Song 27: The Outrageous Construction Project that brought us into Being

 

Here’s the recipe to make a universe:

You start with nothing, and then you proceed to *take stuff away* …

You’ve got to have the right kind of ‘nothing’ to do that, of course. It’s no abstract ‘Empty Set’ from the world of mathematics. It has fewer rules than that! Clearly, we’re already taking stuff away—we’re on the right track! This form of ‘Nothing’ does not insist on preventing things that don’t exist from sharing its empty realm—every possible kind of nothing is included in its set. That’s a very important philosophical nuance.

Let’s delve even deeper into that strange concept. How can things that don’t exist but aren’t the entirety of the ‘parent nothing’ help us? Be patient. The important idea is that these things are less than their parent nothing. If we focus just on such things, we’ve taken other things away—removed them from consideration.

Let’s now home in on just one such thing that doesn’t exist. For our human mind, which is so dependent on space and time to conceptualize things, we’ll ‘picture’ it as a featureless dot (among an inexhaustible sea of such dots within the parent nothing’s realm). Yet we’ll try to keep in mind that it’s a thing with no size. That doesn’t mean that it’s infinitesimal, because that defines a size—it just doesn’t have the attribute of size at all.

Now … to build our universe, we take that dot and *work inward.*

To work inward, we imagine various further subsets that we can define within our chosen dot. These are also things that don’t exist but that there’s no rule preventing them from being included in the recipe, just as with the parent nothing.

We’re going to take up residence in this one chosen dot, so we get to decorate it. We get to say which of the subsets of that dot are going to be ‘keepers’ and which are going to be banished, ignored, quarantined, or ‘put in the back of the closet’. Among the keepers we choose are a field that can manifest space, and another that will actuate time.

Bingo! Right?

Here we have something with reference points that we can work with and talk about, though it’s all only inside that dot we’ve chosen. But inside there … Voila! … Because there are no rules to prevent it, we’ve got ourselves a foundation on which we can build stuff.

Out of nothing? Outrageous!! Ridiculous!!! Radically Twisted!!!! Completely off the Wall, and Downright Certifiably Insane!!!!!

Great. We’re insane, so we need this next step … we carefully, surgically remove all evidence of the ‘cognitive We’ from that ‘picture’. Which dot got chosen and which initial ingredients worked to create space and time are just look-back descriptions we’re borrowing from our particular ‘cognitive We’ perspective in this particular universe. They’re not meaningful in any general sense, and therefore not really useful to the construction project.

That’s because our Song of Everything is, emphatically, NOT an Anthropic argument (Anthropic meaning that we’re only seeing this because a ‘cognizant we’ exists to observe it. See the Wikipedia page on the “Anthropic Principle”).

NAE, lads and lassies! Dinnae fall for ‘at wee trap. This Song 27 is far more subtle and Outrageous than that.

The ‘cognitive we,’ which provides the philosopher’s putative ‘Observer Selection Effect’ is nothing special—it is ill-defined at best. The concept can be extended to become essentially universal to ALL “objects” in any *physical* universe (meaning a universe that allows excitations of its intrinsic [quantum] fields—things that can be interpreted as discrete entities). Such an ‘observer’ needs no cognition or awareness of its experience.

For example, the simple electron qualifies.

It can be any object of any sort that crosses an internally defined (self-defined) threshold such that it can be said (by its interactions with other objects) to have an existence—meaning that it can be described/defined as an entity that can interact meaningfully or usefully with other sub-dots within its one-dot realm in order to build some sort of internally describable structure.

As said, this “observer selection” is effectively *universal.* If it has any usefulness as a philosophical concept, perhaps it is in discussing ‘decoherence’—distinguishing objects from their universal fields. And not everyone would agree that making such a distinction is helpful at all.

Fields interacting with other fields is a process that is happening all over the ‘parent nothing’ realm. It is definitely NOT random (because ‘random’ is a rule for behavior). Rather it ‘results in’ or ‘exhibits as’ an inexhaustible supply of complex connected puzzle pieces (dots with sub-dots with sub-sub-dots, etc.) with self-defined rules linking the sub-dots. Each connection (interaction) is an “observer selection” that qualifies as a bona-fide construction project all by itself.

Outrageous? Yer damn tootin’!

The key point that I’m harping on over and over here is that whatever structure or meaning is produced by the participants can only be seen and defined from the inside—from the participants’ perspective.

In our particular case, there seem to have been a tremendous number of participants (sub-dots) brought into the project, which worked to construct and then reinforce a safe bubble for us, surrounded by a protective buffer, or no-mans-land—a gauntlet of ramparts and bulkheads, alligator-infested moats and razor-wire fences and crenellated battlements that keep out stuff that we don’t need and stuff that would be destructive …

… until what’s left deep down inside of this outrageous self-selected subset of the *nothing of zero size* is our nice relaxed Comfortable Universe.

Easy as pie. Throw it in the oven and bake at 325º for 25 minutes.

This is no joke. This is the astounding, outrageous, paradoxical pathway that leads to a coherent “existence” without requiring any preconditions.

We’ve talked about it over and over in various ways—how we got ‘something from nothing’. And we’re going to talk about it again before this Song 27 is over, because it is just so damn important.

Our Song of Everything’s specific version of the recipe chooses to start with a simple ingredient list that produces what physicists call ‘Inflation’—the earliest event or entity that we have observable clues about.

Here’s a more complete playbook for our particular Outrageous “impossible” construction project:

First, pick a few ingredients from the “Nothing” (what we’ve been calling the Big-V Vacuum), ignore all others, and create endlessly self-replicating space-time, which is given the name of Inflation by the Cosmology community. We’ve depicted that as our Cosmic Easter Bunny believing that it can “run really fast” and escape the Big-V Vacuum’s destructive mallet in the Cosmic Whac-a-Mole Game (see Songs 17, 22, and 23 for all those details).

As our Easter Bunny desperately runs at lung-busting pace to elude the Cosmic crush of the Big-V Vacuum's mallet, it finds that it is acquiring useful allies from the extensive library within old Big-V.  Not everything is trying to destroy it, though the vast majority of things *are*.  The trick is to construct a buffer.  Here we depict three possible such allies who get recruited, allies that will eventually coalesce into the Strong Nuclear Force and the particles in its domain.  Truth and Beauty, Horizon and Navel, and Charm and Strange.

Second, start “re-heating”—a ‘phase-change’ or end to Inflation that creates a ‘junk pile’ of disorganized building materials. Physicists call this event “re-heating” because the Standard Model of Cosmology, when projected back in time, implies that there was something extremely hot before Inflation came along. Our Song of Everything says that Inflation itself was the first event, so when the ‘heating’ task gets started, it is virginal, carrying no baggage. I think that’s important, because it is a simplification where there is no justification to add any complications.

Third, start picking up baggage. Sort through the junk pile of building materials and select stuff that builds useful structures. The “re-heating” starts without most of the laws and constants of physics that we’re currently locked into, and without *any* particles as we know them; but as we cross the vast uncharted landscape of the Great Cosmic Desert (see the graph below), eventually what started as pure clean gravity—raw potential energy—gets ‘contaminated.’ At least that’s our Song of Everything’s version of the story.

