The argument comes up far too often.

Morality requires an absolute reference point.  Without God there can be no morals.

But it occured to me today that this parrots an argument made just over a hundred years ago in physics:

Light is a wave and therefore requires a medium to propagate.  Without the aether in interstellar space, there can be no light.

A bit of a background:

Light was postulated by Issac Newton to be particles that flew like tennis balls through the air.  This dominated until the single and double slit experiment showed the existence of diffraction, which could only be explained by a wave theory.  So after James Clerk Maxwell postulated his famous equations, the world decided upon a wave theory of light.

However, waves require something to move in. Just like waves in the ocean require water, waves of light should require something (be it air or glass) to move in.  But there wasn’t anything in space (as far as people could tell).  So how did the light from the sun get to Earth?

This led physicists to postulate an everpresent aether which filled the entire void of space.  This aether would allow the waves to get from the sun to Earth.

However, this aether should cause the speed of light to be different between a beam propagating with the Earth’s rotation versus a beam propagating perpendicular to the rotation.  This should happen because as the Earth goes around the sun it will “drag” some aether with it, this dragged aether will slow light down that’s going into it, but speed it up if it’s going with it (imagine light getting a tail or head wind), but going North-South the light shouldn’t really experience any net difference.  So when they performed very precise experiments to detect the aether, they found nothing!

The solution didn’t come until 1905 when Einstein was studying the photoelectric effect – basically a current is created when a light of a minimum energy is incident on a material.  Einstein postulated that light existed in photons (discrete particles), which solved the aether crisis and won him the Nobel prize (this was more practical than Special Relativity, which he also discovered in the same year, as well as the cause of Brownian Motion).

So what does this have to do with theological arguments about morality?

Basically, my analogy is that people couldn’t understand how light could propagate the void of space without an aether, in much the same way that people can’t understand how morality can exist independant of an absolute objective standard.

It took arguable one of the most brilliant people of the past century to solve the issue of light in space, negating the need for an aether, however, it is arguablly more accessible to understand how morality can arise naturally.

For more on naturalistic ethics, see some of my older posts:

• Why is God Ethical
• Atheist ethics
• Atheist ethics revisted
• Evolution of altruism

In our normal experiences we know that every event is caused by something else. If a window breaks, it happened because a ball went through it, which happened because a kid threw it, and so on.

However, if the history of science teaches us anything, it is that our “normal experiences” have often been wrong.

The Earth is not flat, although it looks pretty flat (especially on the prairies). The Earth moves, although it seems like everything else does. Things tend to stay in motion, even though everything experiences some friction around us and eventually slows down. And not every event has a cause.

An atom can undergo three processes when emitting or absorbing light. First in can experience stimulated absorption, when a photon of light hits an electron in the atom and bumps it to a higher energy level. This is like coming along and picking up a pencil and putting it on a higher shelf – the overall energy is increased. It can also undergo stimulated emission, this is the key to what happens in lasers. A photon comes along, “bumps” the electron (that’s in its excited state) and the electron drops to a lower state, releasing its energy as another photon (1 photon in, 2 photons out). Basically it’s like coming along and knocking the pencil back down to a lower shelf, and as the pencil falls, rather than picking up speed with energy it emits energy in the form of light. These two processes fit our mold of having a nice explainable cause, and there isn’t anything to weird about them.

However, the final process is spontaneous emission. This is when an electron in an excited state, for no reason, drops to a lower state and emits a photon. This is essentially equivalent to a book that’s sitting nicely on a shelf that suddenly falls to the ground. There is no physical cause here!

So what is theoretically happening? The idea is that within the Uncertainty Principle (the idea that we cannot know anything to arbitrary precision) a matter-antimatter pair of particles can spontaneously be created (from nothing!) and can knock that excited electron just enough that it falls to the lower state. This is known as a vacuum fluctuation.

But what does this ultimately mean? Essentially, it is entirely natural that stuff can happen, unpredictably, with absolutely no cause!

But how often does this really occur? It turns out that it happens continuously. The time that an electron can stay in an excited state (without spontaneously emitting) has been measured to be (for some of the longest atoms) only 10 milliseconds. That means that every second there are at least 100 large vacuum fluctuations in the size of a large atom (about a tenth of a nanometer). And many atoms have orders of magnitude shorter lifetimes (often in the nanosecond or 10^-9 range).

So not only can events happen with no cause, but things are happening with no cause more often than they seem to be caused!

So what’s the big deal in the end?

Well it’s not just the emission of radiation from atoms that can have no cause. Since physicists have increased the sensitivities of their astronomical observations, it has lead them to determine that the universe has zero energy (conveniently within a quantum fluctuation).

This leads many to believe that the universe could essentially be nothing more than an uncaused vacuum fluctuation.

As Dr. Victor Stenger puts it: “The universe looks exactly as it would look if there was no God.”

For a more detailed writeup on these ideas, see the Skeptics Guide to the Universe blog post for today.