In Search of a Theory of Everything

by Demetris Nicolaides

  Conclusion

  There are astounding conceptual similarities not only between Epicurean physics and the verified laws of modern physics but also between various Epicurean scientific hypotheses and the hypotheses of cutting-edge physics. I have no doubt that Epicurean and Aristotelian reasoning, especially the arguments regarding space and time atoms, can truly be instrumental in our search for a theory of everything. It is really sad that not too many books have survived from Epicurus but also from Democritus—another prolific writer on just about everything. Is this fate or could it have been avoided?

  * * *

  1Diogenes Laërtius, The Biography of Epicurus 10.2–3.

  2Hesiod, Theogony 116.

  3Other words often used are mentally, theoretically, and mathematically.

  4Aristotle argued that a partless thing can’t move.

  5Aristotle, Physics Z. It is beyond the purpose of this book to present the details of Aristotle’s complex arguments. The interested reader may find a great analysis in the book by David J. Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), chap. 8.

  6Aristotle argued that quantum motion requires that space and time atoms exist. Now, in modern quantum mechanics, motion is quantum; thus, with Aristotle’s thinking in mind, a new quantum-mechanical theory should require that space and time atoms exist, too.

  7Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, 113–116.

  8Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, Books One and Two, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin Books, 2005).

  9Although Anaxagoras thinks otherwise. Infinite divisibility doesn’t ever lead to an actual smallest magnitude (e.g., of zero size) because what is, Being, can never seize to be, cannot become Not-Being. It rather leads always to a smaller magnitude (as also implied by Zeno’s paradoxes). See Simplicius, Physics 164.17.

  10Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, 1.159–162 (14).

  11Ibid., 1.175–176 (14).

  12Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (New York: RiverHead Books, 2016), 43 (Kindle ed.).

  13Einstein quoted in Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 5.

  14Bergson quoted in ibid., 45.

  15Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

  16Ibid., 62.

  17Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe 1.459 (21).

  18Ibid., 1.504-05 (22).

  19Diogenes Laërtius (Epicurus’s), Letter to Herodotus 10.61.

  20Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe 2.234–237 (43).

  21Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 50.

  22Ibid. See also World Science U, the courses on relativity for an animated and masterful explanation of this subtle point, http://www.worldscienceu.com/courses/university (accessed July 16, 2019).

  23Diogenes Laërtius (Epicurus’s), Letter to Herodotus 10.46, trans. Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, 125.

  24Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, 123–125.

  25M. C. Escher, 29 Master Prints (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 22.

  26Color is simply for reference. Also E-atoms can’t be composed from just one part (as Aristotle argued). So the square partless E-atom is an innocent simplification that does not change the essence of this particular discussion.

  27Detail: if the atom was already moving, say, right, then it has 1/8 chance to continue so; thus, it will not swerve. But the directions in real space are so many that the chance to continue in the same direction is astronomically small and anyway it can’t happen always.

  28Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (New York: RiverHead Books, 2017), 217 (Kindle ed.).

  14

  It’s Fate—Maybe

  Introduction

  Since everything is made of atoms (elementary particles in general), then the behavior of all living things must be dictated by the laws that these atoms obey, the laws of nature, Democritus thought. In fact, no biological system hitherto has violated this general realization. Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? alludes to that by contemplating the physics of living cells and of life. Of course, nowadays the specialized fields of biochemistry and biophysics have been constantly verifying this idea. Does such a realization, however, mean that the laws of nature have an influence on human free will? That is, when I decide to eat pizza instead of Chinese food, have I really decided what to eat, or has “my decision” been predetermined by the laws that nature obeys? Generally, do we have free will or not?

  Determinism Versus Indeterminism

  The physics of Democritus, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein (his relativity) is deterministic; by contrast, the physics of Epicurus (because of the swerve) and of quantum mechanics (because of Heisenberg uncertainty principle) is probabilistic. Einstein’s relativity is the better theory for describing the world of the large, and quantum mechanics is better for describing the world of the tiny. And recall that we lack a unified description of nature.

  Determinism means that the motion of every atom in the universe is precise (even if we can’t ever know it). How atoms moved in the past determines precisely how they will collide and move in the future—a “rigidity” in “motion.” So my lunch future, if it can be connected to atomic behavior (and motion rigidity), is, say, pizza because it has been predetermined for me by how atoms moved, collided, and interacted in the distant past (before I existed) and every moment thereafter, until some of these atoms ended up forming me and my brain and making me feel hungry for pizza, which I ended up having. Clarification: determinism doesn’t mean that someone who’s done a bad deed shouldn’t really be held accountable since such a deed has been predetermined by the universe and so it was no one’s fault. It rather means that the very action of someone being or not being held accountable itself is an involuntary action; it’s not a choice at all, and it too would have been predetermined by the laws of nature (not of the courts)—because for a deterministic universe there is an unalterable chain of causes, fate.

