Emergent Multiverses

I have now finished reading:

Wallace, D. (2012). The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum theory According to the Everett Interpretation. Oxford: OUP.

In keeping with my self-proposed rule of reading things you disagree with, I managed to get through to the end of this lengthy and in places very technical book. You do need a background in quantum physics (which I have) as well as probability (sort of) and philosophy of science, especially physics (umm…). Anyway, we got there.

The question then is ‘was I convinced?’ Do I now see universes (even ‘local’ universes, whatever that means) popping into existence whenever a cat is placed in a box with a radioactive source?

No.

I think there are questions, some of which I outlined before. To take the answered one first: what about Ockham’s razor? This states that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. The answer from Wallace is that this is true but according to the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics each extra universe is necessary, therefore Ockham’s razor does not apply.

As an argument that is acceptable, of course, but it does rather beg the question as to the reality of the universes popping into existence on a very frequent basis, even if the frequency is uncountable. If the interpretation is correct, the razor is not applied, but the ‘if’ is a big one.

The unanswered question is about where the energy comes from to create a universe. A universe, even a local one, is a big thing with a lot of matter and energy. To duplicate it exactly except for one particular facet will take an equal quantity of energy, and so on for all the uncountable multitudes of universes which appear. Somewhere this uncountable quantity of energy has to be found. The conservation of energy is a well known law of science and even quantum mechanics managed to obey it, only bending the rule slightly and temporarily.

The question of energy, therefore, is unanswered and I think it needs an answer before the emergent multiverses idea could be accepted.

The rest of the book seems to be mainly a defence of the emergent multiverses idea along the lines that it does not do any worse than any other theory of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. For example, one of the bones of contention over the multiverse theory is something to do with probability. I suspect it is something like that in the multiverse theory there is no objective probability because all outcomes occur, just with greater of lesser numbers of branches available. Someone who experiences a branch will land up in one of the subsequent branches with a probability given by the number of branches which are possible with that outcome.

There may well be problems with the philosophy of probability. I am sure there are, but just to argue that the multiverse universe does no worse when subject to those problems than any other interpretation is hardly a strong argument in favour of the theory. It might remove an objection, but that does not make it correct.

The consequences of the choice of metaphysics that one takes to be behind quantum mechanics and its interpretation are rather few. Semi-conductors, for example, work weather or not you think every time a P-N junction triggers gives another parallel universe where it does not. One argument put forward for the usefulness of multiverses is it is helpful in calculations (although I have not seen one where it is used) but that is not evidence for reality. In solid state physics it is useful to calculate using electrons of negative mass. That does not mean that anyone believes they exist. Even if multiverses are helpful computationally or conceptually, that does not mean they exist either.

There is a question floating around as well as to whether or not emergent multiverses are science or metaphysics or mere speculation. The problem here is that scientific theories, in order to be counted as such, need to be testable. That is, you need to be able to conduct an experiment to verify (or not) the hypothesis. So far as I know there is no suggested verification experiment possible for emergent multiverses. There is a lot of speculation about finding wormholes and practicing time travel (really) but none of these seem to be a practical experimental set-up. Towards the end of the book Wallace does seem to rely a bit heavily on science fiction for ideas and explanations of what he is discussing. I am sure that there are good scientific bases for it (to a point) but quoting fiction, no matter how ‘serious’ it is, is hardly going to prove the point.

As I mentioned before, the most likely explanation for the issues we find around quantum mechanics are likely to be found, in my opinion, in the fact that we are limited, macro-scale, beings and quantum mechanics deals with the unimaginably small. At the scale of atoms and electrons, things are different from what we experience ourselves. Our expectations are not going to be met, no matter what they might be. We can verify an awful lot of the theory of quantum mechanics, granted, to perhaps surprising levels of accuracy, given the probabilistic nature of the theory. But that does not and cannot mean that we can take things like wavefunction collapse and the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment as being seriously real. They are parts of our discussions and conceptual equipment around quantum physics. Taking the collapse of a superposed wavefunction to mean that the entire universe splits into two seems to be taking realism and faith in our models of the very, very small far too much for granted.

