Gravity: The End of the World as We Knew It?

In the NYT: If Gravity Doesn't Exist as a Distinct Force, But is a Product of Entropy, what is entropy the product of? (And if a speculative, incomplete, undocumented paper can challenge gravity, Einstein, and kick Newton once again, and get peer-review and comments, why must no one ever dare challenge Darwin?) Perhaps entropy is what happens in a fallen cosmos. I do recall some years ago being told by a French biologist that a certain Roman Catholic cardinal (whose name I forget) speculated or even claimed that Adam and Eve fell before "ze Beeg Bong" (yes, you can envision Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau pronouncing "the Big Bang" as I've indicated above--it took a couple of repeats for me to get it.....) Time, space, and gravity--who knows what they are? They are decidedly not material things, but matter is subject to them, or embedded. Perhaps the gravity-defying feats recorded in Scripture (not to mention numerous accounts of levitations elsewhere) have something to do with this. To walk on water would require, in a Newtonian universe, the suspension of the law of gravity in particular time and place, or the creation of another force of levitation against the force of gravity in that time and place, or maybe gravity is not so much a force itself....Who knows?

Comments

[Lars Walker]

Pres. Obama has appointed a blue ribbon panel to investigate whether the nation has an adequate gravity supply, and to implement new regulations and taxes, if necessary, in order to assure that America remains gravity independent.

[Clifford Simon]

Was it the NY Times that sent its golf (yes, golf!) reporter to interview Albert Einstein in 1915?

"It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options" could have come straight from the mouth of the inarticulate and devil-haired boss in "Dilbert."

[Michael Bauman (not Dr.)]

No one must ever challenge Darwin (or at least the philosophical materialism at the foundation of current evolutionary theory) is that a successful Darwinian challenge actually has an effect on everything from how we do economics to our school systems our health care priorities, i.e., real money and power.

If 'gravity' does not exist, but the effect that we call gravity does then it really doesn't matter very much.

However, if philisophical materialism is overthrown as the foundational philosophy of science, that is another story.

[Matt]

"And if a speculative, incomplete, undocumented paper can challenge gravity, Einstein, and kick Newton once again, and get peer-review and comments, why must no one ever dare challenge Darwin?"

Evolutionary theory is constantly being reinforced by new research and evidence. There is no radical theory on the horizon that is likely to overthrow it, and the theory is accessible to most. Theoretical physics, on the other hand, is the domain of the weird and the wonderful. I'm glad there are a few people on this planet that can understand it. Alas, I am not one of them.

[Margaret]

"Evolutionary theory is constantly being reinforced by new research and evidence."

Ah. Then surely it can humor a little questioning?

[Matt]

Margaret writes, "Then surely it can humor a little questioning?"

Sure. It does all the time, and the answers are there.

[Christopher Hathaway]

No Matt, evolutionary scientists do not humor questioning the basic assupmtion of evolution, and their answers only hold if you maintain the assumption. Theirs is a hermeneutically closed circuit.

[Trainingroom.blogspot.com]

I think we have to be careful, when reading articles like this, not to try to leap to theology too quickly. I know a little (emphasis on little) about some of the issues related to this new speculation due to my reading a book about black holes and related subjects a couple years ago. Because of that, I can tell you that this article is like most newspaper articles about complicated science: it grabs on to an exciting and headline-worthy idea ("gravity doesn't exist"), then fails to explain much. I notice, for example, that the article mentions holograms once with no explanation of what it means; because of the book I read I know it's referring to the idea that the entire universe is a sort of holographic projection, but I don't know precisely how that would fit with these new ideas about gravity, and the article is no help on that front.
Also, though I'm not a Darwinist, one reason why scientists accept challenges like this as legitimate, but not challenges to Darwin, is because there is no theory of everything in physics that has people satisfied. Ever since quantum mechanics and general relativity were pioneered, and proved incompatible yet both apparently true, physicists have tried all kinds of theories, the latest being the thousand speculations of string theory. On the other hand, the theory of evolution, right or wrong, is a biological theory of everything that has satisfied a lot of scientists.

[Mike Melendez]

Gravity exists. That is known. Just what it is or what causes it is the issue being addressed. But newspaper reporters and their editors dumb down the science to meaninglessness. Note the picture of people and things floating above the earth that accompanies the article.

If the physicists ever do come up with a TOE, then the four fundamental forces will no longer be fundamental but be explained by something else. But not to worry, their effects will continue to exist and I think we will be allowed the then-archaic names for them.

