Cosmosapiens Quotes

“Moreover, as we saw in Problems with string theory,‡ while each string theory is internally consistent, Smolin presents a strong case against external consistency with evidence, concluding that “all the versions we can study in any detail disagree with observation”. He also maintains that it is externally inconsistent with the scientific tenet of relativity theory: “Einstein’s discovery that the geometry of space and time is dynamical has not been incorporated into string theory.” Without more positive results from these tests of reasonableness for a scientific (as distinct from a mathematical) conjecture, it is difficult to see how the speculated existence of other dimensions is any more tenable than the belief of many Buddhist schools that there are 31 distinct realms of existence. Furthermore, the so far untestable idea that the matter of the universe reduces not to fundamental particles but to strings of energy seems no more or less reasonable than the Upanishadic insight that prana (vital energy) is the essential substrate of all forms of energy and, in many interpretations, of all matter.”
― John Hands, Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe

“Although cosmologists call the current orthodox model the Standard Cosmological Model or the Concordance Model, it is perhaps more accurately described as the Quantum-Fluctuation-Group-of-Inflationary-ConjecturesEither-Before-Or-After-the-Hot-Big-Bang-Unknown-27-per-cent-Dark-MatterUnknown-68-per-cent-Dark-Energy Model. The versions with inflation occurring before a Big Bang are more internally self-consistent than either the ones in which the Big Bang is the start of everything or else the internally inconsistent Judaeo-Christian and Islamic divine creation myths.† However, since they do not offer a convincing account of what dark matter and dark energy are, they can hardly claim parsimony or even great explanatory power since they currently leave 95 per cent of even the claimed minute observable part of the universe unexplained. Moreover, since these versions don’t explain where the quantum vacuum, the laws of quantum mechanics, and the inflation field came from, it is difficult to argue that they are more reasonable than the insight that Brahman or the Dao is ultimate reality that exists out of space and time, from which everything springs and of which everything consists.”
― John Hands, Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe

“The Christian Church long ago assimilated this particular Platonic notion and gave a simple explanation: the transcendent reality is God. Consequently the vast majority of leading scientists in the West, from the first scientific revolution of the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century up to the early twentieth century— Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Descartes, through to Einstein—sought to discover the mathematical laws that govern our universe as ways of discovering, in Stephen Hawking’s notable phrase, the mind of God.”
― John Hands, Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe

“The conjecture that mathematical forms exist as a transcendent reality outside the physical universe and that they cause and/or govern the universe must explain how a mathematical form can generate and/or control a material universe.”
― John Hands, Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe

“Most cosmological explanations say or assume that matter behaves and evolves according to the laws of physics. Hence the fundamental question is what caused these laws to exist? As we shall see in Chapter 28 when I examine the evolution of philosophical thinking, there is no clear answer. Even the archetypal rationalist Aristotle was compelled by following the chain of causality to conclude that the first cause must be self-causing, eternal, unchanging, without physical attributes, and hence divine.”
― John Hands, Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe

“Neither any modifications to the Inflationary Big Bang model nor any competing conjectures currently provide a satisfactory scientific, as distinct from mathematical, explanation of the origin of the matter of which we consist and why the universe took the very particular form, rather than any other form, that allowed the eventual evolution of humans. There must be an explanation—and one of these conjectures may eventually supply it—but cosmology has problems meeting the generally accepted tests that differentiate science from speculation or belief.”
― John Hands, Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe

“Neither science nor reasoning offers a convincing explanation of the origin and form of the universe, and hence of the origin of the matter and energy of which we consist. I think it most likely that it is beyond their ability to do so. In Ellis’s view the ability of science to answer foundational questions is strictly limited. The evidence so far from this quest supports his “profound conclusion that certainty is unattainable at the foundations of understanding in all areas of life, including fundamental physics and cosmology as well as philosophy [and] even the apparently impregnable bastion of mathematics”. This is not a counsel of despair or pessimism. If we accept the limitations of science and reasoning, “we can attain satisfying and even profound understandings of the universe and the way it works, at all times regarded as provisional but nevertheless providing a satisfactory worldview and foundation for action”. Hopefully science will have greater explanatory power when I move on from the emergence of matter to its evolution.”
― John Hands, Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe