Once Before Time - Martin Bojowald [131]
Just before the time of Empedocles, forty years after Heraclitus and Parmenides, Anaxagoras had contributed a theory of the formation of structure. The initial state is homogeneous, as for Anaximander: “All things were together, infinite according to amount and smallness. For the smallness was simply infinite. And so long as all things were together, due to the smallness nothing could clearly be discerned therein.” The world thus starts from a highly symmetrical and extremely simple initial state with little structure. As in modern cosmology, the crucial problem is how, from such a symmetrical state, structures such as galaxies and stars can arise; one must find a motivating reason for a complicated dynamic happening. For Anaxagoras, this reason is the spirit: “And over everything just having a soul, large as small, the spirit rules. Thus it has the power over the whole vortex motion so that it can push on this motion. And first this vortex began from a certain little point, but it extends further and will extend still more. And all that was mixing and separating and departing from each other was known to the spirit. And all ordered the spirit, how it should become in the future and how [what no longer exists once] was and how it is [right now].”
Except for the strong determinism, this picture closely resembles the inflationary formation of structure, assuming an initial structureless vacuum state whence structures emerge by quantum fluctuations. For the emergence of structure, quantum theory is crucial, replacing the “spirit” of Anaxagoras. It may be noteworthy in this context that some physicists, such as Eugene Wigner, have attributed an important role to consciousness in the measurement process of quantum mechanics, namely, in the collapse of the wave function. In this view, the wave function collapses when consciousness (of an experimenter or an observer) acts on the quantum system.
Nowadays, however, this opinion is shared only by a minority, and especially in cosmology it is dubious. In final consequence it would, after all, mean that the wave function of cosmic background radiation, which resulted from the initial vacuum, collapsed just a few decades ago when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson measured them by a lucky break. (Unless, of course, there are other life-forms in the universe who scooped humankind in this discovery and thus caused the collapse even earlier.) But by preventing the gravitational clumping of smaller concentrations, cosmic background radiation plays an important role in the early universe, which was much denser than it is today. Without it, galaxies of much smaller scale than observed should exist. If the radiation at those times had still been in its original uncollapsed wave function, it would have interacted with matter differently, changing the process of structure formation. If consciousness is required for the collapse of the wave function, one can only draw the conclusion that in those early times a self-conscious matter form must have made observations—an assumption not at all justified to save Wigner’s interpretation.
In addition to pictures of the cosmos, the consequence of indivisibility derived by Parmenides from the same logical principles as the illusion of motion is of interest: “Nor is it divisible because it is totally uniform. And nowhere is there a stronger being which could prevent its connectivity, nor a weaker one; it is rather entirely filled by the being. Thus it is fully connected; for one being closely borders to the other.” As already seen, Zeno tried to support the hypotheses of Parmenides, but the contradiction with observations of obvious change was too dramatic.
This dilemma motivated the atomists, in particular Leucippus (a student of Zeno, who himself was a student of Parmenides) and Democritus (slightly younger than Leucippus), to question Parmenides’ premises systematically. Motion obviously must be possible, and so the atomists eventually concluded