Prologue: The Quicksand at the Foundation of Reality

Here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters, our bold mission is to explain all of reality, existence, life, their meaning and purpose, where we came from, and where we’re going. It’s what we’re calling a Song of Everything. It’s not a ‘Theory of Everything’ because it’s broader and deeper in scope than a scientific theory—far more all-encompassing.

We’re after the really, really Big Picture, and yet we argue that this quest can be as comfortable as sitting on a sofa, sipping on a favorite beverage, and relaxing. There is no pressure or angst necessary, even when considering the deepest mysteries that have confounded the world’s most capable thinkers.

These deep thinkers love their work, so they don’t recognize what we see as a significant problem: They’re thinking too intensely—applying too much elaboration—with too much laser-sharp focus on nuance and detail. It is like adding straws to a camel’s back, or adding too many blocks to a tower. It is our claim that they’ve gone well beyond the comfortable bounds of common sense—piling heavier and heavier burdens on a foundation of reason that wasn’t made to handle such specialization. The practical result: the ground these thinkers build upon in order to take their stands (their axioms—the starting rules) is quicksand—completely unstable.

Quicksand has a notorious attribute—the harder you struggle to get out, the quicker you sink in, get swallowed up, and disappear.

If you sit back on your couch, pop open your cool one, and relax, you’ll live a long, happy life and never sink even an inch into that quagmire.

How can we make such a blanket, global claim that philosophers and scientists and mathematicians and the like are starting their quests on ground that is not actually firm? It’s not an outrageous claim to make at all. The most astute of the deep thinkers readily admit this themselves. As long as 100 years ago, logicians (we’ll drop the name of Kurt Gödel here and point to the year 1931) even succeeded in rigorously proving that this is inevitable, though others will push back, saying that … no … such a proof doesn’t apply to their particular field of study.

We ask: where is the boundary beyond which logic does not apply? The simple answer is … the quicksand. The logicians have used logic to identify where logic fails.

But there is that camp that will never be convinced, and anyone is welcome to join them in their ongoing struggles to find responses—to fashion localized ‘life rafts,’ to imagine elaborate scaffolds, to venture onto temporary steppingstones and the like—looking for ways to evade the quicksand.

All this may sound ‘anti-intellectual,’ and in a sense it is, but calling it that completely misses the point. For at least a century, the human mind has found itself incapable of absorbing all the useful knowledge and wisdom that exists. We are swallowed up in an intellectual era of deep specialization. It is not even remotely possible for one mind to understand the workings at the frontier of every subject. The mission of our Comfortable Universe/Song of Everything project is to help us pull back to within a comfortable framework—to recognize the practical working boundaries that can be identified in all fields and applied to everyday life.

A few quick examples of what we mean by this:

First, the field of pure mathematics underwent a major crisis at the end of the 19th century, the result of which was a new formal structure called “Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory with the Axiom of Choice.” That is the standard ‘foundation’ accepted by most modern mathematicians. This new foundation has both too much and too little power. It has far too much to bother with, even for most working mathematicians, let alone for the typical work-a-day world citizen. Yet it does not have enough to encompass the deepest problems. It is a ‘life raft’ in a sea of quicksand.

The same is true for the physical world, where Newton’s laws of physics were overturned early in the 20th century by Einstein’s General Relativity and by the Quantum Mechanics revolution. By the late 20th century, we had an effectively complete working model of particle physics and another for Cosmology, both known as ‘Standard Models.’

Here, also, the theories are far too powerful for most practical uses. We don’t need to understand particle physics in order to cook a perfect soft-boiled egg (a pursuit which has its own high-end specialists!) We don’t need the Standard Model of Cosmology to figure out what time the sun will rise tomorrow. And yet these Standard Models are built on a whole array of simplifications and ad-hoc assumptions. Here again, the specialists have fashioned exquisite scaffolding to keep us above the quagmire that we find at the smallest scales and have built ‘effective’ steppingstones on which we can safely tread only lightly, never putting too much weight on them (working only within low energy limits, for example).

Yes, our Song of Everything embraces some distinctive views and approaches. We consider it a philosophical and naturalist perspective, and we attempt to be rigorous and precise, yet your host, though holding a Doctor of Philosophy degree (a PhD), is an amateur in these fields—a 77-year-old retired NASA research Atmospheric Scientist. Because of that, many professionals and specialists in those fields are likely to dismiss our position out of hand … Still, we always seek their guidance and strive to be up to date with current research.

We are seekers of wisdom—the kind of broad-scoped wisdom that can encompass … Everything … yet remain fully accessible to one (diligent) human mind.

To start down that path, step zero, the very ground beneath our feet, finds us standing firmly—not on solid ground, but on a question:

Where does wisdom lie?

The modern English language provides us with this wonderful foundational tension—a nearly perfect conflict—right here at the very beginning.

Here are the two directions toward understanding. Yin and Yang. Which way to go? Forward toward truth, or backward toward eliminating falsehood?

We chose the words ‘wisdom’ here, rather than ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’ because such a word suggests more careful consideration. And that’s exactly what we seek. Our quest is rooted in the love of wisdom—the very meaning of the word ‘Philosophy’ in ancient Greek—and its pursuit.

But wisdom itself requires a closer look. It comes in a trinity of forms, and we’ll be seeking a balance among them.

There is the practical and emotional wisdom of Common Sense—what Aristotle called “Phronesis.”

There is the theoretical wisdom that pursues understanding through reason and logic, in which Science is rooted.

And there is the intuitional wisdom, which each of us is born with (its genetic element) and continually grow into (by processing the environment that we navigate). This is our unique and distinctive individual Spirit—the biggest picture of our personality. It necessarily incorporates the culture in which we are embedded, and that is usually associated with Religions or faith traditions. These provide common elements, often called ‘Spiritual’ that guide the individual, but ultimately each of us interprets our environment in our own unique way.

Where do each of these three forms of wisdom lie?

Your host, Dr. Pete, the CEO and sole employee here at Comfortable Universe, NLC*, pursued a career in physical science. And so, establishing that as an obvious bias right up front, we choose to start down one of the six possible general paths here defined. We choose the dual paths of Science—highlighting what Science has shown us, yet also systematically exploring the sometimes-unrecognized links among areas where Science can’t, or hasn’t yet, provided answers. What Science has taken shots at but missed may be the greatest unexplored territory we will cover.

*(a Non-Legal No Liability Corporation—incorporated only in the state of Euphoria)

But always we will seek grounding along the other four paths. The intended usefulness of this quest is in its ecumenical scope—encompassing what we’ll call Big-P squared: the Biggest Possible Big Picture.

And in that vein, here is our chosen first step today. We ask:

Where is truth if not in physical experience (an observed interaction—such as a Scientific experiment) interrogated (Sensed) by a participant and then represented in a model (an outcome) within the participant’s perspective (Spirit)?

Can there be any meaning to a ‘fact’ without this trinity: an event, an entity to define it, and a language in which the definition is posed?

Consider, then, this trinity of universals:

The Physical Realm
(The Infinity of time, space, and everything contained therein … all in one block—everything that ‘Flat Physicalism’ recognizes as existing.)

Oneness
(The assemblage of potential points of reference—of ‘beginnings’—each of which differs from all others—minds, perspectives—the Infinity of distinct entities capable of interacting with others.)

... and (in honor of Pi Day 2026, the day this was posted) ...

The realm of Abstract Objects
(The Infinity of non-causal descriptive entities: ideas, generalizations, languages, etc., etc. Even the categories here are infinite.)

The above trinity is intended to contain Everything. Everything. Full stop.

Nothing is left out.

Let us rephrase that far more carefully. “Nothing” is not given its own separate place among these universals, but is the only entity that resides in all three—the physical vacuum, a primordial Big-V Vacuum (which we style as “The One” from the Tao Te Ching) with its “I have no point of view” point of view, and the simple abstract conception of the Empty Set.

Symbol for the Empty Set—the abstract object that represents Nothing—with its inevitable Yin-Yang nature embedded within.

Can more than one of these be primal—the launch point, the lynchpin, the foundation of truth?

Each of them has its highly respected proponents. But the game here is rigged, isn’t it? Our Song of Everything espouses a distinctive point of view. We got to pose the question; and we used the advantage to structure the wording ‘just so’ and to thereby suggestively put one of the three in the middle.

Now … the careful reader will have noted some strategically placed paradoxes within the above discussion:

Wisdom lies.

Nothing is left out.

Logic proves that logic fails.

The “I have no point of view” point of view.

We stand firmly, not on solid ground, but on a question.

This leads us, finally, to the meat of this post: To our essential point of departure. AXIOM ZERO—the Unassailable Primacy of Paradox (or Antinomy).

