“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 [unification 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.
‘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:
All reality is defined by experience.
All experience is ultimately rooted in (can be traced back to) the physical world (flat physicalism).
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.)
All emergent entities/agents are approximate. All models describing them are also necessarily and appropriately approximate— ‘fuzzy around the edges.’
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!
—a stand-in for our Song of Everything’s Great Cosmic Desert, which encompasses a range of scales equivalent to the difference between a single atom and a Great Blue Whale—across which science can tell us practically nothing. One thing seems certain, though, based on what we observe today: as we cross this vast trackless landscape, we pick up a whole lot of baggage along the way.
Our Comfortable Universe Song of Everything’s story of how our Universe began has reached the point where it begins to obliquely intersect with, or becomes parallel with, the earliest things that the science of Cosmology can detect—the end of the epoch of Inflation. What science knows about that time is sketchy at best. It is a vast stretch of mostly unknown time and physical processes—if knowledge were rain, this would be one of the driest deserts that we’ll need to cross.
The gap between the end of Inflation and the ‘symmetry breaking’ event that produced the physical system that governs today’s universe is a vast seventeen orders of magnitude in space scales within which we have no touchstones—no known processes, no known particles. Translating this gap in space scales to our macroscopic world, it is the difference between the size of an atom and the size of a Great Blue Whale—the largest living thing on Earth. It is as if we knew nothing at all about the whale’s internal structure other than that it was made of a big mess of atoms swarming and sloshing around. No molecules. No chemistry. No DNA. No cells. No known rules to organize the cells into bones, muscles, organs, or any kind of structure at all within the whale.
It’s as if, somehow, beyond the reach of science’s understanding, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms “magically” organize themselves into this gigantic, awesome, living, breathing, swimming, self-reproducing creature!
The Great Blue Whale represents the starting point of the universe that we can observe and experience today. Yes, it is already likely to be that complicated at the point where we can first get a good glimpse at it. The atoms play the role of the mysterious stuff that Inflation somehow (by unknown processes) bequeathed our universe to work with to get here. The meandering pathway that our universe took to make its way across the Great Cosmic Desert between these two vastly different states is probably forever beyond what Science will ever be able to show us. There are almost certainly many paths that would work. And so, there may be many equally plausible Tales to tell, describing our wandering universe’s sojourn from there to here. This is a realm were Song and Story are going to have to suffice.
In order to properly depict the Cosmic Desert and put it in the perspective of ... well, ... Everything, we need to present a graph from a technical review article from a scientific journal, even though it is a busy mess and surely too technical for most readers to understand. The reason it has to appear here is because it provides an overview of Everything physical—all the stuff we can perceive and explain. This amazing graph puts it all in a bigger context that shows what lies beyond, shows where the current laws of physics break down, and shows what we might see in the future. It’s called the “Triangle of Everything.”
The Triangle of Everything
Adapted from Figure 2 of:
Charles H. Lineweaver, Vihan M. Patel; “All objects and some questions”. Am. J. Phys. 1 October 2023; 91 (10): 819–825. https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0150209
an OPEN-SOURCE peer-reviewed journal article.
Depicted is the history of the expansion of our observed universe from the little white dot at left, called the Instanton, evolving left-to-right toward today and beyond. It relies on the Standard Model of Cosmology (the Lambda CDM model), so it is a conventionalist model, dependent on the physics that scientists largely agree upon. The grey area is that future region. The brown areas are the areas of CENSORSHIP that cannot be observed. Everything we can comprehend fits into that slice of the triangle filled with blue and pink and ivory, which represents the time from what’s called the Electro-weak symmetry breaking (EW, leading to the QGP - Quark-Gluon Plasma) to now.
The yellow-orange Great Cosmic Desert is also effectively Censored from our understanding because matter as we know it didn’t exist before the Electro-weak symmetry breaking event. We infer that there was a period of Inflation, but don’t know how that started, how it ended, or how it worked. We don’t know how stuff behaved before the Quark-Gluon Plasma formed.
All the other stuff on the graph will be coming up for discussion eventually, but we’ll leave the explanations for later.
Given our lack of knowledge about how we got through that desert, there are many speculative ideas being proposed and discussed in the scientific literature (in peer-reviewed journals and in the non-reviewed but moderated arXiv system).