As wise physicist (I forget whom) once commented that not only is quantum physics stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. Talk of multiplying universes at the drop of a quantum hat really does not add any clarity, I suspect. Quantum mechanics is a human level theory, which is extremely accurate in what it does (most of the time). To claim that it is so good that the universe has to multiply itself repeated to follow it seems to be imbuing it with a great metaphysical burden which I doubt it can carry.

Realism and Physical Laws

Are you a realist about the laws of nature? Most people, I would warrant, would not know how to answer the question, which is fair enough. It is only physicists and philosophers of science who tend to worry about such things. But it is, at least, a bit interesting.

The question is whether we think that a physical law is correct and really describes the world, or whether a law is a relation inhering in the world. The difference is in the words ‘inhere’ and ‘describe’. A view in which the laws describe the world can be traced back the David Hume, the Scottish Empiricist. A law which inheres in the world is a metaphysical entity which controls the world.

Most people, including most physicists, do not worry about the difference too much. But taking the laws of nature as inhering in the world can lead to some odd sorts of effects in our thinking. Hence, we can start to believe that every time a quantum event occurs in a way that affects the macroscopic universe (a cat in a box with a phial of poison which opens when a radioactive decay occurs) the universe splits into two, and we go down one branch or another (the cat is, when we look at it, alive, or dead, but not both).

If we take the view that laws of nature only describe the universe to us, there is less of a problem with unknowable branching universes. In a sense, it seems to me, the Humean version of physical laws are a bit more humble than metaphysical laws of nature. In the Humean case, what matters is the description of the universe as it appears to us. We might be grasping at each advance of science towards a better understanding of what is going on, but each step is not getting at a final truth, but simply a better understanding.

I think there might be an analogy with theology here; indeed, some authors about the problems surrounding quantum mechanics reach for God-like beings to give a total explanation of the theory. But that is not accessible to us as limited humans. Ian Ramsey once noted that the early Church Fathers were giving the best descriptions they could of the Godhead, but they were not dialling Chalcedon 451 for updates on the Trinity every week and writing it down. Human descriptions of the Trinity are exactly that: human descriptions of the indescribable in human terms.

We can see, perhaps, that we might be over-egging our quantum pudding by claiming that quantum mechanics gives a complete description of the quantum scale. Quantum Mechanics gives rise to some paradoxes, grated, but the paradoxes are human paradoxes, grounded on our ignorance of what is really going on at the quantum scale (the very, very small), in a similar way to Trinitarian theology, which is grounded on our ignorance of what is going on in the Godhead.

Therefore, when physicists or philosophers of science come up with ideas like the multiple emerging universes of branching quantum mechanics and argue (quite coherently, admittedly) that this is all fine and no counterargument can really stand against it, we have the right to be a little sceptical. Quantum mechanics might be the best theory we have which describes the micro-world, but that does not mean it is giving us the constraints that the micro-world acts under. Just because it is correct (i.e., gives accurate predictions) does not mean that quantum mechanics is a metaphysical entity controlling the world.

Again, caution is suggested by the analogy with Trinitarian theology. Just because something is a deduction from an idea about the Trinity, does not mean that the deduction is right. Theology works with a host of images and metaphors for God and the Godhead. Running one of them to death is liable to land the theologian in heresy. Similarly, running one idea of quantum mechanics to death is liable to land the philosopher of science in a but of a muddle, claiming that, for example, each time the cat is placed in a box and is later observed, the universe splits into two identical universes, one with a live cat and the other with a dead one.

The quantum world is a great deal weirder than we can imagine, I think. We do not know what it is like to ‘be’ and electron. How does an electron experience a magnetic field and emitting photons by moving through it? We have no idea. To claim that we do have is to argue that quantum mechanics is an absolute, cast-iron physical law. In fact, I would suggest, quantum mechanics is simply a human language construct (that language being mathematics, of course) which predictions which can be experimentally verified as being reasonably (and certainly usefully) accurate.

If this is correct, then arguments about multiple emerging universes start to look a little superfluous. The problems which such theories claim to solve – the relation between the Schrodinger equation and the Born rule, one being a solvable wave equation and the other being probabilistic, dissolves. It is simply the result of having to use two bits of a human construct to explain what we see.

