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 toward the intimate and arguably crucial perspective of the thing that emerges—what does it ‘experience’ and does it make Sense … at every step along what may have been a very long and winding path 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 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.
The physics of this 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 a clear explanation of why the intense pressure causes the huge repulsion.
The Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric 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. To dig even further into the math and science, 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??? 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 300th 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 how the first ‘something’ popped out of the mysterious ‘nothing’ that is the Big-V Vacuum. Still sticking with the physics story, 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. 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’s goal was to escape the game entirely before the monstrous Big-V Vacuum, with its big black mallet, could whack it out of existence.
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 the poster-boy for nothing … well, our universe is stamped with an expiration date.
But thanks to that 1000-flip zone of smoothness, 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 crate 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 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 punch-line. 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, let’s start 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 ‘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 4th 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 away 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!
... tasked with keeping sky and earth separated, he stuck to his task for 18,000 years, growing ten feet in height 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. And yet the real power of his being was just beginning to stir.
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 seen again.
And 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 deep ravines and canyons and his blood poured out of his body and became the rivers that would 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. That 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 even being discussed much (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. 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 those two moments 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 with Song 24. Stay tuned.
In the original arcade game, there are holes in a table out of which pop little mechanical moles. The player has a mallet with which s/he attempts to whack the mole before it disappears back into its hole. As the game progresses, the speed of the moles and the number of appearances keep increasing, making hitting them an ever-increasing challenge.
In our analogy, we added a few twists. First of all, the holes have become our familiar Cosmic Rabbit Holes, the moles have been replaced by pink Easter Bunnies, and the big nasty black Mallet is wielded by the primordial “Big-V Vacuum,”
Most importantly, the Bunnies don’t just pop back down into their hole. Their goal is to escape the game table entirely and become free-agent baby universes. The role of Big-V Vacuum is to prevent this by whacking the Bunny back into the hole (back into the oblivion of the Vacuum) before it can make its escape.
The Bunny has some tricks up its sleeve. It is carrying a set of internal rules that it is going to pit against Big-V’s skill with the Mallet. Big-V doesn’t seem to respect any rules, however, and claims that its reaction ‘time’ with the Mallet is virtually instantaneous because it doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of time.
There seems an intractable conundrum here. What rules can our Bunny invoke that would work when Big-V seems entirely lawless, refusing to acknowledge, let alone obey, rules of any kind.
To address this conundrum, Our Song of Everything seeks clues from what Science can tell us about the ‘little-v vacuum’ that we can observe from within our universe (which is presumed to be a successfully escaped Easter Bunny, so to speak).
But here we find that things begin to look more challenging for the Bunny than we could ever have imagined. Turns out that Big-V is a true MONSTER! The calculated energy of just the bits of the little-v vacuum that we can interrogate, is gigantic! As discussed in the opening video from PBS Space Time, one teacup of the stuff would be enough to boil away all of Earth’s oceans. And we have a whole universe full of this stuff—the vacuum is everywhere. With that much energy lurking in the vacuum—with that much force and intensity wielding the Mallet—our Bunny, and every possible universe it could have hoped to create, should have been thoroughly and completely smashed back into its hole within a tiny fraction of a second.
That’s the Vacuum Catastrophe. No universe anything like ours should ever be possible. ***(But see the important footnote below.) And yet, somehow, our oceans haven’t boiled. We’ve been spared. That calculated monstrous energy has obviously not shredded our real universe into bits. In fact, it seems to have done nothing at all.
This is the mysterious clue that we have to work with. It has been called the biggest mystery in physics, and also the worst disagreement between theoretical prediction and actual observation in all of science. (Stay tuned for Song 23 in our Song of Everything, where we will be offering a pretty solid explanation for this paradox that supports our relaxed, one-step-at-a-time picture of the way the Universe got started.)
What rule, or what loophole in Big-V’s seemingly unlimited power and its apparently impenetrable disrespect for rules, could the Bunny possibly hope to come up with?
This is not a question that science is prepared to answer. It may never be.
It is not even a question that logic or reason can answer.
It needs a Song!
Back in Song 17, we introduced the Whac-an-Easter-Bunny analogy and declared that the Bunny could run faster than Big-V could wield the Mallet.
Well, that doesn’t seem to hold up under close scrutiny. Running requires some sort of running track—Space. ‘Fast’ requires a measure of Time. Big-V scoffs at such foibles.
In Song 18, we doubled-down on the idea that any rules that the Bunny comes up with only really reside inside its ‘head’—meaning from a perspective that is internal to it and particular to it. The critical rules that allow its internal perspective to survive and flourish have to somehow ‘trick’ big-V into not ‘noticing’ the escaping Bunny in ‘time’ to Whack it. Because of the raging maelstrom of Big-V’s vast energy resource, the best way to be not noticed seems to be to ‘slip through the cracks’—to be as tiny and insignificant as possible.
So, our Song suggests that our Bunny builds its rules inward—deeper and deeper inside itself. Maybe it even has to shed layer after layer of rules as it runs a gauntlet through the Rabbit Hole—like the way the outer layers of an onion die and form a skin protecting the deeper layers within.
We aren’t trying to claim that we know the rules that the Bunny used. In fact, our Song of Everything takes the firm position that there is nothing special, distinctive, or unique about the rules that resulted in our observed universe. But our Song does insist that these layers of rules emerged one at a time, randomly, testing Big-V’s reaction, and probably also exploiting its complete indifference.
In Songs 17 and 18 and then in the physics details discussed in Songs 19 and 20, our approach was minimalist. There is some secretive way that our Bunny can ‘run fast’ that Big-V doesn’t ‘care’ about—at least not enough to take a whack at it. Maybe the random chaos within Big-V’s realm actually generated a bubble of ‘un-whack-able-ness’ that the Bunny has exploited. Think of flipping a fair coin 1000 times and coming up heads each and every one of those 1000 flips. This is the kind of rare anomaly that the timeless, utterly indifferent Big-V will necessarily produce every so often, simply because it is possible.
And that’s all we needed. Secret rules tuned to chance loopholes (big bubbles in the random froth), with a little luck and some patience and persistence ... and here we are, Winners of the Lottery, leaning back on our sofa, lifting our drinks for a toast, and belting out a rowdy old bar Song! Our Song of Everything!
