May 29, 2012
23:2
World Scientific Review Volume - 9in x 6in
AComputableUniverse
Chapter 26 The Universe is lawless or “Pantôn chrêmatôn metron anthrôpon einai”⇤ Cristian S. Calude1 , F. Walter Meyerstein2 & Arto Salomaa3 1
Computer Science Department, The University of, Auckland, New Zealand. 2 Barcelona, Spain. 3 Turku Centre for Computer Science, TUCS, Turku, Finland. The belief that the physical Universe is a knowable system governed by rules which determine its future uniquely and completely has dominated the Western civilisation in the last two and a half millennia. The goal of this paper is to provide new arguments in favour of the hypothesis that the Universe is lawless, a hypothesis proposed and discussed in our papers.7,9,11,14,15,18
1. Introduction The endeavour to discover and determine the laws presumed to govern the physical Universe is as old as Western civilisation itself, as are the difficulties herewith associated. Witness the anecdote transmitted by Plato (in his dialogue Theaetetus) concerning Thales of Miletus, the first mathematician to accurately predict a solar eclipse (for the 28th May 585 BC): While Thales was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet.
Nowadays we continue “to look upwards”, albeit with the help of the latest technology and its fabulous instruments. This process is unavoidably marked by the human “measure” which biases the laws we presume to hold in the entire Universe. In what follows we provide new arguments in favour of the hypothesis that the Universe is lawless, a hypothesis proposed and discussed in our pa⇤“Man is the measure of all things”, Protagoras, 5th century BC.
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