The Delusion of a Well-Ordered, Self-Consistent Universe

We live in a world that is, objectively, vastly different from what we think it is.  Here is an example of one of our most common biases.  It's called Pareidolia—the tendency to find meaning where there is none.   Top photo taken by the author on Easter Island, 21 October 2018.  Bottom photo is from NASA, taken by the Viking 1 Orbiter, 25 July 1976.

The human mind is a marvelous thing. Thirty-seven trillion individual single-celled beings have gathered into a massive, complex colony, and assigned the task of executive management and decision making to a hodgepodge of specialized cells in a cobbled-together organ protected inside a bony case.  It's just two percent of the total colony, yet it consumes a full 20% of the available energy supply.  This organ's operating system has been undergoing tuning and refinement for hundreds of millions of years.  It works spectacularly well to gather inputs (observations) and create models regarding what these inputs mean.  Over time, the production of these models got more and more efficient—astoundingly successful at filtering the input data to produce survival strategies—and the resultant species proliferated across the planet.

The key word in the paragraph above is 'models'.

The human brain's operating system is an extremely sophisticated and efficient filter, designed to identify existential threats to the colony, and opportunities as well, with an excellent track record of success using a strategy that assures that very few true instances of threat and opportunity are missed (very few false negatives), but at the expense of a huge number of false positives.  Exhibit A is the image at the top.  If something doesn't 'make sense', the operating system does not just reject it.  It has been tuned to go to desperate, even ridiculous extremes to find any sort of match (to past experience) that it can.

We are hopelessly immersed in this operating system.  It is telling us, over and over, that the world works in a way that it can model (via mental pictures and/or narratives), at least well enough to reliably function.  Repeated successes inevitably prop up the illusion that everything has some order and self-consistency that careful evaluation and repetitive experience can take advantage of.  Even the random and unpredictable extremes can be factored into the model and reliably managed (think insurance policies). It's how we got where we are, dominating the ecosystem of this planet.

But when we move beyond survival and personal success within our community, and the community's success within the planet's ecosystems, the operating system loses its experiential edge and increasingly shows its weaknesses.  As the inputs become more abstract, the observations that can't be found to contribute to a useful model are much more likely to be simply rejected.  Such inputs are judged to be random noise until proven otherwise and must be filtered out to extract the useful signal.  Random noise is, of course, not well ordered and not self-consistent, and in almost every field of study that humans undertake from our own Genome to the make-up of the universe, that noise appears to be prodigious.

To wit, Exhibit B:

What the universe is made of according to the 'Standard Model of Cosmology':  Signal that we understand: 4.6%.  Noise (stuff we cannot explain): 95%.

A similar pie chart describing the Human Genome would show only 1-2% of our DNA as Protein Coding and conserved during reproduction (the actual Genes - the equivalent of the Atoms), 3-8% as functional "machinery" which is non-coding but is conserved during reproduction, and the rest gets biochemically transcribed, and yet contains no describable function beyond what is expected of the null hypothesis (the term science uses to say 'there is no known meaning or purpose applicable to any theory we currently have').

Science is all about using repeatable experiences to discover the order and structure of the presumed self-consistent universe.  Exhibit B shows how much success this approach has had.  Everything that is understood falls in that tiny light-blue wedge labeled 'Atoms'.  All the rest, the stuff called 'Dark' stuff, is understood to exist, but we haven't yet figured out what it actually is.  Even within that 4.6% that we understand (that we can make useful predictive models about), 93% of that is more random noise—free-floating gas in empty space.  Only 7% of it is consolidated into galaxies, stars, planets, pie charts, and living things.  In our own solar system, the sun contains 99.86% of all the mass, while the Earth contains just 0.0000000003% of the solar system's mass.  Life, of course, is just a thin layer of 'slime' on and around the surface of our planet, and the human species makes up just 0.01% of the mass of living things.  Yet how much of our brain power is devoted to sorting out the complexities of living among our fellow humans?  How much of the machinery of scientific and technological model-building is devoted to things right here on this single planet?

We are making models of the stuff we know about; and it's patently obvious that they've been astoundingly successful.  As a key example, science has developed the 'Standard Model of Particle Physics' that explains how that 4.6% of the universe that is made up of Atoms and their constituents work and how they interact in simple, controlled situations.  That Standard Model has made extraordinarily accurate predictions, sometimes down to the tenth decimal place, that have proven to be correct, including predicting the existence of the Higgs Boson long before its 2012 'discovery'.  Yet I am now going to offer the Standard Model as my Exhibit C, in making my case for the power of Confirmation Bias and for our continuing delusion that the world is Self-Consistent.  At the heart of the formulation of the Standard Model, which is a lot of very difficult math, is a rather esoteric procedure given the name of Renormalization.  Renormalization has been key in unlocking the Standard Model's ability to make those highly accurate predictions.  But to do so, the 'raw math' had to be tweaked—adjusted to fit the observed properties of the particles it describes.  To reinforce that: The model becomes well-ordered and self-consistent only when the observed properties are forced into it.  Why the particles have those specific properties is not explained.  Furthermore, those properties only apply to our relatively quiescent corner of Space and Time where gravity can be effectively ignored (it's called 'Minkowski Space'), where the enormous seething activity found in the early universe has all but dissipated, and where the effects of the vacuum (the deep, enigmatic emptiness that our universe is apparently headed toward, and which seems to be related to that vast reservoir of Dark Energy) are also essentially neglected.  Bottom Line: Renormalization only works to reinforce what we experience 'locally'.  The big picture is left as a complete mystery.