*** Important footnote (the rest of this post)
The Vacuum Catastrophe calculation, as Dr. Matt O’Dowd discusses in the PBS Space Time video up top, has some underlying assumptions that are peculiar to our universe’s physics. The big one, for the purposes of our Song of Everything, is the selection of the Planck Scale as the cut-off energy scale. (If you include smaller scales, that just makes the catastrophe even worse!)
The Planck Scale was introduced by Max Planck way back in 1899, well before the laws of Quantum Physics and General Relativity were known, and yet it unifies them at short length scales (what physicists call the UV). The Planck Length is the teeny-tiny size of a unit of space at which Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity seem to want to merge. It’s unimaginably small—take a meter stick and cut in half. Take one of those pieces and cut it in half and keep doing that for a total of 117 times and your smallest piece is the Planck Length. Interesting thing about your attempt to make that last cut, though: any kind of scissors or power saw or laser beam that can be sharpened or focused tightly enough to make that final cut has to have such concentrated energy that it would automatically collapse into a black hole before it could accomplish the cut, so that making sense of anything that small or smaller, within our currently accepted laws of physics, is literally impossible.
The mission of the Song of Everything is to look beyond our current laws of physics, because they are known to be incomplete and inadequate. There is far more territory that is unknown than known, not the least of which is what’s going on at and below the Planck length scale, where it is most likely that our universe got its start.
It is at this tiniest scale that our Cosmic Rabbit Hole exists in the Whac-an-Easter-Bunny game. The Easter Bunny that pops up is very likely to be at or below that scale, and its first steps, as it escapes the marauding Mallet of Big-V Vacuum are likely to be that tiny as well.
In the long footnote on Song 19, in the previous post (Part Three), we introduced and emphasized the notion of Asymptotic Freedom—an attribute of at least one important part of the currently accepted laws of physics—because it provides the pathway from these tiny scales to the larger. An entity that has Asymptotic Freedom sheds the shackles of the physics laws that govern the larger scale processes when it operates at the Planck Scale. This notion, therefore, is essential to our Song of Everything’s approach to the Creation Story. It is what allows the tiny germ that leads to our universe to pop out of the Big-V Vacuum and begin its journey to becoming the universe that we observe.
Every rule carried by our Easter Bunny as it emerges from the Cosmic Rabbit Hole has to be compatible with the notion of Asymptotic Freedom. Black Holes are a complete fail in that regard. They’re pretty much the poster child for an anti-Cosmic-Rabbit-Hole that does nothing but swallow up Easter Bunnies. The Song of Everything, therefore, categorically declares that Black Holes were not a feature of the laws of physics of the Germ universe that first emerged.
How could there be laws of physics in the ‘ancestry’ of our universe that were so radically different from the laws we observe today? The very term that we chose to use here—‘ancestry’—provides our explanation. The Song of Everything’s one-step-at-a-time approach to the Origin Story is most suited to a story in which universes have ways to self-replicate, so that we actually do, truly, have an ancestry. We have a parent universe and our universe will give birth to (or already has) child universes.
Each succeeding universe in the ‘genealogy’ provides opportunity for new physics to emerge out of the Library of possibilities in the Big-V Vacuum and be tested. Furthermore, just as with living things, old laws that are no longer useful fall by the wayside, disappear, and can be completely lost, and new laws that evolve, create contradictory, even destructive situations that could not have existed in the earlier generations, such as Black Holes ... and Vacuum Catastrophes.
Let’s explore that in more detail using an example from our own ‘ancestry.’ We human beings evolved from some sort of vertebrate that lived in the ocean at some time in the distant past. That fish-like thing breathed water, and would die if it was thrown out onto dry land. If we are submerged deep in the ocean, we would also die. Yet one came from the other. The laws that allowed us to breathe water are completely lost, and we do not even know for sure what the fish-like thing we came from exactly looked like, what it ate, etc. Of course, there are mammals that have returned to the sea (although none that I know of have resumed breathing water – yet.)
In the case of our universe, many of the current laws do not allow Asymptotic Freedom. That’s why they predict the Vacuum Catastrophe. In the early universe there were probably no such laws. Instead, the original set of laws had to have emerged with Asymptotic Freedom; and some, or even most of those laws must have since been completely lost and are not necessarily recoverable, although future universes could re-discover them if necessary. The analogy is to convergent evolution, in which the same useful trait or structure has evolved independently multiple times.
When we apply the analogy of the evolution of life to the development of our universe, even assuming that such an analogy is highly predictive, valid, and appropriate, there is still one major difference that we have to recognize. It can be neatly characterized by a simple equation.
N = 1
The ‘N=1 problem’ states that we have only our one observable universe to study. (It also applies to the number of technologically advanced civilizations that we know about and the number of individual minds whose perspective we experience first-hand.) It’s a big overarching problem, this N=1 thing, and Our Song of Everything will probably return to it.
The point to be made here is that when we study life, N is HUGE. We have a vast branching tree of life full of living species and many more fossils to study; but in the case of a putative genealogy of universes, and the possible interaction between them in the FLAT WORLD realm (introduced in Song 21), we are hopelessly trapped inside a small portion of this single functioning unit and have zero knowledge of any other individuals in our own species let alone of other more distantly related universes. It is as if a single cell (even, perhaps a super-advanced neuron) in an organism was tasked with trying to describe the true full function of the organism it lives in, and to explain how that organism got so huge and complex. With Darwin’s help, and with the benefit of all the other species we have to study, we have been able to piece together a rich story of the evolution of life. But in the case of our N=1 universe, we are forced to operate with severe blinders on.
How appropriate is this analogy to biology? This is a subject that our Song of Everything claims is wonderfully low hanging fruit, ripe for discussion—long overdue and vastly underrecognized and underappreciated. On this blog there are several discussions already posted addressing this. They are very much to be considered adjuncts to the Song of Everything. Given the tremendous complexity our universe allows, and assuming that some version of our Song of Everything appropriately describes how simple Germ universes got their start emerging from the Big-V Vacuum, then it seems almost mandatory to consider a step-by-step evolution linking such a Germ universe to today’s observed universe.
Did an especially energetic amoeba one day just happen to give birth to Einstein? Right. What a crazy idea it seems to assume that our cozy, exquisitely well-prepared Comfortable Universe just suddenly happened all at once in one giant leap.
Here continues the epic saga that intends to be a complete answer to the burning question “WTF, man?” or more intelligibly “What’s life all about, anyhow, dude? What’s real and what’s just bullshit? Do we have a clue?”
Yes, we do! It’s all pink Easter Bunnies!