Two features of virtually all of this work are noteworthy for our purposes here at the Comfortable Universe. First, the vast majority of those papers operate on the assumption that today’s laws of physics apply. One could almost accuse physicists of treating these laws as ‘Canon,’ though they would certainly deny that. It’s more a matter of simple publishability. If speculative work is not rooted in widely accepted existing work (with a demonstration of knowledge of that work through citations), it is very unlikely to pass peer review. What these papers do, then, is to explore extensions or modifications of the existing laws. But, as many other commentators have noted, such restrictions may be a trap—a straight-jacket or prison—that prevents science from finding the breakthroughs needed to advance.
The second feature of virtually all of the work in the field of particle physics and cosmology, including but not limited to the speculative work trying to explain the physics of Inflation and the path through the Great Cosmic Desert, is that they must make simplifications and assumptions to the governing laws in order to find solutions. The equations of
Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, and General Relativity are gruesomely difficult math that cannot be solved in general. Progress is made through various clever simplifications—most often this takes the form of neglecting smaller terms in equations—terms that represent higher-order effects of small quantities, for example, or terms that are deemed not relevant to the process being studied.
Our Song of Everything operates on a very different set of founding assumptions: First, the accepted theories of Quantum Fields and General Relativity are known not to be valid final descriptions of the Universe. They are simplifications themselves. But even if one grants that they are perfect representations of our universe, there is certainly no law that requires the most important phase changes, selection events, and rare anomalous behaviors that these laws produce to be mathematically tractable. Most likely it is those neglected small terms that would produce the kind of low-probability events that are crucial to produce interesting but extremely rare behaviors.
Second, and even more fundamental is our strongly held assertion that the developing universe did not ‘know’ about today’s laws of physics when it began. We assert that it began very simple, with the simplest possible set of functional laws and no a-priori constraints on its rulebook other than being possible. It began with minimal rules that were compatible with one another, which our currently accepted laws are not. So, it makes sense, we argue, to play with simple scenarios, to let them ‘shake out’ in ‘stories’ such as our Song of Everything, and to look for pathways that lead to the final product that we observe. The current laws of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity probably have roots in those early compatible scenarios, but possibly only very obliquely.
A Third, more specific feature of our Song of Everything’s pathway from the early Germ Universes to today is the assertion that the early universe quickly found a way to spawn Baby Universes. This seems natural if not inevitable, since Inflation itself is a self-replication of the space it is creating. It is a topic that we’ll be discussing in great detail going forward. Universe self-replication opens up the opportunity for gradual, step-by-step evolution of the physical laws, following a meandering trial-and-error pathway from the early simple state to the complex final product we observe.
Our simple Germ Universe concept with minimal presuppositions about its initial state and laws of physics lies far beyond the realm of the objective scientific method. It is a story—a Song—but we suggest that this analog to the biological story of Abiogenesis is the most plausible paradigm to navigate the vast Cosmic Desert—plenty of rest-stops at Oases along the way! Plenty of opportunity to build structure, step by step, inventing the equivalent of molecules (perhaps explaining how fundamental particles acquire multiple attributes, such as spin, charge, chirality, mass, isospin, color charge, polarity, etc.*), then an equivalent of chemistry (a rulebook governing particle interactions, e.g. mixing angles and coupling constants*), then DNA (such as rules that define symmetries and symmetry breaking events*), and ultimately bones and muscles and organs (laws that allow the first structures, such as the Pauli Exclusion Principle*), to get us from a tiny nebulous Germ to a well-organized Great Blue Whale. *(We apologize for all the physics jargon terms in this paragraph. Details are not the point here, so don’t sweat them—this is definitely the “small stuff”, which we’re arguing could have developed along a variety of possible pathways. Modern physics just accepts these features as “given,” and does not—cannot—explain why or how the particular attributes, constants, rules, laws, and structures got chosen as the stuff our universe is made of.)
Perhaps that’s how the primordial giant, Pangu, fits into the story. What did he eat to allow him to grow so huge during his 18,000-year vigil to expand the universe from its Cosmic Egg?
The primordial giant, Pangu, from Chinese legend, tasked with keeping earth and sky separated.
Looks like he was eating pretty well, doesn’t he!
The next step, then, would be to delve into that detail of what happened at the end of Inflation—how our universe gets across that empty desert, and the baggage (all those physics jargon terms) that it inevitably acquires along the way.
The Song of Everything is able to provide an example of a coherent story, or sketch, based on our distinctive view, as just described, and making use of the few clues that science has provided in ways that scientists and philosophers haven’t explored—perhaps haven’t yet fully appreciated.
