Here continues the epic saga that intends to be a complete answer to the burning question “WTF, man?” or more intelligibly “What’s life all about, anyhow, dude? What’s real and what’s just bullshit? Do we have a clue?”
Yes, we do! It’s all pink Easter Bunnies!
No, seriously. The cute little Bunnies are our unique way of telling the story of how our universe began.
For the full story, start with Part One, then check Part Two, and you’re ready to head on down this long and winding Bunny trail:
Song 15
Near the end of Part Two we were homing in on one of the simplest ways that our universe might have come into existence, assuming that existence isn’t just a figment of our imagination and that things did have a beginning rather than being eternal (whatever that can possibly mean).
The default simplest explanation seems to be undirected random chance: just throw all the possible building blocks or ingredients together in an agitated vibrating vat and let them ‘cook’ and see what comes together.
In Part Two, I offered the suggestion that “This is no ‘Easter Bunnies pounding randomly on a keyboard’ until they successfully type Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It’s a lot more sophisticated and a lot more complicated than that!”
What I mean by that is that the ‘creation’ process is far more likely to have happened in a sequence of steps rather than an all-or-nothing, all-at-once single event. First the Easter Bunnies would have to home in on a language (and its alphabet). Then, maybe, a decision on a genre would come next—science fiction, romance, or non-fiction, for example. The next steps might be to settle on a plot or outline and develop the profiles of the key characters or talking points.
The ‘target’ story (our particular universe) did not just fall together by our cute little bunnies typing strings of random characters drawn from the any and all languages and alphabets—just hoping that the exact text of the story in one coherent language appeared. But for completeness—in order to make sure we don’t miss something important that we don’t yet know about—that is where we have to start.
All the possible letters from all possible alphabets are in the pot, or on some massive keyboard. The connections that happen between these building blocks (the order in which the bunny types them) do not, of course, all ‘make words.’ That is, they don’t all have equal viability to hold together. Some have greater potential than others to fit into useful sentences—to serve as a basis for further specific clumps of words that can create a working plot-line.
But, as I said, that’s the simple-minded way. Now let’s get more sophisticated and start organizing the Easter Bunnies and their keyboards—give them a hierarchy.
Bunny number one bangs away on its keyboard until it has chosen a particular alphabet. Bunny number two then works with that particular alphabet only, and bangs out string of characters, with the goal of creating meaningful individual words.
Let’s check a specific simple case that is close to home. Not English. That’s probably not a very useful language for building a universe (though we don’t necessarily know what is). Let’s say that Bunny number one picked an alphabet that has just four letters: A, G, C, T.
Look familiar? Those are the four nucleotide bases that are the building blocks of DNA. The words being formed by Bunny number two would then be genes; and the next Bunnies in the line are tacking genes together hoping that a living thing will come popping out—perhaps even another pink Easter Bunny!
With a different alphabet—that mysterious one that defines the laws of physics—can our Bunnies hope for a whole universe to pop out?
Well, for starters, it’s likely that the language will, at least in part, be mathematical, with the characters filling the equations that govern the processes we know about.
There are caveats with that, of course. We have equations that govern Space and Time and the way big clumps of matter like baseballs and Easter Bunnies move around (Einstein’s Field Equations governing General Relativity) and we have an equation that governs the small scale (Protons and Electrons and Light), called the Standard Model of Particle Physics, but we don’t know how (or even if) these two equations fit together to make the whole universe.
The problems don’t end there. First, the equations in their general form are not even solvable. Only very specialized solutions have been found (very useful ones, to be sure—our physicists are a clever lot—they’re some of the smartest people around). Moreover, both of these big-picture equations are clearly and demonstrably inadequate simplifications themselves.
Speaking of his Field Equation, Einstein declared that one side of it was “carved from fine marble” but the other side was just “low grade wood” full of knots and splinters and cracks and sort of haphazardly cobbled together with bent nails and duct tape.
The equation describing the Standard Model of Particle Physics is even worse. It is literally a hodge-podge of descriptions of each of the individual particles and their interactions, all shored up by a scaffolding of ad hoc corrections called, collectively, Renormalization, which is why they won’t work at all on the very smallest scales. Just take a look at the mess that this equation presents physicists with:
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| The Lagrangian Density equation for the Standard Model of Particle Physics. For those interested in a more in-depth explanation, there's a great PBS Space Time video about this equation on their YouTube channel. |
Well … that’s today’s universe—the final product, so to speak. Our best science minds have studied our observable reality, and that’s what they’ve come up with. But look how much complication is in those equations. Is that the simplest universe that could be ‘viable?’ Or is there one that just the first several Easter Bunnies could type out and then hand on to the next Bunny in line for further refinement later on—a simple ‘germ’ of a universe that is kind-of like the simplest form of life: a protocell or a self-replicating nucleotide.