No, seriously. The cute little Bunnies are our unique way of telling the story of how our universe began.
For the full story, start with Part One, then check Part Two, and you’re ready to head on down this long and winding Bunny trail:
Song 15
Near the end of Part Two we were homing in on one of the simplest ways that our universe might have come into existence, assuming that existence isn’t just a figment of our imagination and that things did have a beginning rather than being eternal (whatever that can possibly mean).
The default simplest explanation seems to be undirected random chance: just throw all the possible building blocks or ingredients together in an agitated vibrating vat and let them ‘cook’ and see what comes together.
In Part Two, I offered the suggestion that “This is no ‘Easter Bunnies pounding randomly on a keyboard’ until they successfully type Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It’s a lot more sophisticated and a lot more complicated than that!”
What I mean by that is that the ‘creation’ process is far more likely to have happened in a sequence of steps rather than an all-or-nothing, all-at-once single event. First the Easter Bunnies would have to home in on a language (and its alphabet). Then, maybe, a decision on a genre would come next—science fiction, romance, or non-fiction, for example. The next steps might be to settle on a plot or outline and develop the profiles of the key characters or talking points.
The ‘target’ story (our particular universe) did not just fall together by our cute little Bunnies typing strings of random characters drawn from the any and all languages and alphabets—just hoping that the exact text of the story in one coherent language appeared. But for completeness—in order to make sure we don’t miss something important that we don’t yet know about—that is where we have to start.
All the possible letters from all possible alphabets are in the pot, or on some massive keyboard. The connections that happen between these building blocks (the order in which the bunny types them) do not, of course, all ‘make words.’ That is, they don’t all have equal viability to hold together. Some have greater potential than others to fit into useful sentences—to serve as a basis for further specific clumps of words that can create a working plot-line.
But, as I said, that’s the simple-minded way. Now let’s get more sophisticated and start organizing the Easter Bunnies and their keyboards—give them a hierarchy.
Bunny number one bangs away on its keyboard until it has chosen a particular alphabet. Bunny number two then works with that particular alphabet only, and bangs out strings of characters, with the goal of creating meaningful individual words.
Let’s check a specific simple case that is close to home. Not English. That’s probably not a very useful language for building a universe (though we don’t necessarily know what is). Let’s say that Bunny number one picked an alphabet that has just four letters: A, G, C, T.
Look familiar? Those are the four nucleotide bases that are the building blocks of DNA. The words being formed by Bunny number two would then be genes; and the next Bunnies in the line are tacking genes together hoping that a living thing will come popping out—perhaps even another pink Easter Bunny!
With a different alphabet—that mysterious one that defines the laws of physics—can our Bunnies hope for a whole universe to pop out?
Well, for starters, it’s likely that the language will, at least in part, be mathematical, with the characters filling the equations that govern the processes we know about.
There are caveats with that, of course. We have equations that govern Space and Time and the way big clumps of matter like baseballs and Easter Bunnies move around (Einstein’s Field Equations governing General Relativity) and we have an equation that governs the small scale (Protons and Electrons and Light), called the Standard Model of Particle Physics, but we don’t know how (or even if) these two equations fit together to make the whole universe.
The problems don’t end there. First, the equations in their general form are not even solvable. Only very specialized solutions have been found (very useful ones, to be sure—our physicists are a clever lot—they’re some of the smartest people around). Moreover, both of these big-picture equations are clearly and demonstrably inadequate simplifications themselves.
Speaking of his Field Equation, Einstein declared that one side of it was “carved from fine marble” but the other side was just “low grade wood” full of knots and splinters and cracks and sort of haphazardly cobbled together with bent nails and duct tape.
The equation describing the Standard Model of Particle Physics is even worse. It is literally a hodge-podge of descriptions of each of the individual particles and their interactions, all shored up by a scaffolding of scale-limiting corrections called, collectively, Renormalization, which is why they won’t work at all on the very smallest scales. Just take a look at the mess that this equation presents physicists with:
Well … that’s today’s universe—the final product, so to speak. Our best science minds have studied our observable reality, and that’s what they’ve come up with. But look how much complication is in those equations. Is that the simplest universe that could be ‘viable?’ Or is there one that just the first several Easter Bunnies could type out and then hand on to the next Bunny in line for further refinement later on—a simple ‘germ’ of a universe that is kind-of like the simplest form of life: a protocell or a self-replicating nucleotide.
The question we’re asking, then, is this: Was our observed universe built as it appears to us, or did it develop in a series of steps from something much simpler. What is the simplest structure that could be imagined? For example, can you start erasing some of the terms from that hodge-podge equation for the Standard Model of Particle Physics shown above? Or can you take some of the known, vastly simplified solutions to Einstein’s Field Equations and show that they describe a working universe?
The answer is almost certainly yes. There is likely to be any number of proto-universes that could work.
The analogy to the creation of life does seem relevant, though we have to carefully note the differences as well. But in doing the comparison, we get a surprise. It seems that there are at least three significant differences between the generation of the first germ of life and the generation of the first germ of a universe that each suggest that a proto-universe might be even easier and more likely to form than the earliest possible forms of life—perhaps much easier.
1. Life takes the chaos of the primordial chemical soup and organizes it. The jargon term for that is “reduction of entropy.” Life needed to ‘swim upstream’ against the strong currents of what’s known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the chaos always tends to increase. For universe formation no such law exists in the Big-V Vacuum’s primordial chaotic soup.
2. In order to function as a self-organizing, self-replicating entity, life seems to need a certain minimal complexity. Every surviving living thing on Earth needs four distinct chemical families working together: lipids for cell membranes for protection, carbohydrates such as sugars for energy and for structure, amino acids for protein metabolism, and the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) for heredity. In the case of a germ universe, the requirements for self-replication and evolution may be much simpler. For example, the very formation/actualization of any and all candidates for potential universes (every character string the Bunny could type) intrinsically defines a natural, self-selected ‘cell membrane’ between the chaotic Vacuum and the proto-universe. It only remains to see how well it works.
3. A universe is (probably) a closed system, whereas life is very much an open system that needs to draw energy and material from its environment, at the expense of its internal resources. On the other hand, the universe just pops up with the right stuff self-selected—the needed rules and limitations. There are no externally imposed ones. If the universe doesn’t exhibit the right stuff, then it just self-annihilates and fades back into the non-existent shadow realm of the Vacuum.