But before delving into Our version, we check in on these clues that scientists have explored, without going into a lot of depth about their story. That is the consensus story—the stuff we seem to agree on—what science has found to be useful in making predictions.
Cosmologists’ consensus story of how the universe has evolved through time is called the Standard Model of Cosmology, or more technically the ‘Lambda CDM’ Model. The ongoing, very sophisticated and technical work being done combines many avenues of ‘detective work’ needed to look at and ‘behind’ the curtain of light released by the cooling universe 380,000 years after Inflation ended.
We’ve already talked about that curtain of light. It’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The clever techniques and avenues of analysis Cosmologists employ cover a vast range of cutting-edge physics. They study high-energy particle physics data taken at massive particle accelerators like the LHC—the Large Hadron Collider—a seventeen-mile-long ring of super-high-powered magnets and sensors built in a tunnel on the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. They study high energy particle collisions that mimic the energy levels that were happening in the very hot early stages of the universe.
On the other end of the scale, Cosmologists make use of some of the biggest and most sophisticated telescopes on Earth and in orbit to study galaxy formation, statistics of the all-sky population of galaxies and how their structure and composition seem to have changed over time. And they make use of and develop theory and models based on particle physics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, chemistry, and beyond.
It isn’t the purpose of our Song of Everything to summarize or describe all that amazing work. It is always at the core of our story, of course, providing the basis for our wider perspective. But science that is ‘settled’ is the bailiwick of peer-reviewed journals, textbooks, and usually some very well-done non-technical popularizations. A fine jumping-off point for the most relevant work, with many primary sources cited, is the Wikipedia page titled “Chronology of the Universe.” This is what Wikipedia refers to as a “Level 4 Vital Article” in the Physical Sciences category,* which means that it is one of the 10,000 most important articles among the more than seven million on English language Wikipedia. So, it gets special monitoring and review and is likely to benefit from considerable expert volunteer editorial effort to make it balanced and trustworthy.
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* Since it is the mission of our Song of Everything to cover … well … everything, a good, up-to-date encyclopedic reference source seems essential. Without question (and even with), we believe that Wikipedia has filled that niche in the way it ought to be filled in our information-saturated, disinformation-saturated, AI garbage-saturated, modern knowledge landscape. The image below shows a tabulation of the subject categories of those 10,000 Level 4 articles and the 1,000 Level 3 articles that encompass them. Wikipedia’s community continually debates the big picture of how to balance this content across subject areas as well as the nitty-gritty of each of the articles. Here at Comfortable Universe headquarters, we subscribe to this process and its result as the best dynamic (ever-changing) moderated and curated, truly all-encompassing Song of Everything for stuff that the human enterprise has agreed upon.
Wikipedia’s Level 4 and 3 Vital Article distribution by topic category.
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The niche that this series of Comfortable Universe/Song of Everything posts seeks to carve out for itself is to explore new ideas that lie beyond what has been agreed upon, and often outside of the realm of what it is even possible to discover by experiment and direct observation. There are three analogies that apply to our process.
Sherlock Holmes … quote from The Sign of Four:
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
The first analogy is to a Sherlock-Holmes-style mystery story, where we sleuth out obscure clues, use abductive reasoning to interpret them in ways that might not be the currently popular ways, applying them to different models than those that have been popularly considered in hopes of arriving at conclusions that have not previously been given serious attention.
The difference between our mission and that of Sherlock Holmes, of course, is that this is not fiction. The clues are from the real world and the conclusions have not been written into the plot by an omniscient designer (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), but rather by the mysterious machinations of Mother Nature, whose role as ‘designer’ is itself an open question and subject for inquiry. The conclusions may not be hard facts at all, but rather a fresh perspective or a new insight into how or world might work and where it might be headed in the future.
The second analogy requires some novel insights and fresh perspectives right from the start. We place our Sherlock Holmes inside a human body. He and Dr. Watson are individual cells within this vast 30-trillion-cell organism—say red blood cells that have the capability of freely traveling around and gathering clues.
The mysteries to be solved from this ‘deep down inside’ perspective are: Where did this giant, complex entity (the 30-trillion-member colony of single cells) come from? Did it have a beginning? Was it a simpler, smaller colony at some time in the past? If so, how did the observed structure develop and what is its purpose? Does it have the aspiration and capability to establish new colonies somewhere far beyond the realm that can be observed (to self-replicate)? Would it even be possible for our Sherlock Holmes to discover that this being has a conscious mind embedded in a broadly distributed network of certain specialized cells (the neurons)? Is it reasonable, or just crackpot new age woo, to extend the human-body-universe analogy that far?