[Christopher Hathaway]

I would think a "theory of everything" is by definition not science so much as philosophy. So often I encounter the explanation for this or that peculiar scientific speculation, "It works mathematically", meaning that it doesn't contradict itself regardless of whether there is any observable proof. Many philosophical systems are internally consistent, yet nevertheless wrong.

If scientists rule out the interactions of the Ceator with the creation because of a Newtonion conception of the universe as a closed system running like a clock and needing no "outside" guidance, then any explanation for the incredible complexity and wonder of the universe that appeals to the Designer's hand is ruled out by definition, regardless of whether it is the most logical explanation otherwise. That is not science. It is dogma. We religious recognize dogma when we see it. Many scientists, rejecting the validity of dogma, blind themselves to recognizing it in their own systems.

[Josiah A. Roelfsema]

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Creation came about by the working of His Spirit, hovering over the waters. But when first created, the world was formless, void; empty and shapeless; run down, as it were, not yet wound up. In a word, it was Chaos. The Ancient Greeks, among others, knew this; they had retained it in their myths, though eventually distorted, through the telling and retelling of the story from Adam and Eve through their children and their children’s children. This Chaos was, in a way, neither good nor bad. It was simply void, nothing. It had neither been made good yet, nor been twisted from good to evil.

God created by His Word, by speaking order into Chaos. (Which, by the way, gives us our understanding of how to act in this world, as we are made in imago Dei, so we are to bring order out of chaos, to plant a garden and tend it.) It is this Word alone, the Logos of God, that drives back the void of the beginning, that creates light and darkness, day and night, that brings order to the world.

But then after God created and saw that it was good, something happened. The order in the world was disturbed. Adam and Eve were tempted by the serpent. They were tempted not to believe the Word of God. The serpent says, “Has God really said…?” Yes, indeed he had, but Eve did not heed God’s order, nor did Adam. And Chaos came to reign in the good world of God.

The writer of Genesis knew this, for the snake, the serpent, is the ancient sign of Chaos, the void, the unformed. And so it was that not merely sin entered into the world, but also Chaos re-entered as a force, a power, as the running down of the universe. Entropy is the way physicists describe this. Entropy is the tendency of the world toward chaos, toward running down. It’s the thermodynamic way of explaining why unkept barns fall into ruin, why my bicycle rusts, why burned gas does not reconstitute itself. For to restore something is the opposite of its returning into chaos.

To undo what has occurred through the natural running down of the universe requires energy and mind, power and plan. It was precisely in order to end this running down of the universe, to make all things new, that Christ came to earth with the power of God and the mind of God, with both the energy to undo and the mind to speak order. He came to love, heal, and forgive; to make new.

Jesus died. His body, however, did not see decay. God held the body of His righteous one from the laws of the fallen universe, from falling prey to Chaos through the workings of entropy. His resurrected body no longer is subject to the laws of physics or of (fallen) nature: He can pass through walls. Jesus’ resurrection and subsequent appearances show not only His power over sin and death, but also over (fallen) nature. Could it be that God has intended the same for us from the very beginning? That we may not be subject to the laws of fallen nature, but rather that we may learn to rule nature in the image of God, that being sustained by His energy and guided by His mind, we may be like Him, only not on the serpent's terms, but on His terms.

[Matt]

Christopher Hathaway writes, "No Matt, evolutionary scientists do not humor questioning the basic assupmtion of evolution, and their answers only hold if you maintain the assumption. Theirs is a hermeneutically closed circuit."

Christopher, I think you're right in as far as scientists will dismiss non-scientific questions about evolution (young earth creationists do the same in terms of dismissing the scientific issues.) However, if someone brought up a scientifically plausible alternative, they would examine it. It's just that nobody has done that. It's like climate science. The same false claims (it's the sun, we've been in a cooling trend since 1995, etc.) are made repeatedly, but they've been refuted so many times that scientists do not deign to "humor" them. They've become a joke.

[Joseph Stringer]

Ah, entropy. It has always been the concrete evidence that something is fully wrong with the materialistic explanations of things. Entropy could not exist as a law of nature while at the same time the complexity of things within that nature keeps increasing. There MUST be a cause for the increasing complexity. What could it be? Or...Who?

[Clifford Simon]

I don't enjoy being a contrarian, but...

In the science of statistical mechanics, we say "order" and "disorder." One would be mistaken to think that our terms have teleological meaning: it's exactly the equivalent of thinking that "real" and "imaginary" numbers have ontological meaning for the mathematician. Imaginary numbers are not imaginary: we just call them that.

This thought-experiment will illustrate the mistake. Consider a box of atoms. We say that the atoms in the box are in state of disorder, if it is likely that they could have gotten there by shaking the box. If it is not likely that they could have gotten there by shaking the box, then we say it is in a state of order. Now there are two scientists. One we will call Picasso, and the other we will call Frankenstein. Each scientist has an identical box of atoms. We will ask each of them to put their box of atoms into a state of order.