Similarly, the problem of wavefunction collapse vanishes as well, I think. This is the issue that before we look in the box, the cat exists in a superposition of states – it is either alive or dead. When we make an observation, it is either one or the other, the wavefunction as suddenly collapsed into one state. The question is then asked about how the collapse happens, physically. The answer is that it does not happen, because the collapse of the wavefunction is something that emerges from the human level description of the universe. It does not necessarily happen in the quantum level because the quantum level is inaccessible to us.

Quantum mechanics is quite weird enough, it seems to me, not to require additional counter-intuitive ideas to further complicate matters. While emergent universes might not be ruled out specifically by the theories of quantum mechanics, they are an unnecessary and, perhaps, rather arrogant addition to the laws of nature. We simply do not know what is happening at the quantum level; that knowledge is unavailable to us.

 

Wittgensteinian Fideism?

The question mark seems to be apposite. Neither term in the title here is in common circulation, so before discussing the content of this book:

Nielsen, K., & Phillips, D. Z. (2005). Wittgensteinian Fideism? London: SCM.

I think unpacking the title might be an idea.

To start from the end, ‘fideism’. According to Penelhum, fideists argue that faith does not need the support of argument, and therefore reject the approach of philosophical defenders of faith who try to show that faith is compatible with reason, scientific knowledge, and so on. Faith, on this view, need not be rational. There are some venerable names in this tradition: Tertullian and Kierkegaard, for example, although their positions still can be defended on philosophical grounds.

In fideism, the key is a state of trust and commitment to God, not to some doctrine or argument about God. We reject, as sinful beings, signs of God’s presence revealed to us, and think that only human powers are the cure for human ills. Reason and science require detachment; faith requires a passionate involvement. Faith requires rebirth and submission; without these God remains hidden from us.

The’ Wittgensteinian’ bit of the title refers, of course, to the Twentieth Century philosopher Wittgenstein, and, more specifically here, to his idea of language games. Wittgenstein’s own relationship to faith, religion, and, more specifically in his context, Christianity, is ambiguous, but it is certainly true that some of his ideas have been incorporated into philosophy of religion and theology.

Wittgensteinian Fideisim, therefore, is the accusation that some philosophers of religion claim that faith (particularly Christian faith, but the claim is usually advanced against Judaism and Islam as well) is a particular language game and that the language game can only be understood from within the faith, that is, by someone who is a believer already. Therefore, the argument goes, these philosophers argue that religion cannot be criticised from outside the faith. Hence, if we agree that, say, Christianity is a language game, or at least that that language and meanings, actions and activities that constitute Christianity constitute a language game then was can claim that the faith is immune to criticism from without, although not from within, the language game.

These claims about some philosophers of religion were first put forward by Kai Nielson in the mid-1960s. The philosophers in his sights were Peter Winch, Norman Malcolm, and D. Z. Phillips. Eventually, Phillips replied, denying that there is or was such a thing as Wittgensteinian Fideism and that, even if it did exist, he was not such a fideist, and the argument, slowly, developed from there, culminating in the book referred to above, which has Nielson’s original 1967 paper, some of Phillips’ responses, Nielson’s responses to those, and some papers from a 2003 conference on the subject.

It is, admittedly, the sort of book that gets philosophy, and particularly, in this case, philosophy of religion, a bad name. Mostly Phillips and Nielson seem to spend their time talking past each other and accusing each other of not having read what they have written carefully enough. In short, the book can be characterised as two rather grumpy elderly men arguing about who said what about them when. External interventions in the debate do not really seem to help, either. On the whole, I did not feel that the discussion was advanced, let alone resolved, by the papers in the book.

I think the principal problem with the whole debate is that Christianity (and, I suspect, Judaism and Islam, although I do not know) is not a philosophical discussion. Of course, right back to the Patristic Fathers philosophy has been a part of the debates within and about Christianity, but that does not mean that either philosophy or the philosophical categories imported into Christian theology by engagement with philosophy, represent anything other than human ways of exploring, describing and discussing the faith.