Constant bombarding by the Chaos of the Big-V Vacuum produces the ‘junk pile’ or, to use another analogy, a bunch of ‘dust-bunnies’ (made of particles and strands of dust and lint) and eventually this stuff settles and coalesces into the first structures. This may not be anything we recognize, but (as we’ve discussed before), because of the Asymptotic Freedom that the Strong Nuclear Force exhibits, the first structures are probably ancestral versions of that—say, for example, colorless proto-quarks and gluons. (We presume that many of the strong force-related attributes, including the three families, color charge, isospin, came in later steps).

How this happens—the steps along the path—nobody knows. As we’ve discussed at length in Song 25, the Great Cosmic Desert covers a colossal range of scales—the equivalent of starting with a single atom and ending up with a Great Blue Whale or a Towering Skyscraper.

We emerge from the Cosmic Desert observing an expanding universe that our current best theory (The Standard Model of Cosmology, also called the Lambda CDM Model) projects backward to an ‘Instanton’ with Planck Energy and Planck Length size. (See the graphs below.)

Now, here is something that is truly outrageous—in the uncomplimentary sense—something that is just plain beyond the pale of common sense.

Consider: The Planck Energy is enough energy to propel me and the sub-compact car I’m driving from here (the Blue Ridge of Central Virginia) to Cleveland—a full tank of gas! Yet this amount of energy is concentrated into an object no bigger than the Planck Length, which is twenty *orders of magnitude* smaller than a single proton! Take a proton and expand it to the size of the observable universe. Then this Instanton thing is supposed to be the size of just one single cell in my body!).

How such a monstrous thing could exist seems to defy credibility. And, indeed, scientists readily acknowledge that this projection of the Standard Model can’t possibly be trusted.

Our Song of Everything takes the position that no fundamental object with anywhere near that much energy ever existed. And we offer a concrete alternative. We propose that such prodigious apparent energy is like the Skyscraper emerging from the Great Cosmic Desert. In its actualization, it was built brick-by-brick through many lost evolutionary steps, each with much smaller energy involved, each of which happened gradually and patiently through a long genealogy—a family tree of universes.

Homing in on that analogy to the Skyscraper: the early universe, when viewed from our present-day vantage point appears as a tall Skyscraper of impossibly high energies because all the details of how it was built have been lost. Our crude particle accelerators smash into the top of the Skyscraper and break stuff off, and the pieces appear to free-fall all the way back down to the ‘ground,’ because the patiently evolving laws of physics that built the tower, brick by brick, through generation upon generation of ancestor universes, are utterly lost—out of sight—only present in that “gauntlet of ramparts and bulkheads, alligator-infested moats and razor-wire fences and crenellated battlements” that these ancestor universes have built for us.

Fourth, we emerge from the Great Cosmic Desert when the particles that make up today’s universe appear via a wildly outrageous process that’s called the “Electroweak Phase Transition.” It produced a ‘Left-handed universe’ (WTF?) with outrageous naked particles that seem to have more and more energy the closer you study them (requiring yet more mathematical trickery called Renormalization to correctly describe these particles when they’re properly and modestly “dressed” for a life within our Comfortable observable realm.)

Here’s a bit of the flavor of this bizarre construction project: Somewhere along the way through the Great Cosmic Desert, particular fields connected with, and acquired the property called ‘Spin,’ which is just a different, more complicated way than simple velocity for a thing to interact with spacetime. Another property also got acquired, which we know as Electromagnetism.

Significantly, Electromagnetism is the only physical thing that operates at all ranges across spacetime (other than, perhaps gravity—if that is not merely the ‘warp and weft’ of spacetime itself—i.e., the essence and end-product of Inflation).

Working with these two oddly unrelated attributes, in order to build structures that have solidity like tables and chairs and comfy sofas, a bizarre tool had to be plucked from the Big-V toolbox that was effectively a left-handed ‘wrench’ (called a W boson) that only operates on those particles that have left-handed chirality to their spin. The right-handed ones are just ignored!

Who ordered that?

This looks, for all the world, like a cheap gimmick—hardly something that feels fundamental or basic. And yet this is how our universe constructed all of its important structures, from atoms and molecules to stars and planets and Easter Bunnies and nice comfy sofas.

There’s a fun PBS Space-Time video that imparts some of the sense of oddness about these laws of physics, which depend on properties called isospin and hypercharge that we haven’t even mentioned here in our Song of Everything. It’s a little ‘deep’ but if you just sit back and enjoy the ride, it’s a fun immersion into the weird world of Quantum Field Theory.

Physicists have a pretty firm handle on the peculiar and esoteric mathematical gymnastics that govern the Electroweak Phase Transition (the theoretical work didn’t even start until I was in High School in the 1960’s, got a big boost when the W boson was first observed in 1983 after I had started my career at NASA, and wasn’t wrapped up until the Higgs Boson was finally confirmed after I had already retired from NASA in 2012).

With that underpinning, science can pretty well explain everything that seems to be useful to our everyday lives (which, as we’ve pointed out before, is actually pretty insignificant compared to the stuff that is not understood that is lurking out there. It’s a mere 5% of all the stuff the universe is actually made of. Dark matter and dark energy remain totally unexplained), so we won’t cover this in any detail. It’s expertly covered elsewhere.

Here, our Easter Bunny has recruited the help she needs from that master conjurer called Inflation, from the proto-matter guru that came from (re)heating (the apparent hot Big Bang as seen in the background), and from the Higgs and W/Z boson construction workers, ready to get to work. Our exhausted Easter Bunny, having run her heart out to escape the Big-V’s Whac-a-mole mallet, can finally sit back on her sofa and relax for a bit.

The parts of our Song of Everything’s creation story that are agreed upon—that are ‘text-book’ material—are perhaps best summarized by the Wikipedia Page titled “Chronology of the Universe”, which we’ve discussed before.

By contrast, our Comfortable Universe blog posts specialize in extending and expanding the boundaries of known science into unexplored territory. We leave the known and accepted stuff to the vast available published material and boldly venture into the beyond.

Please stay tuned.

* * *

So … Okay … as promised … back to those first impossible statements at the beginning:

Can you really start from Nothing and build something downward and inward?

Well, that really isn’t the key question. The key question is what’s going to stop you?

In order to fully flesh out that paradoxical picture of “taking stuff away from nothing and building inward from that”, we once again go back to the very beginning—the Big-V Vacuum. The wise old sages who wrote the Judeo-Christian Bible weighed in on this. They gave the Big-V another name, which appears in the second verse of the book of Genesis: the “formless Void.”

I’ve lost count of how many different attempts I’ve made to describe this ‘Essential Nothing’ even though I understand that it is intrinsically forever indescribable.

I’ve tried calling it the “quicksand at the foundation of reality”, and the “The Great Empty Everything;” but the best name for it is the oldest—it is the “Tao that cannot be spoken.”

Now … as repetitive as this might seem, we’re going to struggle through that quicksand yet again, on the idea that the more ways one speaks about ‘That which cannot be spoken,’ the better will be our approximation.