What is the simplest self-replicating universe? There is a one-word answer, which I’ll just state here without explaining—it’s a physics jargon term with a very specific meaning but a word that has more common meanings to the average person on the street: Inflation. Big clues from the world of physics point to it as a pretty clear best answer. So, let’s dig in and find out what Inflation means in cosmological terms and how we get to it.
Song 16
The analogy to living things is a ‘model’ that our Song of Everything is going to adopt and work from.
It’s an open question, of course. We don’t even know the steps that life took starting with the chemical elements in early Earth’s primordial soup. The genes have been completely lost (and the words in the alphabet—the laws of physics—that got our universe started may be just as completely wiped away).
In the case of life, geneticists have been able to work backward to identify the basic genome for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all living things on Earth, and it turns out to have at least 355 genes associated with at least 60 different proteins common to all current life. At least 30 chemical (selection) steps are necessary to produce the LUCA from prebiotic chemistry—and that’s just to produce its RNA.
But here’s the important point (building on the three differences above): The elements available to create life are highly limited in number. There are only about 92 natural elements that the laws of physics have allowed our universe to produce for chemistry’s periodic table. Is the Library of potential not-impossible entities that lurk beyond the Veil of existence in the primordial Big-V Vacuum so limited? What law, in that lawless realm, would restrict the possibilities so severely? Or at all?
We, of course, don’t know what’s out there beyond the reach of observation. But we have been able to glean important clues by interrogating the little-v vacuum from our comfy reference frame here in our one cozy universe. By concentrating on the tiniest things (down to what is called the Planck Scale, which was mentioned near the end of Song 13 in Part Two), we see a raging quantum ‘froth’ or ‘foam’ that does seem completely lawless. Things can briefly have negative energy. Space itself gets totally twisted and wonky and undefinable. At that scale, things can violate every known law of physics that holds our larger-scale comfortable realm together. That’s why we can surmise that the Library is more extensive than we know and that no known governing laws are in force.
Here’s a great tutorial on the Quantum Foam from the US particle accelerator/collider facility Fermilab:
Extrapolating these clues further using pretty simple logic (looking carefully at the questions asked a few paragraphs ago, and the assumptions behind them) and taking the T.H. Huxley view that not only are there relevant things that we don’t know, but that those things are illimitable, then it seems inevitable that the full scope of ‘what’s behind the Veil’ of the Big-V Vacuum is … well, let’s just say Vast!
Okay, it seems reasonable, then, for our Song of Everything to bring us through this Cosmic Rabbit Hole from not being to being by random selection—by letting the Bunnies rattle around on their keyboards or letting the Cosmic soup pot just stew away until something useful appears.
Those last two words are the important ones. Something appears, and is useful (to itself). It has to resist the ‘temptation’ to instantly self-annihilate and retreat back into the uncharted seas of nothingness.
It has to survive.
DNA did that job really well. We’ve already thoroughly beaten to death the point that nobody knows the detailed step-by-step process that got life started. Our Song of Everything isn’t even going to try to unravel that mystery. But it is going to dive boldly into the Rabbit Hole to explain how the laws of physics might have accomplished a germ universe that ultimately led to our Comfortable Universe.
How might a little particle of something find a way to survive and endure within this chaotic froth we see on the tiniest scales? Again, we can rely on the clues we have. It has to manifest space scales that are significantly larger than the tiniest ones we can observe—space scales where things get stable, which, of course, means it has to first manifest space itself, since space isn’t a requirement in the lawless Big-V Vacuum. And it has to manifest the rule that defines ‘surviving.’ Inherently, this means starting the clock ticking (manifesting time itself) in order to provide a measure—a ‘metric’ by which survival can be usefully defined.
Surviving, to us, means cheating the odds—still being around when it seems more likely that you would not.
And yes, it turns out that the game of Survival for a universe really is about as close to ‘cheating’ (or a sort of con game) as a strategy can get. Let’s delve into that a little more closely.
Song 17
THE INSIDE-OUT PERSPECTIVE
The bigger the universe seems to be on the inside, the smaller it has to make its ‘profile’ from the ‘perspective’ of the destructive forces of the Chaos—the Big-V Vacuum. It builds its complexity inward. They’re like layers of an onion; but unlike an onion, the universe does not ever grow any ‘bigger’ than the primordial particle that started it. Rather, each new layer is ‘smaller’ than the one it emerged from.
How in the world do you fit our whole universe inside a single tiny particle? Let’s play this idea out in a cosmic arcade.
Remember that ‘Whac-a-Mole’ arcade game? Well, in our world, it’s the ‘Whac-an-Easter-Bunny’ game. The playing surface has holes in it (Cosmic Rabbit Holes) out of which pink Easter Bunnies pop up and then quickly drop back out of sight. The player’s goal is to whack the Bunny with a mallet before it disappears.
Now imagine that you’re the Big-V Vacuum and you’ve constantly got these Easter Bunnies popping up and trying to become real, messing up your nice serene realm of pure ‘white noise.’ This will not do. No pink bunnies allowed (… ??? – see later). You’re a Vacuum after all, and any good Vacuum worth its name can’t have Easter Bunnies hopping all around cluttering it up. So, your goal is to be poised with that mallet, ever vigilant, with hair-trigger reaction time, ready to whack those damn Bunnies back out of existence.
Now, I’ve repeatedly noted that the Big-V Vacuum has no rules. Anything is fair game. Here’s the point. “No rules” means there’s no such thing as space and no such thing as time. No such thing as Easter Bunnies. But there's also no such thing as 'not space' or 'time is forbidden' or 'No Easter Bunnies allowed.' Although none of that stuff has any special privilege—not being necessary or fundamental—neither is it actually prohibited.
So, out of one of the holes something that pops up claims to be an Easter Bunny; and not only that, it claims to be able to run so fast back into the hole that you can’t whack it. In our game the Bunny claims to be able to escape into its own universe if you don’t whack it. It says that it’s not going to just pop back down into the hole, it's going to tunnel into a new realm where the player with the mallet can't get to it. And we have to whack it before that happens. But where can it possibly go? There’s no space. How can you measure its speed when there’s no such thing as time?
It is purely a matter of perspective. From your point of view as the Big-V Vacuum, there’s no ‘place’ for the Bunny to go but back into complete oblivion. But then, because the Big-V Vacuum is lawless, it actually can’t even have a ‘point of view.’