The question we’re asking, then, is this: Was our observed universe built as it appears to us, or did it develop in a series of steps from something much simpler. What is the simplest one that could be imagined? For example, can you start erasing some of the terms from that hodge-podge equation for the Standard Model of Particle Physics shown above? Or can you take some of the known, vastly simplified solutions to Einstein’s Field Equations and show that they describe a working universe?
The answer is almost certainly yes. There is likely to be any number of proto-universes that could work.
The analogy to the creation of life does seem relevant, though we have to carefully note the differences as well. But in doing the comparison, we get a surprise. It seems that there are at least three significant differences between the generation of the first germ of life and the generation of the first germ of a universe that each suggest that a proto-universe might be even easier and more likely to form than the earliest possible forms of life—perhaps much easier.
1. Life takes the chaos of the primordial chemical soup and organizes it. The jargon term for that is “reduction of entropy.” Life needed to ‘swim upstream’ against the strong currents of what’s known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the chaos always tends to increase. For universe formation no such law exists in the Big-V Vacuum’s primordial chaotic soup.
2. In order to function as a self-organizing, self-replicating entity, life seems to need a certain minimal complexity. Every surviving living thing on Earth needs four distinct chemical families working together: lipids for cell membranes for protection, carbohydrates such as sugars for energy, amino acids for protein metabolism, and the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) for heredity. In the case of a germ universe, the requirements for self-replication and evolution may be much simpler. For example, the very formation/actualization of any and all candidates for potential universes (every character string the Bunny could type) intrinsically defines a natural, self-selected ‘cell membrane’ between the chaotic Vacuum and the proto-universe. It only remains to see how well it works.
3. A universe is (probably) a closed system, whereas life is very much an open system that needs to draw energy and material from its environment, at the expense of its internal resources. On the other hand, the universe just pops up with the right stuff self-selected—the needed rules and limitations. There are no externally imposed ones. If the universe doesn’t exhibit the right stuff, then it just self-annihilates and fades back into the non-existent shadow realm of the Vacuum.
What is the simplest self-replicating universe? There is a one-word answer, which I’ll just state here without explaining—it’s a physics jargon term with a very specific meaning but a word that has more common meanings to the average person on the street: Inflation. Big clues from the world of physics point to it as a pretty clear best answer. So, let’s dig in and find out what Inflation means in cosmological terms and how we get to it.
Song 16
The analogy to living things is a ‘model’ that our Song of Everything is going to adopt and work from.
It’s an open question, of course. We don’t even know the steps that life took starting with the chemical elements in early Earth’s primordial soup. The genes have been completely lost (and the words in the alphabet—the laws of physics—that got our universe started may be just as completely wiped away).
In the case of life, geneticists have been able to work backward to identify the basic genome for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all living things on Earth, and it turns out to have at least 355 genes associated with at least 60 different proteins common to all current life. At least 30 chemical (selection) steps are necessary to produce the LUCA from prebiotic chemistry—and that’s just to produce its RNA.
But here’s the important point (building on the three differences above): The elements available to create life are highly limited in number. There are only about 92 natural elements that the laws of physics have allowed our universe to produce for chemistry’s periodic table. Is the Library of potential not-impossible entities that lurk beyond the Veil of existence in the primordial Big-V Vacuum so limited? What law, in that lawless realm, would restrict the possibilities so severely? Or at all?
We, of course, don’t know what’s out there beyond the reach of observation. But we have been able to glean important clues by interrogating the little-v vacuum from our comfy reference frame here in our one cozy universe. By concentrating on the tiniest things (down to what is called the Planck Scale, which was mentioned near the end of Song 13 in Part Two), we see a raging quantum ‘froth’ or ‘foam’ that does seem completely lawless. Things can briefly have negative energy. Space itself gets totally twisted and wonky and undefinable. At that scale, things can violate every known law of physics that holds our larger-scale comfortable realm together. That’s why we can surmise that the Library is more extensive than we know and that no known governing laws are in force.
