Asking "Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life," Hawking's Collaborator Has No Sensible or Coherent Answer

 In Quanta Magazine, we recently had a podcast giving an interview with physicist Thomas Hertog. The podcast is entitled "Why Did the Universe Begin?" In the podcast Hertog discusses some of the issues he discussed in his 2023 New Scientist article "Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?" Hertog offers no coherent-sounding or sensible-sounding answers to either of these questions, nor does he even give any coherent-sounding or sensible-sounding speculations while trying to answer these questions. But along the way in the article and the interview we get some revealing confessions. 

Hertog collaborated for years with the well-known physicist Stephen Hawing. After an interview says "you said some of the first words that Stephen ever said to you was, the universe we observe appears designed," we have this confession from Hertog:

"I do not believe, and Stephen certainly did not believe, that there was an actual designer or a ‘God’ behind this whole thing. He would rather keep religion out of the physics of the Big Bang. But then on the other hand, the laws of physics as we know them, seem mysteriously fit for life. They seem fine-tuned. It’s as if the universe was destined to bring forward life at some point."

Later in the interview Hertog gives more details, saying this:

"Down at the level of fundamental physics, down at the level of the particle forces and the composition of the universe, the fact that we have three dimensions of space and all that, it seems to me fine-tuned to bring forth life. Change any of these properties of the laws, and quickly you end up with a lifeless universe."

We have here multiple confessions. One is a confession that the universe appears fine-tuned. Then there is the confession that Hawking and Hertog were atheists, the type of people who would not believe in a designed universe no matter how well-designed the universe appeared to be. In his New Scientist article Hertog quotes Hawking as stating, "The universe appears designed." I have added this statement to my very long list of scientist confessions that you can read here, which is the longest collection available anywhere of scientists making confessions they do not normally make. 

In his New Scientist article Hertog elaborates further on cosmic fine-tuning:

"Of all the universes that could exist, ours is spectacularly well configured to bring forth life....The universe’s biofriendliness, it turns out, concerns the laws of physics themselves. There are numerous features in these laws that render the universe just right for living things...But the density of vacuum energy seems to be 10¹²⁰ times lower than physicists expect based on theory. If the vacuum energy density of the universe were just a tad larger, however, its repulsive effect would be stronger and acceleration would have kicked in much earlier. This would have meant that matter was so sparsely distributed that it couldn’t clump together to form stars and galaxies, once again precluding the formation of life. The laws of physics and cosmology have many more such life-engendering properties. It almost feels as if the universe is a fix – a big one."

In his New Scientist article Hertog claims that Hawking rejected the idea of the multiverse as an attempt to explain cosmic fine-tuning. He states this:

"Stephen’s reticence to embrace the multiverse grew stronger in the early 2000s, when it became clear that it didn’t actually explain anything....Multiverse cosmology is like a debit card without a PIN or an IKEA flatpack closet without a manual: useless."

We then have in the article some incoherent mumbo-jumbo that does nothing to explain why we have a habitable universe. It is some cockamamie musing that attempts to throw some mention of the word "natural selection" without actually offering anything referring to the so-called "natural selection" of Darwin. We read this:

"Stephen and I came to understand what went on in the early universe as a process akin to that of natural selection on Earth, with an interplay of variation and selection playing out in this primeval environment. Variation happens because random quantum jumps cause frequent small excursions from deterministic behaviour and occasional larger ones. Selection enters the picture because some of these excursions, especially the larger ones, can be amplified and frozen-in thanks to quantum observation. This then gives rise to new rules that help shape the subsequent evolution. The interaction between these two competing forces in the furnace of the big bang produces a branching process – somewhat analogous to how biological species would emerge billions of years later – in which dimensions, forces and particles first diversify and then acquire their effective form when the universe expands and cools. And just like in Darwinian evolution, this introduces a subtle backward-in-time element to our hypothesis. It is as if the collective quantum observations retroactively fix the outcome of the big bang. For this reason, Stephen liked to refer to our idea as 'top-down cosmology'  to drive home the point that we read the fundamentals of the universe ex post facto, somewhat like how biologists reconstruct the tree of life. 'We create the universe as much as the universe creates us,'  he once told me."

This is nonsensical incoherent hogwash. All of the references to natural selection and evolution are spurious, as they refer to a time when life did not exist. We have some scrambled effusion with a little Darwin seasoning sprinkled in to try to make the mess sound a little more sensible. No, we don't create the universe. No, observations after the Big Bang cannot possibly "fix" the Big Bang in terms of making it retroactively compatible with life's eventual appearance. The passage has a reference to "quantum observation," but the reference makes no sense, because what is being talked about is a time when there were no observers. The claim by Hertog at the beginning of the quote that he and Hawking "came to understand what went on in the early universe" is very vain groundless boasting. Jumbled, unreasonable, incoherent-sounding speculation is not understanding something. What went on in the early universe is a mystery a thousand miles over Hertog's head. 

The subsequent paragraphs in Hertog's New Scientist article are  laughable. He starts talking about the hazy, murky concept of a holographic universe, as if that had some relevance to his discombobulated musings. Hertog isn't making a speck of sense when he says this:

"In this cosmological setting, it turns out it is the dimension of time that holographically pops out. History itself is holographically encrypted. What’s more, time emerges in the ex post facto manner that we had envisioned. The past is contingent on the present in holographic cosmology, not the other way around. In a holographic approach to cosmology, venturing far back in time means taking a fuzzy look at the cosmological hologram. It is like zooming out, an operation whereby we discard more and more of the entangled information that the hologram encodes. Holography suggests that not only time, but also the physical laws that shape our universe, disappear back into the big bang."

This statement, like the previous paragraph I quoted by Hertog, belongs in some compilation that we might entitle "scientists shoveling incoherent or unbelievable baloney and BS." In the more recent Quanta Magazine podcast interview, we don't get anything any better. Hertog gives us this far-from-enlightening statement:

"I guess the crux of the hypothesis that Stephen and I ended up developing is that this process of simplification and unification, maybe it just goes on all the way, and maybe ultimately even the distinction between space and time disappears. That’s the crux of his hypothesis. And the unsettling thing, of course, is that the Big Bang — the origin of time — would also become the origin of law. The laws themselves sort of evaporate going all the way backwards."

Nothing that Hertog says in the Quanta Magazine podcast interview or his New Science article makes any sense in terms of helping to explain why the universe is just right for life or why the universe came to exist. In the interview he talks on and on about the concept of a holographic universe, and it all sounds as incoherent, confused and irrelevant as his quote above referencing that concept.  The holographic universe theory is the harebrained speculation that the universe's volume is an illusion. It was stated by physicist Leonard Susskind like this: "The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience—the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people—is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface." A theory so silly does nothing to explain the universe's origin or the fine-tuning of the universe's laws and fundamental constants. 

Hertog has no sensible or coherent answer to questions such as "why is the universe just right for life" and "why did the universe begin." There is a sensible and coherent answer to such questions.  It is the answer that a transcendent power and wisdom wanted our universe to exist and caused it to have characteristics that would allow creatures such as us to exist.