Here we’ve come square up against the ‘Tao problem’—a fundamental philosophical black hole that refers all the way back 2,500 years to the ancient Chinese faith tradition called Taoism.
Founder of Taoism, the sage named Laozi, shown here “Riding out of Legend” in a modern depiction juxtaposed with a historic characterization painted by Zhang Lu about 1500CE. This iconic portrait of him riding his ox is associated with the tale of his abandoning civilization and retiring to the western wilderness, leaving behind only his famous text, the Tao-Te Ching.
We find that Laozi, had things nailed all those years ago when he wrote, as the opening lines to the Taoist ‘bible’, the Tao-Te Ching:
”The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao.
The name that can be named is not the true name.
The nameless is the beginning …
Naming is the origin of particular things.”
No matter what linguistic gymnastics one attempts to invoke to describe the Big-V Vacuum (e.g. the Cosmic Rabbit Hole, the Portal to the 0th Dimension, the Void, the Huge First Nothing, the Great Empty Everything), one necessarily falls short of correctly depicting it. This thing that happens to get a ‘beginning’ popping out of it cannot be adequately talked about (or modeled in any coherent way), no matter how you try.
With that clearly in mind, we talk about it anyhow …
… because here we are, and we can talk about it…
… and because the Big-V Vacuum doesn’t give a flying hairy horse-potato whether we talk about it or not!
How does 'running really fast' get you away from the ubiquitous, lawless, indifferent Big-V with her timelessly swift mallet? This seems to come as close to a 'miracle' as anything can get. Or to cheating. There are a lot of subtle issues here, and we're going to explore them further (see the Song 22 post, which will follow this one when it's ready). For now, we can just sit back on our comfy sofa and enjoy life. We've escaped! We're no longer wallowing in that lawless shadow realm on the other side of the Rabbit Hole. By succeeding in existing, we get to claim that we win! How lucky we are!!!
Suddenly, we begin to see why the concept of God can be a very useful tool for talking about this “in the beginning” stuff. It’s especially comfortable and natural to think that there could be a point of view out there on the other side of the portal that is creating this miracle—that is responsible for our uncanny good fortune.
Not everybody is going to agree that this virtual (not physical) Big-V Vacuum qualifies as The primordial and most fundamental basic state. Yes, it is eternal in the sense that it is outside of time. Yes, it is ubiquitous because space isn’t a feature it requires. But is it the most basic thing? Is it even necessary?
Those who talk in terms of a primal God or Brahman or Platonic Forms can make their case. Our Song of Everything's position is what I believe to be the simplest case. The Big-V Vacuum is the least of all possible primordial states. No, it is not necessary, but that's a big part of its power (or usefulness—again, we're up against the Tao problem). There is no practical difference between it and “nothing” because any absolute concept of a Big-N Nothing is a non-starter—being an absolute, it literally does not permit anything else at all, let alone the start of a universe. That leaves the Big-V Vacuum that physicists can interrogate and learn something about from within our reference frame, as the most fundamental practical working ‘nothing’ that is possible. Full stop. (Right. Good luck trying to stop philosophers from disputing it.)
Now … back to our precocious little fast-running Bunny. In order to claim that s/he is fast, s/he has brought with him/her some built-in rules. Space was one. Time was the other. Our Bunny ‘believes’ in its rules. It probably has no choice, actually—it’s sort of a one-eyed Bunny that can only look forward because what’s behind can’t be seen or adequately recognized in any way. And so, it ‘thinks’ that it is running, and indeed running so fast that it can avoid the mallet. And it has invited all its BFFs along. Suddenly out of the rabbit hole, a bazillion bunnies are streaming into the new realm doing the happy bunny dance!
Song 18
Okay, in order to help make better sense of this, I’m going to briefly jump ahead in the Cosmic Creation Story to the time when one of the Bunnies at its keyboard gets handed the baton and gets to work trying to add a speed limit beyond which we can’t move our mallet when we try whacking the Bunny. This is another layer to the onion. It didn’t have to happen at first—it isn’t needed to create that first Germ of a simplest universe—but it makes the thought experiment easier to understand.
From our perspective, the speed of light is our cosmic censor, and that role is probably intrinsic to physical stuff existing in our reference frame—seeming to hold it apart from the greater, lawless, chaotic Big-V Vacuum. But what is light but one random particular thing within our observed ‘particle zoo’? As I said, light, and its speed (its interaction with space and time) was a later addition to the Cosmic Song of Everything, and not relevant to the earliest stages of formation of reality. The ‘speed’ at which ‘space’ was created (the speed that our whack-a-Bunny thinks he is running) was and ought to still be faster and seems more fundamental/original.
Whatever the ‘force’ is that ‘manufactures’ space, it does not apparently exchange information, but it does profoundly affect the exchange of information. Our fast-moving Easter Bunny is the pioneer who is opening up this new territory as it runs. The ‘manufacture’ seems to be a process of realizing (making real) a zero-entropy (no chaos—what science calls ‘isotropic’ [looking the same in every direction] and ‘homogeneous’ [being made of the same kind of stuff everywhere you go]) state amid the boiling infinite-entropy Big-V Vacuum state. Notably, (again for those who care about the deeper science of the Song of Everything) a region that is purely isotropic and homogeneous can’t actually contain any usable energy. That would emerge later in the Cosmic Origin Story, and as our story goes, it is in conjunction with the appearance of light.
The only sure way to make such a manufactured state ‘endure’ is to ‘invent’ the idea of endurance itself, specifically by constructing the first bit of pure (isotropic and homogeneous) time and space within which things can potentially start to emerge and rattle about.
We wrap up Song 18 by coming back to the opening line from Song 17—the ‘inside-out’ perspective. As counter-intuitive as it seems, the spacetime that our Bunny is manufacturing (our entire universe, ultimately, and all the complex information within it that “rattles about”, i.e., is exchanged at light speed or slower) seems to have to be a subset of (conceptually smaller than, or ‘within’) the attributes of the entity doing the manufacture. It’s all in the Bunny’s head, so to speak.
This naturally brings us full circle back to the opening image of Part One of our Song of Everything, where we introduced the Big-T Trilogy (just decided to call it that right here) of fundamental reality. Talking about the universe strictly from the inside-out perspective of what the Bunny perceives demands that we acknowledge the essential value of accepting the mind-body paradox as intrinsic to the structure of reality. Our Spirit (our mental modelling system) filters and processes Everything that we Sense. We use what we sense to develop a story that we collectively agree is some objective knowledge (our Science); and delving deeper and deeper into the story, as we've been doing, inevitably drags us right to the threshold of the 'Tao Problem,' which, of course, resides ever so comfortably at the heart of the Spirit side of things.
