The Meaning of Life

(In a universe of chaos and uncertainty)


The search for a comprehensive meaning to life – our purpose here, where, how and why the universe began, its fate, our future etc – is not new to mankind. It has been, perhaps, the most persistent of all the intellectual adventures in man’s eventful history.
The adventure has seen many deviations and pitfalls, vehement clashes against dogma and the subsequent sciences degrading to dogma in the hands of vested interests.

The search for a meaning to life or the quest for a ‘theory of everything’ is about finding a theory that describes in a nutshell, all the phenomenon that we observe. A mother theory, of which all other theories are merely corollaries. Only such a hypothesis appears to bear the potential, to shed light on why we are here. Why it is that the universe appears to be so perfectly designed to accommodate us. The theory- if at all it exists- must be able to unify the fundamental forces of nature, predict the number of particles in the universe and unify them into a single family, it must be able to specify the boundary conditions of the universe –the instant of creation; it must explain why the universe is, the way it is. Further, the theory while allowing for enormous complexity must be simple. At the end of it all we must be able to wonder ‘How could it have been otherwise? How could we not have comprehended it for so long?’
The search for such a comprehensive theory is like trying to infer the rules of a board game, the rule book for which is missing. We and everything in the universe are obeying the very laws that we attempt to discover.

The fact that science has been descending in complexity over the ages promises hope that a theory of everything can be discovered. We have been discovering over the centuries that nature is infact, less complicated than it appears to be. Studies in mechanics, thermodynamics and acoustics, for example, converged after the postulation of Newton’s laws as it became evident that sound waves and other forms of energy are governed by the same laws of motion.
Like wise all the matter that we observe in the universe today can be classified as belonging to either the class of bosons or fermions. A grand unified theory that shall unite these two classes of particles into a single one and also unite the four fundamental forces of nature – gravity, the weak force, strong force, and electromagnetic force- into a super force are being sought.

The giant mathematician Laplace once boasted, that given the velocity of any moving body he could predict its position at any other instant of time. On hearing Laplace’s claim, the French emperor Napoleon asked,
“Where does God fit into this picture”, to which the former replied, “Sir, I did not find the need for such a hypothesis.”
The belief in a static and deterministic universe pervaded over human psyche for many centuries and influenced the course of our intellectual evolution. The belief that we live in a completely deterministic world- that the state of the universe at any instant can be predicted given it’s conditions at a previous instant- came to be called ‘scientific determinism’.
The deterministic view of life implied that our future could be predicted, at least in principle. While it is seemingly evident that the position of a particle can be predicted by Newtonian mechanics, could scientific laws empower us to determine something like ‘who would be our next president?’ Determinism answers in the affirmative, it is very much predefined. But the complexities of the equations are so severe that we are too crippled to solve them and further they have an inherent property called chaos.


The tables were overturned against scientific determinism in the wake of the discovery of the uncertainty principle proposed by Werner Heisenberg. That the position and velocity (or momentum) of a particle cannot be simultaneously determined with absolute precision- or in other words, that the position of a particle is always uncertain- was a concept that stood against centuries of scientific development.
In an election with two candidates and one post, the voters can cast their votes in favor of any one of the two which again is a case of uncertainty. But the uncertainty arises from the fact that we are ignorant of the pattern of voting. If one were to hide cameras in the polling booth, the outcome then won’t be uncertain.
The uncertainty as described in the ‘uncertainty Principle’ is not likewise. Scientists have devised ingenious ways to sneak up on particles and yet attempts to determine simultaneously, their position and velocity have proved futile. Meaning, these parameters not just appear to be uncertain, they really are uncertain. The prediction of the future then becomes ‘not difficult but impossible’, in principle. No matter how powerful a super computer we build, if we input uncertain and lousy data in, we will get lousy data as the output.