Therefore, we can say that while Christian faith has some of the aspects of a language game in Wittgenstein’s terms, the same can be said for, say, chemistry. That does not mean that either Christianity or chemistry is immune from discussion outside those subjects, however. A physicist may comment on either, as may an ethicist or politician. What the comments amount to is not the point; with a fair amount of care and engagement with an alien subject, the external commentator can make pertinent points that require a response.

The other thing about Christianity specifically (asides about how Judaism and Islam are included are only, I fear, there for political correctness rather than the result of any engagement with those faiths) is that it completely ignores, on both sides, any encounter with God. The debate is about the existence of God, the coherence of belief in God, and so on. There is no discussion about how God might be encountered.

In Christianity, of course, the clue is in the name. Christianity is, first and foremost, about the encounter with God in the shape of His incarnate, crucified, and risen Son, Jesus. That is, Christianity is not a series of more or less coherent doctrines, debates, creeds, and activities, but ultimately about the encounter with Jesus. The encounters came first, after all. The accounts of Jesus’ life came afterward and then, as the message was carried out into the world, came the doctrines, creeds, and liturgies that have developed over the last two thousand years or so.

It is, of course, open to us as humans to accept or reject the encounter with God and Jesus. That is a slightly different debate about human freedom and will rather than fideism as such. The language game (or games) which that encounter might produce are perhaps, human constructs and are open to criticism, much like any other human construct or the idea of human constructs itself. If an individual never has the encounter then they are left with a language game to engage with or to reject. If the encounter develops a deeper faith than that in a person who never has it, then that is a matter or human experience and lack of it, not, surely, a philosophical position.

Levelling Up

There are a few political rallying cries which stir most liberal Westerners: freedom and slavery, for example. This has been an issue in certain right-wing arenas during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lock-downs and other restrictions on freedom of movement. The freedom from having irresponsible people infect me with a possible lethal and (at the time) hard to treat illness does not seem to be quite so much on the agenda, but no one is perfect.

Equality before the law is another thing upon which liberal democracy is founded, as is the universal franchise, that is that all people should have a vote in deciding who is going to represent them. These things were not always part of our national structures, of course. The obtaining of them was a struggle, and took, in fact, centuries.

One of the early groups to argue and agitate for those things we now consider to be rights under our national constitution were the Levellers. These are to be distinguished from the Diggers (discussed a couple of weeks ago. Indeed, the Diggers seem to have regarded the Levellers as insufficiently radical, describing themselves as the ‘True Levellers’.

The Levellers had their beginnings in the First English Civil War (1642-6). They were never a united political party; more a few well-known leaders and their followers, and a large number of pamphlets and tracts describing a program of reforms. Their main claims and arguments were for a reform of Parliament and religious tolerations. Everyone was born equal in their political philosophy, and no one had a natural right to govern or rule over another free-born person. Government had, therefore to be by consent.

Fair enough, but that begs the question of ‘consent by whom?’ to which the answer was ‘the people’. That raises another question, of whom ‘the people’ are. The complaint was that Parliament was, in two ways, undemocratic. Firstly, the undemocratic elements, the House of Lords and the Monarch had to be stripped of their power. Secondly, while Parliament was officially democratic, in fact, the franchise was so small in many constituencies and many seats were in the pockets of the local gentry as rotten boroughs, the democracy as the voice of the people, in general, was stifled.

The Leveller suggestions were to elect Parliament more frequently – every year or two (depending on which pamphlet we read), giving MPs a modest salary to prevent them being dependent on rich patron and their programs and for the electorate to be all men over 21 except servants (who were expected to vote as their employers directed), the recipients of alms (ditto) and royalists (who would have to wait a decade). If voting was a birthright, it was only to be removed from those who had squandered it – criminals, supporters of the king, the wage earners and so on. Thus the Levellers actually limited the franchise significantly and never seem to have considered the right of women to vote.