At the end of the exercise, each scientist shows the contents of his box. Frankenstein has arranged his atoms into a battery, a light source, plants in soul, and a living man tending the soil.

Now Picasso opens his box. Picasso and Frankenstein have agreed that their boxes will be EQUALLY ordered, statistical-mechanically speaking. But Picasso's box contains no living beings at all. Picasso has put all the hydrogen atoms on a layer at the top, then all the helium atoms on a layer under them, and so on, down to a lead layer at the bottom.

Picasso's box is ordered, because you can't get the atoms into that state by shaking it. In fact, it could be that Picasso's box and Frankenstein's are IDENTICAL in order --- that is, insofar as what we mean by "order" is what the physicist means.

One step further: what the physicist means by the second law of thermodynamics --- the law that deals with order --- has no bearing on anything besides what the physicist means by order. In particular, when man perceives the Created Order, he is not perceiving statistical-mechanical order. That is to say, statistical-mechanical order is not the order that God made.

You might be surprised to know that suffering is statistical-mechanical order, not disorder: for in order for suffering to exist, there have to be beings that can feel it, and discrete causes that can cause it, and these beings and causes don't exist in a box of atoms that could have gotten there by shaking.

To summarize, the law that "the world tends to disorder" has no bearing upon the created order and its fall. The connection between them rests entirely upon a confusion of terms.

[Michael Bauman (not Dr.)]

Trainingroom writes "I think we have to be careful, when reading articles like this, not to try to leap to theology too quickly."

If, as Christians assert, that "God is everywhere present and fills all things" and God became man for our salvation, there is nothing that is not theological and teleological in content.

The problem with Mr. Simon's post is that the dogmatizing scientists tend to think that the box is all that exists and it is therefore self-ordering.

None of the posts asserting the current scientific dogma do anything other than blindly proclaim that their first principals are correct and therefore the pattern of thought based upon those principals is correct. However, note, as Mr. Hathaway said, a system can be logically consistent and yet wrong.

Science does not need to be pursued from a foundation of philosophical naturalism. When one denies the theanthropic reality that Christianity proclaims one has to truncate the explanation of things in order to remain in control.

If one assumes a loving creator God in constant intercommunion with His creation, the facts that speak to the nature and direction of sentient life are likely to be interpreted differently. An entirely different cosmos appears infinitely more wonderful and awe inspiring than the mere worship of our own mind and the hyperbolically ecstatic observation that there are a lot of stars (think Carl Sagan).

[Bob Srigley]

To say that evolutionary theorists have adequately dealt with the objections brought by creationists or that evolution is continually being reinforced by new evidence, is reminiscent of the complicated efforts centuries ago to bolster the old geo-centric Ptolemaic model. This system actually "worked"; it had predictive power. It even seemed reasonable. It was just wrong.
Christians who feel compelled to accept the authority of man's wisdom over the Bible should assess the damage realistically. Both materialistic evolution and "long age creationism" necessitate the existence of death, disease, carnivory, parasitism and suffering of every sort before the Fall. The creation we see around us must be the same one that God declared "very good" in the beginning, just a little worse for wear. The brokenness that afflicts the world can't be all our fault, because it predates us. This is Pelagianism all over again.
Regarding the original question of entropy, we know that even now all things are mercifully held together in Christ (Col 1:17). Is it possible that before the Fall that there was a greater infusion of divine power such that the seeming inexorable law of entropy was suspended or abated? A world without death would (and will) require some connection with the Source of Life.

[Trainingroom.blogspot.com]

Michael Bauman: the problem is not moving from science to theology. The problem is moving from erroneous newspaper articles about science to theology. Simply because a newspaper says something about science that triggers a theological reflection, that does not mean that the theological reflection has an adequate basis in the supposed facts the article asserts. It does Christianity no service to spin theological theories, or try to reinforce already-accepted ideas, with bad data.

[Clifford Simon]

>>Regarding the original question of entropy, we know that even now all things are mercifully held together in Christ (Col 1:17). Is it possible that before the Fall that there was a greater infusion of divine power such that the seeming inexorable law of entropy was suspended or abated?<<

That's entirely possible, although you may be surprised at what that possibility implies.

For instance, consider storms. Jesus calmed a storm over the sea of Galilee saying "Peace, be still." That is the sort of divine "infusion" you mean, if I understand you right. Of course it is possible that such Divine activity was the norm before the fall.