Yet our real lives beyond the realm of science offer plenty of evidence that the universe is far from self-consistent, and seldom well-ordered.  A simple personal example will serve as Exhibit D:  My best friend, when I was in third grade, suddenly hauled off and sucker-punched me in the gut, as hard as he could.  He never explained it, never apologized, and yet we remained best friends.  The brain's sophisticated management system must leave science behind when there seems to be no model that applies.  How did my eight-year-old mind decide that my friend's overtly hostile act was not grounds for rejecting him as a friend?  It was a unique single event, beyond the realm of repeatable experience, and yet it required an immediate response.  Eye for an eye?  Should I punch him back?  Should I walk away?  As it happens, I did neither.  We were not verbally confronting each other or even having a significant conversation before the event, as I recall it, and what happened afterward seems to have been an effort to discount the event and restore normalcy.  Why?  In hindsight, I've learned that this friend was a serious troublemaker.  (One of his antics cost him his life at the tender age of twelve.)  But at that moment, the subtleties of body language seem to have held sway.  Those cues do not even reach the conscious portion of the operating system, yet they influence it profoundly.  Here we cross into the shady realm of 'instinct' and 'intuition' (hunches and gut feelings [literally]).  The desire for normalcy is one of our strong human biases, and it reveals a deep-seated emotional need for a well-ordered, self-consistent world, even when the evidence of experience points in a contrary direction.

Finally, it is astounding to realize that even in the domain of the purely abstract (mathematics and logic), there is no possibility of self-consistency.  One needs to go no further than the 'Liar Paradox' ("This sentence is false.") to see the problem.  This leads to the well-known Gödel's incompleteness theorems.  If you can't find solid ground here in the simple realm of numbers and reason, how in the world (literally) can you hope to find it anywhere else?  The Foundations of Mathematics (the link is to a Wikipedia article that I'm presenting as Exhibit E) has a long and storied history, but what was never taught to me in my entire science education and career is how the field went through a foundational crisis in the late 19th century that exposed such unresolvable paradoxes and eventually resulted in a 'Standard Model' for mathematics that doesn't pretend to be either complete, consistent, or decidable in all situations.  That Standard Model is called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF), and it limits itself to doing calculations within its specified 'Domain of Discourse'.  Its axioms are set up so as to avoid Russel's Paradox, a conundrum that notes that the "set of all sets that do not contain themselves" is a fundamental contradiction.  Gödel's incompleteness theorems proved that any sufficiently strong mathematical system (model) has to either be inconsistent or incomplete.  ZF is not immune from that.  It can't prove its own consistency.  It is a 'work-around' that declares that not all groups of things can be considered 'sets'.  Instead, there are things that are just excluded (not deemed 'well-founded') or that (in other models) get called 'proper classes'.  There is a very real parallel here to the idea of 'Renormalization' in physics.  One of the axioms in ZF that I find especially bizarre is the Axiom of Infinity, which declares that there is a 'Completed Infinity'—a bulk thing that is called 'countable'.  Now, I'm not about to refute the value of the ZF model, but neither am I alone in questioning this particular axiom.  I was just in 8th grade when I had an epiphany that I understood the nature of infinity, and it hasn't troubled me since.  And it definitely is not countable in any practical real-world sense.  One of the positions taken by some modern mathematicians is that the field is no longer necessarily relevant to or rooted in physical reality.  Hmmm.  I put myself in a different camp, which Exhibit E (the Wikipedia article linked to above) calls 'rough and ready realism'.  It quotes Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman:

"People say to me, 'Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?' No, I'm not ... If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it – that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers ... then that's the way it is. But either way there's Nature and she's going to come out the way She is. So therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn't predecide what it is we're looking for only to find out more about it."

And with that, I rest my case.  The world is awash in a sea of chaos.  We often go to extremes to protect ourselves from it, both physically, and psychologically.  But the reality is that shit happens; and most of it is not 'Renormalizable'.

There is no 'Standard Model'.

This is not a call to reject science.  Far from it.  Science has an important job to do.  Its process—its ability to endlessly self-correct—is our best hope for a better life.  The 'religion' associated with science is, unfortunately, just as dogmatic as any other religion.  The place of science is not to discover some underlying absolute order, like a nice clean 'Theory of Everything', but to continue to systematically sort through the intrinsic noise of reality to find more hidden 'gems' of useful, standardizable, stuff.  I am confident that future scientists will have access to even more clear understanding of the human brain's biases and limitations and will thus be well-positioned to work at that exciting frontier where the well-ordered, self-consistent realm meets the realm of what I call 'Big P' Paradox.  It has always been at that interface where the 'fantastic' (the fantasies that science calls Hypotheses) becomes the future 'normal' every-day experience.  Let the work proceed!

Breaking my New Year's Resolution???

 

As I posted on January 1st, my resolution for 2025 was to do an outdoor hike of at least five miles every single day this year, no exceptions, no excuses.  It's been great motivation, and it had been a very positive experience on balance ... so far.

But what about injuries?  What about a catastrophic illness?  What if I'm kidnapped by Aliens?

Shit happens, right?  Just look at that photo of my left ankle.  It was May 6th.  The story is such a typical one.  It was not a hiking-related injury.  I was preparing stuff in the kitchen and dropped something really hard and heavy, and tried to intercept it--to break its fall--with my foot, soccer style.  Big, stupid mistake.  It clobbered that ankle, which is always sensitive because there's a bone chip in there from when I broke my ankle 37 years ago and the orthopedic surgeon told me he wasn't going to operate because the ankle was stable enough.