The Leveller position was founded on Scripture, a fact which those who regard them as the foundation of the British political left might like to ponder a little. Limitations on the power of government were necessary because the human heart was corrupt and magistrates were likely to err. Certain freedoms were to be respected no matter what Parliament decreed, be it never so democratically elected. Freedom of conscience was likewise to be protected. Conscription was to be outlawed and everyone was to be treated equally under the law.

There were to be limits, of course. True freedom of conscience was liable to land up with trouble. Freedoms should not land up troubling other people or endangering the state. Natural law, of comeliness and civility, should trump religious freedom when required. For the Levellers, perhaps, political liberty was the route to religious liberty. The two could not, at the time, be separated.

For the Levellers God did not choose the university-educated men to be ministers of the Gospel, but the ill-educated, the fishermen and tent-makers of the New Testament. Anyone could, therefore, preach; clergy who spoke of obedience and submission to the government were serving other gods than Jesus. This is a consequence of the Reformation and the printing press – the Bible was available for all the read and discuss, and people did, drawing their own conclusions.

However, people also needed to be instructed in the Gospel, and hence there was a case for having ministers, but these should be elected by the people of gathered churches, rather than imposed by the government and a national church. The Levellers therefore would have separated church and state, something which was not to the liking of many in the country at the time. Politics and religion were not that easily separated.

Of course, theological positions among the Leveller pamphleteers varied, and there is dispute as to how much of their program (such as it was) was theological. Lilburne of course was a well known religious radical, in trouble as a young man before the outbreak of the civil war over distributing banned pamphlets. Many Levellers seem to have taken the core of Christianity as the Golden Rule and it was the basis of their arguments for equality. Old Testament forms of government were overturned by the incarnation. The Old Testament was not, according to the Levellers, a prefiguring of later practices. If the church was a voluntary assembly, then Old Testament ideas of church and government could not apply.

After the 1647 Putney debates, the Levellers were suppressed. They had been too influential, particularly in the army, for the comfort of the government and an ill-timed and ill-planned mutiny led to their decline. They may well have felt betrayed by Cromwell (who spent some time defending Lilburne) and Parliament. The impact of the Levellers was rather small; they existed as a group, albeit loosely, for around six years. None of their proposals were established, and they were forgotten about for two to three centuries, until the Chartists revived some of their demands and, slowly, some of the demanded freedoms were established.

Their program was radical – equality under the law, inalienable natural rights, freedom of conscience, limitations on government, concepts of natural justice and voting rights for the poor. These had never existed, except in their imagined Anglo-Saxon past (before the Norman yoke was imposed). It is little wonder that their demands were too rich for the grandees of the time and, in many places, are still too much for governing classes to swallow.

The Emergent Multiverse Part I

I have been, slowly and painfully, reading

Wallace, D. (2012). The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum theory According to the Everett Interpretation. Oxford: OUP.

Slowly, because it is a complex subject, and painfully because while I am a fully paid up quantum mechanic, or at least I was, my skills are a bit rusty.

Still, Wallace’s claims so far (I have read Part One of the book) are reasonably clear, even to a rusty quantum physicist. The main claim is that the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is the only one that does not require additional bits to be added to the formalism of quantum mechanics. Hence, the argument goes, it is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics that we have.

Now, as an argument, this is valid, but it is a bit weak, in my view. Firstly, the interpretation produces nothing measurable, it seems (perhaps it will in due course). Secondly, just because we cannot think of a better interpretation of quantum mechanics than the emergent multiverse view does not mean it is right, it simply means that we cannot think of anything better. So much the worse for us.

A post or two ago I produced a couple of questions about the emergent multiverse view. So far, the book has addressed one of the. I wondered about the multiverse view and Occam’s razor. That is, we are strongly encouraged by Occam’s razor not to multiply entities unnecessarily. Wallace’s reply is that Occam’s razor is valid, but the key word is unnecessarily. That is, his view is that as the formalism of quantum mechanics requires it, creating additional universes does not break Occam’s razor. We multiply entities but not unnecessarily.

This may or may not be true, of course. Within the assumptions that Wallace makes it is reasonable, but I think that worries do remain and are not answered by this assertion. This relates to the over concern I raised, which is where the energy comes from to create another universe, exactly the same as this one, every time something happens to require that to happen in the quantum mechanical formalism. Creating anything, including universes, takes energy, and quantum mechanics, while it can, temporarily, play fast and loose with conservation laws, has to obey them in the final analysis. Quantum mechanics may be weird, but it does not break the conservation of energy.