Patch crafted by the author, hand-stitched in the early 1970's

AXIOM 0: History: Originally, back in the late 1960’s I named this “The Paradox Axiom” and simply, informally stated it as: “Paradox is the Essence of the Universe.” Upon continued casual thought, over many years I assembled an informal lexicon of example paradoxes. On 24 November 2013, I began to formalize the philosophy by posting a discussion entitled “Of Paradox – Huxley’s Islet” here on my pjwetzel.com blog.

AXIOM 0: Alternative names: A more descriptive and evocative name is the “Self-Negating Axiom.” Perhaps it could also be called the “Everything is Nothing – Nothing is Everything Axiom;” but our current preference is simply the “Big-P Axiom.” The latter refers to both a putative overarching Paradox landscape (Paradox with a capital P) and to the Biggest Possible Big Picture that is attainable within such a landscape.

AXIOM 0 fundamentally asserts that an overarching Paradox landscape is the one and only ‘fundamental or foundational thing.’ It is to be preferred over others, such as God, because it is the minimal possible entity (Axiom) required to be taken on faith in order to launch a systematic ‘search’ for ‘truth.’ It is necessary (fundamental) because our first step into a rigorous interrogation finds that the world (“reality”) admits nonsense statements such as the Liar Paradox (“This Statement is False”). By self-reference (by definition), such a landscape defies both proof and negation. It defies interrogation in general—it is foundational because it is illimitable, and can be conjectured to be a global, robust ‘origin and destination’ for all possible enquiry—all interrogation of the world. It is where the ‘buck stops,’ so to speak. To wit:

The program of the Big-P ‘truth-seeker’—the ‘pathfinder’—is to understand the complete composite picture of the world, known as “reality,” in as robust and objective a manner as is possible—to build a Theory of Everything, or in more general terms, a Story, a Worldview, or a “Song of Everything” to which they, or some consensus of a group of them, consider Comfortable. Their paths of inquiry necessarily go beyond pure reason and science because of the following sequential argument:

1. All reality is experience.
2. All experience is ultimately rooted in (can be traced back to) the physical world (flat physicalism).
3. All experience is emergent. (This applies all the way down to the ‘perspective’ of an individual fundamental physical particle, which is contingent on an interaction—decoherence—in order to extract it from its quantum vagueness.)
4. All emergent entities are approximate.  All models describing them are also necessarily and appropriately approximate— ‘fuzzy around the edges.’
5. Scientific, mathematical, and philosophical models of the physical world are unavoidably rooted in experience (no rigorous objective, observer independent perspective—model—can be both complete and possessed of no unprovable statements—Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems).  The best mathematical representations of the world are not perfect abstract structures, but well-crafted approximations.

Current best formal statement of AXIOM 0: All propositions (all models of experience that attempt to characterize what we call reality), including this one, are rooted in Antinomies—as defined in the German Language—contradictions that can be rigorously proven within the framework of a formal system and which thus indicate an [irresolvable, intrinsic] error in the conception of the rules of inference or the axioms of that system.

Before ending this discussion, we’ll open the discussion of more of the basic axioms on which we build our Song of Everything. There will be much more to come on this very foundational list. This is just the beginning of a sketch:

AXIOM 1: Physical law governs everything (Flat physicalism). There are no supernatural (or abstract) layers that can usefully interact with the physical layer. They can attempt to describe physical reality, but no causal connection can be proven. Nevertheless, the recognition of a minimal, virtual, inaccessible layer is necessary by AXIOM 0, and it is necessary to take this on faith. It cannot be proven. AXIOM 0 demands complete (or intrinsic) humility. No law is bedrock. No absolutes are physical. All discovered laws are approximations. All useful physical laws are flexible and subject to modifications (adjustments).

AXIOM 1A: This leads to the important corollary: physical laws are subject to downward causal pressures (Strong Emergence) from large-scale (complex) systems, such that the laws that originated those systems can be lost, and might no longer be retrievable.

AXIOM 2: Censorship limits abound in our universe (and in our ways of observing and experiencing it); and they are unavoidable. They’re the comfortable guard-rails—very sturdy and well maintained. But some of our useful physical laws transcend them, and these are windows into a far wider functioning existence that helps explain the origin and nature of what we observe and perhaps points to ‘places’ that we can strive to ‘go’ as our understanding advances.

AXIOM 3: There is a ‘Nirvana’ where the human mind becomes free of physical burdens and attachments.  It is a selfless condition and feels pure and perfect; and each and every one of us has experienced it and can build our mental powers to experience it more often.  Just as with other deep specializations, our Song of Everything recognizes an approachable element.  No training in Zen and meditation is required.  Such specialization distills the experience but does not create some kind of exotic new brain structure.  Building a good, balanced, comfortable life enables us to reach the same state, but without the ascetic restrictions.  To wit:

AXIOM 4:  Being human is to be, first and foremost, an individual mind deeply embedded in complex social structures, all within the physical guard-rails our universe has set up.  The firm foundation for us is the mind’s power.  To maximize that power, we work toward a secure physical base—health, basic needs (food, shelter, a safe and nurturing community)—but all the while paying attention to that power: the “mind-enterprise.”  Learn and grow the arts of self-affirmation (“I’m doing a good job”) and critical exploration (“my mind-enterprise work is never finished”).  Focus your life on what you do well and on expanding that.  Quarantine the negative (‘Evil’ of all descriptions) and give such things no oxygen.  We are capable of an existence that is *MORE* solid, more satisfying, and closer to perfection than the mysterious universe that houses us!

Song 25: The Long Haul through the Great Cosmic Desert

The Atacama Desert of northern Chile

—a stand-in for our Song of Everything’s Great Cosmic Desert, which encompasses a range of scales equivalent to the difference between a single atom and a Great Blue Whale—across which science can tell us practically nothing.  One thing seems certain, though, based on what we observe today: as we cross this vast trackless landscape, we pick up a whole lot of baggage along the way.

Our Comfortable Universe Song of Everything’s story of how our Universe began has reached the point where it begins to obliquely intersect with, or becomes parallel with, the earliest things that the science of Cosmology can detect—the end of the epoch of Inflation. What science knows about that time is sketchy at best. It is a vast stretch of mostly unknown time and physical processes—if knowledge were rain, this would be one of the driest deserts that we’ll need to cross.

The gap between the end of Inflation and the ‘symmetry breaking’ event that produced the physical system that governs today’s universe is a vast seventeen orders of magnitude in space scales within which we have no touchstones—no known processes, no known particles. Translating this gap in space scales to our macroscopic world, it is the difference between the size of an atom and the size of a Great Blue Whale—the largest living thing on Earth. It is as if we knew nothing at all about the whale’s internal structure other than that it was made of a big mess of atoms swarming and sloshing around. No molecules. No chemistry. No DNA. No cells. No known rules to organize the cells into bones, muscles, organs, or any kind of structure at all within the whale.

It’s as if, somehow, beyond the reach of science’s understanding, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms “magically” organize themselves into this gigantic, awesome, living, breathing, swimming, self-reproducing creature!

The Great Blue Whale represents the starting point of the universe that we can observe and experience today.  Yes, it is already likely to be that complicated at the point where we can first get a good glimpse at it.  The atoms play the role of the mysterious stuff that Inflation somehow (by unknown processes) bequeathed our universe to work with to get here.  The meandering pathway that our universe took to make its way across the Great Cosmic Desert between these two vastly different states is probably forever beyond what Science will ever be able to show us.  There are almost certainly many paths that would work.  And so, there may be many equally plausible Tales to tell, describing our wandering universe’s sojourn from there to here. This is a realm were Song and Story are going to have to suffice.

In order to properly depict the Cosmic Desert and put it in the perspective of ... well, ... Everything, we need to present a graph from a technical review article from a scientific journal, even though it is a busy mess and surely too technical for most readers to understand. The reason it has to appear here is because it provides an overview of Everything physical—all the stuff we can perceive and explain.  This amazing graph puts it all in a bigger context that shows what lies beyond, shows where the current laws of physics break down, and shows what we might see in the future. It’s called the “Triangle of Everything.”

 

The Triangle of Everything

Adapted from Figure 2 of: 

Charles H. Lineweaver, Vihan M. Patel; “All objects and some questions”. Am. J. Phys. 1 October 2023; 91 (10): 819–825. https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0150209

an OPEN-SOURCE peer-reviewed journal article. 

Depicted is the history of the expansion of our observed universe from the little white dot at left, called the Instanton, evolving left-to-right toward today and beyond.  It relies on the Standard Model of Cosmology (the Lambda CDM model), so it is a conventionalist model, dependent on the physics that scientists largely agree upon. The grey area is that future region.  The brown areas are the areas of CENSORSHIP that cannot be observed.  Everything we can comprehend fits into that slice of the triangle filled with blue and pink and ivory, which represents the time from what’s called the Electro-weak symmetry breaking (EW, leading to the QGP - Quark-Gluon Plasma) to now.

