2012, Prometheus Books, 708 pages

Back Blurb

How does the cosmos do something it has long been thought only gods could achieve? How does an inanimate universe generate stunning new forms and unbelievable new powers without a creator? How does the cosmos create? That’s the central question of The God Problem.

In The God Problem, you’ll take a scientific expedition into the secret heart of a cosmos you’ve never seen. Not just any cosmos. An electrifyingly inventive cosmos. An obsessive-compulsive cosmos. A driven, ambitious cosmos. A cosmos of colossal shocks. A cosmos of screaming, stunning surprise. A cosmos that breaks five of science’s most sacred laws. Yes, five.

And you’ll be rewarded with author Howard Bloom’s provocative new theory of the beginning, middle, and end of the universe–the Bloom toroidal model, also known as the big bagel theory–which explains two of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark energy and why, if antimatter and matter are created in equal amounts, there is so little antimatter in this universe.

Author Blurb

Howard Bloom has been called “the Darwin, Newton, Einstein, and Freud of the twenty-first century” and “the next Stephen Hawking.” He is the author of The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism; Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century; and The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History.

Tragedy and Decay, Comedy and Creativity

I’m very interested in how nature creates order from chaos. For instance, it’s not immediately obvious why, when carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen come together, they’ll link themselves into amino acids. These amino acids in turn will become proteins, the building blocks of life. Then life itself–from plant to reptile to mammal–evolves towards ever higher levels of consciousness. My dog for example, lacks the consciousness to understand the reflection is an image of herself. Sometimes she tries to play with her reflection. Other times, she goes after her reflection as though it were a rival dog. But I have the consciousness to understand a reflection is a reflection. And I’m higher up evolution than my dog. To be sure, Darwin’s process of natural selection explains why evolution happens. But, as Darwin himself was aware, natural selection cannot explain why mutations should happen in the first place that drives life higher, towards more complexity. Darwin could not explain it, nor could anyone else, for that matter. Bloom has a great quote from the physicist Paul Davies, who sums up the problem in these words:

The central issue … is whether the surprising–one might even say unreasonable–propensity for matter and energy to self-organize “against the odds” can be explained using the known laws of physics, or whether completely new fundamental principles are required. In practice, attempts to explain complexity and self-organization using the basic laws of physics have met with little success.

The enigma of order from chaos goes beyond life. It’s everywhere. Look at a beautiful and complex structure such as the arms of the Milky Way galaxy. Gravity can explain the motions of each of its constituent stars. But it can’t explain why, in the vastness of space, galaxies–local pocket of order–should have arisen in the first place. According to the conventional rules of physics, things should be more spread out, more diffuse. And what is this conventional rule, you ask?–well, it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Here’s the definition of the Second Law from the Libretexts site:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time. The second law also states that the changes in the entropy in the universe can never be negative. Why is it that when you leave an ice cube at room temperature, it begins to melt? Why do we get older and never younger? And, why is it whenever rooms are cleaned, they become messy again in the future? Certain things happen in one direction and not the other, this is called the “arrow of time” and it encompasses every area of science. The thermodynamic arrow of time (entropy) is the measurement of disorder within a system. Denoted as delta S, the change of entropy suggests that time is asymmetric with respect to order of an isolated system, meaning: a system will become more disordered, as time increases.

So, there appear to be two powers in everlasting opposition. First, there’s the Second Law. It’s the destroyer. Systems begin in highly ordered states. As high grade energy dissipates into heat, entropy increases until the point where nothing is possible anymore and the system suffers a heat death. It’s an ironclad law. Then, there’s this power that creates order from chaos. It’s nameless. We’re not sure how complexity spontaneously arises. But we can see it happening everywhere. And, worse of all, it seems to defy the Second Law. And this perceived contravention of the Second Law is really one of the great holes in twenty-first century science. Bloom’s book tries to fill in this gap.

The God Problem

Bloom begins by inviting the reader to be Bloom. He tells his story from childhood through the second person ‘you’. For example, when Bloom was a kid, he says he wasn’t very good at many things. But he was persistent. Since you are him (for the duration of the book), the book reads ‘you were persistent, and that’s how you discovered corollary generator theory’. What’s corollary generator theory? That’s one of his key terms for how the universe creates complexity: corollary generation is the process of unpacking implicit properties from axioms.