It hurt like hell.  It began to swell up, and soon the swelling had spread all the way up my lower leg to my knee.  I could barely walk.  The pain was biblical!

I would surely have to stay off the leg until the swelling went down, right? 

Well, I wasn't going to give up without trying.  I took some aspirin (I don't even keep Ibuprofen around) and headed out to at least try to walk a bit.

It was pure torture.  I limped along gamely for just a single mile, and it took an hour and a half.  But then the aspirin seemed to kick in, just enough that I was able to pick up my pace.  It was still as painful as a root canal, but I could see hope of getting in the five miles and living to tell about it - keeping the resolution alive for at least another day.

And I did it.  It was no fun at all, to say the least, but I'd had a day like that with a twisted ankle when I hiked the AT in 2012, and it all worked out for the best.  Back then, I had been almost back to normal the next day.

But that was a twisted ankle.  This was a blunt-force trauma injury.  What would it be like the next day?

May 7th: The swelling was down, back to just a very sensitive local area around the ankle.  I headed out to try to walk, and was shocked to find that walking did not aggravate the pain.  This was not systemic, not down in the guts of my foot where bones rub together.  I was able to get my five miles in at almost a normal pace.  And best of all, I was able to actually enjoy the experience!

Normal service resumed!  New Year's Resolution kept alive ... at least until the next big disaster strikes.

That January 1st post has grown long and unwieldy, so I'm retiring that one and picking up the coverage here.

Spring has sprung and it's one of the best times of the year to be out.  The bugs haven't proliferated yet, temperature hasn't gone into a tropical sizzle, the new greenery is all fresh and perky, and the birds are singing up a storm, and I'm loving my life in the woods again, and eager to share my joy, whether in words or in photos.  

The Month of May was a delight.  I had no more problems with that ankle, except for the usual twinges of that bone chip, and hiked a total of 187.653 miles.  Five months of adhering to the resolution--seven to go. 

Total documented miles hiked since I started recording my walks with a GPS on June 12, 2010:  25,287.105 miles!

Photo Archive follows:

This is Western Maidenhair Fern, one of my favorite deep-woods plants, and very difficult for gardeners to grow.  It's called 'western' because its range is up and down the US west coast--including among the huge Redwoods and up into Alaska among the giant Sitka Spruces, growing all the way out into the Aleutian Islands.  But somehow there's a rogue colony of it in the mid-Atlantic, and it's actually reasonably common around here.  (There's another colony in Vermont).  I love the way ferns unfurl in spring, and the delicate, fractal-like geometry of their leaf pattern.  Walked past two small clusters of these on May 10th, not on any real trail--just a route I took through the woods around my retreat at the Cloister at Three Creeks.

White Spotted Slimy Salamander (yes, that's it's official name, not my description).  Accidentally discovered when I turned over a log on June 1st.  Native to the Blue Ridge and vicinity in the Mid-Atlantic.

May 13th: Flooding rains at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is a view at the convergence of two creeks.  The water was higher in this episode than it was here in the Blue Ridge of central Virginia during Hurricane Helene last fall, and the biggest flood I've ever seen here since moving here about 4 years ago.

Tulip Poplar flower.  This has been my favorite species of tree since I was a kid and planted a seedling and watched it grow to more than 100 feet tall and four feet in diameter.  Yes, it's a fast-growing species. It has a truly unique leaf shape (also shown in the image) and these unique flowers that bloom in May.

May 16th: This is not a fungus.  It is called 'Wolf's Milk' and it is a slime mold--related to the single celled amoeba, these 'creatures' exist independently as single cells most of the time, and yet they signal each other chemically when conditions are right, and aggregate into these pustules in order to reproduce.

Sketch Pad - The View from Outside the Box: Big breaking news in Cosmology

The "Creation of Reality" out of the Virtual Vacuum: a co-equal superposition of "nothing" and "something" spontaneously becomes "everything" thanks to what Physicists call Dark Energy. 

(Last update: 3 May 2025)

Inspired by the March 19, 2025, release of new results from DESI - the experiment that is studying millions of galaxies to understand how our universe evolved.  This outside-the-box analysis and commentary starts with an equation that Mathematicians will tell you isn't even right.  That's because it isn't math ... it's reality.

What if, at the time of the Big Bang, Dark Energy and Planck Energy had the same absolute value, and were the 'particle pair' that started it all?

That breakthrough idea comes from a thought experiment that follows from the cartoon above.  The resulting scientific hypothesis, which I call the Dilution Hypothesis, offers a seemingly compelling solution to three and possibly four of the most profound mysteries (unsolved problems) in physics.

First it presents a physical resolution to the 'worst prediction in all of physics' - the so-called Cosmological Constant Problem.

Second, it explains the 2022 Nobel Prize Winning observations proving that what Einstein called "Spooky action at a distance" is real - the essential non-locality of reality known as Bell's Theorem. 

Third, it resolves the 'Measurement Problem' in quantum physics, most famously described in the 'Schrödinger’s Cat' thought experiment in which it appears that an "observation" (the ill-defined action of making a measurement) is required to change the fuzzy probability of a quantum field state into a real physical state.