Without getting too technical, Wallace seems to be arguing, so far as I have followed him, that each quantum transition does not cause a new universe to emerge. Hence, if I have an atom in its ground state and it collides with another atom, and it has a probability of gaining energy to promote its electron to one of two other states, two new universes are not created for the two possible outcomes. It is only when we have (to use the standard example) a cat in a box which may be in one of two states that there are two universes, one with a dead and one with an alive cat. So the number of universes that are created is not so big as it might be, but it is still uncountable.

I still think that there are further worries. Firstly, as an extension of the above, there is still the underlying question of what the quantum formalism means. The normal interpretation of the wave function is that it gives the probability of finding a particle in a given state. While Wallace raises concerns as to what probability means in this case (and, indeed, in wider cases) the wave function is not the particle. That is, the quantum formalism is not a full description of what is going on at the micro-scale. The quantum scale has little to do with our intuitions and understandings, which is based on our macro-scale experience. What we get out of the equations is not reality, or a description of it, but something we can work with.

It seems to me that there is a danger here of taking the relatively clean quantum mechanical description of the world available through the mathematics of Hilbert space and it associated entities, and thinking that this is the description of the world and all that is in it. That seems unlikely. Quantum mechanics is not, despite its success in the twentieth century, the be-all and end-all of physics, let alone science as a whole, or human experience. The status of scientific theories, especially in physics is disputed. Wallace seems to think that because we do not dispute our theories of dinosaurs and take their description of the world to be pretty well true, we should do the same with quantum mechanics, otherwise something is wrong with our conception of science.

However, we need not take the quantum mechanical description of sub-atomic particles to be true in the same sense that we take dinosaurs to be true. Both theories (no doubt; I am not an expert on dinosaurs) have problems in interpretation, but we are not constrained to take both theories as having the same sense of truth about them. Dinosaur theories are true because we can find bones and reconstruct what the creatures may have looked like. Quantum theories are true because we can make predictions about what will happen under certain circumstances which turn out to be valid within experimental error. These are not scientific theories on the same level as each other, it seems to me.

Theories in physics, therefore, are somewhat odder than those in other subjects in science. Mostly, this is because they rely on two aspects that Wallace seems to rather (so far at least) ignore. Firstly, of course, they are based on mathematics. This is not, of course, a problem (except for people who have to learn how to do the mathematics in the first place) but there are questions about what the mathematical entities thus created mean. Secondly, most physics, including quantum mechanics, is the outcome of a process of modeling some aspects of reality. Again, there arises, perhaps more pressingly, questions about what the models mean as representations of reality. We certainly do not have to take them literally. If we do, then perhaps we do land up with an emergent multiverse from quantum mechanics, but the move is not forced.

Common Treasury?

Politics and economics are inevitably intertwined. If people feel worse off, they will more often than not blame the government and vote (if voting is permitted and fair) to remove it. If, therefore, you change the political landscape, there is surely scope, if not desire, to change the economic one.

The execution of King Charles I in 1649 is a case in point. The monarchy, as it was conceived in, say, 1639, had been dismantled, not only literally but legally. Despite the efforts, some of which were honest, on both sides, the distrust and intransigence engendered by years of plotting and warfare led to the demolition of the political and social hierarchy as it had been known. The question was: what happens next?

Perhaps the most radical reform propositions put forward were those of the ‘Diggers’, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the ‘True Levellers’. The Levellers themselves were a more radical organisation, proposing to extend the franchise but maintain property rights. The Diggers objected that the poorest people would not benefit from this. The rich parcelled off land for themselves, while the poor had to beg or scratch a living from land rented at a high price or beg for bread for their families.

The Digger solution was to restructure landholding. The people should be restored to their land, each with sufficient land to grow their own food. The workers on the land of others for ‘small wages’ barely enough to keep themselves and their children should be able to work for themselves. All people, rich and poor alike, will act more righteously towards each other when Christ comes again and that event was expected soon.

