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| The Cosmic Rabbit Hole—portal to the 0th dimension. This is a whimsical depiction of the primordial gateway that connects the inexplicable roiling sea of emptiness to all the stuff we see and experience. It’s basically a teeny-tiny wormhole; and it’s the single most common and abundant entity in the universe! |
It’s a long story. Part One was more-or-less a preamble. Here in Part Two, we’ll actually take our first steps down the path …
千里之行，始於足下
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” … or more literally translated … “The Journey of a thousand li (里, lǐ—the Chinese ‘mile’, which is now standardized as half a kilometer) starts with the ground beneath your feet.”—Tao-Te Ching (The Classic of ‘The Way’ and its Serene Power), Chapter 64
Song 8:
Let us begin, then, at the very beginning—the ground at our feet—both in terms of human discourse (merging three of the most ancient texts, with commentary), and at the first moment of time—when time itself emerged from the timeless—the Great Cosmic Rabbit Hole.
“In the beginning …” —Genesis 1:1
“… there was neither non-existence nor existence …” —Rig Veda, 10:129
“… The Tao (the ineffable) gave rise to one” (the Tao that can be spoken).
“The one became two ...
(All emergent things seethe with the conflicting properties of Yin and Yang—desperately desiring to endure yet desperately seeking to return to the Womb of their creation. From modern quantum mechanics, this fits the interpretation of the “quantum froth,” detected even in a complete vacuum as a cloud of virtual particle pairs [a particle and its anti-matter counterpart] that are constantly appearing and self-annihilating.)
“... The two became three.
“And the three gave birth to all the things that we find around us.”
—Tao-Te Ching, Chapter 42
When an unusually strong random fluctuation in the ‘ether,’ the ‘void,’ the ‘first Nothing,’ the ‘Tao’ begins to actualize a separation between Yin and Yang, the two opposing forces increasingly clarify and balance; but to keep them apart a third entity is needed. Thus, according to Chinese folklore recorded in the Classic of Mountains and Seas from about the 4th century BCE, there emerged a legendary primordial being named Pan Gu. He hatched from this cosmic Yin-Yang egg brimming with strength and resolve: with 氣 (qì, meaning vital energy).
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| Pan Gu emerging from the Cosmic Egg. The calligraphy at left is just for effect. It’s apparently a very old promotional blurb for an inkstick product—one of the most versatile tools used by ancient Chinese calligraphers and artists. The characters literally say, ‘long life, happiness/good fortune, the news thereof, buttoned or sealed by oil/grease’. The two red stamps seem to say ‘salty’ and ‘sweet’. |
As the macroscopic world materialized, Pan Gu was tasked with keeping the two opposing influences physically separated. Legend says that with his immense strength, he stood holding up the sky and keeping it away from the ground. Each day the sky grew ten feet higher, the earth stretched ten feet wider, and Pan Gu grew ten feet taller; and this continued for eighteen thousand years!
The math from this 2500-year-old legend provides an absolutely astounding co-incidence [or prediction?]. A distance of ten feet per day accumulated for 18,000 years is virtually precisely half the distance around the Earth at the equator—a number that is accurate to five significant figures! That’s an accuracy that is as good or better than most of the predictions of modern quantum field theory and General Relativity!
We’ll be exploring the way modern physics describes these same events (the expansive growth of our universe from the infinitesimal ‘Cosmic Egg’ to a whole universe) in much more detail in a little while.
Song 9:
But back to that ground beneath our feet. This thing that we call ‘beginning’ is a profound mystery. What is this ‘act’ of coming into existence—of actualizing or ‘materializing’—of translating from ineffable to accessible—and how can it happen?
This is not likely to be entirely a science question, though science has a point of view—the virtual particle pairs that endlessly poke their noses out of the Rabbit Hole for just a fleeting instant. But science is silent about where these particle pairs came from. That’s a philosophical, even a Spiritual question. For the full picture, the ancient texts that address the question manage to do as good a job as science does.