The last mystery that it addresses has been called the biggest problem with the currently accepted Standard Model of Particle Physics, and it's called the Hierarchy problem.  The discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 was the crowning jewel on the Standard Model.  Problem is that its mass is an unexplainably low number.  The Higgs' interaction with the Vacuum should give it ginormous mass.  The fact that it doesn't may be explained by the Dilution Hypothesis. 

* * *

The latest news from the world of cosmology may be the biggest news since 1998.  It certainly is for me—an avid follower of all the news about the very biggest picture of our reality.  I had a front row seat on that big news of 1998, while working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.  It was the discovery that our universe is expanding at a rate that is accelerating.  Some mysterious force or influence seemed to be ripping our universe apart faster and faster.  That unknown force was given the name of Dark Energy.

It's hard to believe that was 27 years ago already.  The research earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011, and the discoveries made back then have become mainstream science that almost everybody has heard by now, yet back then it was a totally unexpected shock result.  It led to the formulation of what has become known as the Standard Model of Cosmology. In a nutshell, the Standard Model's basic story is that all the stuff we know about and understand (stars, galaxies, planets, chairs, and Easter Bunnies and all the light and other forms of energy that make them tick) makes up less than 5% of the total stuff of the universe.  All the rest of it is pretty much a total mystery, divided into two bins.  26.5% is "Dark Matter"; and nobody knows what that actually is.  Despite massive searches, it hasn't been observed yet.  We only know (or suspect) that it is there because of its gravitational influence on the behavior and structure of galaxies, among other things.  Finally, the vast majority of the universe's material (about 68.6%) consists of that mysterious stuff called Dark Energy, which seems to be steadily, inexorably ripping the universe apart.

The standard model says that Dark Energy is a constant, unchanging in time and space.  The so-called Cosmological Constant was first proposed by Einstein himself back when he was developing the General Theory of Relativity well over a century ago.

Since 1998, work has been ongoing to understand Dark Energy and to quantify it more precisely.  Astrophysicists have developed some very clever ways to study the influence of Dark Energy and, in particular, the way it might have been influencing the universe at various times in the past.  That's where this week's big news comes in.  

Screen shot from a Lawrence Berkely Lab article published on the day of the announcement of the results of three years of DESI observations

The DESI experiment, which has been ongoing for about four years, released preliminary results a few years ago that brought to light the first suggestions that the Cosmological Constant may not actually be constant at all.  Dark Energy appeared to be weakening with time.  Last week's newly released analysis of much more data has strengthened this finding, and, although it doesn't reach the strict "5-sigma" threshold for a confirmed new discovery (which means that there is only a 0.00003% chance that it is not), it has opened up a 4.2-sigma gap between the Standard Model and some new model of Dark Energy that evolves over time—a model that would specifically say that Dark Energy is weakening as the universe expands.

Okay.  That's the gist of the news that has inspired this post.  Maybe Dark Energy was very much stronger in the early universe than it is today.  Maybe it even ties in (seamlessly?) with the rapid explosive growth of the universe right after the Big Bang that has been called 'Inflation'.  Maybe it is entangled with the Higgs Boson's Mass (gosh, maybe the Higgs Field and Dark Energy and Inflation are all closely related—perhaps unified in the early high-energy epochs of our universe). And maybe Dark Energy will all but disappear in the far distant future as our universe continues to expand and cool.

That representation of Dark Energy dwindling over time has always made more sense to me, and this post is here to discuss how and why.  It's an outside the box discussion, and I'm going to begin it at the farthest reaches of our comprehension of reality and work my way back in.

I'll start with nothing.  A blank piece of paper on a sketch pad.  Let the thought experiment begin.

That blank represents what we call 'the vacuum', and in it, I am now drawing a single dot.

The pencil I used to draw the dot is a special one—infinitely sharp—so that the dot itself has no dimensions.  It is an infinitesimal dot.

And here's where the cartoon at the top of this post comes in.  Our creator (or the unguided process that led to our universe's creation) began his work with that single dot expressed as an 'equation'

0 = 1/∞

As mentioned in the caption, Mathematicians will tell you that this is not a valid equation.  The valid way of expressing this relationship uses 'Limit' notation:  Zero is the limit of the quantity 1/n as n approaches infinity.  They're not wrong.  They're just suffering from a sort of self-inflicted 'myopia.' 

Also as mentioned in the caption, this expression is meant to be a depiction of reality, not of math.  The number zero represents nothing.  The lack of stuff and things.  The absence of every imaginable and unimaginable entity.  It is that blank sheet of paper on my sketch pad.

The number one represents 'something' or 'anything' in the sense that it is the opposite of nothing.  A presence of 'stuff' of any sort—the foil in the absurd question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" that philosophers have wasted their time discussing for millennia.

The thought bubble by our wise creator in the image up top attempts to depict the absurdity of that question by posing the expression as the answer:  The two-sided 'equation' demonstrates the co-existence of nothing and something in superposition.  And the glue that binds them is that most mysterious Paradox known as "infinity"—unrestricted 'bigness'—a 'numerical' or virtual entity that nicely straddles the gulf between the "necessary" (abstraction—an 'absolute') and the "contingent" (actualization—anything that can be realized).  Because it resides in the denominator of the expression as written, we're dealing with the inverse of bigness—unrestricted smallness—the infinitesimal.

How to understand the infinitesimal?  Let's explore the dot that I drew on the sketch pad.  In order to see it, you have to zoom in, right?  Let's start with a million-x zoom lens.  Zoom in a million times magnification, and my dot is still infinitesimal.  Another million times?  Still the same.  No matter how many times you repeat the zooming-in process, the dot does not get any bigger in your new view.  And it never will.