The Diggers, of course, acted as they wrote. In 1649 twenty or so Diggers set themselves up on St George's Hill in Surrey and proceeded to build shacks and plant the land. The land was, they informed the authorities, crown land, but as the king was no more, and the crown claimed the land by right of the Norman Conquest, the had been returned to the original owners, the common people of England.

The local landowners, of course, regarded the Diggers as a threat. Eventually, so did the authorities. The Diggers were harassed, their plantings and home destroyed and many were arrested. Their threat to landowners was perceived as considerable, although their writings denounced the use of violence. Persuasion was the key: landowners would voluntarily give up their land to the poor when they saw the rightness of the cause of the poor. This is based, of course, on a particular reading of Scripture, particularly the texts relating to the Garden of Eden and also relating to the second coming of Christ.

The Church, of course, was intimately related to the landowning class, the clergy being mainly drawn from the strata of society and churches being major landowners themselves. In common with a lot of the other sects, the Diggers had no time for the established church or its clergy. Indeed, some of the early resistance to their commune was organised by a Parson. They accused the clergy of making God and Christ distant from the ordinary people, and so reliant for salvation on the clergy themselves. With the addition of heaven for obedience or Hell for the opposite, the power of the clergy over the minds of the ordinary people was, in the Digger view, established, and alienated people from God.

Winstanley, the key author for the Diggers, stressed the immanence of God, God could be known by all. Here, of course, we see the influence of the translated Bible. If all can read Scripture, then all can interpret Scripture. All can, themselves, know God without the intervention of clergy (or, indeed, anyone else). Here Digger arguments perhaps start to shade into Quaker theology: all carry the light of Christ in themselves, and none should oppress that.

While the Diggers were ejected, suppressed, and fined, the ideas they put forward did not totally expire. In 1999 some land rights activists reenacted the first Digger encampment and were similarly ejected. The Diggers are often described as England’s first communists, which is sort of true, but that description is often given by the more Marxist historians of the English Civil Wars and their aftermath, which ignores the very strong theological strands in Winstanley’s thinking.

There are resonances between the Diggers’ views and those of some contemporary theologians. This is not so true in the liberal Western tradition, where, after all, the welfare state, at least in theory, prevents people from being really, really, poor, but in other parts of the developing world, the liberation theology has inspired social action and political views aimed at overcoming oppression and promoting social justice. The reading of Scripture by the people themselves, the oppressed, can lead to a liberation of their views, including on the church and its collusion with the authorities, and then action to remedy the injustice.

Partly, then, the questions of the Diggers and the latter-day liberationists turn on the right and authority to interpret Scripture. If it is from the established authorities, the church in collusion with oppressive regimes, then ‘pie in the sky when you die’ is the religion that is promulgated and accepted by many. But the Bible is full of scenes of liberation and salvation. A key theme, I believe, in liberation theology is the Exodus, with the refrain ‘set my people free’. Similarly, the movement for cancelling debt draws its inspiration from the Biblical principle of ‘jubilee’. The Bible can be a potent political weapon.

The weapon of the Bible can cut both ways. The problem with the powerful is that they prefer to keep hold of their power and privileged. The Digger encampments were scattered and destroyed. Third World land rights activists are assaulted and murdered. We should not overstate the Diggers and their influence, of course – there was a period of at least two centuries when no one had heard of them – but the issues they raised are still live ones today.

The Multiple Universe

 Quantum mechanics is weird, counter-intuitive. The ‘true meaning’ of quantum mechanics is the subject of many late-night undergraduate discussions, preferably fuelled by a few beers, but, so far as I know, most physicists and practitioners of allied subjects such as mathematics and chemistry simply and pragmatically decide not to worry about the meaning, get on, and calculate stuff that is useful. What it means more widely than the result to apply to the case in hand is not really a problem.

Despite the pragmatic approach of most physicists, there are a few, theoretical physicists and philosophers of science, who continue to worry about what quantum mechanics means for our view of the universe. The problem which most concerns them is that quantum mechanical weirdness seems to potentially have macroscopic effects.