The Judeo-Christian Bible just presupposes an eternal ‘everywhere’ God. My dubious alter-ego, Bad Axe Jack from the Mean Boys’ Pit will tell you that’s all a body needs—nice and comfortable—easy as fallin’ off a log. He has a lot of good company, though everybody seems to have their own personal definition of 'God'. As a way of talking about our origin, different versions may be more or less useful, but, in general, the idea is not wrong.
The Rig Veda digs a little deeper. It both clarifies and muddies the philosophical picture by describing a shadowy “phase change” that reveals the “not nonexistent.”
Finally, the Tao-Te Ching takes the ball and runs with it. It approaches the question with all the subtlety of our best scientific theories (the weirdness of quantum mechanics), but with none of the boundaries that science establishes for itself. It is fully prepared to address the underlying mystery about ‘what’s behind the veil.’ And that is why our Song of Everything (what you’re reading at the moment) is going to work from this point of view.
As the reader may have noted in Part One, the Song of Everything is big on dividing things into threes. There are actually three points of view about our deep origin that cover all the possibilities.
1.) Stuff always existed. “It’s turtles all the way down.”
2.) Stuff came into existence without cause, because the process of cause-and-effect itself emerged with it. This is not so much a ‘beginning’ as a ‘becoming.’
3.) Stuff doesn’t exactly exist at all. Never did. It’s all some kind of really trippy dream … an illusion … a hallucination.
That last view doesn’t seem to stand up to scrutiny because … well … here we are, you and I, looking and feeling pretty darn real as we hang out and “talk story” as Hawaiian-born natives like to call it.
But hold on. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It may mean that ‘scrutiny’ or ‘analysis’ aren’t the right tools. It’s a hallucination, dude! Relax and soak it in because eventually it’s going to just go ‘poof!’
By comparison, the first view seems rock solid, straightforward and simple; and yet it is exceedingly dissatisfying to the human psyche, and I argue that it cannot work in a real physical world. It invokes an infinity, which is impossible to reconcile with experience (including the most rigorous and probing scientific enquiries, observations, and theories of the stuff we know).
Imagine holding the end of a string that does not have another end. It extends into that cosmic rabbit hole and it just goes on forever.
Well, first of all, how do you know this ‘fact’ about the other end? Second of all, what properties must such a thing have in order to satisfy the definition of not having another end? Third, generalizing the problem into an abstract concept, it is called “infinite regress,” and you’ll note that the term is a complete cop-out because it is a tautology.
How can something that happened an infinite time in the past have any relevance? If God has been piling turtles on top of one another forever, who or what created this hopelessly obsessive-compulsive God? How can infinite stuff fit into a finite, observable universe, and if it can’t, then where in the bleep is it, actually?
Sigh … Eternity, eh? Fine. Let’s set this brain-frying idea aside for a while—leave the one-ended string out on the porch and come inside to a much cozier, far more interesting problem.
The middle view has us settling into a special way of thinking that is both the easiest, laziest, most comfortable way of looking at things, yet also the most profound. Stuff comes into being (emerges) carrying its own built-in rulebook with it. More properly, the things that pop out of the Cosmic Rabbit Hole are largely defined by the rules they obey—rules that address how the given thing might interact with other things.
When something pops into existence, Quantum Mechanics tells us that it’s usually a pair of Yin-Yang opposites. Random chance then picks another thing that pops out of the Rabbit Hole to interact with one or the other of the initial pair before they self-annihilate, and if the combination works … well, the Cosmic Egg has hatched and Pan Gu is born! We’ve lifted a foot and taken the first actual step on our journey!
Song 10:
In simplest non-poetic terms, that first interaction that avoided a quick annihilation did so because its rulebook gave it an *internal reference frame* that differentiated it from the realm it came from—the deep recesses of the ‘Cosmic Rabbit Hole’, which we’ve also described by other names (the ‘Veil’, the ‘Great Empty Everything’, the ‘Huge First Nothing’, etc.), none of which, the Tao-Te Ching reminds us, are going to be adequate.
But this differentiation that had to happen (if there was, indeed, a beginning) between what emerged and the ‘place’ it emerged from is the source of potential valuable clues about that other ‘place’.
On this side of the Rabbit Hole, we have our universe, and the nice cozy couch that we are sitting on as we chat about it. How might that be different from what’s on the other side?