Although there are no adequate ways of explaining the inexplicable, every way of approaching it adds value. By exploring as many ways as possible, one comes closer to the ‘core essence’ of what’s ‘hidden behind the veil’—forever just beyond reach, yet, by its manifestations, intimately and centrally underlaying the nature of Everything that can be spoken—Everything for which a Song can be sung.

After all (by our carefully, patiently, sometimes tediously developed argument over these past 26 Songs), this thing that cannot be spoken is at the very core of our origin—it is the very most foundational and important thing to speak about.

This time I’ll start by trying to envision a thing that has no time or space. It’s tough, even for starters. But then you have to add the global idea that this thing has no other reference frame either. It obeys no rules of any kind (except, beautifully paradoxically, the “rule that there are no rules”)—it’s just formless, unbounded, unfathomable, lawless chaos.

What it does have is an unlimited supply of what we’re calling virtual dots, or elements to its set—an illimitable ‘sea’ of them, if you can ‘picture’ a sea that has no time or space. A good way of thinking of these dots is that they’re like ‘ideas.’ They don’t really exist but they sort-of ‘point to’ ways that things could exist.

Ideas! Ahhhhhhh - a light at the end of the tunnel???!

The best ideas are ideas that could be used to make something useful. Most of the dots in this ‘sea’ are just garbage; but since there is no time or space, all the dots touch all other dots, and so useful things are bound to hook up with each other and organize themselves.

These are still just dots, but they are more sophisticated than the garbage dots, because they’ve cooperated with other dots to construct something useful … like, say, … no less than our whole effing universe!

This is our thought space for the origin of Everything.

What is the usefulness of a ‘sophisticated’ dot lost in an illimitable sea of garbage?

It’s all a matter of perspective.

It is only useful to itself. The value and meaning are entirely relative, defined only within its individual internal perspective.

In that timeless, spaceless ‘sea’, remember, this sophisticated dot is always interacting with all the other dots. Each dot can manifest arbitrary rules and attributes that define the usefulness of other dots to its construction project, and can acquire more rules and functions by means of interactions with these other dots, and can, for example, define boundaries and/or coupling strengths between them.

Sophisticated dots have sorted and organized themselves such that the garbage dots don’t matter much any more, or are ‘kept in the closet.’ These have pieced together a functional ‘internal life’ defined by the interactions with the selected dots that *are* useful to them. This is the fleshing out of the idea that you start with ‘Nothing’ and ‘take stuff away’ (or put some of it in the closet) in order to build our meaningful reality.

Dots that employ (or acquire) the reference frame we call spacetime can internally refer to this ‘piecing together’ as a sequence of events. But that’s only for its internal reference. Each dot remains just a dot—a ‘block’ with no ‘external’ characteristics at all.

And that is critically important philosophical groundwork. There is no external perspective—there is no ‘God’s Eye’ point of view.

Because of the complete lack of restrictions from without, the really sophisticated dots have constructed a whole realm of sub-dots of their own, entirely internally, with rules that can increasingly (but never absolutely) insulate the realm from the general population of garbage dots and other less useful dots (effectively stowing them on the back shelves in the closet).

So, finally, here is the outrageous construction project of which Song 27 sings.

Out there beyond the reference frame of our particular sophisticated dot with its internal ‘sub-dots’, there could be an over-arching hierarchy of dots—dots that encompass ours and other dots such that ours could just be a ‘sub-dot’ to it, etc.

There is no way of identifying or defining a ‘top level’ of dots or of knowing how many layers down from said ‘top’ our universe resides.

Trying to make such a presumption (i.e., by defining a top layer) would imply an abstract absolute. How could such a top layer come into being, and how does one know that it is, in fact at the top?

Such an absolute cannot have any practical meaning, truth or function. Our Song of Everything adamantly insists that no absolutes have any useful relevance to our collectively defined existence.

And so, we’ve come full circle in this latest attempt to explain the intrinsically unexplainable.

* * *

At the end of the day, we settle for this:

There’s a dot in the midst of this madness, and that dot is our universe. Less complex dots in layers above ours can represent precursor universes—ancestor universes—and are reflected in what we perceive as the early development stages of our particular observable universe.

All this stuff at the fringes and beyond represent the bubble-wrap, the packing peanuts, and the shipping crate in which we sit comfortably insulated from the vast, vast majority of all that outrageous madness.

How lucky we are!

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Back in Song 25, we presented two versions of a graph from a paper in the peer-reviewed scientific literature (please go there for the citation), which does a great job of giving an overview to the entire development and evolution of our universe. It’s called the Triangle of Everything. Here are the two versions of the graph:

The left vertex of the triangle shown in the upper version, which represents the origin of the universe as described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, is almost certainly wrong, because it comes to a point at a singularity—a point where physical law and mathematical description break down. In the second graph, we’ve offered an alternative view that escapes this problem but replaces it with more than one possible solution.  We posit that there are many possible paths that describe our sojourn through precursor and small-scale laws of physics.  These seem very unlikely to be unique solutions and are also well-hidden from the probing eyes of science because many of the ‘tracks’ are erased by subsequent activity.

Note also, more fundamentally, that this graph does not have any natural edges—it could be extended *without limit* both to right and left and up and down off the top and bottom. One could zoom out until the part that is shown appears to be merely an infinitesimal dot. It just happens to be the dot we’re in. What prevents equally useful dots from being anywhere else on the scale? Nothing!

Further: This graph just depicts a space and energy scale. There could be many other scales added, in order to comprehensively describe the realm in which we find ourselves.

These graphs are outrageously busy, and yet everything mentioned in them, in the top graph especially, can be easily searched on the internet. Most of the named items have their own Wikipedia page.

In the bottom graph, we’ve taken the liberty of widening the pathway to our universe by proposing a version of the theory of General Relativity that includes quantum processes and settle toward Asymptotic Freedom at the smallest size scales. There are candidates for such a theory, and we’ve discussed aspects of them at length in Song 19.

The widening depicted along the bottom edge of the ‘Triangle’ is actually very conservative. No stable particle heavier than the proton and neutron exist (labeled ‘p’ and ‘n’ along the Compton Limit line on the graph). It seems very likely that the ‘Construction Zone’ labeled ‘Preheating’ and ‘Building the Mass Gap’ includes all the space to the left of, and curving downward from, those two particles (i.e., a gently curved line extending to the left of ‘p’ and ‘n’ and curving downward through the heart of the ‘dark matter’ ellipse toward the lower left corner of the graph.)

On the upper end of the widened zone, the speculative presence of primordial black holes (for which there is a very extensive Wikipedia page) would also point to a class of even more abundant ‘just a little less dense’ primordial star-forming pockets that we’ve depicted on the graph as ‘Goldilocks pockets of reheating,’ represented by yellow asterisks with red shadowing.

How could you possibly get one without the other?

These rarely discussed entities (which we presume are statistically rare within any given Hubble Radius—i.e., within any observable portion of a universe, which explains why observations haven't confirmed them,) are one of several super-super intriguing hot-spot mechanisms that could have produced stars, heavy elements, and ultimately life at times when the ENTIRE UNIVERSE was in a Goldilocks zone where water was liquid—long before the Standard Model's accepted isotropic, homogeneous Cosmology predicts that the first stars should have formed.