The yellow-orange Great Cosmic Desert is also effectively Censored from our understanding because matter as we know it didn’t exist before the Electro-weak symmetry breaking event.  We infer that there was a period of Inflation, but don’t know how that started, how it ended, or how it worked.  We don’t know how stuff behaved before the Quark-Gluon Plasma formed.

All the other stuff on the graph will be coming up for discussion eventually, but we’ll leave the explanations for later.

Given our lack of knowledge about how we got through that desert, there are many speculative ideas being proposed and discussed in the scientific literature (in peer-reviewed journals and in the non-reviewed but moderated arXiv system).

Two features of virtually all of this work are noteworthy for our purposes here at the Comfortable Universe. First, the vast majority of those papers operate on the assumption that today’s laws of physics apply. One could almost accuse physicists of treating these laws as ‘Canon,’ though they would certainly deny that. It’s more a matter of simple publishability. If speculative work is not rooted in widely accepted existing work (with a demonstration of knowledge of that work through citations), it is very unlikely to pass peer review. What these papers do, then, is to explore extensions or modifications of the existing laws. But, as many other commentators have noted, such restrictions may be a trap—a straight-jacket or prison—that prevents science from finding the breakthroughs needed to advance.

The second feature of virtually all of the work in the field of particle physics and cosmology, including but not limited to the speculative work trying to explain the physics of Inflation and the path through the Great Cosmic Desert, is that they must make simplifications and assumptions to the governing laws in order to find solutions. The equations of Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, and General Relativity are gruesomely difficult math that cannot be solved in general. Progress is made through various clever simplifications—most often this takes the form of neglecting smaller terms in equations—terms that represent higher-order effects of small quantities, for example, or terms that are deemed not relevant to the process being studied.

Our Song of Everything operates on a very different set of founding assumptions: First, the accepted theories of Quantum Fields and General Relativity are known not to be valid final descriptions of the Universe. They are simplifications themselves. But even if one grants that they are perfect representations of our universe, there is certainly no law that requires the most important phase changes, selection events, and rare anomalous behaviors that these laws produce to be mathematically tractable. Most likely it is those neglected small terms that would produce the kind of low-probability events that are crucial to produce interesting but extremely rare behaviors.

Second, and even more fundamental is our strongly held assertion that the developing universe did not ‘know’ about today’s laws of physics when it began. We assert that it began very simple, with the simplest possible set of functional laws and no a-priori constraints on its rulebook other than being possible. It began with minimal rules that were compatible with one another, which our currently accepted laws are not. So, it makes sense, we argue, to play with simple scenarios, to let them ‘shake out’ in ‘stories’ such as our Song of Everything, and to look for pathways that lead to the final product that we observe. The current laws of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity probably have roots in those early compatible scenarios, but possibly only very obliquely.

A Third, more specific feature of our Song of Everything’s pathway from the early Germ Universes to today is the assertion that the early universe quickly found a way to spawn Baby Universes. This seems natural if not inevitable, since Inflation itself is a self-replication of the space it is creating.  It is a topic that we’ll be discussing in great detail going forward. Universe self-replication opens up the opportunity for gradual, step-by-step evolution of the physical laws, following a meandering trial-and-error pathway from the early simple state to the complex final product we observe.

Our simple Germ Universe concept with minimal presuppositions about its initial state and laws of physics lies far beyond the realm of the objective scientific method. It is a story—a Song—but we suggest that this analog to the biological story of Abiogenesis is the most plausible paradigm to navigate the vast Cosmic Desert—plenty of rest-stops at Oases along the way! Plenty of opportunity to build structure, step by step, inventing the equivalent of molecules (perhaps explaining how fundamental particles acquire multiple attributes, such as spin, charge, chirality, mass, isospin, color charge, polarity, etc.*), then an equivalent of chemistry (a rulebook governing particle interactions, e.g. mixing angles and coupling constants*), then DNA (such as rules that define symmetries and symmetry breaking events*), and ultimately bones and muscles and organs (laws that allow the first structures, such as the Pauli Exclusion Principle*), to get us from a tiny nebulous Germ to a well-organized Great Blue Whale.  *(We apologize for all the physics jargon terms in this paragraph.  Details are not the point here, so don’t sweat them—this is definitely the “small stuff”, which we’re arguing could have developed along a variety of possible pathways.  Modern physics just accepts these features as “given,” and does not—cannot—explain why or how the particular attributes, constants, rules, laws, and structures got chosen as the stuff our universe is made of.)

Perhaps that’s how the primordial giant, Pangu, fits into the story. What did he eat to allow him to grow so huge during his 18,000-year vigil to expand the universe from its Cosmic Egg?

The primordial giant, Pangu, from Chinese legend, tasked with keeping earth and sky separated.

Looks like he was eating pretty well, doesn’t he!

The next step, then, would be to delve into that detail of what happened at the end of Inflation—how our universe gets across that empty desert, and the baggage (all those physics jargon terms) that it inevitably acquires along the way.

The Song of Everything is able to provide an example of a coherent story, or sketch, based on our distinctive view, as just described, and making use of the few clues that science has provided in ways that scientists and philosophers haven’t explored—perhaps haven’t yet fully appreciated.

But before delving into Our version, we check in on these clues that scientists have explored, without going into a lot of depth about their story. That is the consensus story—the stuff we seem to agree on—what science has found to be useful in making predictions.

Cosmologists’ consensus story of how the universe has evolved through time is called the Standard Model of Cosmology, or more technically the ‘Lambda CDM’ Model. The ongoing, very sophisticated and technical work being done combines many avenues of ‘detective work’ needed to look at and ‘behind’ the curtain of light released by the cooling universe 380,000 years after Inflation ended.

We’ve already talked about that curtain of light. It’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The clever techniques and avenues of analysis Cosmologists employ cover a vast range of cutting-edge physics. They study high-energy particle physics data taken at massive particle accelerators like the LHC—the Large Hadron Collider—a seventeen-mile-long ring of super-high-powered magnets and sensors built in a tunnel on the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. They study high energy particle collisions that mimic the energy levels that were happening in the very hot early stages of the universe.

On the other end of the scale, Cosmologists make use of some of the biggest and most sophisticated telescopes on Earth and in orbit to study galaxy formation, statistics of the all-sky population of galaxies and how their structure and composition seem to have changed over time. And they make use of and develop theory and models based on particle physics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, chemistry, and beyond.

It isn’t the purpose of our Song of Everything to summarize or describe all that amazing work. It is always at the core of our story, of course, providing the basis for our wider perspective. But science that is ‘settled’ is the bailiwick of peer-reviewed journals, textbooks, and usually some very well-done non-technical popularizations. A fine jumping-off point for the most relevant work, with many primary sources cited, is the Wikipedia page titled “Chronology of the Universe.” This is what Wikipedia refers to as a “Level 4 Vital Article” in the Physical Sciences category,* which means that it is one of the 10,000 most important articles among the more than seven million on English language Wikipedia. So, it gets special monitoring and review and is likely to benefit from considerable expert volunteer editorial effort to make it balanced and trustworthy.

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* Since it is the mission of our Song of Everything to cover … well … everything, a good, up-to-date encyclopedic reference source seems essential. Without question (and even with), we believe that Wikipedia has filled that niche in the way it ought to be filled in our information-saturated, disinformation-saturated, AI garbage-saturated, modern knowledge landscape. The image below shows a tabulation of the subject categories of those 10,000 Level 4 articles and the 1,000 Level 3 articles that encompass them. Wikipedia’s community continually debates the big picture of how to balance this content across subject areas as well as the nitty-gritty of each of the articles. Here at Comfortable Universe headquarters, we subscribe to this process and its result as the best dynamic (ever-changing) moderated and curated, truly all-encompassing Song of Everything for stuff that the human enterprise has agreed upon.

Wikipedia’s Level 4 and 3 Vital Article distribution by topic category.

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The niche that this series of Comfortable Universe/Song of Everything posts seeks to carve out for itself is to explore new ideas that lie beyond what has been agreed upon, and often outside of the realm of what it is even possible to discover by experiment and direct observation. There are three analogies that apply to our process.

Sherlock Holmes … quote from The Sign of Four:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

The first analogy is to a Sherlock-Holmes-style mystery story, where we sleuth out obscure clues, use abductive reasoning to interpret them in ways that might not be the currently popular ways, applying them to different models than those that have been popularly considered in hopes of arriving at conclusions that have not previously been given serious attention.