In other words, all the questions we want to ask about the one universe that we are deeply embedded inside and therefore severely restricted in our ability to observe by all the Censorship ‘guard-rails’ that are set in place.
The analogy is far from perfect, but we’ve been making the case that it is a surprisingly useful and appropriate way of interpreting the clues we have available, and we’ll be continuing to add evidence that supports that case.
Which brings us to our third analogy—that of a jury trial. Once Sherlock has gathered all his evidence, he needs to ‘take the case to court’ to try to get a conviction. Is his ‘preponderance of evidence’ sufficient to convince a jury of his peers?
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The Song of Everything is a journey of exploration and discovery. Maybe there’s another analogy here—in this case a metaphor. We’re a modern-day young Darwin, embarking on our round-the-world expedition on the HMS Beagle.
Charles Darwin by G. Richmond ca. 1830 and HMS Beagle, in the Straits of Magellan by Robert Taylor Pritchett, 1890.
So … what evidence has the scientific process uncovered? What clues do we have about Inflation and its ending from observations? The big one is a strange attribute of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (and of the arrangement of all the galaxies in front of it)—the fact that it is all spread out so unnaturally evenly in every direction across the sky—the Cosmologists’ term is “homogeneous and isotropic”.
Think of a traveler setting out from the shores of Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio, USA, intent on exploring our planet. She plans to travel just about 70 miles each day and explore the world in great detail, eventually getting a look at almost the entire surface of the Earth. Now, imagine that every day she encounters a new city, and finds that it’s just like Cleveland—almost exactly the same size and shape and sitting beside another body of water very much like Lake Erie. All the topography she passes through is low rolling hills never more than about 210 feet high. No matter what direction she chooses to travel the next day, she inevitably finds another Cleveland and another Lake Erie, over and over, for her entire round-the-world trip!
That’s the strange picture that we see in the sky in every direction: galaxies arranged in clusters and filaments with voids between them that look the same everywhere in space. In the background, we can see the little perturbations—little bumps—in the Cosmic Microwave Radiation that started these structures. Mysteriously, these bumps vary by no more than one part in 100,000 across the entire sky, with a ‘power spectrum’ (meaning the arrangement of sizes of the perturbations compared to their distance scales) that proves that the universe is nearly perfectly flat. Why such teeny-tiny bumps and none bigger all across the vast expanse of the Cosmos? We’ll be all over that question in a second.
There’s much more subtle detail to the CMB and to the biggest structures in the universe—those clusters and filaments of Galaxies—that science is picking apart, trying to figure out what it means. Our Song of Everything is following this research closely, and sleuthing out the clues that are not fitting the standard and accepted models—reading between the lines. Looking for the cracks in the floorboards to see what might be underneath.
Scientists naturally want to emphasize their successes—the amazing discoveries and advances of our understanding of this Origin Story—and so far, they remain pretty confident that the Standard Model—the Lambda CDM model—of our universe is the best coherent description—it fits a lot of the evidence extremely well, and it fits most of the evidence better than any other proposed model.
Most.
When theoreticians try to tackle the universe’s origin story using the laws of physics that govern today’s universe, their results do not simplify the picture but complicate it. Think of Grand Unified Theories that try to unify all the forces of nature. In order to work, they require additional fields and interactions, or even additional dimensions of space. Think of String Theory, really a vast family of theories. The promise that it offers stems from the fact that a gravity particle naturally falls out of this theory when strings form closed loops. The concurrent problems, however, seem forbidding. String theory is no simplification to the universe. It defines a nearly infinite number of possible initial vacuum states, requires many additional dimensions of space, and in general introduces many new particles, some of which (the supersymmetry particles) should have been detectable by today’s technology, but have not been observed. Although some of String theory’s constructs may have a useful role to play in the Cosmic Origin Story, it is not likely to be a theory that uses today’s laws of physics as its basis. Our Song of Everything takes this as a massive clue that the modern laws of physics simply do not apply to a simple origin story. To throw in another analogy, scientists have been looking for their lost keys under the streetlamp, because that’s where the light is, and not looking off in the dark areas down the road.