The uncertainty principle that gave birth to quantum mechanics and the two theories of relativity are the two giant intellectual achievements of the 20th century.
Relativity showed that our hitherto notions of space and time were infatuations and that we live in a four dimensional world, not the three dimensional one as it appears to be. Space and time after relativity could no longer be considered as separate entities but a single one called space-time. Time is not absolute but married to space to give a single entity called ‘space-time’.
A lesser discussed implication of relativity was that it predicted an expanding universe. Yet, the belief in a static universe was so strong that Einstein introduced a cosmological constant in the equations to nullify the expansion. A constant he later described as the greatest blunder of his life.
It was not until Hubble’s observation of a Red shift in light, coming from distant galaxies that we began to conceive that the universe is expanding. The Red shift implied that distant galaxies are receding from us from which we can logically conclude – by reversing the direction of time- that all galaxies were lumped together at some point in the history of the universe. All the matter in the universe condensed to a point of infinite density and zero volume; what mathematicians call a singularity.

An expanding universe, a big bang, singularities, uncertainty, chaos , disorder, not very optimistic terms, and where does that leave us?
Are we living in a universe where we cannot even judge whether something before us is real or virtual; dead or alive?
Take the example of Schrödinger's cat, a famous thought experiment.
Consider a cat in a closed box. To kill it, a gun is set within the box which will be triggered only if a certain radioactive nucleus will disintegrate, the probability of which happening is 0.5.
If the box is not opened and we try to predict, what can we say of the state of the cat- is it dead or alive? The probability of each event occurring is 50%.
The cat is infact both dead and alive!

This is what quantum mechanics teaches us of life. That whatever occurs does so, only as a matter of chance. This physical meaning of quantum mechanics was initially fiercely contended on the reasoning that something or someone cannot be half alive and half dead no more than a woman can be half pregnant. Each event has a number of histories adding up to give the event we observe. This is what has come to be termed as ‘The sum of Histories’ method. Most of the histories cancel out, but in some cases as that of the Schrödinger’s cat, the histories add up to make the uncertainty conspicuous.



Frustrated with the bizarre consequences of quantum mechanics, Einstein in vehement opposition to it declared, “God does not, play dice with the universe.” Einstein proposed the hidden variable theory to make the uncertainty principle consistent with physics. But experiments conducted by the British physicist John Bell produced results inconsistent with hidden variables.

The quantum mechanical model of life and the universe was initially put forth by Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac and Heisenberg. Here the position and velocity of particles are represented by wave functions, the magnitude of which represents the probability of finding the particle in that position and the rate of variation of the wave equation gives the velocity of the particle. Therefore given the wave equation at one point of time the wave equation of the particle at a later time can be determined. There is still an element of determinism in this, as one combination of position and velocity is still determinate.
More recent developments in physics have shattered this hope too, for advocates of determinism, as we now know that gravity wraps space-time to extreme levels that there are dimensions of the universe we cannot observe. The last nail on the coffin of determinism came from the proposition of the second law of black hole dynamics which predicted that black holes emit radiations now called Hawking radiations. This was like a correction to the first law which affirmed that the event horizon or the boundary of a black hole cannot decrease. The event horizon is infact a measure of the entropy of the black hole which again is a measure of its mass.
During the postulation of the first law it was believed that the mass and entropy of the black hole cannot decrease as nothing comes out of the black hole. The second law showed that it need not always be so. Black holes do emit radiations at a steady rate. Particles and anti particles emerge from the vacuum fluctuations of space, one of which can enter into a black hole and the other forsaken into empty space. To preserve the law of conservation of energy, one of the particles must possess positive and the other negative energy, equal in magnitude. The negative energy particle - or the virtual particle as it is called- falling into the black hole decreases it’s mass and energy, causing its event horizon to decrease. The real particle on the other hand appears to be radiated by the black hole. What comes out of the black hole therefore is always the same, immaterial of what goes into it. There is no way, even in principle, to determine what exactly falls into the black hole in this case, as the particle is virtual. While in the Schrödinger’s equations one combination of speed and position can be determined, the same in the case of black holes would amount to predicting the nature of a particle – antiparticle pair. It is impossible to determine the nature of the virtual particle and hence the real particle radiated by the black hole too must have an indeterminate nature because the same is dependent on the virtual particle.

