Stephen Hawking on parallel universes & ISSUE OF CHOICE

The significance of this article is show that the universe is processual, which is the core principle of Tao. It doesn’t have a fixed identity, and exhibits what I would call multiple timezones (not his language).
And that the process can include multiple universes that co-exist with this one, or possibly even universes/probabilities that simply fail to manifest because they don’t support some invisible impulse to evolve.

In short, he is finding a plausible way for Quantum physics to become at least partially human-centric, i.e. the particles somehow CHOSE to evolve in a path that nurtured human life. He doesn’t use that language of “choice”, but it is implied by his supporting it teleologically (looking back).

My position has been that part of the evolution of humanity is to SHAPE the flow of the life force (=quantum field + INTELLIGENCE), that we don’t simply sit helplessly and watch while it unfolds according to some remote physical law.

Just think of the trillions of cellular decisions/perceptions made everyday/every moment within the micro-cosmos of our body-minds, and you begin to raise awareness of this shaping process. As within, so without.
michael

HAWKING REWRITES HISTORY… BACKWARDS
Nature
Friday, June 23, 2006

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060619/full/060619-6.html

http://www.thothweb.com/article3292.html

How did the Universe begin? Many scientists would regard this as one of the
most profound questions of all. But to Stephen Hawking, who has perhaps come
closer than anyone to answering it, the question doesn’t in fact even exist.

Hawking, based at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleague Thomas
Hertog of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics at CERN in Geneva,
Switzerland, are about to publish a paper claiming that the Universe had no
unique beginning1. Instead, they argue, it began in just about every way
imaginable (and maybe some that aren’t).

Out of this profusion of beginnings, the vast majority withered away without
leaving any real imprint on the Universe we know today. Only a tiny fraction
of them blended to make the current cosmos, Hawking and Hertog claim.

That, they insist, is the only possible conclusion if we are to take quantum
physics seriously. “Quantum mechanics forbids a single history,” says
Hertog.

The researchers’ theory comes in response to a problem raised by ‘string
theory’, one of the best hopes for a theory of everything. String theory
permits innumerable different kinds of universe, most of them very different
from the one we inhabit. Some physicists suspect that an unknown factor will
turn up that rules out most of these universes.

But Hawking and Hertog say that the countless ‘alternative worlds’ of string
theory may actually have existed. We should picture the Universe in the
first instants of the Big Bang as a superposition of all these
possibilities, they say; like a projection of billions of movies played on
top of one another.

It all adds up

This might sound odd, but it is precisely the view adopted by quantum
theory. Think of a particle of light reaching our eye from a lamp. Common
sense suggests that it simply travels in a straight line from the bulb to
the eye. But to make correct predictions about the particle’s behaviour,
quantum mechanics must consider all other possible paths too, including ones
in which, say, the photon bounces around the walls thousands of times before
reaching us.

This summation of all paths, proposed in the 1960s by physicist Richard
Feynman and others, is the only way to explain some of the bizarre
properties of quantum particles, such as their apparent ability to be in two
places at once. The key point is that not all paths contribute equally to
the photon’s behaviour: the straight-line trajectory dominates over the
indirect ones.

Hertog argues that the same must be true of the path through time that took
the Universe into its current state. We must regard it as a sum over all
possible histories.

Take it from the top

He and Hawking call their theory ‘top-down’ cosmology, because instead of
looking for some fundamental set of initial physical laws under which our
Universe unfolded, it starts ‘at the top’, with what we see today, and works
backwards to see what the initial set of possibilities might have been. In
effect, says Hertog, the present ‘selects’ the past.

Within just a few seconds after the Big Bang, a single history had already
come to dominate the Universe, he explains. So from the ‘classical’
viewpoint of big objects such as stars and galaxies, things happened only
one way after that point. Other ‘histories’, say, one in which the Earth
formed only 4,000 years ago, have made no significant contribution to this
cosmic evolution.

But in the first instants of the Big Bang, there existed a superposition of
ever more different versions of the Universe, instead of a unique history.
And most crucially, Hertog says that “our current Universe has features
frozen in from this early quantum mixture”.

In other words, some of these alternative histories have left their imprint
behind. This is why Hertog and Hawking insist that their ‘top-down’
cosmology is testable. Hertog says that the theory predicts the pattern of
the variations in intensity of microwave background radiation, the afterglow
of the Big Bang now imprinted on the sky, which reveal fluctuations in the
fireball of the nascent Universe. These variations are minute, but
space-based detectors have measured them ever more accurately over the past
several years.

As the two researchers work out top-down cosmology in more detail, they hope
to be able to calculate the spectrum of these microwave fluctuations and
compare it with observations.

The theory also suggests an answer to the puzzle of why some of the
‘constants of nature’ seem finely tuned to a value that allows life to
evolve. If we start from where we are now, it is obvious that the current
Universe must ‘select’ those histories that lead to these conditions.
Otherwise we simply wouldn’t be here.