Back to the Standard Cosmological Model—the Lambda CDM Model: It actually does start out with a significant simplification of Einstein’s General Relativity, called the FLRW metric (we talked about that in Song 23. It’s the model that assumes the universe is made of a homogeneous perfect fluid and nothing else, the same stuff at the same density everywhere). That is another telling clue, and probably a really big one. Yet the Lambda CDM model is utterly silent about how Inflation works, about how the universe exited the epoch of Inflation, about how it crossed that vast uncharted Cosmic Desert, and even about what 95% of the universe is made of!!!
That’s the most telling clue—the ordinary physical matter that you and I and our comfortable sofa are made of makes up only about 4.8% of the stuff of the Cosmos. The Lambda CDM model requires the rest of the stuff to be divided into two huge bins of entirely unknown stuff, which are appropriately called Dark Matter (making up 25.8% of the universe’s stuff) and Dark Energy (the remainder—a whopping 69.4%). NOBODY knows what those two biggest ingredients of the universe are made of or how they came to be. We only know about them because of what they seem to do to the ordinary physical matter. Even more mind-boggling is that only 5% of the ordinary physical matter (5% of the 4.8%, meaning just ¼ of one percent of all the stuff of the universe) is useful stuff like stars and planets and star-forming nebulae. The rest is just free-floating gas lost in deepest intergalactic space or matter trapped inside black holes.
Bottom line: All the models that modern science recognizes as its best explanations of today’s universe have some huge cracks in their floorboards—rich fodder for further exploration. Here’s where our Song of Everything finds its niche: new perspectives on the things Science hasn’t figured out. We put Sherlock Holmes on the case, using abductive reasoning applied to the biggest big picture we can imagine, systematically collating all the clues *and* all the missing elements and unknowns—seeing if there are patterns that make sense, piecing clues and unknowns together, sketching out step-by-step processes that fit the evidence, even if they’re not necessarily the only paths from there to here. It’s a journey that can be surprisingly instructive.
Abductive Reasoning, adapted from art by Pivot Design Group
There are two really basic mysteries about the CMB, both related to that ‘all Cleveland all across the sky’ structure.
First, in order for galaxies to have that structure, and not to have failed to form or to have formed into clumps that were so dense that they all collapsed into black holes, the structure of space at the time of the CMB had to have no more and no less than that 1-part-in-100,000 unevenness. 1 part in 10,000 and the galaxies all collapse in on themselves. One part in 1,000,000 and they wouldn’t have had time to form yet. Why such an unnaturally narrow range of fluctuation size?
Second, extrapolating back to the time of Inflation, the allowable range of variability at that early time has to be completely implausibly tiny—almost infinitely perfectly flat and smooth—no quantum fluctuations allowed.
Well, our Song of Everything has already revealed the most plausible (we feel) explanation for that extreme smoothness at the time of Inflation: it’s what we’ve called the Vacuon—the extremely rare 1000-heads-in-a-row coin flip scenario making a rare appearance within the general chaos. The Vacuum got silent ‘long enough’ for our whole ‘Block Universe’ to emerge—all time and all space that our universe occupies. The key idea here is that the universe began as a single particle of basically no size—so no room for fluctuations.
After Inflation ended, matter and radiation showed up. Science has no idea how. The Song of Everything says that they were introduced from the Vacuum as ‘mutations’—really ‘contaminants’ to the simpler early universes—that proved useful for the universes to more robustly sustain themselves. These two forms of ‘stuff’ were battling it out in a hot dense plasma, and the fluctuations, originally quantum scale, became sound waves. When the fog cleared and radiation and matter got decoupled from each other, that was the moment that the CMB was formed. The sound waves froze in place, so to speak, and those are the 1-in-100,000 fluctuations we see—literally the ‘echoes’ of those sound waves.
But why and how could the waves be restricted to such an unnatural range of sizes. As we described in our all-Cleveland-everywhere analogy, the seventy-mile patches of identical terrain on the scale of Earth represent the dominant scale of the fluctuations, and a one-part-in-100,000 fluctuation compared to the radius of the Earth implies that all the terrain on Earth would be limited to hills no more than 210 feet high.
Okay … maybe the analogy itself is a clue! Our real Earth does have a very limited range of elevation—not every possible size. If our real Earth was all water, the size of water waves would be the limit—the range of possible wave heights. What limits the fluctuation sizes on Earth’s oceans (and really also on land if you ignore erosion)? The answer is gravity. That pull of gravity is always working to damp down the biggest waves. The analogy suggests that somehow the CMB structure is limited by a (pretty weak) gravitational pull toward some sort of ‘center.’ In this case, because of the precepts of Relativity (called the Cosmological Principle), that center has to be relative to the observer. Problem is that in the Standard accepted model, which is well-supported by data, there is no ‘center of gravity,’ relative or not, because the universe is flat, homogeneous, and isotropic.