The description that Professor Thomas H. Huxley provided us in Part One, is probably worth repeating at this point.
“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, …”
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| Pencil drawing of T. H. Huxley done by his daughter Marian Collier |
That other side is infinite, illimitable, and as physicist and luminary Freeman Dyson put it in a quote from a 2004 article that we are also going to want to revisit a few times, “inexhaustible”
“Gödel’s theorem implies that pure mathematics is inexhaustible. No matter how many problems we solve, there will always be other problems that cannot be solved within the existing rules. […] Because of Gödel’s theorem, physics is inexhaustible too. The laws of physics are a finite set of rules, and include the rules for doing mathematics, so that Gödel’s theorem applies to them. ”
We will explain Gödel’s theorem in considerable detail in later discussions. That part doesn’t matter at the moment. The point that these great minds (and a number of others, including Stephen Hawking) are hinting at is that the other side of the Rabbit Hole contains a completely unlimited ‘library’ or ‘storehouse’ of possible phenomena that might pop out … and yet we just needed two of them to start our journey.
In order to make a universe as complex as the one we find that we live in, how many more times has it tapped into this reservoir? How much trial-and-error testing of various ‘reagents’ and ‘catalysts’ might have been involved before producing the final version that we see before us?
Did it all happen at once, right at the beginning?
Why in the name of blazes would we believe that???
Song 11:
Now we’ll go back and take an even closer look at that first step. Out of the gateway (the Rabbit Hole) came two entities that interacted, and, in doing so, found that they could work together to fashion a combined rulebook that avoided a quick self-annihilation as they saw the situation from inside their own reality.
Many kinds of rulebooks with this feature could be out there. In our case the Easter Bunny rulebook didn’t seem to work as well as something resembling the virtual particle pairs from Quantum Mechanics, but we don’t understand the full underlying rules for either of them; and that is a HUGE, under-appreciated clue. It is telling us, loud and clear, that understanding the rules is not required (and conceivably not even possible) in order to participate in the game.
Indeed, it may be telling us something far deeper—that the rules are not ‘preset patterns’ about how to function that are somehow residents of their own abstract realm (some version of the school of Philosophy known as Platonism) or were somehow all established ‘in bulk’ right at the beginning.
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| Plato (428-423 – 348-347BCE), one of antiquity's most renowned Greek philosophers, believed that the fundamental nature of the world was described by unchanging abstract ‘Forms’ such as mathematical objects and their relationships, which are not invented by us, but discovered using reason and logic. Image is a detail from The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, 1509 |
It seems far more likely that the process of finding ways to function—navigating the path that got us here—has been telling the rulebook what to say!
This fundamental perspective can be expressed in a radical statement:
“It’s Strong Emergence all the way down.”
“Strong Emergence” is a pretty technical term. It describes a view of the world that the majority of today's philosophers and physicists deny (perhaps because it fundamentally undermines so many of our cherished beliefs about the fundamental solidity, well-ordered-ness, and self-consistency of reality). The meaning of it and its implications will be discussed at length as we go along. For now, we’ll use an analogy. We’ll return to the Turtles.
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| “The Hindoo Earth” from Popular Science Monthly magazine, 1877. |
Hindu mythology has a World Turtle supporting World Elephants that hold up the corners of the Earth. The turtle herself is not standing on another turtle, but on some kind of ‘ground’ that successfully holds her up. This does not need to be any kind of bedrock—no hard and fast foundation. It only has to usefully hold her up. How far might she have traveled before she found this “Huxley’s Islet” that manages to hold her up? How many tinctures, potions, spells, influences, elixirs might she have tested before she found a combination that gave her such astounding strength?
Her sisters and brothers might not have found such useful, steady ground, or the right combination of powers and forces, so the worlds they were holding up are gone. That ground and the power to stand on it are metaphors for the composite of all the governing laws and constants of physics, known and unknown, that characterize our universe; and the evidence strongly suggests that these laws and constants are not unique.
