The Relief of "Knowing"

I remember watching my father type away at WordPerfect on his ‘95 vintage HP machine back when I was about 5 years old, same as it. I wondered how this machine could be controlled by so many small buttons, and how he could know what to type. I watched closely enough that it would become an anecdote he re-told throughout my childhood.

I worked out how to print because when he pressed Ctrl+P and clicked around a bit the printer would start producing things.

I don’t remember very much of that now, except for the pain of ignorance

and the relief of knowing.

That same pain and relief cycle follows me around today and a video I watched by “Big Tugg” on YouTube (really can’t work out this guy’s schtick – I think that might be the point) but he acted out desperation and flailing at the lack of our understanding of the mechanics behind and process of things like black holes, the gravity of our local group and universe and anti-matter and so forth.

I felt a sense of sadness that I could not communicate back to him that though it may be entirely unproven, we have a plausible answer for some of these things.

But in the way life experiences do, let mine inform this: I only know about the fine-tuning problem because of my interest in atheism, apologetics and having followed that discourse from YouTube to a group at my university in 2013/14. That’s a bit neither here nor there but the apologetic is framed something like this:

“small differences in any number of physical constants would render the universe uninhabitable.”

“the universe is fine-tuned for life.”

“therefore it is likely an intelligent designer exists.”

That may not be any one individuals verbatim words but it definitely captures the gist of the argument. I remember being annoyed by the concreteness of the argument despite it being just another plea to put a god in the gaps.

Fast forward to late 2015 and I’ve dropped out of college. I’m working for too little pay for a little company called <redacted> in Aurora, CO. They paid me little enough that I was calling home to my uncle, the executor on the trust I got for being orphaned, to be able to cover rent.

I was watching Neil Degrasse Tyson’s re-imagining of Cosmos and he raised the topic of black holes having enough gravitational force inside them to contain our known universe inside them if it could curve in another dimension or set of them.

I stopped mid-watch to go ask reddit if there was a theory about black holes being the children universes of the outer universe. A kind user (not a thing on reddit anymore) pointed me to Dr. Lee Smolin, Theoretical Physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Canada.

Dr. Smolin had a hypothesis dating back to work in the late 80s or earlier, Cosmological Natural Selection that hypothesized that the physical constants were tuned to maximize the likeliness of neutron stars to collapse into black holes, or rather that the universe would be somewhat average of a set evolving to create the most black holes it can. That is, because we live in a universe it’s likely to be a statistically likely version of the universe and the type creating the most children universes would thrive and come to represent most of the universes in a nested black-hole multiverse.

He also drew my attention to the fact that time and space flip at the event horizon of a black hole, the space dimension of the outer universe looks time-like and the time dimension forms a space-like dimension. Penrose diagrams and “PBS Space Time” might make more sense to you than me, but they make this point. As I understand it this disconnect happens on a quantum level too and that means that the constants that define our physics could vary slightly in this flip in time and space. That means we have a sort of representative-of-mean selection mechanism and a method for varying inputs on each new universe. It’s a lot like biological evolution, and I might suggest that instead biological evolution might be like it out of necessity, they follow the same set of physical laws.

I can only hold Dr. Smolin in the highest regard for his work publishing this idea because while I know intellectually that I do not understand the work, I still feel the relief of knowing.

I know what so many atheists, “nones” and other non-deistic believing people don’t: whether it’s truly provable or not, we have reasonable answers to the questions “why are we here” (black holes) “what is the meaning of life” (becoming a black hole) “where do we go when we die?” (black holes) and so on. It may not be a pretty answer, in fact, it’s kind of downright horrifying if it’s true, but it’s an answer. It’s infinitely better than staring into the fine-tuning argument and just shrugging.

It might be worse than “I don’t know” as an answer to someone who’s actively debating you on the grounds that they believe the fine tuning or another “intelligent design” argument because it lacks evidence to such a degree. But that doesn’t stop me from knowing and reminding myself that there are honest, hardworking minds out there that might just be on top of the answers to life’s biggest questions and we just don’t know it.

Whatever algorithm gets me down, whatever curve ball life throws at me, I don’t want to ever forget that I have so much relief of knowing. Dare I say it, if I were to die today I may have come to know all I really needed.