There is another explanation besides gravity that could work. Another thing that damps down the size of fluctuations in a fluid is its viscosity. What if the stuff in the early universe was sort of gooey, like molasses? Observations and theory seem to agree that this isn’t the case. The early matter was apparently a near perfect fluid with little to no internal damping friction. Although alternative models of the early universe with viscosity have been explored, anything gooey enough to damp these sound waves seems to be entirely ruled out.
We’re always open to new ideas; but for now, viscosity or gravity seem to be the only two, and so our Song of Everything is going to fall back on the ‘Sherlock Holmes rule’: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Gravity it is, then. And here’s how it might work. We go back to the ‘Block Universe’ that was created by the cooperative efforts of the YYon, the Qion, and the Vacuon. It is not infinite in size. It only has to be big enough, from the perspective of whatever is within it (our pink Easter Bunny), to have a meaningful internal ‘life’.
In Song 23 we talked about how our universe seems to be comfortably shrink-wrapped in cellophane and packed in a gigantic shipping crate full of packing peanuts. The walls of the shipping crate are where the Cosmological Principle requiring homogeneity and isotropy break down. When Inflation’s intense gravitational repulsion ended and its Potential Energy presumably began to break up into particles, they did have an effective center.
Within our shrink-wrap, we sort-of see a consequence of that in the CMB. It seems to display a preferred reference frame. We are moving more than a million miles per hour relative to the frame in which there is no ‘Doppler shift’ in the CMB. That’s twice as fast as our solar system is rotating around the center of our galaxy. That says that the ‘rest frame’ of the CMB should be several million light years away—roughly the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy. But that just confirms a view that all the galaxies in our local group are all part of the same ‘Cleveland-sized’ patch of sky and therefore all of us see the pull of our possible Cosmic Center of Gravity as being basically in the same direction.
The visualization is a bit tricky, but the Earth analogy helps. When you’re standing on Earth, the center of gravity always seems to be ‘down’ even though that is a different direction for different observers in different ‘Cleveland patches’ around the planet. Each galaxy cluster around the cosmos, including ones that are moving rapidly away from us in the general expansion would see the CMB reference frame as being pretty near to them. They wouldn’t see us as stationary at all in relation to their perspective of CMB’s rest reference frame. They see us as roaring away from them as fast as we see them roaring away from us.
But we all see a direction that seems to be ‘down’. The center of gravity is there—a small deviation from homogeneity and isotropy that observations are suggesting does exist—which would be tugging at everything, and damping the fluctuations. It’s called the “Cosmic Dipole anomaly” and it is still ‘Breaking News’; but here at the Song of Everything, we’re always trying to connect the dots regarding things Science is still trying to figure out, and this is one apparent confirmation of the clues we’ve been looking at. We’re including a video from an independent for-profit organization who disingenuously call themselves “NASA Space News” despite having no affiliation with NASA at all. The video is well-grounded in the facts, so we choose to overlook the reprehensible co-opting of the name of the government agency where your host worked for 25 years.
Even with a center of gravity that presides on scales much bigger than our observable universe, the fluctuations could be bigger or smaller, because they ought to have any possible size, right? What rule would prescribe the size of the fluctuations to be ‘just right’ for galaxy formation and the structure we observe?
Our Song of Everything jumps in here and offers just such a rule—a form of ‘natural selection’ via the evolution of universes.
In the early Germ Universes, there were no galaxies—just the pure inflation field. Here in our Song of Everything, we’re carefully and patiently advancing toward the full story of what happened next and how it happened, which involves Germ Universes self-replicating—having babies.
Way back in the middle of this post, we said: “The next step, then, is to delve into the detail of what happened at the end of Inflation—how our universe gets across the Great Cosmic Desert, and the baggage that it inevitably acquires along the way”. We are getting there ... slowly and patiently. And Universe Self-Replication (USeR) Cosmology is the main means by which we get there.
