Lee Smolin, Professor of physics at the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University, author of "The Life of The Cosmos" quoted in "THE THIRD CULTURE" by John Brockman
"When I realized that people like Martin Rees and Bernard Carr were right - that the world is very special in ways that seem a priori extremely unlikely - I began to wonder whether there might be some real mechanism, something taking place earlier in the history of the universe, that might explain how the properties of the elementary particles have been selected so that the world has the enormous amount of structure and variety it does. ( . . . )
"At this time, I was reading a lot of biology: Richard Dawkins on evolution, Harold Morowitz on self-organization, and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis on the Gaia idea. And I remember wondering whether, if the earth can be understood as a self-organized system, maybe the same thing was true for larger systems, such as a galaxy or the universe as a whole. This was also summertime, and I was sailing a lot, and I spent a lot of time letting the boat drift and wondering what kind of mechanisms of self-organization might have acted early in the history of the universe to select the properties of the elementary particles and forces in nature. It seemed to me that the only principle powerful enough to explain the high degree of organization of our universe - compared to a universe with the particles and forces chosen randomly - was natural selection itself. The question then became: Could there be any mechanism by which natural selection could work on the scale of the whole universe?( . . . )
"This idea came right away, because of two ideas I was familiar with from my work on quantum gravity. The first is that inside a black hole, quantum effects remove the singularity that general relativity says is there - and that we know is there from the theorems of Penrose and Hawking - and a new region of the universe begins to expand as if from a big bang, there inside the black hole. I remember Bryce Dewitt, who is one of the great pioneers of quantum gravity, telling me about this idea shortly after I began to work for him, on my first postdoc. The second idea - which comes from John A. Wheeler, another great pioneer of the field - is that at such events the properties of the elementary particles and forces might change randomly. All I then needed to make a mechanism for natural selection was to assume that these changes are small, because reading Dawkins taught me the importance for natural selection of incremental change by the accumulation of small changes in the gene. Then, with the universes as animals and the properties of the elementary particles as genes, I had a mechanism by which natural selection would act to produce universes with whatever choices of parameters would lead to the most production of black holes, since a black hole is the means by which a universe reproduces - that is, spawns another.( . . . )
-Lee Smolin
See Lee Smolin's new book, "The Life of The Cosmos"
John Gribbin, from: In The Beginning: The Birth of the Living Universe
"I have argued that our Galaxy is alive - literally alive, in the full biological meaning of the term. Like other galaxies it has been produced by a process of evolution and competition within the Universe, following the Big Bang. The end-product of this evolutionary process has been spiral galaxies that are very efficient supernova-nurseries. ( . . . )
"There are several hundred million black holes in our Galaxy alone. There are millions of other spiral galaxies in the Universe today, each carrying a similar cargo of black holes. And the extreme firestorms in which spiral galaxies merge to create elipticals produce many more millions of black holes in the supernovae that consume the last traces of gas and dust in those galaxies. So a giant elliptical galaxy may well contain tens or even hundrds of billions of black holes. The Universe is extra-ordinarily good at turning matter into black holes, and the process depends, as we have seen, on a chain of quite extraordinary coincidences in the laws of physics. This realization is the key to the new understanding of the Universe itself - that it, too, is alive, and that it has evolved in competition with other universes.
"It seems that we know, more precisely than anyone has ever known before, what the Universe is made of, and how much of the different kinds of stuff there are, as well as how the Universe came into existence. We know that it seems to be so efficient at the job of making stars and turning them into black holes that it could almost have been designed for the job. And we know that the ultimate fate of the Universe itself is that one day the present expansion will be first halted and then reversed, so that it collapses back into a singularity that is a mirror-image of the one that gave it birth.* We actually live inside a huge black hole - a black hole so big that it contains billions of other black holes inside itself. ( . . . )
*(recently it has been shown that the Universe's expansion may be accelerating. This is not yet corroborated or understood.)
"The idea of the Universe as a black hole is not new, although until recently it was distinctly unfashionable. As far as I know, I was the first person to describe the Universe in these words, in an unsigned editorial commentary in the journal Nature in 1971 (volume 232, page 440). Scarcely anybody took the notion seriously, because nobody then realized that the Universe is dominated gravitationally by dark matter. But today, scarcely anybody doubts this picture. And if all the complexity of galaxies, stars, planets and organic life has emerged from the singularity in which our Universe was born, within a black hole, could not something similar be happening to the singularities at the hearts of other black holes? ( . . . )
"One way to picture this is to go back to the analogy between the three dimensions of expanding space around us and the two-dimensional expanding surface of a balloon that is being steadily filled with air. The analogy is not with the volume of air inside the balloon, but with the expanding skin of the balloon, stretching uniformly in two dimensions but curved around upon itself in a closed surface. Imagine a black hole as forming from a tiny pimple on the surface of the balloon, a small piece of the stretching rubber that gets pinched off, and starts to expand in its own right. There is a new bubble, attached to the original balloon by a tiny, narrow throat - the black hole. And this new bubble can expand away happily in its own right, to become as big as the original balloon, or even bigger, without the skin of the original balloon (the original universe) being affected at all. There can be many bubbles growing out of the skin (the spacetime) of the original universe in this way at the same time. And, of course, new bubbles can grow out of the skin of each new universe, ad infinitum. ( . . . )
"Instead of the collapse of a black hole representing a one-way journey to nowhere, many researchers now believe that it is a one-way journey to somewhere - to a new expanding universe in its own set of dimensions. Instead of a black-hole singularity 'bouncing' to become an exploding outpouring of energy blasting back into our Universe, it is shunted sideways in spacetime. ( . . . )
"The dramatic implication is that many - perhaps all - of the black holes that form in our Universe may be the seeds of new universes. And, of course, our own Universe may have been born in this way out of a black hole in another universe. While the fact that the laws of physics in our Universe seem to be rather precisely 'fine tuned' to encourage the formation of black holes means that they are actually fine tuned for the production of more universes. ( . . . )
"Cosmologists are now having to learn to think like biologists and ecologists, and to develop their ideas not within the context of a single, unique Universe, but in the context of an evolving population of universes. Each universe starts from its own big bang, but all the universes are interconnected in complex ways by black hole 'umbilical cords', and closely related universes share the 'genetic' influence of a similar set of physical laws. ( . . . )
"Astronomers calculate that there may be as many as 1020 planets suitable for life-forms like ourselves in our Universe. We see the components of organic life everywhere in the Universe, and the chances are that most of those 1020 planets are actually alive, in th esame way that earth/Gaia is alive..
- John Gribbin, from In The Beginning: The Birth of the Living Universe
" More and more, what I believe must be true is that there are mechanisms of self-organization extending from the largest scales to the smallest, and that they explain both the properties of the elementary particles and the history and structure of the whole universe.( . . . )"To put it most simply, I think a successful theory that merges relativity and cosmology with quantum theory must also be a theory of self-organization."
- Lee Smolin
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