What's the difference, then, between a dot you can never see and pure nothing?  If you say 'No practical difference - they're equal - and your expression is obviously valid' then you're on board with my meaning.

Yet there is unquestionably a difference between something and nothing, right?  It is as obvious as the difference between black and white.

In the abstract, idealized (myopic) realm of Mathematics, that is right.  An infinitesimal point in a parameter space is completely different from the lack of specification of such a point and of a 'space' in which it resides. Clearly, "Nothing" seems conceptually simpler.  Its counterpart opens a Pandora's Box filled with all sorts of enigmatic questions and contains all sorts of messy stuff (e.g., how to define an 'axiomatic' all-inclusive, unrestricted parameter space to begin the enquiry).  That's the black-and-white thinking that leads to the absurd question "why did something show up at all, when Nothing seems the preferred state of reality?" In the real world there is no practical, physical difference between the two. Nothing and something cannot be cleanly separated.  The science that we call 'physics' (study of the physical) offers many different ways of expressing the ambiguity that results in trying to resolve smaller and smaller things or trying to remove things from a 'box' until nothing is left.  The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a good start.  It says that the more accurately you try to zoom in on the location of the dot (to box it in), the more it is likely to be buzzing in and out of that box (uncontrollably tunneling through the walls of the box).  Specifying an absolutely perfect location will take you to a blur of random motion that will put the actual dot at that location only once in ... forever.  It is effectively NOT 'there'.  Physics has come to recognize a tiny length scale, called the Planck Scale, below which nothing can be resolved - nothing that small or smaller can have any physical significance, not even in principle.

I've probably belabored this point more than I should.  Let me just step back to say that many people who practice science and math suffer from an existential angst when told that their black-and-white conception of reality just doesn't work.  Their classic response has been succinctly expressed as "Shut up and calculate."  In philosophical space the same issue is confronted when trying to bridge the gulf between Necessary and Contingent.  How can a thing be both?  I've offered a primer on that above—the key is that entity known as Infinity.  It's bigger than you can imagine, but also fully realizable if you embrace the intrinsic blur it includes at the limits of conceptualization.  I was lucky enough to have figured that out while sitting in my High School library during a 'Study Hall' period when I was in the eighth grade.  (That was in 1962, even before the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation was discovered!  It's astounding to realize how far the science of Cosmology has progressed in my lifetime.)  I'll never forget that moment.  I was imagining holding the end of a string in my hand—a string that did not have another end.  You just have to get over your angst, people.  Something and nothing happily co-exist in superposition, and we'll continue to explore further the idea that for a necessary thing to be actualized, it has to be observed by some kind of interaction/entanglement with the contingent physical world (an 'observation,' in the broadest sense of the word, is required).

Now the fun begins.  As I said at the start, this is a thought experiment where that blank piece of paper represents the vacuum – a 'place' where there is supposed to be nothing—a completely unrestricted 'lawless' nothing – and the dot represents ... well, let's go all the way and then backtrack.  That dot is the universe.

You see, there is no rule that prevents my infinitesimal dot from having attributes.  Fundamental particles like the electron are point particles—they have no dimension—and yet they have charge, spin, and mass.  If we allow string theory into the picture, then the electron may have more than three dimensions as its operational 'realm'.  (This may be important later in this discussion.)

The dot that I drew could have negative pressure.  That would set in motion an exponential gravitational repulsion, expressed only within its confines, which can readily give rise to the entirety of our universe and much, much more.  Maybe that's too much for the layperson to swallow in one felled swoop.  Carl Sagan might say 'let the dot be blue and step back and marvel at our insignificance amid the vastness' (of the whole of the sketch pad).

The "pale blue dot" - a famous photo of distant Earth taken by Voyager 1 from beyond the orbit of Neptune in 1990 as reprocessed for its 30th anniversary in 2020.  (Look for it in the middle of the streak of sunlight, which is an artifact of the camera lens.)

But maybe the dot is blue only from 9 to 10PM on Thursdays when Carl Sagan's show is live on your TV, and pink the rest of the time.  Whatever.  It could have as many attributes as needed to characterize it as indistinguishable from our ridiculously complicated universe.  Remember, it sits in a 'lawless' realm (the vacuum—the sketch pad) and so it is entirely free to acquire and experiment with (pick and choose, modify and refine) any sorts of laws that work for it.

And here's the thing.  That sketch pad doesn't have to have any of those attributes.  It only has to permit me to draw them in (to permit them to become manifest).  In our thought experiment, the sketch pad is the vacuum—a completely indifferent realm that isn't even arguably real; and calling it a source of 'possibility' is too vague and inadequate.  The vacuum is the closest there is to a 'Necessary' (starting point), but its 'being' is entirely Contingent on observation by some coherent (physical) entity that emerges within it.  Again, the Necessary and the Contingent must coexist.  Must.  The best term I've found to accurately characterize the philosophical and physical status of the vacuum is that it is Virtual—similar to a 'memory' but without need of a conscious mind, and without the element of time involved—"real but not actual, ideal but not abstract."  A Virtual object can be (and obviously is) the source of things that are 'actual' (allowing the emergence of existence itself).  This virtual-actual perspective can be credited to the French thinker Gilles Deleuze from the second half of the 20th century, and people who subscribe to his concepts are called Deleuzians.  (I'm not making this stuff up!)