The difference between our mission and that of Sherlock Holmes, of course, is that this is not fiction. The clues are from the real world and the conclusions have not been written into the plot by an omniscient designer (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), but rather by the mysterious machinations of Mother Nature, whose role as ‘designer’ is itself an open question and subject for inquiry. The conclusions may not be hard facts at all, but rather a fresh perspective or a new insight into how or world might work and where it might be headed in the future.

The second analogy requires some novel insights and fresh perspectives right from the start. We place our Sherlock Holmes inside a human body. He and Dr. Watson are individual cells within this vast 30-trillion-cell organism—say red blood cells that have the capability of freely traveling around and gathering clues.

The mysteries to be solved from this ‘deep down inside’ perspective are: Where did this giant, complex entity (the 30-trillion-member colony of single cells) come from? Did it have a beginning? Was it a simpler, smaller colony at some time in the past? If so, how did the observed structure develop and what is its purpose? Does it have the aspiration and capability to establish new colonies somewhere far beyond the realm that can be observed (to self-replicate)? Would it even be possible for our Sherlock Holmes to discover that this being has a conscious mind embedded in a broadly distributed network of certain specialized cells (the neurons)?  Is it reasonable, or just crackpot new age woo, to extend the human-body-universe analogy that far?

In other words, all the questions we want to ask about the one universe that we are deeply embedded inside and therefore severely restricted in our ability to observe by all the Censorship ‘guard-rails’ that are set in place.

The analogy is far from perfect, but we’ve been making the case that it is a surprisingly useful and appropriate way of interpreting the clues we have available, and we’ll be continuing to add evidence that supports that case.

Which brings us to our third analogy—that of a jury trial. Once Sherlock has gathered all his evidence, he needs to ‘take the case to court’ to try to get a conviction. Is his ‘preponderance of evidence’ sufficient to convince a jury of his peers?

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The Song of Everything is a journey of exploration and discovery. Maybe there’s another analogy here—in this case a metaphor. We’re a modern-day young Darwin, embarking on our round-the-world expedition on the HMS Beagle.

Charles Darwin by G. Richmond ca. 1830 and HMS Beagle, in the Straits of Magellan by Robert Taylor Pritchett, 1890.

So … what evidence has the scientific process uncovered? What clues do we have about Inflation and its ending from observations? The big one is a strange attribute of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (and of the arrangement of all the galaxies in front of it)—the fact that it is all spread out so unnaturally evenly in every direction across the sky—the Cosmologists’ term is “homogeneous and isotropic”.

Think of a traveler setting out from the shores of Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio, USA, intent on exploring our planet. She plans to travel just about 70 miles each day and explore the world in great detail, eventually getting a look at almost the entire surface of the Earth. Now, imagine that every day she encounters a new city, and finds that it’s just like Cleveland—almost exactly the same size and shape and sitting beside another body of water very much like Lake Erie. All the topography she passes through is low rolling hills never more than about 210 feet high. No matter what direction she chooses to travel the next day, she inevitably finds another Cleveland and another Lake Erie, over and over, for her entire round-the-world trip!

That’s the strange picture that we see in the sky in every direction: galaxies arranged in clusters and filaments with voids between them that look the same everywhere in space. In the background, we can see the little perturbations—little bumps—in the Cosmic Microwave Radiation that started these structures. Mysteriously, these bumps vary by no more than one part in 100,000 across the entire sky, with a ‘power spectrum’ (meaning the arrangement of sizes of the perturbations compared to their distance scales) that proves that the universe is nearly perfectly flat. Why such teeny-tiny bumps and none bigger all across the vast expanse of the Cosmos? We’ll be all over that question in a second.

There’s much more subtle detail to the CMB and to the biggest structures in the universe—those clusters and filaments of Galaxies—that science is picking apart, trying to figure out what it means. Our Song of Everything is following this research closely, and sleuthing out the clues that are not fitting the standard and accepted models—reading between the lines. Looking for the cracks in the floorboards to see what might be underneath.

Scientists naturally want to emphasize their successes—the amazing discoveries and advances of our understanding of this Origin Story—and so far, they remain pretty confident that the Standard Model—the Lambda CDM model—of our universe is the best coherent description—it fits a lot of the evidence extremely well, and it fits most of the evidence better than any other proposed model.

Most.

When theoreticians try to tackle the universe’s origin story using the laws of physics that govern today’s universe, their results do not simplify the picture but complicate it.  Think of Grand Unified Theories that try to unify all the forces of nature.  In order to work, they require additional fields and interactions, or even additional dimensions of space.  Think of String Theory, really a vast family of theories.  The promise that it offers stems from the fact that a gravity particle naturally falls out of this theory when strings form closed loops.  The concurrent problems, however, seem forbidding.  String theory is no simplification to the universe.  It defines a nearly infinite number of possible initial vacuum states, requires many additional dimensions of space, and in general introduces many new particles, some of which (the supersymmetry particles) should have been detectable by today’s technology, but have not been observed.  Although some of String theory’s constructs may have a useful role to play in the Cosmic Origin Story, it is not likely to be a theory that uses today’s laws of physics as its basis.  Our Song of Everything takes this as a massive clue that the modern laws of physics simply do not apply to a simple origin story.  To throw in another analogy, scientists have been looking for their lost keys under the streetlamp, because that’s where the light is, and not looking off in the dark areas down the road.

Back to the Standard Cosmological Model—the Lambda CDM Model: It actually does start out with a significant simplification of Einstein’s General Relativity, called the FLRW metric (we talked about that in Song 23.  It’s the model that assumes the universe is made of a homogeneous perfect fluid and nothing else, the same stuff at the same density everywhere).  That is another telling clue, and probably a really big one.  Yet the Lambda CDM model is utterly silent about how Inflation works, about how the universe exited the epoch of Inflation, about how it crossed that vast uncharted Cosmic Desert, and even about what 95% of the universe is made of!!!

That’s the most telling clue—the ordinary physical matter that you and I and our comfortable sofa are made of makes up only about 4.8% of the stuff of the Cosmos. The Lambda CDM model requires the rest of the stuff to be divided into two huge bins of entirely unknown stuff, which are appropriately called Dark Matter (making up 25.8% of the universe’s stuff) and Dark Energy (the remainder—a whopping 69.4%). NOBODY knows what those two biggest ingredients of the universe are made of or how they came to be. We only know about them because of what they seem to do to the ordinary physical matter. Even more mind-boggling is that only 5% of the ordinary physical matter (5% of the 4.8%, meaning just ¼ of one percent of all the stuff of the universe) is useful stuff like stars and planets and star-forming nebulae. The rest is just free-floating gas lost in deepest intergalactic space or matter trapped inside black holes.

Bottom line: All the models that modern science recognizes as its best explanations of today’s universe have some huge cracks in their floorboards—rich fodder for further exploration. Here’s where our Song of Everything finds its niche: new perspectives on the things Science hasn’t figure out. We put Sherlock Holmes on the case, using abductive reasoning applied to the biggest big picture we can imagine, systematically collating all the clues *and* all the missing elements and unknowns—seeing if there are patterns that make sense, piecing clues and unknowns together, sketching out step-by-step processes that fit the evidence, even if they’re not necessarily the only paths from there to here. It’s a journey that can be surprisingly instructive.

Abductive Reasoning, adapted from art by Pivot Design Group

There are two really basic mysteries about the CMB, both related to that ‘all Cleveland all across the sky’ structure.

First, in order for galaxies to have that structure, and not to have failed to form or to have formed into clumps that were so dense that they all collapsed into black holes, the structure of space at the time of the CMB had to have no more and no less than that 1-part-in-100,000 unevenness. 1 part in 10,000 and the galaxies all collapse in on themselves. One part in 1,000,000 and they wouldn’t have had time to form yet. Why such an unnaturally narrow range of fluctuation size?

Second, extrapolating back to the time of Inflation, the allowable range of variability at that early time has to be completely implausibly tiny—almost infinitely perfectly flat and smooth—no quantum fluctuations allowed.

Well, our Song of Everything has already revealed the most plausible (we feel) explanation for that extreme smoothness at the time of Inflation: it’s what we’ve called the Vacuon—the extremely rare 1000-heads-in-a-row coin flip scenario making a rare appearance within the general chaos. The Vacuum got silent ‘long enough’ for our whole ‘Block Universe’ to emerge—all time and all space that our universe occupies. The key idea here is that the universe began as a single particle of basically no size—so no room for fluctuations.