Most of today’s scientists and philosophers seem to prefer the notion of ‘preset patterns’ to the laws and constants, as if they are the things that nature is required to work with. The term ‘Brute Fact’ is sometimes invoked when, for example, we ask why the mass of the electron has the particular value that it has (which is, by the way, 0.0005485799090441 ± 0.0000000000000097 unified atomic mass units. With that small amount of uncertainty, the mass of the electron is one of the most accurately measured fundamental physical constants in all of reality).
Why does it have that mass and not ... say ... 42? Nobody knows. But the real complete answer is that this accuracy only applies to the comfortable middle realm between the big and the small. It is an approximation that breaks down more and more the closer you try to actually look at an electron; and ultimately it breaks down completely at the entrance to the Cosmic Rabbit Hole.
And so, our Song of Everything utterly rejects any notion that there is a prescribed ‘set pattern’ and sees no need for one.
The notion that the rules could have been different, and, indeed, were different when what became our reality was a simpler place (earlier in its history) is one of the fundamental features of our story.
To rephrase and reinforce: rules that work best get selected. Rules that work less well fall by the wayside and are eventually forgotten—completely lost—even though they may have been required to produce the structures that came before. Those laws that once governed the way the world worked have been abandoned and utterly lost. There was never a unique path from early times to today’s world, and so there’s probably no way to ever reconstruct the exact path behind. And this includes the laws of physics—all the way down to the origin of the universe.
As a more accessible example, think of the early band of Homo sapiens embarking on their journey out of Africa. New challenges met us every step of the way. This honed our skills at pathfinding—discovering new rules to ensure our survival in the new environment. There was no more swinging from fig trees and eating the fruit all day. No more figs at all. No more trees, in fact. (This was probably because of climate change—the coming and going of ice ages.) The rules about how to live in a fig-tree-filled jungle didn’t matter anymore, and so they were forgotten, and eventually completely lost.
The bigger-picture bottom-line of all this: Whatever their provenance, the rules are not fixed absolutes because the physical world has no absolutes. They’re malleable, dynamic, ever-changing, and yet deeply rooted. The rules governing our present-day existence have been tested and tweaked and refined for an unfathomably long time—billions of years at least.
Meanwhile, humanity’s oldest surviving knowledge is not more than a few tens of thousands of years old, and we’re doing fine. Does all that deeply rooted change really matter to us here on our comfortable couch?
Not likely.
Song 12:
Okay. Let’s take stock of where we stand.
Science has had great success in sleuthing out a lot of the present-day rules that underlie our existence. Its successes are mind-boggling. Just look at the above clear image of a baby Easter Bunny fetus in a Cosmic Rabbit Hole that was recently taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Okay, it’s actually a strange star called Apep that is spewing out shells of dust and gas.)
Our Senses seem to tell us that the rules are cast in concrete. The vast bulk of them are so deeply ingrained into the fabric of our world that it doesn’t seem reasonable to think they could change.
And so, our Spirit (our natural frame of mind) tells us that we might as well accept the rules on faith.
Every time you sit down on your comfortable sofa, you don’t worry about the Pauli Exclusion Principle that underlies the solidity of matter, or about Stellar Nucleosynthesis, without which we wouldn’t have the elements that the couch and your body are made of, or about the warp of space-time described by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity that is going to let you settle your bones firmly down on the cushions.
For every practical application—every situation we encounter in life—asking why the rules are the way they are is nothing but a big waste of time and energy. Worse, if the rules themselves are nothing but a cobbled-together best working playbook (and the bulk of the evidence seems to point in this direction), then talking about them authoritatively would be flat-out impossible.
This is perhaps the most fundamental verse of the Song of Everything. Note well its infinite depth, its Yin-Yang tension, its profound paradox. It tells no truth yet it represents truth in its entirety. It can make your head spin, or it can be a call to lay down all your burdens and just …
Relax! Everything is under control. It’s not all on your shoulders. Vast have been the preparations, the history, the trial-and-error testing, that bring us to today. For your convenience, the linens have been washed, the soap dispenser refilled, the pillows have been plumped, and the bed has been made. Enjoy your stay!
Song 13:
Yep. Lucky Song 13 seems to tell us that the first 12 Songs don’t really matter much. Crazy, huh?