This is a not-so-subtle teaser for an amazing and exciting story that’s upcoming in Song 28!

And that is as good a place as any to end Song 27—leaving the reader in suspense—wanting to read on, right? We hope so. Stay tuned!

Song 26: The Universe and her Babies

The hard-working staff at Comfortable Universe headquarters has been developing a story, called our Song of Everything that starts with an origin story of how our Universe came to be. We’ve rambled some, but basically it has taken 25 Songs to develop the origin story to this point: a picture that our universe started with a very simple Germ Universe with just a few ingredients that emerged from the primordial Vacuum.

Here we summarize the technical details of our specific example. It’s technical, using physics jargon, and yet it is still just a generalized sketch. The story starts with a one-dimensional quantum dipole harmonic oscillator field (excitations of which are colorless proto-gluons or unified proto-quark-gluon amalgams that we’ve dubbed YinYangons or YYons for short, and would be their own anti-particles). This ‘particle/field’ brings ‘proto-space’ or the potentiality for space to the party. In our present-day observed universe, typical Quantum Fields can be viewed as harmonic oscillators, like little springs attached to every point in space, but the YYon field has more heavy lifting to do. It needs to articulate (be able to actualize) the very idea of space itself. Its virtual ‘structure’ carries the potential for two points in a potential one-dimensional space as well as the spring that connects them—a full one-particle universe, so to speak, and yet it is only a potential—not fully physically existing any more than any quantum field exists without an observation.

The action (literally) gets started when we introduce a “Squeezing” proto-time entity that we’re calling a Qion after the Chinese term “Qi,” meaning Vital Energy. The Qion emerges from the Vacuum and, perchance, interacts with the YYon, sending it into excitations. The Qion is a proto-de-Sitter-space-like gravitational field excitation (it is NOT a cosmological-constant-style vacuum energy but a proto-quantum-gravitation field—the first-emerging essentials of General Relativity). It has an anti-particle that is proto-Anti-de-Sitter-like that does not participate in this first interaction. That anti-particle would naturally gravitationally collapse back into nothing—but watch for a discussion later in this post—a later step in our universe’s evolution may have taken advantage of this anti-Qion to initiate the first matter—Dark Matter!)

The “Squeezer” Qion would have had to have enough amplitude (energy) to cross the threshold to initiate what we recognize as Eternal Cosmic Inflation. (Note, however, that this is “proto-physics,” involving just the two fields mentioned, with far simpler precursor laws and different ‘universal constants’ and coupling constants than we have today.)

Even then, that high-energy excitation of the YYon would have only created a tiny fleeting Potential Energy fluctuation (a tiny little “Block Universe” with just a tiny bubble of space-time that wouldn’t be good for much) because of the incessant interference from Vacuum noise. What allowed our big, functional core of nearly flat, homogeneous, and isotropic time and space to establish (along with the required highly non-linear and necessarily approximate and fuzzy shell/edge/boundary—defining that ineffable transition zone between the non-existence of the Big-V Vacuum and a functional internal reference frame for the nascent Germ Universe) was another major statistical outlier—a highly anomalous ‘quiet zone’ within the primordial Vacuum. We call that third ingredient the Vacuon, which evokes the Chinese term “Yuan,” meaning “Origin.”

The above is only a sketch—a story—and probably one of an unlimited class of possibilities. We’ve chosen these ingredients because they fit the clues that we are able to observe within our reference frame and because they seem to be able to seamlessly continue the story through the many steps ahead that would lead to our universe. To wit:

The next step in our story involves the ‘magic’ of self-replication. Using the same established ingredients, the early Universe (our Germ Universe or Mama Easter Bunny) was able to give birth to babies. The ingredients were already built in. The Germ Universe consisted of these two fields only (YYon and Qion), and they had already ‘proven’ they could make a universe (obviously), so the self-replication process would have been pretty much like ‘falling off a log’. The Vacuon had done its job. There was ‘room to play’ here in this new Germ Universe. So, with the occasional strong-enough excitations of the two fields, the Mama would quickly be surrounded by babies.

Of course, in order to start the journey from the simple Germ Universe to the complex real world we observe, the replication process needs to allow mutations. We can identify at least three basic forms that these would take. The first involves simple quantum uncertainty. A parent universe consists of an all-pervasive set of fields representing all of its various components. (We are sure of 17 of them in our observed universe today but posit that there were just two in the original Germ Universe. For future reference, we are also positing that there are probably actually something like 200 fields that have affects in today’s universe.) These universe-wide fields and their interactions fluctuate at each point in space within the parent universe, and so the place where the birth of a Baby Universe is triggered has specific excitation energy-momentum values, not necessarily identical to those that initiated the parent.

The second, more fundamental type of mutations will be caused by fluctuations that lead to small changes of the underlying laws and constants, which can be viewed as the coefficients (strengths) of individual non-linear terms (e.g., the Fourier transform) in the governing equations. In the early two-field Germ Universe, there were only two velocities (the speed at which inflation expanded the bubble of space-time, or the effectively useful flat part of it, as perceived from the internal reference frame of the universe, and the speed of propagation of the energy-momentum excitations, which becomes the speed of light when photons arrived as a later mutation) and so only their relative values had meaning. Matter, and particles in general, would only appear later in the evolutionary journey—a result of mutations of the third kind.

This third kind of mutation introduces new localized fields to the parent universe at locations where babies are generated. These new fields become incorporated into the baby, and therefore become universal in its reference frame. The Big-V Vacuum is always there, lurking, insistently churning, making available its inexhaustible supply of potential ingredients, most of which would be useless or destructive. It is the constant ‘battering’ by the Big-V Vacuum ‘noise’ that is the source of the new fields.

Because of its obvious importance, we take the time, here, to digress and discuss one early addition to the original two Germ Univese fields: Matter. It probably was among the early additions, and based on the preponderance of Dark Matter in our Universe, we argue that Dark Matter is likely to have been the first kind of matter to appear.

We will offer a very loose and crude sketch describing one way that Dark Matter may have ‘materialized,’ if you’ll pardon the pun. We’ve already hinted at it. (It’s pretty technical physics talk and yet only a broad-brush discussion thereof.) The “Balloon” side of the Qion field takes a localized form equivalent to a spacetime with negative vacuum energy, though it is not actually vacuum energy, but a field (and an intrinsically unstable one). However, to the extent that it has properties similar to Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space (the shape of space with negative vacuum energy), perhaps it participates in the well-known correspondence to Conformal Field Theory (CFT) in one less dimension. CFT would apply in conjunction with a physical ‘renormalization’ representing the emergence of mass from massless AdS excitations.

We’re presuming that this anti-Qion exists in one space dimension and one time dimension, which would result in a Conformal Quantum Mechanics with only one dimension (time) and would result in a point object emerging and manifesting gravity.