After Inflation ended, matter and radiation showed up. Science has no idea how. The Song of Everything says that they were introduced from the Vacuum as ‘mutations’—really ‘contaminants’ to the simpler early universes—that proved useful for the universes to more robustly sustain themselves.  These two forms of ‘stuff’ were battling it out in a hot dense plasma, and the fluctuations, originally quantum scale, became sound waves. When the fog cleared and radiation and matter got decoupled from each other, that was the moment that the CMB was formed. The sound waves froze in place, so to speak, and those are the 1-in-100,000 fluctuations we see—literally the ‘echoes’ of those sound waves.

But why and how could the waves be restricted to such an unnatural range of sizes. As we described in our all-Cleveland-everywhere analogy, the seventy-mile patches of identical terrain on the scale of Earth represent the dominant scale of the fluctuations, and a one-part-in-100,000 fluctuation compared to the radius of the Earth implies that all the terrain on Earth would be limited to hills no more than 210 feet high.

Okay … maybe the analogy itself is a clue! Our real Earth does have a very limited range of elevation—not every possible size. If our real Earth was all water, the size of water waves would be the limit—the range of possible wave heights. What limits the fluctuation sizes on Earth’s oceans (and really also on land if you ignore erosion)? The answer is gravity. That pull of gravity is always working to damp down the biggest waves. The analogy suggests that somehow the CMB structure is limited by a (pretty weak) gravitational pull toward some sort of ‘center.’ In this case, because of the precepts of Relativity (called the Cosmological Principle), that center has to be relative to the observer. Problem is that in the Standard accepted model, which is well-supported by data, there is no ‘center of gravity,’ relative or not, because the universe is flat, homogeneous, and isotropic.

There is another explanation besides gravity that could work. Another thing that damps down the size of fluctuations in a fluid is its viscosity. What if the stuff in the early universe was sort of gooey, like molasses? Observations and theory seem to agree that this isn’t the case. The early matter was apparently a near perfect fluid with little to no internal damping friction. Although alternative models of the early universe with viscosity have been explored, anything gooey enough to damp these sound waves seems to be entirely ruled out.

We’re always open to new ideas; but for now, viscosity or gravity seem to be the only two, and so our Song of Everything is going to fall back on the ‘Sherlock Holmes rule’: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Gravity it is, then. And here’s how it might work. We go back to the ‘Block Universe’ that was created by the cooperative efforts of the YYon, the Qion, and the Vacuon. It is not infinite in size. It only has to be big enough, from the perspective of whatever is within it (our pink Easter Bunny), to have a meaningful internal ‘life’.

In Song 23 we talked about how our universe seems to be comfortably shrink-wrapped in cellophane and packed in a gigantic shipping crate full of packing peanuts. The walls of the shipping crate are where the Cosmological Principle requiring homogeneity and isotropy break down. When Inflation’s intense gravitational repulsion ended and its Potential Energy presumably began to break up into particles, they did have an effective center.

Within our shrink-wrap, we sort-of see a consequence of that in the CMB.  It seems to display a preferred reference frame. We are moving more than a million miles per hour relative to the frame in which there is no ‘Doppler shift’ in the CMB. That’s twice as fast as our solar system is rotating around the center of our galaxy. That says that the ‘rest frame’ of the CMB should be several million light years away—roughly the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy. But that just confirms a view that all the galaxies in our local group are all part of the same ‘Cleveland-sized’ patch of sky and therefore all of us see the pull of our possible Cosmic Center of Gravity as being basically in the same direction.

The visualization is a bit tricky, but the Earth analogy helps. When you’re standing on Earth, the center of gravity always seems to be ‘down’ even though that is a different direction for different observers in different ‘Cleveland patches’ around the planet. Each galaxy cluster around the cosmos, including ones that are moving rapidly away from us in the general expansion would see the CMB reference frame as being pretty near to them. They wouldn’t see us as stationary at all in relation to their perspective of CMB’s rest reference frame. They see us as roaring away from them as fast as we see them roaring away from us.

But we all see a direction that seems to be ‘down’.  The center of gravity is there—a small deviation from homogeneity and isotropy that observations are suggesting does exist—which would be tugging at everything, and damping the fluctuations. It’s called the “Cosmic Dipole anomaly” and it is still ‘Breaking News’; but here at the Song of Everything, we’re always trying to connect the dots regarding things Science is still trying to figure out, and this is one apparent confirmation of the clues we’ve been looking at. We’re including a video from an independent for-profit organization who disingenuously call themselves “NASA Space News” despite having no affiliation with NASA at all. The video is well-grounded in the facts, so we choose to overlook the reprehensible co-opting of the name of the government agency where your host worked for 25 years.

Even with a center of gravity that presides on scales much bigger than our observable universe, the fluctuations could be bigger or smaller, because they ought to have any possible size, right? What rule would prescribe the size of the fluctuations to be ‘just right’ for galaxy formation and the structure we observe?

Our Song of Everything jumps in here and offers just such a rule—a form of ‘natural selection’ via the evolution of universes.

In the early Germ Universes, there were no galaxies—just the pure inflation field. Here in our Song of Everything, we’re carefully and patiently advancing toward the full story of what happened next and how it happened, which involves Germ Universes self-replicating—having babies.

Way back in the middle of this post, we said: “The next step, then, is to delve into the detail of what happened at the end of Inflation—how our universe gets across the Great Cosmic Desert, and the baggage that it inevitably acquires along the way”.  We are getting there ... slowly and patiently.  And Universe Self-Replication (USeR) Cosmology is the main means by which we get there.

For now, we ask readers to just accept this USeR Cosmology idea without justification and look at its consequences. The overall size of the shipping crate—that is, the size of the entire Block Universe—that allows the very center (our cocoon all wrapped up in cellophane) to be flat and smooth and in our ‘just right’ goldilocks zone of 1 part in 100,000 is the result of selection processes in exactly the same way that humans and fleas and Great Blue Whales have a preferred size. Our Song of Everything’s Natural Selection argument is based on multiple possible physically-allowed scenarios, which we’ve already discussed elsewhere on this blog in a post called ‘Universe Self-Replication Cosmology - Nine Pillars of an intriguing Metaparadigm’, but here in this series of Comfortable Universe posts, we’re diving even deeper, including introducing an entirely unrecognized, entirely ordinary and boring process that may vastly increase a universe’s production of offspring:

Rocks.

Talk about a teaser! You’ll have to stay tuned for the big reveal. This is a patient story, and Song 25 has gone too long in the tooth already. It’s time for a break. Stay tuned for the Songs to come.

Song 24: Reductionism can NOT explain Everything!

“You bet, I cut down that Cherry Tree, dad.  And I’d do it again!  There’s no Cherry Picking allowed around here.”  Adapted from “Parson Weems’ Fable” by Grant Wood, 1939.  Happy 294^th birthday, George Washington!

 

This universe we live in works exquisitely well.

It has been prepared for us to truly profound lengths, depths and breadth, encompassing Everything that we could possibly need. The Cosmos has come into a dynamic balance between change and consistency. Life has prepared Earth’s environment for our arrival for at least four billion years. Every comfort has been considered, every practical contingency accounted for, and all the tools and methods we could possibly need have been laid out before us within easy reach.

Beautiful. What a Comfortable Universe we have, indeed!

Then why, at this point in the conversation, do I just want to jump up off my cozy, comfortable sofa and SCREAM!?!

What I would scream is something along the lines of

“But that doesn’t mean that Science alone can tell us how this happened! Scientists: you have provided us with staggering improvements in human quality of life. But you’ve always been drawn to the low-hanging fruit. You’ve been CHERRY PICKING your areas of focus, dear people, and neglecting vast landscapes of valuable territory!”

To which I would add, after a pause and a deep breath, settling back down on the sofa: “Okay. … Tell me, please. What law declares that there must be a law to govern everything we experience? What law says that the few laws that Science has successfully picked from the Cherry Tree are in any way fundamental and, more importantly, immutable? Can you show me where you’ve found such BEDROCK?”

The Song of Everything, as I’m telling it here in this series of posts, takes a very firm stand that no such Bedrock exists.

Yes, that is a Paradox – the biggest one, in fact. It’s what we call the Big-P Paradox. We stand FIRMLY on the proposition that there is no possible proposition on which one can build a firm stance …

… well … except maybe this one: Sit back on your couch, relax, and accept (yes … on FAITH!) that Paradox, inconsistency, and intrinsic unknowability (the Big-V Vacuum) are the foundation stones on which all that we understand and experience (what we refer to as reality) is built.

What seems like super solid Bedrock to us sitting on our comfy couch, is, deep down at the fundamental level, nothing but quicksand—the more you struggle (to understand it) the faster you sink in and are swallowed in the mire. No, unless you enjoy the struggle for its own sake, you’re much better off just sitting back and relaxing. As we said way back in Songs 4 and 5, we don’t need to sweat the small stuff or agonize about making sense of the big stuff.