  Indeterminism, on the other hand, means that the motion of every atom in the universe is uncertain and probabilistic. How atoms moved in the past is uncertain and thus how they will move in the future will be uncertain, too. An atom may move this or that way, in general, and it may move in one of several allowed ways—a “fluidity” in “motion.” So my lunch future, again if it can be connected to atomic behavior (and motion fluidity), will be one from a rich menu of possibilities: pizza, Chinese, or something else. If, say, the atoms moved this way, they could form a brain that wants pizza; if they moved that way, they could form a brain that wants Chinese. But say I ended up eating pizza, was it a choice or chance?

  Does Indeterminism Save Free Will?

  In other words, does indeterminism imply free will? Epicurus realized that D-atoms are deterministic and reasoned that that meant lack of free will. But unlike the Stoics, he didn’t want “to be a slave of the ‘fate’ ”1 and so he decided to fix it. He was the first to attempt a rational explanation of free will within the context of a scientific theory. He thought his spontaneous swerve (which added fluidity in the motion of E-atoms) restored free will, ethics, and the idea of personal responsibility for our actions. But did it? How free is free will really, if the swerve, which is supposed to be causing it, is really spontaneous and thus can’t be controlled? “When the atoms are traveling . . . at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve.”2 If we can’t control atomic swerving, how can we control our actions, which are supposed to be the result of the swerve? The swerve (or its modern version, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle) does give E-atoms extra ways of moving, which may be correlated to a variety of lunch potentialities (pizza, Chinese, something else), but if we can’t control the swerve, what good is it in claiming control over “choices”? What I will end up eating
might just be the result of chance (of quantum probability or the spontaneity of the swerve)—pure luck—not choice. So we are not sure if indeterminism (of modern or Epicurean physics) entails free will. Would things be different if we could control the swerve (or the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics), our luck? In other words, does the well-known folk saying that hard work brings better luck have any scientific basis? Let’s see.

  Indeterminism in quantum physics means that we can’t control the outcome of an experiment. The very act of observation, of interference in general, we learned (in chapter 7), causes uncertainty in atomic motion. But what if we could somehow control the swerve (in order to make atoms move a particular way in hopes of controlling our choices). If we could do that, we would be violating the very freedom (the fluidity in motion) that atoms supposedly should have if we were to have freedom to control them (and in turn, control our choices). That is, controlling the swerve, which is meant to lead to free will, creates an antinomy, a contradiction: (1) atoms have freedom (in the way they move because they swerve), which (2) supposedly gives us the freedom to control them back, but this (controlling back) (3) also removes their very freedom which supposedly is required—it violates the spontaneity in their swerve that they should have in the first place—if we were to have freedom.

  Thus, it appears that, while indeterminism (via the swerve or the uncertainty principle) may be connected to more lunch potentialities, it doesn’t necessarily entail free will—the actuality of what I’ll end up eating might just be the result of chance, not choice.

  Does Indeterminism Kill Free Will?

  But could indeterminism entail lack of free will, determinism, a rigid regularity? It’s a strange, paradoxical question that I’m prompted to ask because of an interesting observation: that macroscopic determinism (order and regularity) arises out of microscopic indeterminism (the uncertainty and probability of quantum mechanics).3 That is, although the constituent particles of, say, the sun, a flower, our brain, obey randomness, quantum indeterminacy, these large (macroscopic) objects (made of lots of atoms) obey order and predictability. Does such macroscopic order (regularity) and predictability imply lack of free will?

  First, a quick analogy of macroscopic determinism arising from microscopic uncertainty. Say you’ve been observing Manhattan for a month from a zeppelin high up, using just your eyes. You will discover that lots of people visit the beautiful city daily. Although you can’t predict if one particular person will be visiting Manhattan on the next regular day, you can easily predict that lots of people will.4 That is, although the laws of quantum mechanics don’t allow us to predict an individual atom’s exact behavior, the laws of quantum statistical mechanics allow us to make reasonable predictions for the behavior of lots of atoms—and macroscopic objects are made from lots of atoms. We can’t predict when one radioactive carbon-14 nucleus will decay; but if we have millions of them, we can determine pretty precisely that half of them will decay in 6,000 years. Thus, although each and every atom of say a planet, of the sun, and of our body follows the laws of quantum indeterminacy, the collective behavior of all the atoms in a system (the behavior of a macroscopic object, which is made from many particles) is determinable: the earth spins once a day, our heart beats seventy beats per minute, tapping a cellphone app opens it, and our energy-hungry complex brain, which although comprising only 2 percent of our body weight, requires 20 percent of the energy from the food we consume.