There is a whole lot of hand-waving here! The AdS₂/CFT₁ correspondence is very poorly understood, and certainly hasn’t been studied in the context of simple particle physics of a proto-universe. Almost every aspect of such a study is open to exploration and almost none has been explored. As we’ve suggested earlier, there is not likely to be a single unique falsifiable pathway (model) that represents that process. But the key take-away is this: a point object (zero space dimensions) manifesting gravity, probably incapable of interacting with anything else because with no space dimension CFT₁ is not associated with a field, sounds a lot like a seriously good candidate for Dark Matter. It’s at least a direction to look if you’re not operating under the constraints of today’s laws of physics but on the assumption that the universe got its start in much simpler functional configurations and then evolved toward the complexity we see.

Okay … in general, this third and most significant form of mutation during universe self-replication brings in new fields from the Big-V Vacuum’s ‘library’. We know that we have three large space dimensions, so the two additional ones would be introduced as needed (there are solid arguments that explain why we have three large space dimensions and not more.  The most convincing one is that there are no stable planetary orbits in four dimensions), and we know we have at least 17 quantum fields in today’s universe—one for each of the fundamental particles. We know that the theory is incomplete and so there are probably more. If Inflation and Dark Matter are Qion particle and antiparticle acting on the one-space-dimension YYon, we have two more fields right there—deeper underlying fundamental fields that get us through the Great Cosmic Desert.

We will do a little more speculating on the order that things appeared after we emerged from the Desert, based on their energy levels, with the higher energy level things coming first as the universe expanded and cooled and slow-rolled out of what we call ‘Inflation’. But we’ll save that for later. The main point, here, is that we argue that the new universe-defining fields and attributes appeared one at a time in ‘selection events’ that proved beneficial as universes continued to self-replicate and were subjected to mutations, most of which would be useless or destructive, and so may have resulted in a seriously meandering path from ‘there to here’.

Stepping back and perusing the picture we’re presenting, it is a new, rarely discussed ‘metaparadigm’ in which universes reproduce and mutate following some form of Darwinian Natural Selection. This has been discussed at length in two older posts on this blog: The Firestorm in the Universe post and the USeR Cosmology post. Here, as a reality check, we’ll just present a brief Q&A discussion:

Can universes really have babies? (Our known laws of physics seem to allow it and definitely do not prohibit it. In fact, there are multiple possible ways; but there’s certainly no proof that it happens. Our problem is that the proof is effectively censored from us. Somewhat like the interior of a black hole, the new universe disappears as it is formed—it is unobservable. We’re in a strongly constrained perspective within our universe, and the baby universes would develop their own, entirely separate internal perspectives. Imagine if biologists were trapped inside a single organism, say a human body, and unable to observe any other. What a daunting task it would be for them to figure out the story of biological evolution!)

How does this baby creation work? (We’ve identified at least nine different possible ways. This is the subject of those two older posts on this blog, links provided above. In the discussion below, we’ll be highlighting the two most promising ones—the ones our Song of Everything is “putting its money on,” so to speak.)

Is there sex involved? (Not necessarily, particularly with the early Germ Universes, but it is not ruled out. There could be. One far-out speculation is that universes have ways to interact with each other in the hyper-realm that we call FLAT WORLD (a version of the Multiverse). We introduced Flat World back in Song 21, and hope to elaborate on the ideas further in future Songs. Known examples of such potential interactions include wormholes and colliding multiverse bubbles. A version of the wormhole scenario can be considered analogous to sex. One can imagine that colliding universes with different governing laws might create a ‘hybrid zone’ where the two spacetimes are interacting. This could be chaotic and perhaps usually disastrously destructive, but perhaps—at least in this simple and generic hand-waving thought experiment—occasional hybrids could find ways to ‘shake out’ into a new and useful equilibrium.)

Can the babies inherit the parent universe’s laws of physics? (Yes. The formation of the baby universe within the parent universe, by any of the relevant means described in the USeR Cosmology blog post, begins with ‘stuff’ that is infused with the quantum fields and other properties of the parent universe.)

What is the equivalent of DNA that carries the inheritance information? (Those quantum fields that pervade every bit of the spacetime of the parent universe—two in our model of the Germ Universe, and at least seventeen in our observed universe.)

Is there a mechanism that allows mutation during the reproductive process? (Three ways this can happen were discussed earlier. The intrinsic uncertainty of quantum entities from a localized patch of space in the parent universe as they are transferred to the baby seems to make it almost unavoidable.)

Is Darwinian-style Natural Selection possible with self-replicating universes? (The simplest possibility is that it is just a numbers game. The types of universes that have the most babies statistically dominate the population. But interactions between universes, and perhaps even with an ‘environment’—simpler and/or very distantly related universes within the FLAT WORLD realm—would provide a venue where universes compete with each other on some sort of fitness landscape or landscapes.)

What are these ‘fitness landscapes?’ If Natural Selection is driving universe evolution, what are the competitive or selection pressures that would guide it? (Here is where we stop climbing this ladder of speculation and simply assume we can ‘take a leap’ and not crash. Where we land is on FLAT WORLD, and beyond the clues that modern physics has accumulated that various versions of multiverses seem inevitable, our FLAT WORLD construction is entirely fictional. Our Song of Everything boldly presumes an analogy between universe self-replication and the evolution of life and argues that interaction between universes is involved. Such interactions are embedded within theoretical extensions of our known laws of physics, and, in general, are definitely not ruled out or prohibited; and yet the mechanisms are so far beyond observational verification that the discussion becomes pure fantasy. We stick by the analogy to life and entirely rely on that to move forward. The competitive environments and selection pressures in Darwinian Natural Selection seem nearly unlimited, and new and subtle ones are constantly being discovered, including topics that are called ‘Post-Darwinian’ such as Epigenetics and Niche Construction. Universe evolution may employ a different mix of the available mechanisms than biology does. Who knows?)

Could biological life itself play a role in, or even take charge of, the selection processes that drive universe evolution? (It is conceivable, and if it does, then the analog between universes and biological entities suddenly becomes a robust correspondence—far more concrete and closer to a practical reality. We anchor our biggest-picture thought experiments on this idea, and argue that it is certainly possible, almost guaranteed not to be impossible; and therefore, in a vast quantum-governed multiverse landscape, it will have happened, and probably in closely related ancestor universes. Whether it can be said to have happened in the case of our particular universe or its putative ancestry would be rank speculation. We will be proposing some physical processes by which this can happen within our observable universe or something close to it.

 ***(Teaser: localized sub-light-cone-sized bubbles—where inflation ended early, perhaps just a few such spots in our entire observable universe (therefore easy to miss)—leading to star formation and heavy element nucleosynthesis far earlier than standard cosmology suggests—during the era when the CMB temperature was between 0º and 100ºC, making the *Entire Universe* a “Goldilocks” habitable realm—redshift greater than 100, universe barely ten to fifteen million years old!) Look for the elaboration of those ideas in future Songs; but since we don’t yet have any evidence for life anywhere but here on Earth and haven’t observed stars older than several hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the proposed processes cannot rely on much, if any, actual supporting evidence.)***

Could life, therefore, have guided the evolutionary selection of universes toward ones that are especially favorable for life’s existence? (This is the ultimate ‘Fine Tuning’ argument, and it continues to be widely debated in the literature. Our Comfortable Universe approach simply suggests that there is this natural course of events that could, indeed, lead to this universe of ours being favorable to life, and that this seems the least objectionable, most natural way to explain the attributes of the universe that we observe. This is the bottom line of why Universes having babies is such a powerful paradigm.)