Now the thought experiment is ready for the big reveal—the scientific hypothesis.  Our universe is a dot of no size on an independent vacuum substrate.  It has no size because the vacuum is devoid of time and space—those 'dimensions' are hypothesized to be attributes that were acquired (emerged and got selected) in the formation process out of which the universe originated.  Our way of interrogating the vacuum can only be via its interactions with our reference frame from within our universe, but from the outside-the-box, virtual 'perspective' of the vacuum, its interactions with the dot remain unchanged as our universe goes about its evolution.  When our universe was tiny, right at its inception (the Big Bang), the influence of the vacuum was concentrated, behaving more like the way we observe the influence of the vacuum on a closely examined electron that can suddenly interact with a virtual electron-positron pair and switch places with the virtual electron, making it suddenly the real electron, or the way quarks and gluons maintain the vast majority of the mass of protons and neutrons by a constant buzz of virtual motion—in other words the influence is HUGE.  It may be that at the earliest moments of 'creation', Dark Energy and Planck Energy were the same.  But as our universe expanded, the (aggregate) influence on whole-universe fields (on the universe as a 'particle') got diluted from our observational point of view.   Physicists have lamented the 'worst prediction in all of science' as the difference between the calculated vacuum energy (which is based on its influence on individual particles) and the 10-to-the-120th-power smaller value of the Cosmological Constant as it acts on our gargantuan present-day universe as a whole.  Maybe this thought experiment (the outside the box perspective) explains why.  Maybe it can even lead to a calculation of the true size of our universe—not the observable universe, but the whole ball-o-wax!

The hypothesized 'Dilution Effect' described in the thought experiment is meant to address the Cosmological Constant problem—that 'worst prediction in all of physics'.  It already has one very powerful observational line of support for it, and its perspective on the solution to the quantum physics 'Measurement Problem' and to the 'Hierarchy Problem' related to the Higgs Boson's mass offer further weight to the value of exploring it further.  

The support from existing known physics is that it perfectly explains the inherent non-locality of reality that Bell Tests have demonstrated.  Experiments proving the Bell Theorem won the Nobel Prize in 2022.  From the outside-the-box 'perspective' of the timeless, dimensionless, lawless (unrestricted - free of both attributes and restrictions) vacuum, all particles that emerged within that 'dot' on the sketch pad (anything from a given universe on down) are functionally in the same 'place'.  

The perspective on the 'Measurement Problem' starts by considering the process known as CSL—Continuous Spontaneous Localization.  The Measurement Problem has plagued physicists for a century.  Besides the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox, another famous example is the 'double slit experiment' in which a beam of electrons that are sent through a pair of slits produces an interference pattern on a detector screen behind the slits that can only be explained if the electrons are behaving like waves and not particles.  Careful experiments that have been performed with single electrons have confirmed that the electron actually appears to effectively pass through both slits at the same time—a superposition of states.  And yet the electron then produces just a single dot on the detector screen. CSL explains such phenomena as a spontaneous collapse of the wave function due to the electrons becoming entangled with the quantum field of the detector screen, or even of the scientist that analyzes it.  The greatest feature of objective-collapse theories such as CSL is that they produce experimentally testable predictions that can distinguish them from the predictions that simple quantum mechanics makes.  The supposed worst problem with CSL is that it does not conserve energy.  The generalization of the process requires all particles in the combined entangled system to acquire a slight 'buzz' or 'hum' of Brownian Motion—basically heating up the whole system with no known source of that heat.  It might just be that this 'worst problem' is the key that unlocks the new physics described by the 'dilution effect.'  What if the source of the heat is a reduction in Dark Energy?  Think of the collapse of the quantum superposition of states into a single classical observed state as a phase change that happens when the system gets big enough that the effects of the vacuum on it become sufficiently diluted.  In this view, the quantum field actually contains 'hidden' or virtual dark energy, and the fruitful line of research would be to reformulate quantum mechanics to include that 'potential energy'.  There's a 2017 Physical Review Letters scientific paper that discusses this idea (behind an institutional paywall).  See also two popular summary articles about this paper here and here.

Okay.  The hypothesized 'Dilution Effect' is absent (or minimum) for individual fundamental particles on the tiniest scales, it begins to show up when systems have enough mass to begin to be seen in our macro-scale experience of the world, and when acting on our universe as a whole it is reduced by 10-to-the-120th power from the calculated quantum zero-point energy of the vacuum to the observed value of 'Lambda'—the Cosmological Constant or its time-varying counterpart.  Similarly, perhaps an ancient physicist weighing the Higgs Boson back in the early universe might have found it to have much greater mass than it does now because the Higgs Field was more concentrated. (Are there any clever observational methods to actually test this?)

