The Lonely Universe
Many scientists are fond of telling you the following bed-time story : We human beings are just a tiny blip on a minute speck of dust hurtling through billions and billions of miles of cold, unfeeling, and uncaring spaces. This blip is our universe which is but an accident, a freak, a quirk.
This is what you should you do the next time you hear this story : seize on the word ‘accident’, and do not let go of it until you have made your point. If you have to make 100 electric-bulbs, you would set up a factory and go about producing them from various constituent bits and pieces. Let us say that it turns out that 2 of these 100 bulbs are detected to be malfunctioning pieces. You would then be justified in saying that these 2 are accidental outputs with respect to the other 98. However, when someone claims that the universe itself is an accident, what could that possibly mean? Has that person had the experience, so to speak, of 50 million other universes on the basis of which it is declared that the one we live in is an accident with respect to those? How would she know that this universe is an ‘accident’ when this is the only universe she has ever lived in?
This is what you should you do the next time you hear this story : seize on the word ‘accident’, and do not let go of it until you have made your point. If you have to make 100 electric-bulbs, you would set up a factory and go about producing them from various constituent bits and pieces. Let us say that it turns out that 2 of these 100 bulbs are detected to be malfunctioning pieces. You would then be justified in saying that these 2 are accidental outputs with respect to the other 98. However, when someone claims that the universe itself is an accident, what could that possibly mean? Has that person had the experience, so to speak, of 50 million other universes on the basis of which it is declared that the one we live in is an accident with respect to those? How would she know that this universe is an ‘accident’ when this is the only universe she has ever lived in?
posted by The Transparent Ironist @ 7:49 pm
3 Comments:
At 23.3.05,
Anonymous said…
I dont quite get this - does 'accident' always have to be a relative phenomenon?
At 23.3.05,
The Transparent Ironist said…
The term 'accident' makes sense relative to a background of 'normalcy', 'regularity' or 'stability'. Take 'insanity', for example. Insanity is a statistical concept. You call one person insane only because she happens to be the one person out of ten who behaves differently from the rest.If there was only one human being in this world, it would be meaningless to call him/her 'insane' (or, for that matter, 'normal'.)
At 24.3.05,
Anonymous said…
Yes, but there is another sense in which 'accident' can be percieved (and this sense is not altogether different from the one that you talk about) - we label certain happenings accidents when they were not intended to be the way they have turned out. For example, it is right that two malfuntioning bulbs are accidents
because they are not 'normal' but they are also accidents because I intended to make normal bulbs. If suppose I intended to manufacture the malfunctioning bulbs and got two out of hundred that way, then I would call the other ninety eight accidents (their larger count notwithstanding). And I think it is in this sense most scientists talk about the universe being an accident. They usually mean to imply that it just happens that this universe is the way it is (contingency being the key word here)and there may not have been any supreme 'intention' behind the creation of this universe.
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