Hence our hopes, if any, of an orderly, predictable, controllable and determinate world finally breaks down. To quote Stephen Hawking, “Not only does God play dice with the universe, he is an inveterate gambler too, throwing the dice in places where we cannot see it.”

Does that leave us in a world where we can affirm that our lives are not governed by the position of the stars, where fate is a fad and a life which we can mould by our sheer hard work, determination and will? The future after all, is not predefined.
We should think not, because the future being unpredictable and not pre decided, assures a life where we cannot predict the outcome for any given inputs. There is no one-to-one correspondence between any set of given inputs and outputs. A life of randomness, a world of chaos.

Like biologists describe how small random variations can affect large ecosystems in an unpredictable fashion, all non-linear dynamic systems like the world we live in are chaotic.
Chaotic systems are ones whose outcomes are random. They are extremely sensitive to initial conditions and have an exponential error dissipation which is the cause of their randomness.
Each point in the initial conditions of such a system is arbitrarily closely approximated by other points each of which have a significantly different future trajectory. This sensitivity to initial conditions is called the butterfly effect.
The term butterfly effect was first coined by Edward Lorenz in a paper he presented to the American society for the advancement of science. The paper quite entertainingly proved that a ‘butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can change the weather in Washington DC’. The flapping of the wings represent a small change in the initial conditions which cause a chain of events leading to large scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory leading to a final output, would have been different.

No matter how sincerely we may work to achieve a particular goal, like preparing for a university exam, the chaotic nature of the system shall ensure that the outcome is unpredictable for apparently no other reason than chaos!!.

Yet another dimension to the meaning of life, is regarding the origin of the universe, the development of intelligent life on earth as well as the fate of the universe.
Life can be defined as any ordered system that can constantly sustain, grow and reproduce itself. The second law of thermodynamics maintains that all systems pass from a state of order to disorder and consequently the total entropy of the universe should increase. This is true of the total entropy of the universe. The entropy of a system can however decrease, if it is accompanied by a corresponding increase in the entropy of its surroundings. And this is what happens in a living being. Biological beings have a set of instructions embedded in them that describe how to sustain itself called the genes and an accompanying process of metabolism that carries out these instructions.

But is there anything biological about life? A computer virus for example, can make copies of itself in the memory of a computer and also spread itself. A function similar to biological viruses. They should very much count as life. But what does it speak of man’s nature that the only form of life that we have created is something destructive?

The evidence that we possess, that the universe began in a big bang around 20 million years ago is substantial. Nothing more than a logical deduction of Hubble’s observations. At the moment of the big bang all the matter in the present universe was lumped together into a region of infinite density and zero volume. A singularity. This is a point where all physical laws break down. It becomes impossible for us then, to decide how the universe began because there simply are no laws that we can make use of at the singularity. Even the total mass that was present in the singularity need not be present in the present universe as the law of conservation of mass does not hold at the moment of the big bang. General relativity hence claimed that science would never discover how the universe began.
The classical theories of physics therefore laid open the possibility for a God. That for the universe to evolve in the manner in which it actually did, there would have to be something external to the universe to decide upon how the universe and life began. This need for God in the classical approach was the reason why religious leaders were quick to accept the big bang and singularity.

The classical approach of general relativity however fails at the level of the atom or at small distances as it does not take into account the uncertainty principle. The quantum mechanical approach, the more refined one, however has proved that the universe is a self contained system that does not require an external agency to decide the state of affairs here. Quantum mechanics introduces the concept of imaginary time. (If real time can be represented by the x- axis of a graph, with the positive direction marking the future and the negative direction the past, then imaginary time lies on the perpendicular y- axis). The three directions in space and imaginary time constitute what is called Euclidean space-time.
The no boundary proposal of quantum mechanics proposes that Euclidean space is finite in extent but has no boundaries. Much like the surface of the earth which is finite but has no boundaries. If it had one, we would fall off the surface. The no boundary proposal implies that there would be no singularities in the Euclidean space. Thus there is no point where the laws of science breaks down in imaginary time and the beginnings of the universe could still be pondered over. Knowing the state of the universe in imaginary time makes it possible to predict the state of the universe in real time. Singularities and the big bang would still occur in real time but only as determined by imaginary time. The no boundary proposal henceforth establishes that the universe is a self contained system. The way the universe began in real time would be determined by the state of the universe in imaginary time. The universe began as a single point, an ordinary point of
space-time, not a singularity. The singularity occurs only in real time.

