movements. It is the fundamental substance in nature.

Eternity Defended

41. Before the discovery of the Big Bang there was little discussion of the universe, certainly not to the extent that immediately followed.

Pre-Bang, research dealt with observable features of the universe; post-Bang, the direction loosened to include imagined types of universes; theoretically, with different properties.

Essentially, there were two concepts; either multitudinous universes, or one-at-a-time universes, each succeeding the other.

42. The glue binding the concepts are philosophic and semantic notions; philosophic considerations respecting the nature of time; and semantic ones relating to a new definition of nothing .

The first notion does away with humankind’s intuitive understanding of time and replaces it with formal arguments suggesting that time is a fantasy, or unrealistic; and that infinite regression of causes is possible, philosophically speaking.

If something always depends on an unending chain of earlier causes, that is infinite regression: an interminable falling back without ever reaching an ultimate cause.

The egg/chicken child’s puzzle is a popular example; e.g., the cause of this egg’s existence is that a chicken laid it and the cause of the chicken’s existence is an earlier egg, and the cause of the earlier egg is an earlier chicken … and thus into infinite regression.

43. The second notion basically requires a redefinition of nothing to mean a very special form of something .

44. The first of the chain of opposition to the concept of a universe with an origin at the time of the Big Bang was the steady-state, eternal universe model; postulated as an alternative by Sir Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold in the mid-1940s. Other theories followed, all with the common denominator of hypothesised eternality.

In 1948, Hoyle suggested an expanding universe could remain unchanged if time had no beginning or end; and the apparent thinning of the matter of the universe was counteracted by matter being continually created. This steady-state universe was attractive possibly because it suggested an eternal universe, something that did not need to be examined; and possibly because it did away with bothersome theological considerations.

45. Hoyle disagreed on Lemaître’s fireball , or any origin. He argued that the universe could be eternal, and unchanging, while still being an expanding universe. As the galaxies move away from each other, so the steady-state theory proposed, new galaxies develop, or create themselves to fill the space the others leave. Against reluctance to accept the idea of matter continually creating itself out of nothing, Hoyle countered that no one knew the source or cause of the first appearance of matter.

Hoyle spoke with some authority on this issue as it was he who wrote the foundational paper on nucleosynthesis, in 1946.

46. Around the same time, in 1948-1953, George Gamow and others further developed the Big Bang model. Their work led to a picture of a hot, radiation-dominated early universe, and a prediction of a cosmic microwave background of about 3-5 Kelvin. The prediction was significant.

Cosmic Microwave Background

47. Within 20 years, Hoyle’s steady-state model was discarded, severely damaged by the discovery of quasars in the 1960s, but for the major part following the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, in 1964,