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: 21 April 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.

More importantly, the thought experiment that follows from this cartoon, and 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.  But as our universe expanded, this (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!