Accepting some basis for our worldview on faith is not optional.  Our minds emerge from a blob of stem cells to discover a realm in which the self-negating axiom* is built in—rooted at its very core.  We (the rhetorical ‘we’ that really means your narrator, Dr. Pete) claim that the act of faith advocated by our Song of Everything is the purest, most minimal one, because it requires no other belief, no supernatural or undiscovered forces or powers, and certainly no institutions and their power-mongering adherents (including the eminently laudable edifice we call Science).

This I proclaim: Science is but one of three ways of explaining the World. Its rigorous discipline is rooted entirely in our collective experience—our common Sense. Our collective experience is crystalized by our mental models—our Spirit. These three balanced aspects of our Song of Everything are how we build the fullest, most robust picture of Everything.

I began this series by posting this idea in a simple diagram.

In this post, I’m tempted to claim that it may be wrong. What we experience should be at the core, with Spirit being merely a shell surrounding it, and then the collective agreed-upon ‘Knowledge’ that we give the name Science being merely a thin shell surrounding that.

But that’s because I’m indulging in a bit of bias in this Song 24—my personal perspective—the collected and collated ordering of all the observing and reading and learning that I’ve crammed into my brain over the past 77 years.

But it’s time to get off my sofa/soap-box, take a step back, and revisit the wider view.

Not everybody thinks like me.  There are those who accept, on faith (I claim), that Consciousness (Spirit—or our mental experience) cannot be reduced to anything physical. They propose that there is an independent realm of mind, and THAT is fundamental and foundational. Big-P Paradox requires me to accept that this position cannot be dismissed. The venerable old ‘Mind-Body Problem’ is one of the true fundamental Paradoxes. (The Wikipedia page in the link provides a fine example of how philosophers parse and nuance problems.  The Paradox requires just one simple sentence: One’s mind actualizes the substance of which it appears to be constructed.) Therefore, this camp claims, Spirit is at the heart of all things, not Sense. Our consciousness directs our attention only to the elements of the physical world that need our attention, and only as needed. It taps into a universal collective consciousness from which Science then springs.

Okay, fine. They’re entitled to tell their story.

Then there are those who have been the pioneers of our Western Culture in this age of technological and scientific discovery, who accept, on faith (I claim), that Reductionism (Science—the objective, ideally ‘mind-independent’ construction of a model of reality from the smallest elements and the most basic governing precepts) is the most trustworthy way to perceive the world.  I think they would reconstruct the second figure above by putting Science at the center and Spirit at the perimeter.

Science, in its purest form, requires inexhaustible doubt about Everything, most particularly about its own established theories and models of how the world works. Human nature vehemently rebels against this kind of mindset.  We crave control over our surroundings, and so we decide—our brains create models and we operate as if they are absolutes.  I hear scientists give lip-service to the primacy of uncertainty in their field while at the same time they cling to this ‘Religion of Science’ belief that there is some hidden principle that Everything can and will eventually (or should ideally) yield to the penetrating scrutiny of careful, rigorous inquiry.

Okay, fine. They are entitled to tell their story.

And so, my own bull-headed process, always seeking the biggest imaginable Big Picture, always seeking hidden assumptions and biases, always self-correcting, and rooted in a FOUNDATIONAL belief that there is ALWAYS a contradictory position to consider, forces me to return to the balance of that original Big-T Trilogy. All three ways of talking about our world should stand on equal footing.

Couldn’t this be considered a ‘meta-philosophy?’ We cannot ever decide which realm sits at the center of the circle in the second diagram above. It’s not even conceivable that we could extract ‘pure objective truth’ from any one realm alone or any ordering of the three, but as the story is succinctly told by the title of the long-running PBS series, those of us who enjoy the struggle for its own sake can always strive to come ‘Closer to Truth.’

The title of this post is a knee-jerk response to a recent article published online and to a podcast series that I've been working my way through. In my weaker moments, the science bias of the last century or two sometimes feels like an oppressive, opposition-squelching monopoly; and there are maverick scientists and science popularizers who have lately emerged to amplify those kinds of ‘conspiracy’ sentiments to gain notoriety. That’s even worse!

Should I name names? No. If it was at all possible to quote ideas and avenues of thought without associating names with them, that is what I would do. But quotes can be traced back to their sources. I’m choosing to generalize instead because the goal of our Song of Everything is to strive to be in tune with the frontiers of Science, to encompass cutting edge philosophy, and to consider new but always reasonable far-outside-the-box speculations.  In other words, we value balance—equanimity—a Story that feels ... Comfortable.

Love the sinner, hate the sin.

-----------------

* FOOTNOTE on the Self-Negating Axiom.

We are confronted with a realm of being that admits statements such as the Liar Paradox (“This statement is false”).  It reminds us that the bold act of preparing a “statement,” any statement, is replete with flaws, inconsistencies, and omissions.  The Tao-Te Ching told us this long ago.  The statement that can be made is not the true statement.  The statement that cannot be made is the true one.

Our Song of Everything formalizes this into its founding axiom, expressed in the sentence in red in the main body of this post.  Put more generally: A statement and its negation are the yin and yang of existence/experience.  They are inextricably bound like the self-annihilating virtual particle pairs that buzz about at the interface between the Big-V Vacuum and our perceivable world.

Here at Comfortable Universe headquarters at the Cloister at Three Creeks, we love to play with these inherently self-effacing paradoxes and find them to be guidelines for a humble way of presenting ourselves to the world.

“There is no proposition that cannot be deconstructed into absurd and contradictory elements, including this one.”

“There is no law except the law that there is no law.”

“The only enduring balance is the balance between balance and imbalance.”

Philosophers took until 1981 to come around to recognizing this line of thinking.  True to their nature, they had to give it a big new jargon term.  They call it Dialetheism, and it has gained a foothold in respectable discourse among professional philosophers.  Good enough for me!

Song 23: Inflation – the hatching of the Cosmic Egg

Yours truly, Dr. Pete, studying Alan Guth’s 1997 autobiographical account of his discovery of Cosmic Inflation in late 1979, with an excellent not-too-technical description of what it means, why it’s important, and how it’s supposed to work.

Continuing the Song of Everything’s story of how our Comfortable Universe began, the narrative has been proceeding along three different tracks, or story lines.

The first approach is to look to the most ancient stories from our faith traditions. This is the Spirit side of our balanced presentation. We’ve tapped into Hinduism’s Rig Veda,

the Judeo-Christian bible,

and especially the 2,500-year-old Tao-Te Ching and ancient Chinese legends of creation. A fundamental step-by-step process is laid out in Chapter 42 of this ancient Taoist ‘bible’. It’s pretty simple:

Here in Song 23, we will explore how ancient Chinese legend expounds on these simple enigmatic steps to paint a picture of Cosmic Inflation that is every bit as robust as today’s best scientific theories. Read on. That’s the punch line of this Song.

The second set of story lines focuses on the Cosmic Rabbit Hole, implying an emergence from a Lewis Carroll-style ‘Wonderland’ where rules of normal reality hold little or no sway. Our particular take on this brings forth a swarm of Pink Easter Bunnies as a metaphor for the first objects of creation.

There’s a purpose to such madness—a Sense to the nonsense, so to say. It’s a way of visualizing what can be difficult to visualize; and it shifts focus away from the cold, objective sciences of Particle Physics and Cosmology and its (idealized or conceptual) ‘Block Universe’ approach and toward the intimate and arguably crucial perspective of the thing that emerges and is embedded in the system—what does it ‘experience’ and does it make Sense … at every step along a path that may have been a very long and winding sojourn from there to here.

Third and last, we work hard to make sense of the limited clues that Science has provided about these unobservable earliest moments of creation. There does seem to be enough evidence to piece together a simple sketch—perhaps only a ‘Song’, as we like to call it—that gets us across that paradoxical threshold between ‘nothing and something’.

Vital to the Science story is the strange phenomenon called “Inflation.” Here in Song 23 we’re continuing to drill down into this concept in new ways, but first we need to establish the basics of what science knows about this Inflation thing and what it doesn’t.

What we know: Something that is given the vague term “Inflation” caused the universe to look like it started as an unbelievably hot dense speck that ‘exploded’—becoming ridiculously huge in a tiny fraction of a second and sending everything hurtling apart from everything else in an expansion that is still continuing today.

That expansion was what Edwin Hubble first discovered less than 100 years ago, in 1929. It turns out that our reality doesn’t work if there isn’t an expansion like that. If stars weren’t moving away from us, eventually becoming invisible because they’re so far away that their light can no longer reach us, then there would have to be infinite stars out there, so that the entire sky would be as bright as the surface of the average star and we’d be burned to a crisp. It’s called the ‘Olbers Paradox’ and Hubble’s Expansion solved it.