The 'Dilution Effect' has the correct sign and seems to have approximately the right magnitude in our present epoch.  Quantitatively it requires more detail fleshing out from these bones.  The DESI result shows that Dark Energy seems to be about 10% lower today than it was 4.5 billion years ago.  The present value of the Hubble Constant produces a 7% increase of the size (scale factor) of the universe in a billion years.   But theoretical physics contains a wealth of potential modifiers to the simple scaling to the size of the universe.  The set of Grand Unified Theories require two dozen or more Higgs Fields that are characterized by positive vacuum energy at zero field value and offset vacuum minima.  The unknown shapes of these curves could provide plateaus where high energy matter could reside in quasi-stability and contribute to a negative pressure inflation-like expansion.  The vacuum ought to have greater virtual effect on particles that operate in more space dimensions as offered by string theory.  In both of these high-energy 'far outside of observational experience' realms, there seem to be multiple solutions that share comparable validity; and any one specific (e.g. renormalized) solution could be characterized as the DNA of its resulting universe.  Further, the current working 'Cosmological Principle' that says that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic could be a local simplification.  Dark Energy (perhaps in conjunction with a selection of laws that fine-tune the speed of light—the rate of exchange of information) could have created this 'zone' for us as a sort of Cell Membrane to prevent regions with different laws from corrupting our space.   Here is where I want to confront the science community with an accusation of closed-mindedness and bias.  There does not have to be one unique path from the Big Bang to our current universe.  Multiple valid solutions are a good thing.  Is there only one unique solution (only one correct model) for creating a human being?  Or for generating the human species from a non-living chemical starting point?  What law declares that the universe we live in is in any way a unique solution to anything?

We do not even know if the original initiation of a universe from vacuum fluctuations is closely related to the characteristics of our universe (no more than the original single-celled "Last Universal Common Ancestor" of all life on Earth is closely related to me).  If there is any way that universes self-replicate, then ours is the offspring of the offspring ... of the offspring of any original.  If any precursor universes to ours harbored intelligence capable of and interested in simulating its origins, then our universe could be no more than an easily calculated 'toy universe'.  That would explain why it is so tantalizingly mathematically tractable, wouldn't it?  Interesting perspective: Could our universe be the virtual playground of the 'Gods'?  Maybe their real world is a dystopian mess, and our world is the idyllic place they come to escape their problems!  Post card from God:  "Looks like you're having a wonderful time.  Wish I was there."

But back to our own perspective:  Yes, this is a wonderful time to be alive.  Science is presenting us with some tantalizing new cosmological clues.  I see a vast array of avenues of inquiry and re-evaluation that can spring from the fertile soil of this new DESI result.  This is the stuff that burns hottest within me.  There is so much ground that is yet to be explored and so many keen young minds out there capable of expanding the boundaries of thought and understanding.  Let's get to it!

New Year's Resolution 2025 - Walk 10,000 steps every day

What's in a trail name?  On the Appalachian Trail, it is sort of a rite of passage to be bestowed your trail name by fellow hikers.  So far, I've not had that honor.  The only 'nickname' that I've ever been given (by two of my high school best friends a full 60 years ago) was based on this old hat that I used to wear as a counter-culture message in my hippie and pre-hippie rebellion days.  I'll let you guess what that name was (big hint in the image below).  Since then, I've always gone by trail names that I assigned myself:  'Seeks It' during my AT double thru-hike in 2012, 'Hiking Hermit' in more recent years, then briefly 'Mud' as a protest to a counter-intuitive Leave-No-Trace guideline, and most recently ORNG (Out Roaming Nature's Grandeur/Old Ranger Nearly Geriatric).  But I think I'll go back to the original and wear the hat for a while.  That hat is, believe it or not, a Templeform fedora made by Stylepark and bought by my Dad at Strawbridge and Clothier's original downtown Wilmington, DE store in the early to mid 1950's.  Yes, this was his go-to-church dress hat in the era before trucker caps (ball caps with non-baseball logos) became the new vogue.  Photo taken at the Cloister at Three Creeks on March 31st, 2025, with trees just barely beginning to bud out.

2025 is my 77th year on this planet.  I feel amazing and energetic and truly blessed to be still alive, let alone to be able to get out in nature and walk.   I'm astounded to see that nearly half of the men my age in the US have already kicked the bucket by this age (Social Security Actuarial Life Tables for 2024).  I'm beating the odds.  What did I do to deserve that???

Maybe part of the answer is the walking itself.  Honestly, I'd like to get up on a soapbox and preach the amazing benefits of walking and getting out in the peace and serenity of nature.  But all these things are pretty well known, and writers much more talented than me have expounded and pontificated and proselytized on these subjects at length.  I don't need to add to their wisdom.

My walks are the most important part and the best part of every day for me.  I'll even feel a sense of withdrawal and regret if I have to miss a day of hiking, and so when I got up this morning, it seemed natural to consider a New Year's resolution to help me avoid those few days when I just don't feel like going out because the weather is bad, or because I'm tangled up in some indoor sit-down project.  "Sitting is the new Smoking", right.  The chair is going to kill us all!

I already have good habits regarding the walking lifestyle.  When I wake up in the morning, one of the first things on my mind is "where do I want to hike today."  I like to vary my walks, both in the actual route, and also in the reason, theme, or goal of the day's outing.  Some days I'll walk to a store, buy what I can carry back home in my daypack, and save the planet a little by leaving my car parked at home.  Some days I'm looking for a particular feature of nature, such as which flowers are in bloom, how the seasons are changing the woods.

In general, I'm always looking for interesting things to photograph, usually something unusual, whether its natural or some sort of man-made oddity.  Sometimes, for example, I'll take photos of a plant that I don't know and then get on Google's 'search by image' feature to try to identify it when I get back home. 

I love sharing my photographs, so that becomes part of the motivation for creating this blog post.  It will serve to make me accountable for my resolution and to give me the excuse to do a 'show and tell' with one or a few photos from the day's hike.