Answers are seldom bigger than questions (invoking Huxley’s Islet from Song 10), and yet questions do not guarantee answers. Probing this Yin-Yang tension is not something that most of us need or want to do—it’s for a special breed of curiosity-seeker, and even for them it’s perhaps mostly for its own sake.
The Big-P Paradox of existence says that the ‘Cosmic Rabbit Hole’ out of which stuff emerged, does not even properly exist. It can’t be queried (by ‘why’ questions).
Think of the annoying precocious little kid who keeps asking ‘why’ to every answer you give her. The only sure way to end the infinite regress of “why’s” is to answer with a question of your own: “Well, young prodigy, exactly why are you asking why? What if I stuck you with the burden of answering my “why’s” until the universe comes to an end? Would you like that?”
Chapter 1 of the Tao-Te Ching covers this ground so much more eloquently:
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao
The name that can be named is not the true Name
The nameless is the beginning of the found path
Naming is the origin of particular things along the Way
Free from desire, you experience the ineffable
Caught in desire, you see only manifestations
Yet the unspoken and its manifestations arise from the same source
Differing only by the attempt at naming; this is the great mystery.
[Note the precise characterization of the as-yet-unresolved “measurement problem” in quantum mechanics, revealed 2500 years before science recognized it!]
Mystery upon mystery is the gateway into the streaming wonder of existence.”
The Song of Everything has been unapologetically proceeding down one chosen pathway that seems well-enough marked that it can get us through this gateway. It’s an individual choice, to be sure; but as we delve into its physical detail (the specifics of what has been described as the ‘Cosmic Egg’ of combined entities that managed to avoid quick annihilation in Song 9), I’ll present some evidence for those trail-markers—clues gleaned from taking a step back and seeing the known physics in a bigger frame of reference.
The first step is to revisit, one last time, that enigmatic unnamable: the Tao that cannot be spoken. I’ve already dubbed it the “Great Empty Everything.” It could just as easily be called the “Womb of the Mama Easter Bunny;” but there’s a science name for it too: “The Vacuum” (with a capital V). This is distinct from ‘a vacuum’ with a little ‘v.’ The Big-V version is not empty space but the lack of space (and any other attribute). Scientists who drill down into the small-scale (the quantum mechanical) characteristics of the little-v vacuum from their comfortable couches here in the observable universe have provided us with clues about this bigger picture. Most of them don’t even realize the significance of the clues. The key is to re-envision the thought space.
An empty little-v vacuum in space-time (which is the all-pervading currency, or substrate, of our nice comfortable universe) includes in its regime “quantum fields” that are only described by mathematical equations that have no clear physical interpretation. Yet these fields actualize strange shadow-entities called “virtual particles.” A careful look at the physics shows that they are considered nothing but useful tools for visualizing the math. Their physical properties can never be measured, yet there are loads of oft-repeated physics experiments that prove, with no lingering reasonable doubt, that the physical effects of the “virtual particles” are real and significant. Here is not the place to delve into detail of the hard physics, but for those who need confirmation of the importance of these shadow entities, check out the Lamb Shift and the Casimir Effect.
What’s important here is to go the next step beyond. What happens in the little-v vacuum that we have access to via our universe’s internal reference frame, ought to (by re-envisioning the thought space) be a “particular manifestation” of a more fundamental underlying Big-V Vacuum—one that has three vital attributes.
First, it is not dependent on being observed, same as any quantum field in the Everettian interpretation—again I’m using jargon in order to be accurate, but it’s not central to the point here.
Second, it is not obligated to manifest anything physical, let alone our particular universe.
Third, and most vital, it is free to manifest Anything physical—free to accommodate mergers or interactions between ‘virtual particles’ in the way we see virtual particles interacting with our observed world; and those interacting entities can have any degree of complexity—there is no law to prevent it. Easter Bunnies are NOT ruled out. In general, these interacting things are allowed to develop into what we might call self-replicating ‘tumors’ (of which Easter Bunnies and our particular universe are just two examples). Moreover, the Big-V Vacuum remains free to completely and utterly ignore any such entities/tumors that contaminate its dominion—free to function identically whether such self-sustaining ‘cancers’ do or do not exist.