  Here is now the important question: is there a regularity (regardless if it’s obvious or not) in the way the brain thinks, as there is in the way it consumes energy (or in the way the earth spins)? If such regularity is discovered to exist, that might imply lack of free will. Because in the same way we know that the earth will be here in the summer and there in the winter in relation to the sun, and the brain will consume so much energy by tomorrow, we would also know that the brain (we) will think this particular way next week, Monday, noon (even with each brain atom’s actions being uncertain). Of course, note, if such regularity exists but can’t be figured out, our next Monday’s action, although predetermined, would still be unknown to us and thus appear to be our choice. Now, while there is a certain regularity (and predictability) in the way someone thinks, such regularity is not absolute. For example, I know that I’ll have my usual coffee tomorrow morning, and also I have always known that I would study physics. But I may not have my usual coffee tomorrow, and it might not have worked out to study physics. This uncertainty (whatever its source might be) is of course the critical debate of the issue and what gives free will another chance. How?

  Part Free Will and Part No Choice

  According to quantum statistical mechanics, the regularity of a system in general becomes increasingly more precise with increasingly more particles present in the system. So it’s easier to predict the collective action of the many (e.g., of the general vote of millions of people, or when half from a billion carbon-14 nuclei will decay) than the action of the one. Now, since the universe is the ultimate many-particle system, as a whole (or on a large scale), it appears to be rather deterministic (regular) and predictable, too, in its behavior—that is, we know it is expanding, how stars form and die, and how colliding black holes ripple space-time. On the other hand, it is impossible to predict the behavior of the individual microscopic particles (electrons, protons, etc.) that constitute the universe. It appears, then, that determinism might be as much of a property of the universe as its opposite, indeterminism. That might be true for us, too—how we think and act. This is because we are much smaller than the universe, so we are not perfectly deterministic, but at the same time, we are much bigger than an electron, so we are not perfectly indeterministic. Determinacy might govern us as much as indeterminacy—we might be part free will and part no choice. That would be fair, cosmically just, as Anaximander might have put it, I’m certain, perhaps. Besides, as argued in Empedocles’s cosmological cycles (chapter 10), for a universe with no beginning or end, with “first” and “last” to lack absolute meaning, the properties of the composite (of the many and large) are as fundamental as the properties of the few and tiny.

  Conclusion

  In summary, what’s on trial here is whether macroscopic order and predictability imply complete or partial lack of free will, or more generally, whether determinism or indeterminism found in our scientific theories implies anything at all concerning free will. The verdict: I think that’s unanswerable, but that’s a blessing, not a blemish. I personally feel, though unscientifically (without evidence), that I have free will, yet again, it might have been predetermined that I feel so. If Fate does exist, what would be determining her decisions, and the decisions of that? Indeterminism (via the swerve or its modern version, the uncertainty principle) implies free volition no more than determinism does. The debate on free will, as old as Aristotle’s treatises on ethics, has not been settled yet. Not only because we lack a theory of everything (which may be deterministic, probabilistic, or some combination of the two concepts) but also because for either interpretation of nature, arguments can be made for and against voluntary action. Einstein was disenchanted by the quantum indeterminacy as implied by his famous “God doesn’t play dice,” an indirect attack on quantum mechanics’ founding principle, the Heisenberg uncertainty. With this principle there was a lot at stake for Einstein because the philosophy of his relativity is deterministic, the exact opposite of the quantum indeterminacy. Regardless of how history is being written (deterministically, via chance, via free will, or some combination) it is time that “we” consider it.

  * * *

  1Diogenes Laërtius (Epicurus’s), Letter to Menoeceus 10.134, trans. David J. Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 174.

  2Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe 2.218–219, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 43.

  3Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? & Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).
/>
  4For more details of this type of analogy, see Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 154.

  15

  Atomic Connections

  Epicureanism has arguably been an intellectual bridge between ancient and modern science. It contributed to the spreading of Leucippus’s and Democritus’s atomism but also of Epicurus’s own unique rendition of it, to later thinkers.1

  For example, the great Latin poet Lucretius (99–55 bce), a devoted Epicurean, composed the epic didactic poem On the Nature of Things,2 which expounded masterfully the Epicurean philosophy that, according to Roman orator Cicero (106–43 bce), has “taken over the whole of Italy.”3 Epicureanism “survived, it is true, though with diminishing vigour, for six hundred years after the death of Epicurus.”4 It “was a significant trend in Hellenistic times [300 bce–200 ce]”5 and among those who studied it (and atomism in general) during this period were the brilliant scholars of the Library of Alexandria.