Of course, that means that if you try playing the universe ‘video’ backwards, you see that everything was once all together in one spot, and that’s why it makes sense to talk about an origin—a start to our universe—rather than the idea that the universe just always existed.

Since Hubble’s discovery there have been many, many other discoveries and observations that all agree with that expansion story. Most significantly, just a little over 60 years ago (1964), Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were looking for bird poop in their microwave antenna at Bell Labs in New Jersey, trying to figure out why it was giving them a hissing noise when looking at empty space. They were not far from Princeton where physicists at the time were thinking about what kind of radiation might be coming from the early universe when all the stars were packed together in a single spot. Long story short, Penzias learned about the Princeton research and invited the physicists to check out the hissing noise, and it turned out to be exactly what the physicists expected. It’s now called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (the CMB). It is light that has been travelling across the universe for 13.8 billion years, coming from that long-ago time when everything was packed together and hot, but by now the radiation has cooled down to just a couple degrees above absolute zero—easy to miss without sensitive instruments.

The CMB confirms the ‘Hot Big Bang’ expansion theory. There’s hardly any other reasonable way to explain why it is there. The story it tells is that there seems to have been a sort of hot explosion early in the universe’s life.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the CMB is its uniformity across the sky (we’ve previously talked about it—the observable universe seems almost perfectly “isotropic and homogeneous”). No matter what direction you look, the CMB’s light looks the same, down to one part in 100,000. This makes no sense at all when you think of an explosion of a bomb here on Earth, and especially when you realize that the CMB light that is reaching you from different parts of the sky cannot even have been causally connected. If you look at the CMB in the direction of the North Star and compare it to that coming from the sky above the South Pole—those two signals originated in parts of the sky that are moving apart from each other *way* faster than the speed of light. These two parts of the sky could never have had any contact or any way to share information, so how could they have exactly the same properties?

Enter Alan Guth with a brilliant solution: Inflation. Stretch the universe way faster than the speed of light. Before Inflation those two parts of the sky would have been right near each other.

His 1997 book, which your author is shown studying in the opening image, describes his research path, as a recently graduated post-doc, which led to the discovery of Inflation in December 1979. Inflation gives us a picture that explains how the CMB, and the distribution of stars and galaxies across the cosmos, can be so strikingly similar in every direction. Before Inflation, they were all packed together in a single spot. What did this spot look like? Where did it come from? We’ve given our version in previous songs, and we’ll reiterate it here in a little while.

Inflation, then, is the thing that spread the universe out. It is described as some stuff that is extremely densely packed and has a dominant property that does the heavy lifting—a large value of what’s called ‘Potential Energy.’ That energy has a specific single value, and when it somehow came into existence, the huge pressure that it contains causes a super-powerful gravitational repulsion.

Alan Guth, in figure 10.2 on page 171 of his 1997 book, explains that the huge pressure of the potential energy is actually a negative pressure.  The value of the potential energy of the Inflation field is assumed to be fixed (with no known way of changing it gracefully), so that if you try to pull on a chunk of this stuff to spread it apart, you have to do work, meaning you have to add energy to it.  It is resisting your pull—a suction—which means negative pressure.

The physics of how this negative pressure causes gravitational repulsion is described by a highly simplified solution to Einstein’s General Relativity equations. For those who care to delve a little deeper, we’re showing you the equation that gives the quantitative explanation.

The Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) metric first derived from Einstein’s General Relativity theory barely over 100 years ago in 1922, describes the expansion of a simple type of space containing a perfect fluid that is the same everywhere in the universe—smooth and continuous and featureless.  The equation shown explains how a negative pressure fluid produces a big gravitational repulsion.  This is a snip from the Wikipedia page entitled Expansion of the Universe, retrieved 11 February 2026.  The text describes the density parameter ρ as the energy density, but in the equation as written, it has to be the matter density (mass per unit volume).  Wikipedia is as near perfect of a model as we have for maintaining a curated, self-correcting and ever evolving dynamic information base, but, of course, it is always a good idea to double check sources and stated facts.  Errors are inevitable.

This equation is undergraduate or even high-school-level math—nothing more than calculus—simple as a first Germ Universe ought to be!  That’s why our Song of Everything is featuring it.  Our complicated messy universe offers plenty of brain-bending puzzles, but it should have started simple (that’s our fundamental story), and the complications should have been added one at a time, step by step, over many generations of universes, to get us to the complexity that we see today that enables us to sit back on our sofas and relax and not worry about metric tensors and Lagrangians and infinite dimensional Hilbert Spaces.

Note also that although this equation was derived from a specifically three-space-dimensional model, it contains only one space dimension.  We take this as a HUGE HINT that the first Germ Universe was itself limited to one space dimension.  Note that the first ingredient in our proto-universe recipe was a one-dimensional dipole entity—the two-balls-on-a-spring quantum oscillator.  We are going to call this particle the Yin-Yangon or YYon for short, and the fact that it is one-dimensional is probably why physicists haven’t discovered it yet. (Though there may be clever ways to ferret out its existence).

To dig even further into the math and science of Inflation, there’s a good undergraduate physics major level tutorial by Syracuse U physics professor Gary Scott Watson on arXiv.

This gigantic, unchecked repulsion expanded the tiny initial germ particle into the vast expanse of our universe in way, WAY less than a second.

Then it stopped.

How? Why?

Physicists are still trying to figure out the logistics of what started Inflation, what stopped it, and what happened next. There is no known believable answer to that yet, and there are big gaps in the timeline where nobody has the slightest idea what was going on.

There isn’t even a solid explanation of what Inflation itself actually is. It is being called a paradigm rather than a theory.

People are speculating far and wide, exploring ideas, testing them when possible, or just making more calculations that do not yet have a way to be proven or disproven. Some of the early proponents of Inflation are even rejecting it, claiming that Inflation theories have proliferated so much that the concept can never be ‘falsified’ and so they’re looking for other ideas.

The Song of Everything enters the fray: What the heck is wrong with something that can never be falsified??? That pretty much means ‘it's a lock.’  Science doesn’t like to deal with that kind of freedom, but simple common Sense sure can! No calculations here, just a story—a Song.

In previous Songs we addressed the initial conditions that might have preceded Inflation (totally speculatively). Here’s a quick reminder: start with a dipole quantum harmonic oscillator—two balls connected with a spring—that pops out of the Big-V Vacuum. That’s step one. In step two, the spring begins to oscillate when it interacts with a precursor General Relativity ‘particle pair’ that we’ve called the ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ that fortuitously appears out of the Vacuum and interacts with the quantum oscillator. Here we’re going to elaborate on what happens next—what started the Inflationary Epoch.

We actually already hinted at our proposed way to start Inflation in Song 22. Flip a fair coin 1000 times. What are the odds of the coin coming up heads every single time? Well, write down a number with 300 figures before the decimal point.

It’s called ten to the 300^th power. That’s how many times you need to flip 1000 coins in order to have one chance of getting all heads. How big is that number? It’s a Googol times a Googol times a Googol. If we imagine that our universe extends far, *far* beyond the limits of what we can observe (because we’re limited by the cosmic speed limit—the speed of light), then there could perhaps be as many as Googol number of fundamental particles in that ‘Googolverse’.

This could be a version of the FLAT WORLD realm, or a piece of it containing only closely related universes, that we introduced in Song 21. This piece would contain hundreds of trillions of universes similar in size to our own—about 100 times as many universes as there are galaxies in our observable universe; and Inflation theory suggests that the existence of this much stuff is very likely—it is what science has called the multiverse, and Inflation theory says it almost has to exist even though we can never observe it.

Now … each of those individual fundamental particles in this Googolverse/multiverse/Flat World would have to actually secretly be a tiny Googolverse of its own with that many particles inside of it; and then you have to go down into a third layer of the onion where each of those particles would also have to be a mini-mini-Googolverse with that same number of particles.

Whew! Now, down on that third level inside the onion, you’ve finally assembled enough particles such that each one of them could do the 1000-coin flip test simultaneously; and (on average) just one of those particles, somewhere in all of that ridiculous expanse would be the winner.

Well, guess what? A number that big is chump change to the Big-V Vacuum. Remember that Big-V is a realm without time—inexhaustibly patient—and without space. It just lets things that are possible sort-of ‘happen’. And among those things that are possible are the very unlikely statistical ‘outlier’ events like a flip of 1000 coins all producing heads.

Now, the key attribute of Inflation is that it takes all the kinks and wrinkles of space and smooths them out. In its simplest description, it is what’s called a scalar field—like a weather map showing the temperature across the land—only one in which the temperature is the same everywhere in this Inflation object’s ‘sight’ (its internal perspective) …

… like a map of coin flips that all came up heads …

… smooth. Homogeneous and isotropic.