Okay. The preceding discussion has blazed one pathway through a virgin thought-space full of HUGE questions that are hugely speculative.

Physicists rarely, if ever, go beyond that first rung of the ladder (Can universes have babies?) and would argue that there is no evidence at all that our one and only observable universe can give birth to babies. Certainly, there’s no evidence that our universe came from a mother universe out there ‘In Back of Beyond’ on the other side of the epoch of Inflation.

However, there are physicists who have used theories of Inflation to explore the possibility of creating a Universe in a test tube. The earliest one may have been from Alan Guth and collaborators—a paper from 1990. That paper is not an open-source document, but Alan Guth also discusses it in his 1997 book “The Inflationary Universe.” This is one of just 13 books that Nobel Laureate Physicist Steven Weinberg included in his all-time list of best Science books for the General Reader.

It deserves that place. Guth’s writing is amazingly meticulous, careful to remain true to the science, not glossing over things, and yet he manages to explain things clearly without using equations. The discussion of the Universe in a test tube work is found in Chapter 16 (pages 253 to 269). For our Song of Everything, the key takeaway from Guth’s discussion is that if or when your universe-creating laboratory is able to reproduce, or get close to energy levels where all the forces and fields appear to converge (which is called the Planck Energy, about 10**19 GeV corresponding to a density of 10**93 grams per cc) then the probability of creating a baby universe is essentially 1—it will happen. By comparison, our entire observable universe today contains only about 10**54 grams.

Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen extend this work in a 2004 paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0410270 ), taking it from a Test Tube in the lab of a high-tech advanced civilization to a spontaneous event in normal space in the distant future of our universe. Many of the details of Carroll’s approach go in a different direction from the ‘Universe from nothing’ studies that the paper refers to. It is those papers that more closely relate to our Song of Everything approach. But the 2004 paper lays much of the groundwork for our approach before going into its specific model. The key take-away from that paper for the purposes of the discussion here is that any universe that continues expanding (does not collapse back in on itself) will eventually produce localized fluctuations that initiate Inflation and a baby universe. It happens naturally—no ultra-advanced laboratory full of hyper-intelligent aliens required.

(There is a peer-reviewed companion paper, Carroll and Chen 2005 – PDF at Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0505037 – The published paper is not open source: Carroll, S.M., Chen, J. “Does inflation provide natural initial conditions for the universe?” Gen Relativ Gravit 37, 1671–1674 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-005-0148-2. This is the Essay article with no equations—pretty easy to read.)

But both these ideas—the brute force high-tech approach and the patient late-universe approach— were developed assuming that today’s laws of physics have to apply. Well … how can they not? We sit here immersed in those laws of physics; and we are trying to make a baby. What else do we have to work with?

Well, it’s not the ingredients you work with—it’s the way you use them! The Song of Everything offers the argument that there is a subset of conditions embedded within the laws of our universe that the early Germ Universes took advantage of, and that can generate babies with far less energy in a step-by-step equivalent to fetal development.

This is analogous to saying that the sperm and the egg that initiate a baby human being do not have to already have brains and livers and fingernails fully formed and functioning when the baby is conceived.

What we perceive as a ridiculously high density at the origin point of our universe has little to do, we argue, with the density needed by the first simple Germ Universes in order to produce babies. The difference is the difference between the ‘fetal development’ of our known, highly complex universe, and the ‘evolutionary development’ involving many selection steps between the Germ Universe and ours. This is one of the major examples of how Universe Self-Replication can ease the tension associated with unexplained mysteries of our early universe, and we take that to be a significant bit of evidence in support of the hypothesis.

In the fetal development of a complex organism such as we human beings, we begin with a stem cell, and it divides into two.

If our universe is capable of having babies, then it would have scrupulously maintained that capability to produce an analog to a stem cell. Perhaps it still only takes those two original fields, the YYon and the Qion. This claim remains nothing but wild speculation until those simple stem-cell laws of physics are identified. But maybe there is hope. Those laws ought to be simple, and a ‘stem cell’ produced by our universe would have to be simple and compact relative to its general chaos and complexity. However, there’s a significant caveat: There is no guarantee that the appropriate conditions that these ‘stem-cell-laws’ describe lie within the censorship guard-rails of the observable portion of our universe.

Our example story for the early Germ Universe’s baby-making process began with the YYon interacting with the Qion, which produced a spacetime with the fields of those two entities pervading it, and NO OTHER fields. Those two fields then interacted locally within the spacetime of the parent, and a baby was born in the same manner that the original universe was created out of the Big-V Vacuum, except in this case, the requisite fields were already established.

In the case of a universe with added complexity, more fields have been added during the evolutionary steps that describe the ‘family tree’ of our present universe. Each of those steps could have appeared through processes with relatively reasonable *COMFORTABLE* energy densities, but from our ‘look-back’ perspective within the mature universe, all the steps *seem* to have happened at once, and their energies all get added together into one utterly impossibly large *apparent* energy. This is a heuristic argument, of course, not scientifically rigorous, but it is consistent with all the discoveries of particles in the Standard Model of Particle Physics, wherein particle colliders with greater and greater energies are employed, and they produce unstable particles that quickly decay into multiple products with lower energies. The structure of the universe does not require stable high-energy particles. The closest we come is the ubiquitous ‘quark-gluon plasma’ that sits confined in the heart of every proton and neutron.

Now, at long last, we come to the teaser presented at the end of Song 25.

ROCKS!

Our highly complex human bodies have evolved a very elaborate way to reproduce. Given a blank slate on which to design a reproduction mechanism for a complex biological organism such as ours, which contains between 200 and 400 different kinds of mature cells, one could imagine thousands of different possible ways reproduction could be achieved. How a highly complex universe would do this is likely to have just as many potential options, so the option we choose is no more than an exercise. We look to one simple example for our design.

As just noted, humans and other complex multi-celled organisms have many different mature cell types that developed out of the initial stem cell. Each type of cell might be thought of as an analogy to one fundamental particle within our Standard Model of Particle Physics, or, more specifically, one quantum field. As mentioned, the total number of such known fields is seventeen. Taking the analogy to complex life forms built from individual cells seriously, we speculate that the number of fields that actually come into play to create a complex universe could be in the hundreds. Whatever the number, each field is required to be represented in the “DNA” of the “stem cell” that gives rise to the baby universe.

Unless we’re missing something (which is possible), all the necessary fields extant in our universe come into play to describe the simple lowly rock.

Imagine a chunk of cold solid matter that got ejected from a planetary system. Imagine that it had enough velocity to even escape the gravitational well of its parent galaxy and its local galaxy cluster. It is just about impossible to argue against this idea that uncountable numbers of such rocks have taken to wandering the vast expanding void of space, and will continue to do so as the universe ages.

With it rides a small package of excitations of every field that constructed the parent universe. Maybe that’s all that’s needed. In the inconceivable expanse of time during which our expanding universe goes through its heat death, the lowly rock just wanders on and on (we’re presuming that protons do not decay but are completely stable).