The subsequent expansion after the big bang was in such a manner that, it made life possible. All living things are based on chains of carbon atoms, (not the silicon or sand as implied by the biblical concept) carbon being the only element in the periodic table to possess the property of catenation.
The universe at the moment of the big bang was so hot that matter existed only in the form of protons and neutrons. A minute after the big bang the universe cooled to about a billion degrees centigrade to form the simplest hydrogen atoms. Which explains the abundance of hydrogen in the universe. Further cooling ensured that collisions of neutrons and protons formed helium.
Certain parts of the universe were cooler than others and they collapsed under the influence of gravity to form galaxies and stars. These stars were hotter than the sun and the resulting nuclear fusions ensured the formation of the heavier elements including carbon, oxygen, iron, nitrogen and phosphorous. The cooling of these stars enabled the bonding of these atoms in various patterns to form various molecules, that included amino acids and proteins.
The formation of the DNA, was a significant step in the evolution of life. The remarkable property of DNA is that it is self replicating. The nucleic acids present in the DNA chains can unwind and combine with a similar strand of nucleic acids to form two DNA molecules. This was enough for the earliest forms of life: the viruses. (Some scientists do not classify viruses as living beings, rather place them on the border line dividing the living and the non-living world)
The biological processes of evolution and natural selection ensured the arrival of multicellular organisms and later the fishes, reptiles and the mammals. But in the case of humans, evolution entered a critical stage when we developed the ability to encode information in the form of language, particularly written language.
This marked the beginning of an era where information could be handed down from generation to generation externally in the form of books and not just through the genes. Infact, the amount of information that has been encoded in books is billions of times larger than in the human DNA. The human DNA has around 30,000 genes and a good number of them are redundant or inactive genes. It has been estimated that the human genome records 100 million bits of information, in contrast a university library records about
1 trillion bits of information.
Not only can information be recorded externally, the ability to bring about changes in the information stored in books is of great significance. The information stored in genes on the other hand is quite rigid. We share 99% of our genes with apes, 85% with dogs and 50% with fruit flies. The time that was taken for a 1% change in genes from apes to humans took several million years. The speed at which we can alter the information in books is quite evidently, billion of times faster than in the DNA.
This perhaps explains why there has been no recordable change in the human DNA in the last ten thousand years of human history. The need for evolution through genes does not exist anymore.


This puts us in a very awkward situation. The brain, which is our tool to process this information has evolved only as per the Darwinian time-scale. Thus we are only better off than our cave men ancestors in the fact that we possess information in the form of books externally. The aggressive instincts of cave men such as subjugating or killing other men, taking their women and food, jealousy, anger, hatred, ambition etc are still conspicuous in us. We are far more ahead in terms of the knowledge we possess than what Darwinian evolution permits us to be. We will then have to place our hopes on genetic engineering and other ways to alter the human genome to make us more intelligent and to control our aggressive instincts. The dangers to our survival such as the green house effect, over population etc are looming over us and we need to be more intelligent to counter them.
Let us hope that these forms of life will explore ways to inhabit new regions of the universe to prevent a catastrophic end to the human race. Let us also hope that the rich-poor divide does not serve as the
pre-requisite for who becomes more intelligent and who misses the bus. The redemption of the human race can be meaningful only if it is universal and comprehensive.

The search for a meaning to life thus stands incomplete. We can only sum up the discoveries till date and present the most updated views on the same. But the fact that science has been descending in complexity presents us with new hopes. The future and fate of the universe, though not in our hands, are nevertheless totally comprehensible.

The End