For now, we ask readers to just accept this USeR Cosmology idea without justification and look at its consequences. The overall size of the shipping crate—that is, the size of the entire Block Universe—that allows the very center (our cocoon all wrapped up in cellophane) to be flat and smooth and in our ‘just right’ goldilocks zone of 1 part in 100,000 is the result of selection processes in exactly the same way that humans and fleas and Great Blue Whales have a preferred size. Our Song of Everything’s Natural Selection argument is based on multiple possible physically-allowed scenarios, which we’ve already discussed elsewhere on this blog in a post called ‘Universe Self-Replication Cosmology - Nine Pillars of an intriguing Metaparadigm’, but here in this series of Comfortable Universe posts, we’re diving even deeper, including introducing an entirely unrecognized, entirely ordinary and boring process that may vastly increase a universe’s production of offspring:
Rocks.
Talk about a teaser! You’ll have to stay tuned for the big reveal. This is a patient story, and Song 25 has gone too long in the tooth already. It’s time for a break. Stay tuned for the Songs to come.
“You bet, I cut down that Cherry Tree, dad. And I’d do it again! There’s no Cherry Picking allowed around here.” Adapted from “Parson Weems’ Fable” by Grant Wood, 1939. Happy 294th birthday, George Washington!
This universe we live in works exquisitely well.
It has been prepared for us to truly profound lengths, depths and breadth, encompassing Everything that we could possibly need. The Cosmos has come into a dynamic balance between change and consistency. Life has prepared Earth’s environment for our arrival for at least four billion years. Every comfort has been considered, every practical contingency accounted for, and all the tools and methods we could possibly need have been laid out before us within easy reach.
Beautiful. What a Comfortable Universe we have, indeed!
Then why, at this point in the conversation, do I just want to jump up off my cozy, comfortable sofa and SCREAM!?!
What I would scream is something along the lines of
“But that doesn’t mean that Science alone can tell us how this happened! Scientists: you have provided us with staggering improvements in human quality of life. But you’ve always been drawn to the low-hanging fruit. You’ve been CHERRY PICKING your areas of focus, dear people, and neglecting vast landscapes of valuable territory!”
To which I would add, after a pause and a deep breath, settling back down on the sofa: “Okay. … Tell me, please. What law declares that there must be a law to govern everything we experience? What law says that the few laws that Science has successfully picked from the Cherry Tree are in any way fundamental and, more importantly, immutable? Can you show me where you’ve found such BEDROCK?”
The Song of Everything, as I’m telling it here in this series of posts, takes a very firm stand that no such Bedrock exists.
Yes, that is a Paradox – the biggest one, in fact. It’s what we call the Big-P Paradox. We stand FIRMLY on the proposition that there is no possible proposition on which one can build a firm stance …
… well … except maybe this one: Sit back on your couch, relax, and accept (yes … on FAITH!) that Paradox, inconsistency, and intrinsic unknowability (the Big-V Vacuum) are the foundation stones on which all that we understand and experience (what we refer to as reality) is built.
What seems like super solid Bedrock to us sitting on our comfy couch, is, deep down at the fundamental level, nothing but quicksand—the more you struggle (to understand it) the faster you sink in and are swallowed in the mire. No, unless you enjoy the struggle for its own sake, you’re much better off just sitting back and relaxing. As we said way back in Songs 4 and 5, we don’t need to sweat the small stuff or agonize about making sense of the big stuff.
Accepting some basis for our worldview on faith is not optional. Our minds emerge from a blob of stem cells to discover a realm in which the self-negating axiom* is built in—rooted at its very core. We (the rhetorical ‘we’ that really means your narrator, Dr. Pete) claim that the act of faith advocated by our Song of Everything is the purest, most minimal one, because it requires no other belief, no supernatural or undiscovered forces or powers, and certainly no institutions and their power-mongering adherents (including the eminently laudable edifice we call Science).
This I proclaim: Science is but one of three ways of explaining the World. Its rigorous discipline is rooted entirely in our collective experience—our common Sense. Our collective experience is crystalized by our mental models—our Spirit. These three balanced aspects of our Song of Everything are how we build the fullest, most robust picture of Everything.
I began this series by posting this idea in a simple diagram.
In this post, I’m tempted to claim that it may be wrong. What we experience should be at the core, with Spirit being merely a shell surrounding it, and then the collective agreed-upon ‘Knowledge’ that we give the name Science being merely a thin shell surrounding that.
But that’s because I’m indulging in a bit of bias in this Song 24—my personal perspective—the collected and collated ordering of all the observing and reading and learning that I’ve crammed into my brain over the past 77 years.
But it’s time to get off my sofa/soap-box, take a step back, and revisit the wider view.