But I assure you that this won't work at all, unless you can see the difference between statistical-mechanical order on the one hand, and teleological order on the other. The curiosity here is that calm, still air is the air that is statistical-mechanically disordered. Conversely, the stormy air is the air that is ordered. In other words, the situation is backwards from what you would expect on teleological considerations.

Those who wish to maintain their fantasy will refuse to believe me when I say that stormy air is less disordered than calm air: but unfortunately for those who choose to disbelieve, it is a simple fact of high-school chemistry. To explain, I would use the simple example that the air in a jar doesn't spontaneously arrange itself into a tornado. And what could be the scientific reason why no storm in nature continues forever? Well, it's just because the second law of thermodynamics enforces the calm air over the stormy air. Calm is the state of maximum entropy for any gas.

The miracle is not that Jesus brought statistical-mechanical order over and against the second law of theormdynamics: it was rather that he brought teleological order, at the time of his pleasure, by saying so.

All I want to make clear is that there isn't an equivalence between God's order and statistical-mechanical order. The second law of thermodynamics - the law that statistical-mechanical order in closed systems decreases - does not enforce the Fall.

[Josiah A. Roelfsema]

Clifford,

I think I see your point. I hope you didn't take my post as being contradictory of current science per se.

I agree with you that "The second law of thermodynamics...does not enforce the Fall." I wonder, however, whether you see the second law, in terms of the tendency toward disorder, as a possible consequence of the Fall; that is, that God allows things to run down toward calm (calm as in nothing happening, a bleak waste) instead of continually infusing it with His energy and direction. Under this view, his direction would give order to the world not only in the teleological sense but also in the statistical-mechanical sense that what is could not have come about by the "shaking of the box."

[Bob Srigley]

Some of Isaac Newton's contemporaries objected to his theory of universal attraction of bodies (i.e. gravity) on the basis that it seemed to be a reversion to the mystical forces prevalent in Aristotelian science. Newton wisely refrained from trying to explain the "why" of gravity and instead set about answering the "how" questions. The answers he and others obtained using this approach were sufficiently powerful and descriptive of reality to enable us to put a man on the moon.
The Bible is not at all shy about addressing the "why" questions. These are essentially teleological questions and the Biblical answers are more profound than any Aristotle would have come up with. For instance the answer in the Westminster catechism to the question, "What is the chief end of man?" ...to know God and to enjoy Him forever," reveals that our purpose (telos) is not inherent in our own nature, independent of God.
Scientists may explain the "how" of gravitational force, but no one can explain the "why" any better than the verse which says that "in Him all things hold together." In other words creation is not a "closed" system, though at some point in the past it may have been more "open" than it is now, having been "subjected to vanity" because of the Fall.
An enquiring scientific mind liberated by scripture from false notions such as materialistic evolution will find itself on the frontier of true knowledge, the discovery of which will bring glory to God and benefit to man.

[Clifford Simon]

Josiah,

I think we could agree that God may be letting microscopic motion be a determining factor in some events, when He chooses not to let something else be the main factor, and that God's choices and allowances in this matter may be different since the curse of the fall. In the outcome of a physical system, the microscopic motion of atoms is not always the determining factor. If for example a scientist chooses to interfere with an experiment, then the determining factor is the scientist's mind, rather than the entropy of the scientist-plus-experiment system. Maximum entropy occurs when the microscopic motions carry the day - but they don't always carry the day, because other things can happen.

The "reductionist" who sees all events as just the collective action of microscopic atoms will be confused by this.

[Josiah A. Roelfsema]

Agreed.

[mgl]

It's beguiling to consider the possibility that entropy only entered the universe with the Fall, and that its emergence accounts for the perishability and decay that mark our existence ("for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return"). It also provides a neat explanation for the fact that we live in time, since the Second Law is the sole(?) physical quantity that can only operate forward in time. We could further imagine that if there was no entropy in the Garden, our first parents inhabited the same "eternal now" as God does, and that time only kicked in when we were kicked out.

But my hunch (and I may be way off-base here, so be gentle!) is that an entropy-free universe would be uninhabitable by flesh-and-blood beings. There would be no irreversible physical processes, so we would see ash and smoke reconsituting itself into wood and oxygen, ice cubes spontaneously precipitating out of hot coffee, waterfalls flowing upwards (or sideways), and so on. In fact, there would be nothing, in principle, to prevent the entire universe from reforming into a singularity, which raises the question of why it would ever bother to Bang in the first place.

The article's point does make some intuitive sense, seen in this light. After all, gravity "encourages" objects to discard all their potential energy, while the second Law governs the tendency of energetic processes to move to a lower-energy state, so there is at least a superficial resemblance between the two.