Song 19
Now to put some solid physics meat on our Easter Bunny’s bones.
The Big-V Vacuum, as mentioned, maintains a vast Library of possible things, yet it seems possible to describe a way that our reality got started with just a few. What seems most likely is that the process starts with some rudimentary form of the laws of quantum mechanics.
As discussed above, there are two basic sets of equations that our universe seems to be rooted in—Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity. Our one-step-at-a-time approach looks to answer the question: which one of these came first? We have some significant clues about that. The most telling one is the non-locality of entangled particles—what Einstein derided as 'Spooky action at a distance.' The 2022 Nobel Prize was awarded to researchers who proved that the spooky action is real. Quantum Theory does not always respect space-time. It's that simple truth that points to the likelihood that it came first.
Very probably, the relevant quantum entity that started it all was related to the Strong Nuclear Force (the force that, in today's universe, holds quarks together inside the atomic nucleus), because that is the force that has the distinctive property called “Asymptotic Freedom”, meaning that the force (e.g., the coupling between quarks) disappears at the smallest time and space scales.
This form of entity, whatever it happened to be, has the key attribute that it is deliberately vague. In the way that quantum physics is most fundamentally interpreted, becoming real hasn't happened yet.
This quantum entity is capable of excitations of any amplitude and a variety of ‘configurations’ as long as the overall entity has zero net field value.*
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* For those who are more knowledgeable in the science, this long footnote digs deeper and gets far more ‘physicsy’:
Our starting point would be a purely quantum-mechanical bridge across the ‘Mass Gap’ that remains an unsolved issue in characterizing the Strong Force at very small scales. We’ll get back to define and discuss that in a minute.
This is deeply unknown territory, but if there is to be a ‘beginning’ that leads to our recognizable universe, a good start would be a simple fundamental field (a pure primal wave function, mathematically described only—i.e., a rulebook) that can instantiate random fluctuations/excitations from the Big-V Vacuum with a superposition of various internal strengths, not just some simple fixed amplitude. That allows it to form a superposition of quantum ‘structures’ within its natural internal reference frame (taken to be Hilbert Space—which is not a real ‘Space’ but a way of using math to characterize this not-yet-fully existing quantum field).
The fluctuation’s structure, perhaps obeying something like the Born Rule (which is just more math—a way to calculate the probabilities of all the various possible states that could be observed, if observations were made), could poetically be described as the ‘mother’ of universes (The Mama Easter Bunny!). Its key property is its quantum nature, and I will argue that in order to bridge the ‘Mass Gap’, which is its primal function, it needs a more complex mathematical structure than the Nobel Prize winning Yang-Mills Theory (which is already way over the heads of about 99.999999% of everybody on the planet.)
Okay, we dig even deeper. The Mass Gap is an expected phenomenon based on observation. The proposition is that mass is a quantized entity; and that makes sense when you consider that strange leap between having no mass to having (an infinitesimally small?) non-zero mass. There seems to be a fundamental conceptual paradox here, which is associated with the notion of Asymptotic Freedom. The ‘Gap’ is not just an issue of quantity—it is also one of category. A new rulebook that addresses Mass has to have popped out of the Rabbit Hole.
The math of Yang-Mills Theory is characterized by Asymptotic Freedom. This model, developed in 1953, is what was used to piece together that big long equation shown in the image earlier that describes the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The Standard Model, though, is more elaborate than the Yang-Mills math. In order to make it work, the physics at the smallest space scales had to be ignored (effectively grouped into a set of constants) that intrinsically require that there is some smallest mass—a lightest possible particle that could pop out of the vacuum. In other words, there is not a continuum from zero mass to the lightest known particle that we *currently* observe in our present-day universe. The Standard Model’s math, therefore, assumes rather than proves, that a finite mass just suddenly has to appear as an attribute of particles when they appear. The math doesn’t (*can’t*) explain how this happens. The actual particle masses that go into the equations have to be measured separately, in a laboratory experiment (usually a particle collider), and then written into the equations by hand. Stepping back another pace, we face the fact that Mass itself is just a random property of some, but not all particles. It doesn’t even have a single cause (origin story) within the known laws of physics, and so it almost certainly doesn’t have to show up early in our Song of Everything’s Origin Story of simple universes … any more than light does.
The unaddressed problem (or one of them) is that Mass is inseparable from Gravity. Einstein’s Field Equations (General Relativity) have to be invited to this game too, and yet the math used in the Standard Model of Particle Physics assumes that there is no Gravity.
There is a speculative variation (or complication) to Einstein’s Field Equations called Quadratic Gravity (first described by Kellogg Stelle in 1977) that also has that important property of Asymptotic Freedom (meaning that its effect disappears at the smallest scales, allowing stuff to smoothly transition out of the Big-V Vacuum at such tiny scales and into the range of scales that we can observe and work with). I won’t go into any more detail about Quadratic Gravity here, but point to this recent freely available Quanta Magazine article for further reference:
Proving the existence of a non-trivial Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions with a Mass Gap is one of seven Millenium Prize Problems posed by the Clay Mathematics Institute. Anyone who provides the proof wins a million dollars. Will they pay somebody if they prove that it doesn’t exist—that Yang-Mills is wrong, or that it is an ad hoc simplification? What I’m implying in this discussion, very strongly, is that a disproof and a stronger theory is what we really need. What the Clay Institute should be paying for is an improved theory that resolves the paradox between the Mass Gap and Asymptotic Freedom in the UV—meaning at very short space scales—and demonstrates that the Mass Gap, and perhaps also the reason we live in four macroscopic dimensions, are emergent phenomena.
Our Song of Everything is based on the strong assertion that there is no law that requires paradoxes such as this to be resolved. On the contrary, a “Big-P Paradox” (to which I’ve devoted a whole long blog post) seems to underlie many of reality’s deepest problems. In this set of Comfortable Universe posts, so far, we’ve faced it most directly when attempting to talk about the ineffable Big-V Vacuum. It may be that these kinds of portals to the unknowable—these conceptual Rabbit Holes—can be found at the root of literally Everything.
