Is God a Cryptographer?

One of the most intriguing books penned by the illustrious Mario Livio asked the provocative question: "Is God a Mathematician?". My 100 years old father read it and discussed it with Professor Livio. Riding on this title I propose the question: "Is God a Cryptographer?"

The question came to mind in my lively discussions about physics. Quite a few readers of my recent article in Applied Physics Research "Negotiating the Darwin Barrier" have stayed their ground, siding with the more common quantum mechanics approach, claiming: "No Hidden Variables" -- there is nothing out there outside the so called "Darwin's Cage". They all bring up Bell's Inequality and deny any possibility that a big beautiful physics is humming out there unexposed to humanity.

It was then when I asked "Is God a cryptographer?"

They were confused by the question and I quickly elaborated: "In cryptography we take a plain message, say the Bible, or the US Constitution, and we encrypt it to show up as perfectly randomized pattern devoid ciphertext. When we spot such a randomized bit string, we treat it as carrying a meaningful message that needs to be decrypted. If we suspect a human transmitter to hide messages in cryptograms, why not give credence the hypothesis that God or Nature does the same?

Come to think about it, it is quite arrogant to say: "I don't see order in this chaos, so no order exists!" Espeially that we have a long history of finding order in apparent chaos. No random-looking bit string can be proven to be random. It is more appropriate to look upon randomness as the edge of knowledge from the point of view of the observer. If the observer sees no pattern, it may be that there is no pattern, or that the pattern has not been unveiled.

Richard Feynman was straight enough to admit what other physicists are hiding: quantum mechanics is carried by sterile math; the physics, the story, the stuff that the math describes is not anything we humans feel comfortable with -- understand.

When you combine this quantum confusion with the logic of the Darwin's Cage, you develop a strong hypothesis that quantum confusion may be the gateway to the new physics anticipated outside this cage (or outside the barrier, to put it differently).

Quantum field theory fits observations much better than any other theory of science -- is the reply. If the math is so complete, so elegant, then to suggest that it leaves big parts of reality outside is preposterous.

To which I say: If you are looking for a maximum point in a function y=f(x), and you find x=x' for which y' =f(x') is a local maximum, you are happy, despite the fact that down the road for x=x" we have y"=f(x") and y" > y'. The whole idea of the Darwin argument is that we have evolved psychologically to be happy with what we learned about reality for the purpose of our survival, and this happiness removes our incentive to search reality further into territories that have nothing to do with human survival.

To refute the "Darwin's Cage" hypothesis one will have to insist that reality had no parts which were irrelevant to the survival prospects for humans and their evolutionary ancestors. This is a demanding assumption. If you drop it, then you must adopt the proposition that those parts of reality which are survival-irrelevant have not triggered any biological sensors, nor any mental tools, which keeps us blind towards their existence. What is more, it keeps us unsuspecting that an unknown body of physics is lurching there outside the mathematical comfort of our Darwinian cage; leading to a natural tendency to take unseriously anyone pointing out this ground-shaking proposition.