This simple example, taking its cues from the ‘spirit’ of the Carroll and Chen 2004 paper, declares that, perhaps, if no natural reproductive process happens sooner (i.e., more easily, and it probably can if just YYons and Qions are involved in the presence of the other fields), then we can fall back on excitations nucleated by the rock as it eventually finds itself alone in its own light cone—the last and only entity left in its universe—sort of a default ‘stem cell’ of last resort.

And on it goes—a stable, coherently bound bit of matter at near zero temperature that might be practically eternal in such a setting. (Assumptions about diffusion of individual atoms vs. the rock’s gravitational attraction, and about quantum tunnelling of particles within the rock both need to include a stabilization of the mass balance between incoming and outgoing particles—there might be a ‘Ship of Theseus’ discussion to be had here!)

And so, in the vastness of that sort of time landscape, our simple rock might act over and over as a catalyst and nucleation site, because its localized quantum field structure is highly distorted relative to the immensity of the surrounding empty void of space. Perhaps a significant sized quantum of its mass is required to generate a complex baby universe (i.e., the YYons and Qions might not be sufficient). That seems to be the case in the Universe-in-a-Test-Tube model, for example. In such a case, one could argue that our lowly isolated wandering rocks might be the most essential commodity produced by our universe—its very reason for existence!

How many such rocks exist today, having been ejected into intergalactic space by violent collisions and/or gravitational sling-shotting from its parent star system? A few simple assumptions seem to almost certainly lead to a number far exceeding the number of stars in today’s observable universe.

How many of these rocks give birth to Baby Universes as they patiently wander into their own Hubble Volumes (their own light cones with nothing else inside) and drift on and on through a time scale measured by a count of years where the digits in the number itself just grows and grows without any known limit?

Thoughts to ponder.

Foreword: “Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes naturamque novat”

“And he sent forth his Spirit among the Unknown Arts and fashioned Nature anew.”

The title quote is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses VIII:188, from the year 8 CE.  This massive ancient work is Ovid’s “Song of Everything.”

 Immanuel Kant produced one too:

 “A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race [congruence of the perspectives of the Universe’s observers] must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.”

 — Ninth Thesis in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 1784CE

 Here is your Comfortable Universe host and author, appearing the way he most likes to be: all bundled up in a comfortable cocoon in the sort of setting where his thinking is often most productive: “Close to the wild heart of Life” as James Joyce put it in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  This is an image of the younger man, though hardly a young man, taken in early January 2012, on a frigid winter day at Tinker Cliffs on the Appalachian Trail in central Virginia.

This Comfortable Universe project is a journey of discovery for the host and author. I spend my days reading science and philosophy papers, watching videos, thinking and writing on this stuff, following paths that inspiration leads me.

The function of posting the work publicly is critical to the process, even though it is completely ‘ceremonial’ and does not attract the attention of the ‘intended audience’ of working and/or aspiring physicists, cosmologists and philosophers of quantum foundations. Even among that highly specialized group, the intended audience is a small subset of the experts who are conversant with the subjects being discussed here. In addition to having the understanding of the subjects, they would have to have a strong interest in an unusually broad contextual framework of the foundational questions being considered*. Few do. Few even consider this layer of context. They would need to have extraordinarily wide-ranging curiosity but perhaps most importantly, they would require the time and resources to devote thought to subjects that probably could never ‘earn a living’ for them. Few have that luxury.

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* Talking about the context in which we exist necessarily begins with the individual’s personal perspective—the unique “oneness” of the temporary and woefully imperfect minds that each and every one of us is endowed with.

(We can hope to get more general, perhaps usefully, perhaps not, by including the imputed perspective of those around us, and, far more generally, of things that can’t ‘talk’ but can be talked about as experiencing existence. This can include any definable object or entity, right down to the most fundamental particles, and/or even more fundamentally, right down to the presumably inexhaustible variety of [quantum] fields on which objects such as fundamental particles could “come out and play.”)

The argument that argument itself requires a perspective to actualize it (to make it ‘real’ or functional) could imply that ‘mind’ or ‘Spirit’ is actually the central focus of reality. That puts us squarely in the realm of Metaphysics. That’s a field that has acquired a somewhat tainted reputation in our modern times, dominated as these times are by the astounding successes wrought from hard, rigorous, objective analysis; and yet the context of the individual perspective in such analysis is completely and utterly unavoidable. Not one of us has access to anything more. Dreaming of something more objective and universal (such as an observer-independent perspective) is just that—dreaming—and it always will be.

Most philosophers interested in even the biggest picture of “what exists, how and why” (called Ontology) simply gloss over this contextual framework in order to get down to a physicalist agenda, and most physicists themselves couldn’t care less.

But if there is anything in this world that makes fundamental sense, it is the simplicity of an interaction between two entities. Picture the fundamental entity (something abstractly conceived) sitting alone in a void. It has no useful existence until it encounters something else. Only then can time and space acquire meaning. Only then can an observable event occur.

From there, right on up the complexity scale, it is the perspectives on interactions that define meaning, and meaning is the abstract partner that gives context to physical oneness. Without meaning, there’s just nothing to talk about.

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By posting these ‘Songs’ publicly, your host’s brain gets to switch into ‘Theory of Mind’ mode—able to more effectively imagine how the ideas might appear to readers with different levels of understanding and different perspectives. It is kind of like ‘teaching’—trying to effectively communicate—conveying the arguments (or at least the way the author is thinking at the moment) to a generic ‘audience’ or ‘class’. Your host finds that perspective super-helpful as an editing aid.

Also, super-important to my semi-hermit way of life is the pseudo-social interaction involved in this process. The public (meaning, specifically, the audience that the posts are intended to address) becomes my ‘sounding board’. I sense the presence of a generic ‘reader’ who is (ideally) receptive and infinitely patient, non-judgmental, and yet grounded in cultural norms and common sense that help constrain what I write.

I’d love for this ‘audience’ to be real. I’d love it if the ideas were getting someone’s attention …

… actually, NO, I wouldn’t. It would be an unwanted distraction.

As the old saying goes: “Be careful what you wish for!” I prefer that these posts don’t get much attention or notoriety for two reasons. First, there is the non-constructive negativity.  Thoughtful critical evaluation is the lifeblood of any quest for new ideas.  But too often these days people dismiss ideas that don’t fit their preconceptions and/or their worldview without actually thinking about them.  Some instinctively want to push back. Knee-jerk tribalism (polarization) is becoming fashionable. More importantly, even lacking an irrational negative element to the feedback, the phenomenon of ‘social media positive feedback’ can lead to a sense of obligation to an audience, and experience has shown me that that can distract me from the directions I am most curious about and toward directions that ‘address the audience’. Sorry. These posts are not primarily designed to please. They are designed to dig deep—to explore (and then to clear and mark) pathways to new understanding.