For Bloom, it all begins with the axiom. For example, it could be axiomatic that parallel lines never meet. Or it could be axiomatic that parallel lines meet in the far distance. After the axiom comes the process of unpacking the properties of the axiom, or corollary generator theory, as he calls it. If parallel lines never meet, the consequence is that space is flat. If parallel lines do meet, however, the consequence is that space is hyperbolic, curved like a saddle. So depending on the axiom, different ‘big pictures’ are possible. Yes, Bloom like coining terms.

So, what do axioms have to do with nature’s creativity? It turns out, that with a handful of simple axioms, complex structures are possible. Bloom’s search for how simple rules can produce complex structures leads him to the termite mound. Termite mounds can be built up to 13 metres and are amazingly complex structures. These structures come with a natural air conditioning mechanism that keeps the interior temperature constant. They are one of the wonders of the insect world. How are they built? They are built on a simple rule: when a termite runs across a termite dropping, it picks it up and puts it on top of the tallest pile of droppings in that area. So out of quite a simple rule, complexity is possible. The question Bloom wonders is: what if the universe is like that?–out of a handful of axioms, nature creates fascinating and complex structures.

‘The God problem’ to Bloom is a question of perspective: the natural world looks so complex, it must have been created by a higher power. But, if he is right, and complexity arises spontaneously through a handful of simple axioms, then God is no longer a necessary hypothesis. This serves Bloom well, who is a raging atheist. He points to John Conway’s Game of LIfe, Mandelbrot sets, and Wolfram’s computer simulations as proof that simple sets of rules can generate unpredictable and complex structures, and, with his proof, he asks whether the universe is like the Game of Life.

The God Problem reads like a history of science from Babylonian up to modern times. What Bloom does is he reinterprets scientific discoveries from ancient to modern times through the axiom (simple, basic assumption), corollary generator theory (unpacking the axiom), emergent property (the unexpected result of unpacking the axiom), and the new big picture (fundamental shift in understanding). For example, one axiom might be: what if the speed of light is a universal constant? Then you might use this assumption to ask how light and matter are intertwined. The emergent property would be E=mc squared, or energy equals mass * the speed of light. The new big picture would then be that matter and energy are related: you could make a nuclear bomb, for example. So while the nuclear bomb is quite complex, the idea behind it, the idea that light is a universal constant, is quite simple. So, the end result is that, even though the world appears to be quite complicated, this complexity might be based on simplicity. You just have to find the simplicity.

I enjoyed reading about the history of scientific discoveries through Bloom’s viewpoint. What I enjoyed less was his appeal to authority. Often he would say: this scientist won x, y, and z awards, so she’s very smart and therefore you should believe her. It smacked of someone saying: “Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in literature so you should listen to his music.” No, you should listen to his music because he rules. There are some unusual editorial conventions. Whenever he mentions a trade name, the copyright symbol (the little c with a circle around it) appears. So if he mentions iPhone, the iPhone is followed by a copyright symbol. His use of quotation marks is interesting too. Consider this example:

“Discussed” is a very mild word for what these men did. They were , says Proclus “renowned” for their “studies.” So renowned that Plato mentioned them as his “rivals.”

Are all the quotation marks necessary?–maybe the ones around discussed. But surely not around studies and rivals. These are all minor points, of course, but its amazing how jarring such little details are on a reader. My own book is going to the press soon so these little types of details catch my eye.

My major criticism of The God Problem is how the book promises too much. The inside cover, for example, compares Bloom to Einstein, Hawking, Newton, and Freud. I purchased the book believing this. And the book also promises the reader that it contains a proof of how the Second Law of thermodynamics is plain wrong. While it contains lots of example of complexity arising from simplicity, I don’t think it achieves this. And, after reading the book, I conclude that there’s no way Bloom is even remotely close to Einstein, Hawking, Newton, and Freud. It would have been a more satisfying read if the book hadn’t of promised so much. Take Bloom’s “Big Bagel” theory of the universe. It’s right at the end and wraps up the book. The Big Bagel model argues that the universe started from a singularity and is donut shaped. In fourteen or so pages, he explains how it solves the problem of the missing antimatter, the problem of dark matter, and dark flow. He came up with this theory during a brainstorm in 1959. So it’s his theory. But has he published anything on it in a scientific journal? It doesn’t appear like he has. Can he explain why matter went on one side of the donut and antimatter on the other? No. Then he mentions scientists who have published on the donut model in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. The work of these scientists lend credence to his big bagel theory. Wow. Especially the part about the theory being ‘his’. I wonder if the scientists who published on the donut model in the 80s, 90s, and 00s give Bloom credit for this model of the universe. I could look, but I doubt it. An interesting and disappointing read.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong, and I’m doing Melpomene’s work.