From: baez@ucrmath.ucr.edu (john baez)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Trapped!
Date: 30 Jul 92 15:41:44 GMT
Organization: University of California, Riverside

I offer my thanks to Dave Ring, Allen Knutson and especially Mark Corscadden
for posting some of my articles.  However, the rumor that I was trapped in a
fortune cookie factory is baseless and absurd.  In fact, I am at Syracuse
University, where recent experiments in quantum gravity seem to have created
an event horizon of a novel sort that prevents my posts from making it to the
net.  Luckily I was able to penetrate this barrier by means of wormholes.  At
first we had great difficulty controlling the location of the "other end", but 
now I think I have stabilized it and will be posting from UCR until we figure
out how to remove the event horizon entirely.

I would like to plug a book that promises to be very interesting when it 
appears.  No, not my own book on algebraic and constructive QFT, which 
recently DID appear and is extremely boring - I am referring to Lee Smolin's
The Universality of Life.  Smolin is best known for his work with Rovelli and
Ashtekar on quantum gravity.  The book, though (which is not all written
yet), appears to be on very broad themes such as reductionism/holism, crises
in physics (aka "paradigm shifts"), and the definition of life.  Because
Smolin is a rather careful thinker I guess the book (which I've not seen)
will be interesting, not just a bunch of fluff as one might fear from the
description above.  

Here is one very speculative idea he mentioned the other day, which one
could call the "Darwinian Cosmology".  I should emphasize that real physicists
such as Smolin always precede such bold speculations with elaborate
apologies, since they want to distinguish themselves from crackpots who
actually BELIEVE their own wild notions.   Smolin does very nice physics
using lots of interesting math and the following is only for fun.

So - suppose that black holes, when they form, actually create new
baby universes, and suppose that the values of the parameters characterizing 
these new universes (coupling constants or whatever) tend to different from, 
but close to, the values they have in the parent universe.  We can imagine
a parameter space characterizing the universes; each universe determines a
point on this parameter space and its descendants will be randomly scattered
points nearby.  

The details of the mechanism are irrelevant for now; the basic conclusion 
would be obvious to abiologist.     Namely, survival of the fittest: those
universes producing more black holes will have more descendants so the 
region of parameter space with the most universes in it will be that in 
which conditions are conducive to forming many black holes.  This means
that there should be star formation, or at least formation of many dense
regions, and that the universe should last long enough for the black holes
to form before the big crunch.  

The point is that one could imagine this having testable predictions --
once one made it all a wee bit more precise....  :-)

The other point is that this is an alternative to the anthropic principle
when it comes to predicting parameter values.  Rather than saying that we,
the people, are such a big deal, it essentially models the whole universe as
a quasi-living system -- self-reproducing, anyway -- and uses ideas from
Darwinian evolution.

I want to emphasize that all the credit for this idea belongs to Smolin,
as far as I know, and certainly none belongs to me, while all of the blame
for poor exposition of it belongs to me.  I also want to emphasize that 
anyone who finds this cool should keep an eye out for Smolin's book, which
will probably take a few years.

Smolin said this idea was the opposite of the anthropic principle in a
sense.  I suggested the term "misanthropic principle", but it doesn't
really apply.  Still I would like to come up with a cosmological principle
to be called the misanthropic principle.  Perhaps a more scientific version of
"life sucks and then you die"?

Perhaps the misanthropic principle is to blame for this event horizon
that seems to have cut me off from posting in the usual way -- or else
the cosmic censorship hypothesis?