Not everybody thinks like me. There are those who accept, on faith (I claim), that Consciousness (Spirit—or our mental experience) cannot be reduced to anything physical. They propose that there is an independent realm of mind, and THAT is fundamental and foundational. Big-P Paradox requires me to accept that this position cannot be dismissed. The venerable old ‘Mind-Body Problem’ is one of the true fundamental Paradoxes. (The Wikipedia page in the link provides a fine example of how philosophers parse and nuance problems. The Paradox requires just one simple sentence: One’s mind actualizes the substance of which it appears to be constructed.) Therefore, this camp claims, Spirit is at the heart of all things, not Sense. Our consciousness directs our attention only to the elements of the physical world that need our attention, and only as needed. It taps into a universal collective consciousness from which Science then springs.
Okay, fine. They’re entitled to tell their story.
Then there are those who have been the pioneers of our Western Culture in this age of technological and scientific discovery, who accept, on faith (I claim), that Reductionism (Science—the objective, ideally ‘mind-independent’ construction of a model of reality from the smallest elements and the most basic governing precepts) is the most trustworthy way to perceive the world. I think they would reconstruct the second figure above by putting Science at the center and Spirit at the perimeter.
Science, in its purest form, requires inexhaustible doubt about Everything, most particularly about its own established theories and models of how the world works. Human nature vehemently rebels against this kind of mindset. We crave control over our surroundings, and so we decide—our brains create models and we operate as if they are absolutes. I hear scientists give lip-service to the primacy of uncertainty in their field while at the same time they cling to this ‘Religion of Science’ belief that there is some hidden principle that Everything can and will eventually (or should ideally) yield to the penetrating scrutiny of careful, rigorous inquiry.
Okay, fine. They are entitled to tell their story.
And so, my own bull-headed process, always seeking the biggest imaginable Big Picture, always seeking hidden assumptions and biases, always self-correcting, and rooted in a FOUNDATIONAL belief that there is ALWAYS a contradictory position to consider, forces me to return to the balance of that original Big-T Trilogy. All three ways of talking about our world should stand on equal footing.
Couldn’t this be considered a ‘meta-philosophy?’ We cannot ever decide which realm sits at the center of the circle in the second diagram above. It’s not even conceivable that we could extract ‘pure objective truth’ from any one realm alone or any ordering of the three, but as the story is succinctly told by the title of the long-running PBS series, those of us who enjoy the struggle for its own sake can always strive to come ‘Closer to Truth.’
The title of this post is a knee-jerk response to a recent article published online and to a podcast series that I've been working my way through. In my weaker moments, the science bias of the last century or two sometimes feels like an oppressive, opposition-squelching monopoly; and there are maverick scientists and science popularizers who have lately emerged to amplify those kinds of ‘conspiracy’ sentiments to gain notoriety. That’s even worse!
Should I name names? No. If it was at all possible to quote ideas and avenues of thought without associating names with them, that is what I would do. But quotes can be traced back to their sources. I’m choosing to generalize instead because the goal of our Song of Everything is to strive to be in tune with the frontiers of Science, to encompass cutting edge philosophy, and to consider new but always reasonable far-outside-the-box speculations. In other words, we value balance—equanimity—a Story that feels ... Comfortable.
Love the sinner, hate the sin.
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* FOOTNOTE on the Self-Negating Axiom.
We are confronted with a realm of being that admits statements such as the Liar Paradox (“This statement is false”). It reminds us that the bold act of preparing a “statement,” any statement, is replete with flaws, inconsistencies, and omissions. The Tao-Te Ching told us this long ago. The statement that can be made is not the true statement. The statement that cannot be made is the true one.
Our Song of Everything formalizes this into its founding axiom, expressed in the sentence in red in the main body of this post. Put more generally: A statement and its negation are the yin and yang of existence/experience. They are inextricably bound like the self-annihilating virtual particle pairs that buzz about at the interface between the Big-V Vacuum and our perceivable world.
Here at Comfortable Universe headquarters at the Cloister at Three Creeks, we love to play with these inherently self-effacing paradoxes and find them to be guidelines for a humble way of presenting ourselves to the world.
“There is no proposition that cannot be deconstructed into absurd and contradictory elements, including this one.”
“There is no law except the law that there is no law.”
“The only enduring balance is the balance between balance and imbalance.”
Philosophers took until 1981 to come around to recognizing this line of thinking. True to their nature, they had to give it a big new jargon term. They call it Dialetheism, and it has gained a foothold in respectable discourse among professional philosophers. Good enough for me!