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Now we bring in the time-space manufacturing entity—a different net-zero-valued element from that Library of the possible. Imagine an ‘expanding’ and a ‘compressing’ doublet. Deep physics jargon would call them ‘de Sitter space’ and ‘anti-de Sitter space’, or more poetically we dub them a ‘Balloon’ and a ‘Squeezer’—and the recipe for our most fundamental version of reality can begin to ‘cook’.
The element with the quantum attribute among its intrinsic rulebook allows a sort of harmonic oscillator excitation (with a configuration that can be crudely visualized as two balls connected by a spring with the whole system at rest*) to proceed across a ‘reality horizon’ by starting to oscillate when an ‘ephemeral (fleeting)’ virtual space-time manufacturing entity entangles with it—i.e., when the two entities interact and ‘observe’ one another and successfully invent/realize the simple idea of enduring—of surviving
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* Physicists might recognize this configuration as being like a Meson, but it is not that. A Meson is a quark-anti-quark pair connected by a ‘flux tube’ of gluons. It is a Hadron—a composite entity made of three fundamental particles. The imagined excitation being described here is a single fundamental ‘potential virtual particle’ that has its most stable configuration as described—having lowest energy when at rest with intrinsic poles. An excitation (provided by the ‘Squeezer-Balloon’ entity) establishes an oscillation, which could, then and only then, result in quark-gluon-like entities emerging after some phase change, which would require tapping into the Vacuum’s Library for another tool. This would happen later, so we’ll set that discussion aside for the time being.
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That initial established harmonic oscillator is, to use more Physics jargon, ‘Higgs-like,’ by which I just mean that the lowest energy configuration is offset from the most compact ‘shape’ in a realm where the spacetime rulebook has been manifested. The action of the ‘Squeezer’ part of the spacetime manufacturing entity is to effectively force that oscillation into its compact higher energy state, which (according to the General Relativity-related rules built into it) can produce an inflation-like process (internal to the reference frame of the excitation).
Now we finally come back to that term “Inflation,” first mentioned at the end of Song 15. Inflation has a specific meaning to physicists. To our Song of Everything it is the speed that our precocious Easter Bunny needs to escape the Big-V's Mallet. Inflation is a super-rapid expansion of space itself, which is a not-yet-understood physical process that needs a lot more study (perhaps even a more rigorous definition), even though it has already received a huge amount of attention since its first discovery by MIT professor Alan Guth in late 1979 and even though it is widely accepted by modern mainstream Cosmologists as an important part of the early universe.
For now, just think of it as the thing that starts our universe expanding—what makes it look like the universe started with a ‘Big Bang.’ It is an ‘engine’ that manufactures pure, smooth (homogeneous and isotropic) spacetime, and nothing more. (As the universe later acquires more complications, another layer can be added which distinguishes space and time, making it appear as if space is being created faster than information can spread the news of it [via the speed of light]).
The super-fast manufacture of spacetime seems to be the, or one of the, simplest ‘survival’ stories that could work. Spacetime is an example of a ‘playing field’ or ‘substrate’ (what used to be called an ‘ether’) on which physical entities (‘particular things,’ in the language of the Tao-Te Ching) can be manifest.
Spacetime with its entangled quantum field but without any particles having yet materialized is still perched at that ineffable boundary between existing and not existing. Nothing actually physical has appeared yet. But it has the properties needed for us to talk sensibly about it, meaning that it has a rulebook that we’re familiar with. And since the Big-V Vacuum is always seething with stuff, it takes practically no time for the first physical thing to pop onto this playing field carrying some sort of rules with it—none other than our Whack-a-Bunny, perhaps! Or …
“And God said: ‘Let there be light’”—Genesis 1:3
Here we go, again, with our ancient traditions telling us the physics long before physics discovered it.
Song 20
The Library of possible realities embedded beyond the Veil, in the ineffable Virtual Big-V Vacuum, is beyond imagining. Light, with its rule about traveling slower than the speed that its substrate, spacetime, can expand, was just one random possibility. It’s only special because it happens to appear in the rulebook we got.
Going back to the Easter Bunny universe manufacturing facility with its office full of Bunnies, each sitting at its keyboard waiting for its turn at creating something at random with the tools the previous Bunny has handed it, we’ve arrived the Bunny that gets to create physical stuff. What it has been handed is a ‘Way of Talking’—effectively a language. In our real case, the language is a set of laws of physics.
How many keys did the Bunny have to tap before it chanced upon Light as a working first physical thing? How many keys are on this keyboard? It’s impossible to say. That’s asking the question: “how wide is T.H. Huxley’s Ocean of Inexplicability?” We just know it’s there, and our experience with our reality tells is that it is probably really, really big.
What are the physics clues that suggest that we got Light first, before we got particles that could have Mass—before we got the notion of Mass itself? Just because it is simpler. We’re working on a Song of Everything that starts with the fewest possible rules and elements and adds new ones one at a time, if that is possible.
Revisiting more of our guidance from the ancient wisdom traditions (The Tao-Te Ching, Chapter 42):
The Tao became one
Out of the ineffable, the direction for a potential first step down the path was chosen—quantum vagueness and its comfortable ontological freedom.
The One became Two
Two balls, the Yin-Yang opposites, like poles of a magnet, or like the electron-positron virtual particle pair, which are separated but connected with an invisible intrinsic tension—a ‘silent’ spring indicating that there are specific rules by which the two poles are entangled or are ‘virtually one’.
The Two became Three
The spring is activated by the ‘Balloon-Squeezer.’ The realm of spacetime comes into being, and that turns out to be the chosen way to define survival. Suddenly there is a realm for things to appear in and an arrow of time by which to gauge their relative stability. It defines a simple enduring universe within which further interactions can emerge.
The Three gave birth to all particular things.
Again, the Song of Everything seeks the simplest pathway and uses the analogy of a walk down that path. That means one step at a time. The ‘particular things’ came one at a time, and Light was what came first—so says the Judeo-Christian Bible. Only later within the radiation realm of the pure light, did quarks and gluons appear, because the speed limit-censorship requirement provided them with the safe ‘cell membrane’ within which the property of mass could begin to emerge.
To reinforce the strange inside-out view that our Song of Everything has been building toward: this idea of surviving is only an internal feature of the nascent entity. You have to ‘look inside’ of it, or more properly to ‘be’ inside the Bunny’s head, in order to experience it. And since what is outside isn’t even ‘real,’ since reality gets defined from within, then either some elaborate sham has been concocted in all of our minds, or some profound physical threshold has actualized and has been crossed (as ‘witnessed’ and agreed upon by those of us within).