And so, without further ado.  Here we go.  The resolution is basic and simple.  Here are the rules:

• Walk Ten Thousand Steps.  That's nominally five miles, and since I use a GPS and not a Pedometer, I'm measuring distance, not actually counting steps.  My goal is to hike at least five miles each day in 2025, and probably for the rest of my days - as long as I can haul my carcass out of bed in the morning and strap on a belt pack and get out the door.
• Always walk outdoors in a natural setting.  No tread mills.  No gyms.
• Rain or Shine.  No excuses, no exceptions.
• Take at least one photo of an interesting sight and feature it here on this blog post
• Do a little trail work along the way - pick up litter or cut back some brush (I always carry a hand pruning shear in my beltpack).

The creation of this post was my main motivation for the inaugural New Year's Day hike.  I intend to update this post every day, adding a new photo up top and describing the day's hike and distance covered.  The Chronological List of 2025 hikes begins below:

1. Jan 1:  Destination: Sewell's Orchard Pond, Columbia, MD.  5.212 miles.
2. Jan 2:  Sweet Hours Park, Eden Brook Rd., Kings Contrivance Trails, 6.51 miles.
3. Jan 3:  Destination: Walmart! 5.374 miles.
4. Jan 4:  Big Loop around Owen Brown Community.  "Track 11" - a specially designed Loop to be 5 miles: 5.073 as measured today.
5. Jan 5:  Wincopin Trails - Red, White, Yellow, Orange, and Purple.  5.139 miles.
6. Jan 6:  Destination: daughter's house in 6 inches of snow, 8.223 miles.
7. Jan 7:  Patuxent Branch Trail and Lake Elkhorn.  5.362 miles.
8. ... and on we go.  Because of very low view-counts on this post, I'm not updating this daily.  I'll report monthly, probably, and surely when I get to the magical 'virtual round-the-world hike' mark, at 25,000 miles.

January 2025 total: 171.224 miles.  

February 2025 total: 146.785 miles.  

March 2025 total:  173.620 miles.

April 14th, 2025 was the big day: I surpassed the 25,000-mile mark.  I've 'resolutely' kept to the resolution, having hiked at least 5 miles every day this year so far, and have no intention to stop now.

April 2025 total: 173.826 miles.  And on we go ... but ... 

***Because this post is getting long and unwieldy, and because of some breaking news regarding this ongoing quest, I'm migrating the coverage to a new blog post.  Check it out for the current progress.***

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I hope 2025 finds you, dear readers, healthy and full of joy, and getting the chance to get outdoors as often as possible and take a walk.  Cheers!

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PHOTO ARCHIVE

Plastic Trail!  January 1st.  The world is being drowned in plastic, but ... Really???  Plastic trail???  Yep.  This is the first all-plastic trail I've hiked.  Usually this is just a regular asphalt-paved bike and hiker trail, but the slabs of plastic were laid down over it for heavy equipment during a utility construction project.

Pond on a winter morning - January 2.  I'm showing this photo upside down because I think it looks better that way.  What do you think?

January 4, early on a frigid, windy Saturday morning. Wind chill in the teens.  Saying "Hi" and also, really, "Good-bye" to the church I used to attend fifteen years ago: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia (MD).  Back then, I felt very at home there, but the supposedly wide-open and inclusive-of-all UU "theology" has become more and more dogmatic--not in a spiritual way, but politically.  Sadly, they seem to have been sucked into the ever-increasing polarization problem in the US.  I made a few return visits recently but no longer feel comfortable there.

January 5th:  Frazil ice flowing with the current.  Early morning on the Middle Patuxent River beneath I-95.

January 7th: Lake Elkhorn, with two willow trees that really, REALLY like the water.

January 10: Canada Geese hunkering down in an aeration opening in the ice.  Sewell's Orchard Park Pond.

January 13:  Fun with symmetry: an old churchyard tulip poplar tree.

January 15 (at right).  The historic Pratt Truss Bridge built in 1902, now the signature feature of the Patuxent Branch Trail.  At left is my photo from November 28, 2011, the first time I hiked here.

January 17: The walk along Stoney Creek, heading up to the Cloister at Three Creeks.

Jan 19:  deep in the gloom of an impending storm, beside the ecological wasteland of a mown field, we enjoy the ever-hopeful catkins of a sweet birch awaiting spring while basking in a gorgeous Blue Ridge view.

Jan 21:  Bird on a tree-top twig.  Can you spot it?  The clouds are pointing to it.

Jan 22:  View from a hayfield of the peak called 'Three Ridges'.  The treetops there reach well above 4000 feet elevation, though the actual ground doesn't quite exceed that magic threshold. 

January 24:  Three Ridges framed by a badly invasive Paulownia Tree, native to China.

Jan 26:  Three pics for the price of one.  Rainbow Ice falls along the closed Blue Ridge Parkway.

Jan 27:  Ice covered "Stairstep falls".  The trail to get there was almost as treacherous.

February 3:  The first 'wild' flowers to bloom in spring are Skunk Cabbage.  Buds are opening today during a thaw.  The flowers are enclosed in that protective sheath to keep them warm, and the flowers themselves actually generate their own heat by a chemical process.  An extreme adaptation to beat the competition!

February 6:  the noisy abundance of a mountain stream - Stoney Creek at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is my new favorite viewpoint.  We had an inch of rain that had just ended; the roar of a hundred little 'water features' was a wealth of soothing joy!

February 18:  Icicles on a log at Flat Rock Creek in the grounds of the Cloister.  Winter is holding on.  Snow is in the forecast for tomorrow.

Feb. 21:  Ice mushrooms?  Puzzle this one out!

May 3rd:  First Rattler of the season.  An 11-segment rattle on this big guy.