Cosmogony

Reading Dick Teresi's Lost Dicoveries I have been wondering about the religious aspects of Cosmology.

It seems that all cultures, my ancestors the Spanish, and the Arabs. The ancestors of most of my students here in Guerrero, the Tlapanecos, the Mixtecos, the Nahuas, and the African-Mexicans; had a story.

We say it is not scientific, the Bing Bang version is scientific. Teresi doesn't fully share that opinion. He knows the guys on the second floor of the High Rise at Fermilab. The Astrophysicists: somehow he doesn't seem to have much admiration for them. Somehow he doesn't think that we can comfortably talk about what happened thirteen thousand and seven hundred million years ago.

He also muses about destroyed careers due to some Big Bang mafia, or something, that doesn't allow dissent. I have a friend with similar feelings towards the establishment. I myself felt strange at my last visit to the Physics Department at UCSB, I felt the spirit of a monk of sorts called Stephen Hawking in the corridors where I used to walk several years prior, with a more, shall we say "practical" crowd. Those physicists then, were not trying to get the Theory of Everything, just the next paper, the little contribution to a collective endeavor called Physics.

I am agnostic, the weirdness coming from theoretical physicists lately, makes me a little uneasy. I myself never got into the program, of just do your calculation and move on. I am after big fish myself, but I guess I haven't found the approach just right for me.

Here is my take at the current Cosmogony.

It is a discovery of String Theory, that it  has more solutions than we were used to. Say a linear equation, has one solution, a second order one; two. As physicists we chose the right or the right ones. Dirac accepted both solutions to his relativistic fermion and predicted the positron, once him, or others saw that the mass had to be the same. I think it was Weyl.

Now we have 10⁵⁰⁰ solutions for String Theory.

What does that mean?

Finally,  Prof. Frampton says that Dark Matter is made of Black Holes. He reaches this conclusion by claiming that framptons, i.e. massive black holes are all over the place, with huge entropies. Jacob Beckenstein's entropy. Just by counting the entropy out there, he believes that other candidates for dark matter, just don't matter.

Where does that leave us?

Big numbers seem to be telling us something. Paul Dirac already drew attention to this peculiar aspect of our Universe.

Georg Cantor taught us how to count. The Power Set has more members than just the counting numbers. Exponential explosion of possibilities swamps us.

I want to turn things upside down. I want to turn the problem into the solution. Like the Reckoner, that old Archimedes book, we find ourselves counting how many angels are there in the head of a pin.

Many, but not Infinity.

That is my Cosmogony, we live in a place with a lot of thingies to count.

The question is, are  there just labels we chose, or real things?

Here we have old Albert Einstein back. I am a realist, but lost as to what is real and what is just a name. Quarks, may just be irreducible representaions of SU(3), not real objects.

I have to sort this out!