The ‘primordial interaction’ between the Quantum Potential Oscillator and the Spacetime Balloon-Squeezer is just one interesting, approachable, minimalist model of how the ‘first cause’—Time’s arrow—might emerge.
Song 21
Now let’s go back to before Light appeared on the scene—back to the wider realm of that first surviving bit of pure, clean rapidly expanding spacetime, and let us introduce to our readers, the concept of FLAT WORLD.
Once the rulebook that uses spacetime to define survival was selected, then its expansion (“Inflation”) must go on indefinitely in order for the collapse back into the Vacuum to be forestalled. The expanding bubble of spacetime is the simple germ universe’s effective ‘Cell membrane,’ protecting what might emerge within. It is creating a vast landscape of empty homogeneous and isotropic space, which physicists call ‘Flat’ because the rapid exponential expansion has ‘ironed out’ any curvature or wrinkles it might have had.
Now, depending on what does emerge, Inflation might undergo a local phase change (and in the case of our universe, the Song of Everything has identified Light as the catalyst). In general, within the expanding bubble, bits of ‘stuff’ (of which our universe is just one example) are going to be regularly popping up inside this Flat realm and then either annihilating or finding ways to define survival internally.
What if there was some unrecognized way to invoke a time-like measure that is keyed to the rate of expansion of this bubble and some space-like measure that is keyed to some way that the bits of ‘stuff’ (the myriads of surviving universes—what physicists have recognized as a nearly-necessary multiverse) might relate to (e.g. touch membranes with) one another?
Big speculative question. It is possible that we will identify laws of physics (some may already be available in the mathematical realm of ‘String Theory’ and its associated ‘Swampland’—no need to define or discuss details at the moment) in which different universes can be described as touching or interacting.
In the image of Flat World above, the light beacon in the middle is not light but is the representation of the simplest Germ universe—that thing that is spreading out at the speed of space manufacture. The solid stuff that is accumulating on the mountain and spreading out around it more slowly (like molasses) is made of ‘particles’ that are each separate universes.
Really big speculation! And yet, it does not obviously violate combinations of rules that physicists have already been exploring. The point being, that something like the image shown could be a possible real realm …
…within which our universe would be represented as just one single elementary particle …
… and within which single particles carry rulebooks that allow them to interact with one another …
… producing ‘multi-celled’ things made up of aggregates of individual universes!
Whoa! Huge, huge speculation!
But why stop there? These aggregates of individual universes would exist because they have achieved survival within the Flat World regime. What is to stop some of these aggregates from developing ways to self-organize and even self-replicate? What rule stops them? Why not a whole Flat World full of hyper-life—living things composed entirely of individual particles that are each universes? What if those living things include pink Easter Bunnies as well as more intelligent forms of life such as human beings? What if our universe is a single cell within some intelligent human being living in Flat World?
Why. … The. … F***. … Not. … ?
Prove that it is impossible. Going the other direction in this speculative hierarchy, prove that the individual ‘fundamental’ particles (electrons, photons, quarks and the rest) that we are made up of are not, at teensy-tiny space scales far shorter than the Planck Length and therefore far beyond our ability to ever observe, functioning universes in their own right. I'm getting a little overly exuberant here. Proving a negative (the not impossible) is not proof that anything exists. This is just a wild joyride of speculation.
The wider hierarchy would be like layers of an onion. How many layers of reality might there be?
And our speculation doesn’t need to stop there. All the universes in our Flat World multiverse are closely related. They are all built upon that hyper-Light—that germ of ‘eternal Inflation’ that started manufacturing pure, uncontaminated spacetime. But how many other formulas for functioning universes might exist within the Library of possibilities within the Big-V Vacuum? And since our instance of Flat World has found a way to work so well, how many more similar occurrences of that particular combination might there be out there?
Philosophically it seems ludicrous to believe that ours is the only way and that it only happened once. It seems far, far more likely that there are other Flat Worlds and other far more exotic survival strategies available that are just about completely unfathomable to us.
The image of Flat World shown above is clearly an urban world. The people who built those buildings, and the buildings themselves, are all made of fundamental particles that are various types of whole universes. The image does not show a blank sky beyond. It shows all sorts of ‘stars’ and clouds of ‘dust’ and ‘gas.’ Flat World could (more likely than not, we’d speculate) be part of a whole hyper-universe full of trillions of Flat Worlds!
Right from the start, I’ve promised that the Song of Everything would go far beyond our observable universe. The thought space is mind-boggling to say the least. What a fun roller-coaster ride!
Here concludes the trilogy of posts dedicated purely to our basic origin story and the vast expanse of thought space in which it resides: Twenty-one Songs long.
Of course, there is much more to discuss! Here's a flavor of some of the topics to be covered in upcoming Comfortable Universe posts:
Details about Flat World,
about how our universe might fit into it,
about how our universe evolved from some simplest initial Germ universe with just Light,
about how the Mass Gap was bridged,
about how symmetries got broken in order to create a greater diversity of fundamental particles, making atoms possible,
about how those particles then settled into a certain very limited set of just three or four chemical elements,
about how further tweaks allowed stars to form and explode to produce about 88 heavier natural elements,
about how life might have formed from those elements here on Earth and perhaps also 'long ago and far, far away',
about how individual single-celled creatures are far more likely than us fragile complex multi-celled beings to be the universe's interstellar travelers and founders of great Galactic Empires,
about how such humble little beings might be running more of the show than we imagine, perhaps even remotely from an ancestor universe,
about how such a picture can be extended far into the future, well beyond the ultimate death of our one particular universe, and, finally,
about how we humans, if we’re steadfast enough, can be involved every step of the way—
crafters of the distant future—
intergalactic liaisons—
arbiters to the laws of physics themselves—
ambassadors to uncounted new universes—
regent to a trillion Flat Worlds—
and we can begin that epic Cosmic journey right now, right here, without ever leaving Earth!
Talk about Comfortable!
This is no science fiction. It is the power of taking a far wider view—a balanced, always grounded survey of the real potentialities that can carry us to astounding heights of existential greatness!
Grab the armrest of your cozy sofa and enjoy the wild ride. This really is a universe suitable for Sofa Kings and Queens. This Song of Everything is the Song of one special Universe that is … well … just ...
Sofa King Awesome!
The Pillars of Creation, part of the Eagle Nebula, about 6500-7000 light years from Earth, James Webb Space Telescope image from NASA
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