Q&A: Quantum Rate Change
Quantum Rate Change
Question
Hello Rabbi, I read your notebook on faith regarding the cosmological proof. I got to the section on spontaneous quantum appearance and I didn’t understand exactly the proof from there. As I understand it, the Rabbi argues that the laws that allowed this spontaneous appearance were "created," and that this was not really an appearance out of a full vacuum. If so, how do we know that these laws are not primordial? I suggested a line of reasoning that if they were indeed primordial, then the world would also be primordial, and therefore they must have been created. I would appreciate a clarification of the proof.
Answer
The laws can be primordial, but even primordial laws require a lawgiver. This is true both because of the principle of sufficient reason, and because laws are not entities. The fact that some laws prevail does not explain itself, nor does it explain what takes place within that framework. The laws are only the way the lawgiver and His world operate.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t understand the discussion here—primordial laws or not, possible or impossible, and so on. Please write what exactly you’re asking.
I actually am publishing a book, in fact a trilogy. It’s in preparation.
My question is whether there was a starting point for all existence (are the laws included within that existence)? And can the Rabbi explain exactly how cause and effect can work even outside of time? I understand the general idea, but don’t cause and effect exist as an adjunct to time?
I have no idea. The Big Bang tells us that there was. But maybe there was something before it. My claim is that whether it was always there or not, a Creator is required. As for cause and effect without time, I already elaborated on this in a responsa a few days ago. Briefly, time is not an essential parameter of causality, but only part of the language we use to describe it. Even if there were no time in the world, there is no reason one couldn’t say that relations of cause and effect exist there too, except that we would describe them in a different language. Just as, according to Kant, time is only a form of my perception, and still I can speak about my grandfather’s date of birth.
1. I didn’t understand exactly. When I wrote "primordial laws," I meant that they existed for an infinite amount of time, though of course that doesn’t seem possible to me, since time and space began with the Big Bang. In addition, how could these laws be primordial? Doesn’t that mean that the world too would have had to be primordial, if these laws had always always existed? And another difficulty: how can this theory explain the structure of the universe, that it is "fine-tuned" for life, and in general that it exists?
2. What is the level of probability of this theory? I assume it can’t be proven empirically. And in general I understood that everything that happened at time 0 is completely beyond the understanding of science?
3. Why doesn’t the Rabbi publish a book: Guide for the Perplexed 2 or something like that? 🙂