Here is the gateway—the Cosmic Rabbit Hole—a lawless shadow realm outside of time and space, lacking causality—neither caused nor causing, lacking ‘being’ (ontology)—neither not-non-existent nor not-existent, physically empty but not physically irrelevant.
The dry science description of the big-V Vacuum has three parts:
One: It is a random base state (a jargon term meaning that it stays, on average, at the lowest energy state that is possible to have, as any good vacuum should).
Two: it exhibits effectively infinite entropy (another jargon term that just means that it can't contain any information and is incapable of having any physical effect on anything except by quantum weirdness).
Three: it is inextricably linked via sub-Planck-Length wormholes (the Cosmic Rabbit Hole) to every particle in our universe (Planck Length is yet another jargon term for a length so short that everything we know is bigger than that. It's a quantum space scale so small that trying to look at it is physically impossible because any way you try to focus some sort of beam to look at it has to concentrate so much energy that the whole shebang just collapses into a Black Hole. I’ll skip trying to explain wormholes because popular descriptions have pretty well familiarized most of the general public with the concept. Just know that the wormholes we’re talking about here are so tiny that they are not burdened by the sketchy problems or paradoxes, such as negative energy, that bigger-scale ones—that you might hope to travel through—are known to have).
Here is the Tao—the silent, always present unnamable entity underlying Everything—the beginning of our story.
Song 14:
We posit that this Big-V Vacuum is what gave rise to the peculiar space-time that is peculiar to our universe, and to its peculiar rules of causality. The appearance of our universe was random, spontaneous, and without cause. Big-V herself was not altered by our appearance at all, though maybe other things in her ineffable realm might be …
She can allow (is not prohibited from allowing) any of a much broader range of things to jump into existence, and that is potentially important.
As mentioned in Song 13, these other things can be Anything and they represent the ‘library’ of possible effects or entities that our universe could have tapped into as it developed and evolved. They’re not restricted to the few selected, known things that our current universe, so far, has been able to interact with and has found useful.
Yet among the things produced was (obviously) a variety of Somethings, with all their complex accoutrements, both those that have been recognized by science and those that are not (yet) understood, that have cobbled together the universe we know and love.
What were those first Somethings? Science has not acknowledged/recognized that it has penetrated to this depth, yet there are a few pretty clear clues (trail-markers) that could point the way.
If you start from scratch (which is exactly what this Song of Everything is attempting to do), and if you are tasked with producing the world we live in, isn’t the simplest way to go the most likely?
Just throw all the possible entities that might come out of the Rabbit Hole onto a huge vibrating table, like pieces of a zillion-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with a zillion different shapes and a zillion possible ways that each piece might fit with others.
Start the table vibrating, and then just settle back on your couch and watch—no plan, no design, no restrictions. Let the stuff shuffle around, and see what combines and stays stuck together.
Be patient. This is no 'Easter Bunnies pounding randomly on a keyboard' until they successfully type Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It’s a lot more sophisticated and a lot more complicated than that! Stay tuned for details in Part Three
How long will it take? Wrong question. Time is just one of the potential attributes that some of the pieces might bring into being. You have all the time you need, locked up inside those pieces, just waiting to be sprung loose!
What are the first pieces that might stick together that could lead in the direction of our universe? Well, pieces that start the clock ticking are obviously involved. You need time and you’ve got to have something to do the ticking to measure it, which means you need matter in motion through space. Lots of requirements right from the start! It already seems far too complicated to just randomly fall together.
But there does seem to be a preferred way that we can proceed one step at a time; and physics has provided some significant clues that might point to it (though, as already said, most physicists probably don’t realize it).
The big reveal has to come in the form of deep Physics Jargon again. I’ll throw out the terms … won’t explain them here. You’ll have to stay tuned for Part Three!
1.) The Asymptotic Freedom of the Strong Force and a pathway to it in General Relativity, via Quadratic Gravity.
2.) Non-locality as demonstrated to exist via Nobel-Prize-winning experimental confirmation of Bell’s Theorem. What Einstein ridiculed as “Spooky action at a distance” has proven to be reality.
3.) The Hierarchy Problem and the failure of ‘Renormalization’ at UV length scales.
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