Here’s a great tutorial on the Quantum Foam from the US particle accelerator/collider facility Fermilab:
Extrapolating these clues further using pretty simple logic (looking carefully at the questions asked a few paragraphs ago, and the assumptions behind them) and taking the T.H. Huxley view that not only are there relevant things that we don’t know, but that those things are illimitable, then it seems inevitable that the full scope of ‘what’s behind the Veil’ of the Big-V Vacuum is … well, let’s just say Vast!
Okay, it seems reasonable, then, for our Song of Everything to bring us through this Cosmic Rabbit Hole from not being to being by random selection—by letting the Bunnies rattle around on their keyboards or letting the Cosmic soup pot just stew away until something useful appears.
Those last two words are the important ones. Something appears, and is useful (to itself). It has to resist the ‘temptation’ to instantly self-annihilate and retreat back into the uncharted seas of nothingness.
It has to survive.
DNA did that job really well. We’ve already thoroughly beaten to death the point that nobody knows the detailed step-by-step process that got life started. Our Song of Everything isn’t even going to try to unravel that mystery. But it is going to dive boldly into the Rabbit Hole to explain how the laws of physics might have accomplished a germ universe that ultimately led to our Comfortable Universe.
How might a little particle of something find a way to survive and endure within this chaotic froth we see on the tiniest scales? Again, we can rely on the clues we have. It has to manifest space scales that are significantly larger than the tiniest ones we can observe—space scales where things get stable, which, of course, means it has to first manifest space itself, since space isn’t a requirement in the lawless Big-V Vacuum. And it has to manifest the rule that defines ‘surviving.’ Inherently, this means starting the clock ticking (manifesting time itself) in order to provide a measure—a ‘metric’ by which survival can be usefully defined.
Surviving, to us, means cheating the odds—still being around when it seems more likely that you would not.
And yes, it turns out that the game of Survival for a universe really is about as close to ‘cheating’ (or a sort of con game) as a strategy can get. Let’s delve into that a little more closely.
Song 17
THE INSIDE-OUT PERSPECTIVE
The bigger the universe seems to be on the inside, the smaller it has to make its ‘profile’ from the ‘perspective’ of the destructive forces of the Chaos—the Big-V Vacuum. It builds its complexity inward. They’re like layers of an onion; but unlike an onion, the universe does not ever grow any ‘bigger’ than the primordial particle that started it. Rather, each new layer is ‘smaller’ than the one it emerged from.
How in the world do you fit our whole universe inside a single tiny particle? Let’s play this idea out in a cosmic arcade.
Remember that ‘Whac-a-Mole’ arcade game? Well, in our world, it’s the ‘Whac-an-Easter Bunny’ game. The playing surface has holes in it (Cosmic Rabbit Holes) out of which mechanical pink Easter Bunnies pop up and then quickly drop back out of sight. The player’s goal is to whack the Bunny with a mallet before it disappears.
Now imagine that you’re the Big-V Vacuum and you’ve constantly got these Easter Bunnies popping up and trying to become real, messing up your nice serene realm of pure ‘white noise.’ This will not do. No pink bunnies allowed (… ??? – see later). You’re a Vacuum after all, and any good Vacuum worth its name can’t have Easter Bunnies hopping all around cluttering it up. So, your goal is to be poised with that mallet, ever vigilant, with hair-trigger reaction time, ready to whack those damn Bunnies back out of existence.
Now, I’ve repeatedly noted that the Big-V Vacuum has no rules. Anything is fair game. Here’s the point. “No rules” means there’s no such thing as space and no such thing as time. No such thing as Easter Bunnies. Although none of that stuff is prohibited, neither is it fundamental or necessary.
So, out of one of the holes something that pops up claims to be an Easter Bunny; and not only that, it claims to be able to run so fast that you can’t whack it. In our game the Bunny claims to be able to escape if you don’t whack it. It says that it’s not going to just pop back down into the hole. And we have to whack it before it escapes. But where can it possibly go? There’s no space. How can you measure its speed when there’s no such thing as time?
It is purely a matter of perspective. From your point of view as the Big-V Vacuum, there’s no ‘place’ for the bunny to go but back into its hole. But then, because the Big-V Vacuum is lawless, it actually can’t even have a ‘point of view.’
Here we’ve come square up against the ‘Tao problem’—a fundamental philosophical black hole that refers all the way back 2,500 years to the ancient Chinese faith tradition called Taoism.
