"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
― Albert Einstein
A friend of mine recently introduced me to Christopher Langan's CTMU or Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (pronounced 'cat mew', which is cute enough). Oddly, I had never heard of it, which is puzzling for someone (like me) who's been an amateur astronomer for over 45 years. I think I'm fairly well-read with contemporaries like Brian Greene, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the late Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, Sean Caroll, Lawrence Krause, Martin Rees, etc., so it's bizarre to me that CTMU has never come up in my personal research until now. And apparently it's been around for a long time!
In attempting to acquaint myself with it this week, I found CTMU almost is impossible to understand. Again, I regard myself as someone who has an above average understanding of physics and cosmology. To be sure, there are many concepts in this field one really needs a PhD to explain and/or understand, but what’s fascinating about things like Multiverse Models, Inflation Theory, Quantum Tunneling, Superstrings, Time Dilation, Dark Matter, and a whole slew of other theoretical abstractions (some based on observation, others math) is that such concepts can be so easily reduced and understood for the lay reader. Not so with CTMU, and there is much criticism out there about it in this regard — this, to my my skeptical sensibilities, should serve as a warning.
As an example of what I'm getting at, consider this text from a peer-review submitted scientific paper:
“In string theory, the quantum-mechanical amplitude for the interaction of n closed or open strings is represented by a functional integral (basically, a sum) over fields living on a two-dimensional manifold with boundary. In quantum gravity, we may expect that a similar representation will hold, except that the two-dimensional manifold with boundary will be replaced by a multidimensional one. Unfortunately, multidimensionality goes against the grain of conventional linear mathematical thought, and despite a recent broadening of attitudes (notably associated with the study of multidimensional nonlinear phenomena in chaos theory), the theory of multidimensional manifolds with boundary remains somewhat underdeveloped. Nevertheless, physicists' work on the functional-integral approach to quantum gravity continues apace, and this work is likely to stimulate the attention of mathematicians.”
Do you understand that? I don’t. In fact, nobody does. The reason that nobody understands it is because it's a paragraph from Alan Sokal’s hoax paper — intentional gobbledygook in the language of science to make it sound like something complex, sophisticated, and irrefutable. It was designed to fool people. In fact, it did it so effectively it made publication into peer-reviewed science journals before Sokal admitted the hoax.
Now then, compare the above with this paragraph from Christopher Langan's work:
“An act is a temporal process, and self-inclusion is a spatial relation. The act of self-inclusion is thus ‘where time becomes space’; for the set of all sets, there can be no more fundamental process. No matter what else happens in the evolving universe, it must be temporally embedded in this dualistic self-inclusion operation. In the CTMU, the self-inclusion process is known as conspansion and occurs at the distributed, Lorentz-invariant conspansion rate c, a time-space conversion factor already familiar as the speed of light in vacuo (conspansion consists of two alternative phases accounting for the wave and particle properties of matter and affording a logical explanation for accelerating cosmic expansion). When we imagine a dynamic self-including set, we think of a set growing larger and larger in order to engulf itself from without.”
Do you know what any of that means? I don’t. In fact, cosmologists and physicists are utterly baffled by what he’s talking about. I guess that’s the odd thing about his work. Critics of his writings and ideas say he’s undeniably intelligent, but impossible to understand. Unsurprisingly, many of Langan's supporters can be found in the camps of post-modernism, pseudoscience, new-age spiritualism, and far worse. How can anyone know if what he’s talking about is truthful if it cannot even be understood in the abstraction? Why can't his ideas be simplified? Does CTMU explain anything? Can his theory even be tested? Is it falsifiable? So, is it even science? I think not. No doubt Christopher Langan is smart, but he has some other really bad ideas which I will not get into on my blog.
Time to go bug hunting!
Orion Nebula © 2022 Mike McDowell