Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
I read this review of current string pontifications, and again and again I am struck by how much effort the Anti-Anthropic Sky God Freak Cosmologists (especially Einstein) put into their bizarre attempts to squeeze cosmology into a monotheistic framework. They are one step above the “Intelligent Design” creationism apologists. It seems to me that all the desperate anti-anthropic people are frightened, at some deep existential level, by the undoubted, rational reality of there being no omnipotent Sky God watching over them. So ever-expanding universes, or universes where sudden phase changes in the structure of the dark energy destroy existing life, or universes with life-hostile substructural “laws” all make them feel too small, unloved, and insignificant against the vastness. Get used to it, we are cosmic dust. The simplest explanation is that there is no design, no Sky God, no plan, and no ordering. Sic transit gloria mundi.
“In the long run,” he said, “the universe doesn’t want to be four-dimensional. It wants to be 10 dimensions.” So sooner or later, the loops will unravel like a tangle of rubber bands, passing through a succession of configurations that take less and less energy to maintain, until finally the other dimensions expand and the cosmological constant is gone. The decay of the cosmological constant will be fatal, astronomers agree. At that moment a bubble of 10-dimensional space will sweep out at the speed of light, rearranging physics and the prospects of atoms and planets, not to mention biological creatures.
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”