“New” might only mean “new to me” for two reasons. First, because I can’t keep up with all the interesting new research papers being published (even experts in a specialization have this problem in today’s information-saturated environment). But second, because the goal is to travel down pathways that have never been explored before, which sometimes means directions that don’t seem productive to working experts—things that could never lead to research funding. I’m not after financial gain here. I’m driven only by curiosity and wonder. It’s blazing new paths through virgin territory that really gets my juices flowing.

The goal is always to be exploring ground that could be part of the true and real landscape experienced by observers who are embedded in our actual universe. But I also extrapolate rather boldly into realms such as ‘FLAT WORLD’ (where multiple universes interact), based on tantalizing real-world clues that science has provided (e.g., the likely existence of the Multiverse). We argue for scenarios that do not violate any known laws—they are within the realm of possibility—so, although they may appear to be fantasies, and exist in censored realms that observers in this universe can never verify, our goal is always to probe the most plausible—the most likely underlying patterns that fit with what we can observe.

Always remember that so much of what seemed like pure fantasy to Ovid and Kant has become today’s every-day reality.

Yes, I do hope the pathways that I’m clearing and marking in these posts will be useful to others in the long-view, such that the ideas eventually find their way (by gradual osmosis) into the mainstream of scientific thinking, even as the body of work of today’s scientific and philosophical thinkers has found its way into the fabric of these posts.

Your host, Dr. Pete, at age 77 (2026)

Prologue: The Quicksand at the Foundation of Reality

‘The Thinker’ by Auguste Rodin finds himself sinking into quicksand.

Thinkers throughout history have sought to define the Foundation of Reality—the bedrock on which everything rests.  But what holds up the bedrock?

The simplest answer that does not degenerate into infinite regress is “Nothing.”

Not the sterile abstract Empty Set, but an entirely paradoxical, indescribable yet essential ‘working Nothing’ that we call the ‘Big-V Vacuum,’ which lurks on the fuzzy, always approximate boundary between not being and being—the harder you think about it, the less solid it becomes!

Here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters, our bold mission is to comprehensively explain all of reality, the purpose of existence, the meaning of life, how the universe works, where everything came from, and where we’re all going.

Ridiculous?  Not at all!  Isn't that, after all, the common goal of us all? ... even though phrasing it that way makes it sound overly ambitious and utterly unattainable.  Well, our fundamental claim is that it is far more attainable than most of our modern-day deep thinkers realize.  It’s not about taking everything apart—dissecting the subject down to the individual parts, molecules, atoms, even quantum wave functions.  It’s about learning how the subject functions in its natural settings, with emphasis on the most common and relevant situations. 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.  It might even be more appropriately be called the Dance of Everything, because it does involve a sort of choreography (careful, nimble steps down the chosen path), and it entails a keen sense of BALANCE.

We’re after the really, really Big Picture, and we start by recognizing some aspects of the Biggest Picture (including the frame, so to speak) that most modern thinkers appear to have ignored, or perhaps lost track of.  We argue that most of today’s ‘Theory of Everything’ quests have drifted far out of balance, and that there is a fairly straightforward ‘metric’ that can be used to demonstrate this.  The metric is a measure of how useful a perspective is provided by the work.  Useful not to other specialists, but Big Picture useful.  Our bottom line is that a balanced Big Picture quest can be as comfortable as sitting on a sofa in the living room, sipping on a favorite beverage, and relaxing—the deeper concerns left simmering on the back burner in the kitchen, so to speak. There is no pressure or angst necessary, even when considering the profoundest simmering mysteries that the world’s most capable thinkers are addressing.

These deep thinkers love their work, and they’re wonderful open-minded critical thinkers.  Maybe some of them will recognize what we see as the problem: There is a fundamental limit to Every Quest—a limit to physical experiment as well as to logical, rational discourse itself.  What we call reality admits nonsense as readily as it admits common sense.  Some of philosophy’s deepest-probing thinking has become too intense—applying too much elaboration, parsing, and nuance—with too much laser-sharp focus on minutia and detail. In the realm of pure mathematics, mathematicians regale in theories and concepts that they will happily admit have no known or expected relevance to our physical world.  That admission may be less straightforward in philosophy, and it really is a matter of defining the goals of the philosophical pursuit in question.  Most working physicists take a very different approach to issues of Big Picture relevance.  They deliberately blind themselves to it.  (“Shut up and calculate!”)  But our goal here at Comfortable U is crystal clear.  We want to know what explains the experience of the physical world—not just the individual human experience.  Our goal is to extrapolate or extend the perspective to the observable (known) universe’s perspective as a whole, if we can.  It is about physics, in the broad sense of natural philosophy, and with special emphasis on the word ‘natural.’

Unlike physics, the pursuit of philosophy does not demand observational guardrails.  The pursuits of unanswered questions in physics and cosmology often try to apply a sense of ‘naturalness’ to help them choose among theoretical options.  Natural philosophy ought to be doing the same, but that’s not always being done.  When these pursuits stray beyond the naturalness ‘balance,’ they can be characterized as adding straws to a camel’s back or adding too many blocks to a tower. It is our claim that such pursuits have gone well beyond rational common sense’s practical, comfortable bounds—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 are building upon in order to take their stands (their axioms—the starting rules) reveals its underlying nature as nothing but 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.  In fact, you’ll never even need to recognize that the ground on which your couch sits is anything but the sturdiest solid bedrock.

How can we make such a blanket, global claim that all quests have intrinsic limits—that philosophers and scientists and mathematicians and the like are building their quests on ground that is not actually firm? It’s not an outrageous claim to make at all.  Both Physics and Philosophy have encountered obvious problems when pursuing a question too deeply.  Examining a quark or an electron in too much detail simply creates an obscuring fuzz or cloud of additional particles.  The closer you try to look, the thicker the fog gets.  Examining a space scale that is too small requires energy levels that collapse the observing device into a black hole.  In Philosophy, instabilities like infinite regress and self-contradiction can be identified in virtually any inquiry.

The most astute of the deep thinkers might be willing to admit that this is a foundational problem. 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 can be localized (bounded) and 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.

Some of the discussion above may sound ‘anti-intellectual,’ and in a superficial sense it is.  But calling it that completely misses the point. We’re into a new era of information overload, and our Song of Everything is meant as a Balanced response to that.  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).

Our Song of Everything embraces a pull-back to more balanced views and approaches, seeking the most useful practical ‘effective descriptions’. 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 (the ‘Big-V Vacuum’ in the physical realm, the inescapable ‘Oneness’ of any observer—any perspective interrogating and experiencing the world, and the absolute causal ineffectiveness of Abstract Objects) is the one and only fundamental or foundational thing—the thing that “just is” (a ‘Brute Fact’ without explanation).  It is to be preferred over others, such as God, or some immutable, eternal set of Laws of Physics, 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 through reason or experiment. 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 Picture 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 defined by experience.
2. All experience is ultimately rooted in (can be traced back to) the physical world (flat physicalism).
3. All experience is emergent because it depends on an agent—an entity—to actualize it and an interaction to produce it. (This applies all the way down to the ‘perspective’ of an individual fundamental physical particle, which is contingent on an interaction—e.g., decoherence—in order to extract it from its quantum vagueness.)
4. All emergent entities/agents 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).  As a result, the best, most useful and appropriate 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!