This is our Song of Everything’s story of the emergence of time itself—how the first ‘something’ popped out of the mysterious ‘nothing’ that is the Big-V Vacuum. Still sticking with the physics story, an extremely strong instance of the ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ had squeezed the quantum dipole into a highly gravitationally repulsive state just as a rare zone of Vacuum smoothness came along to interact with it—or really to fail to act the way the Vacuum would normally act—to whack the incipient entity back into oblivion. This zone of Vacuum smoothness can be considered an ‘entity’ of its own—a very different sort of vacuum fluctuation—so we’re giving it the name ‘Vacuon’ which is also a play on the Chinese word ‘Yuan’ ( 元 ) meaning ‘origin,’ ‘source’, or ‘beginning.’  The zone of smoothness did not have to be endless. In order to match the observed smoothness of the CMB, it only had to enable Inflation to explosively expand space through about 85 doublings in size ‘*before*’ the Vacuum’s frothing randomness returned and slammed it down.

Note well that that term ‘*before*’ applies only within the internal perspective of the repulsive-gravity Inflation field. And here’s where our Easter Bunny analogy-metaphor comes in handy to improve our understanding.

In Song 22 (our last post), our pink Easter Bunny was playing the role of the mole in the Whac-a-Mole arcade game.

We added a few twists to the game, saying that the Bunny fancies itself a fast runner; and its goal was to escape the game entirely before the monstrous Big-V Vacuum, with its big black mallet, could whack it out of existence.

... and the Meek shall inherit the Earth! ... 

But here’s the thing. You can’t really escape the Game. We notice the ‘little-v’ evidence of the Big-boy Vacuum all around us all the time. Remember, this monster doesn’t abide rules or limitations. That new space-time realm that Inflation is manufacturing, represented by the speed that our Bunny is running, is like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. It’s a dream. It’s all inside the Bunny’s head.

What that means to us, in practical terms, is that we’re going to get Whacked in the end. Nothing lasts forever; and since Big-V is totally the poster-boy for Nothing … well, our universe is stamped with an expiration date.

But thanks to that 1000-flip zone of smoothness (the Vacuon), and the 85 or more doublings that it has allowed Inflation to achieve, the end doesn’t come for a very long time (as we measure it); and here’s why: Current estimates are that at the time Inflation ended (a process that we’ll be discussing in a bit), the universe we can now see was just a few centimeters across but the whole ‘FLAT WORLD’ realm that Inflation manufactured would have been bigger than the size of today’s universe, possibly much bigger. We (our Comfortable Earth and all the stars and galaxies that we can observe—everything all the way out to the Cosmic horizon billions of light years away) are a precious little package wrapped in cellophane deep inside a ridiculously gargantuan shipping container filled with a helluva lotta packing peanuts. We seem to be just about totally Whack-proof.

(It’s getting just a little ahead of the Story, but that moment when we finally get hit with the mallet will not hurt. It’s far more likely to be a ‘not with a bang but a whimper’ story where our universe just expands and expands and expands until it just effectively dissolves back into the Vacuum.)

Now we come to the shocking punchline. Ancient sages knew about Inflation millennia before science did. It’s time to tell the story from that Spirit perspective.

We’ve already begun that tale. In Song 20 we showed the correspondence between the first lines of Chapter 42 of the Tao-Te Ching and the proposed physics of the first emerging particles. And way back in Song 8, we used that same quote along with others to introduce the Cosmic Egg story—the story of the primordial Giant, Pangu:

“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 begat 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. Here is our quantum harmonic oscillator—two balls with a spring. To give it a particle name, we’re calling it the ‘Yin-Yangon.’

“... The Two begat Three.

“And the Three gave birth to all the things that we find around us.”

—Tao-Te Ching, Chapter 42

When an unusually strong ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ fluctuation in the ‘ether,’ the ‘void,’ the ‘first Nothing,’ the ‘Cosmic Rabbit Hole,’ the ‘Tao’ begins to actualize a separation between Yin and Yang, the Quantum Oscillator begins to sing.  The two opposing forces increasingly clarify and balance as they oscillate back and forth; 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 4^th century BCE, there emerged a legendary primordial being named Pangu. He hatched from this cosmic Yin-Yang egg brimming with strength and resolve: with 氣 (qì, meaning vital energy).  In honor of Pangu we’re naming the ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ particle the ‘Qion.’

‘Baby’ Pangu escapes from the Cosmic Egg.

As the macroscopic world materialized, Pangu 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 separated from the ground. Each day the sky grew ten feet higher, the earth stretched ten feet wider, and Pangu grew ten feet taller; and this continued for eighteen thousand years!

The aging giant Pangu.  Tasked with keeping sky and earth separated, he stuck to his labor for 18,000 years, growing ten feet taller every day.

Here is the vast expansion that we now call Inflation, described wonderfully by the Taoist sages two thousand years before Alan Guth.

How and why did Inflation stop? In the Chinese myth, Pangu was so exhausted from his 18,000-year vigil holding up the sky that he laid down to take a nap. It would be his last conscious act. As he settled onto a soft bed of grass, his breathing stilled and his heart stopped beating.

It was a sad, sad moment. Suddenly all the world fell into a great silence—a mournful stillness of such majestic proportion that it has never been felt again.

But in dying, the real power of Pangu’s being was just beginning to reveal itself. Out of that stillness, Pangu’s material form started to change. His last breath became the clouds. His arms and legs became great mountain ranges. His left eye became the sun, and his right eye became the moon. Pangu’s flesh spread out to become the soil. His arteries became the river valleys and his blood poured out of his body to fill them. His hair drifted on the wind and rose to become the stars filling the heavens. His teeth and bones turned into metals, his bone marrow into precious gems.

The Three had given birth to all particular things. There is a great illustrated video that recaps the entire story of Pangu—a fun 8-minute journey:

Again, the Legend of Pangu is just about as good of an explanation of Inflation as any that science has come up with, and here’s a figure from a modern peer-reviewed scientific journal that explains why. It comes from a recent comprehensive 67-page paper that reviews the current research on the very early universe (Allahverdi, et al., 29 January 2021: “The first three seconds: A Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the early Universe”. The Open Journal of Astrophysics. 4 (1): 1. arXiv:2006.16182. Bibcode:2021OJAp....4E...1A. doi:10.21105/astro.2006.16182.).

BBN = Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, RD = Radiation Dominated epoch, meaning that more energy was in the form of light than in the form of solid matter, MD = Matter Dominated epoch, which happened as space stretched and the light cooled but the solid matter stayed steadfast.  The dark black line represents how much of the whole realm of space we can see compared to how much we can see today.  It is based on the FLRW metric equation shown earlier.  That black line begins to dip at the end—the right side of the graph, because the mysterious Dark Energy has begun to cause our universes expansion to accelerate.  Note that the left and right ends of that line could be matched up—both having the same direction and height on the chart.  There’s a big implication here that Dark Energy could be the same thing as Inflation, and it suggests a more speculative possibility that we’ve entered into the very early stages of the next Inflation cycle.  What would that imply for our future?  What does that say about the opportunity for our universe to spawn baby universes that start with an Inflation of their own?  These are subjects for many future Songs!

The horizontal axis of the graph is effectively a timeline, but it’s on a logarithmic scale, so that the actual beginning (time = 0) is infinitely far off the chart to the left. Everything that came before Inflation isn’t shown and isn’t being taken seriously (by Science) because it is so completely beyond the reach of observations and experiments.

Inflation ends a tiny, tiny fraction of a second after the Beginning—specifically 10^-32 seconds (0.00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds) after the moment time began. That can be a little deceptive, maybe a lot, because of a property of General Relativity that you’ve probably heard of—time dilation.  The early universe, at least after the end of Inflation, was extremely compact and profoundly dense, meaning very concentrated gravity, meaning that (if General Relativity is the correct theory describing that mysterious time) time was moving very slowly as we would observe it from our vantage point today (if that even makes any sense, since we can’t observe it).  Something you’ve probably not heard of, BBN, which means Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (coalescing of the first atoms out of a hot plasma of free-flowing quarks and gluons), began about 20 seconds later. In terms of temperature, the difference between the end of Inflation and the beginning of BBN is way more than the difference between an ice cube in your freezer and the thermonuclear furnace in the middle of the sun. It’s a HUGE gap, during which Science can only offer a question mark.

What happened during that time is so completely unknown, and yet so critical to how our universe works, that there is room for many, MANY stories.

Our version, our Song of Everything, fearlessly plunges into that mysterious gap starting with Song 25. Song 24 is sort of an interlude—a digression that is relevant, but more about process, that your host needed to get off his chest.