The principal example of these macroscopic effects is the widely known ‘Schrödinger's cat’ paradox. Suppose we have a cat in a box (no cats were harmed in the writing of this post). Also in the box is a radioactive source. These sources decay randomly, and, it being in the box, we do not know when it is going to decay, but when it does, the cat will die. From outside the box, we have no idea as to whether the cat is alive or dead. In quantum mechanics terms the wavefunction of the radioactive source and the cat is in a superposition of states:

|cat> = a|cat alive> + b|cat dead>

The odd-looking brackets are standard quantum mechanics notation denoting the quantum wave functions. The letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ are the probabilities of the cat being either alive or dead. In standard quantum mechanics, these are complex numbers; the modulus squared of the complex number giving the probability of that state.

The only way to establish the health of the cat is to open the box and look. At this point the wave function |cat> collapses, or at least the superposition collapses, and the observer sees either |cat alive> or |cat dead>. The superposition of states is not observed. The question arises of how, exactly, this works. What is going on to collapse the superposition of the wavefunction?

This leads us to at least one conceptual problem. We can view the collapse as a purely instrumental affair, and ignore the human questions of what is going on. The important thing is the answer and, to boot, that it is the right answer. While this works for quantum mechanical problems, it leaves the understanding of the universe behind. Quantum mechanics does not describe the universe as it is, but is a tool to describe the results of experiments.

Conceptually, instrumentalism means that all we are interested in is the observational output of the theory of quantum mechanics. How such results are achieved is unimportant. But quantum mechanics is very successful at predicting and explaining the unexpected, such as superconductivity. The idea that results such as this are simply the consequences of some sort of formalism unconnected with reality is uncomfortable, to say the least.

There are, of course, other options. Another approach suggests that there are hidden variables that represent the state of the system but are unknown until we choose to measure it. However, from a physics point of view, the hidden variables simply add complexity to the theory of quantum mechanics without adding any physics. Making, possibly, the theory intelligible is not sufficient pay-off to make these theories popular.

Another approach is the quantum many-worlds theory. Here, the idea is that that there are two parallel, but non-interacting worlds created at the point of a quantum fluctuation. The argument is something like this:

The cat is either alive or dead, but we do not know which. When I make an observation, I go from being ignorant of the fate of the cat to knowing it. I do not see an indefinite cat, but a cat in a given state. But then if you ask me ‘Is the cat alive or dead?’ you are in a state of ignorance until I tell you. And so on. The point here is that the wavefunction of the cat, the observer, and observers of the observer are not separable. Macroscopic forces act of the cat, me, you, and everything else. Before I look the whole universe is in two states, one with a live cat, one with a dead one.

Upon looking the wavefunction collapses into one or the other case. But the argument of the many-worlds approach is that collapse does not happen. The universe splits into two, one with a live cat and one with a dead cat. There is no collapse but simply we find ourselves in a world with one outcome or another. We might have found ourselves in a world with another outcome.

Given that quantum interactions occur many times a second in the universe, that universe is splitting into incredible numbers of universes all the time. This is a very strange idea (much exploited by science fiction writers) but it can be claimed, with some justification, that it is a natural result of the quantum mechanics theory.

I do have my doubts, however. Quantum mechanics is well known for breaking the conservation of energy over short time periods, but the energy required to create many universes, each a copy of the current one seems to be prohibitive. I have never seen an argument to suggest that this can be achieved within our understanding of physics as it is. Admittedly I have not yet looked very far, so it might exist.

My second objection is a bit more philosophical. The creation of many, many, universes which do not interact ever again seems to me to be multiplying objects to no avail. This seems to be a clear break of Occam’s razor. If we can never tell if the universe has just bifurcated, why bother having it so. This also suggests that the many-worlds interpretation is heading away from being science – we can never test the idea because, by definition, ‘our’ universe and its parallel never interact past creation.

That is not to say that such ideas are in principle untestable or pointless. I may simply be expressing my ignorance and I certainly need to read a bit more about them. But quantum mechanics and its implications are unsettling enough for most people. Multiplying universes at such speed seems to be a bit beyond the pale.