Song 23: Inflation – the hatching of the Cosmic Egg

Yours truly, Dr. Pete, studying Alan Guth’s 1997 autobiographical account of his discovery of Cosmic Inflation in late 1979, with an excellent not-too-technical description of what it means, why it’s important, and how it’s supposed to work.

Continuing the Song of Everything’s story of how our Comfortable Universe began, the narrative has been proceeding along three different tracks, or story lines.

The first approach is to look to the most ancient stories from our faith traditions. This is the Spirit side of our balanced presentation. We’ve tapped into Hinduism’s Rig Veda,

the Judeo-Christian bible,

and especially the 2,500-year-old Tao-Te Ching and ancient Chinese legends of creation. A fundamental step-by-step process is laid out in Chapter 42 of this ancient Taoist ‘bible’. It’s pretty simple:

Here in Song 23, we will explore how ancient Chinese legend expounds on these simple enigmatic steps to paint a picture of Cosmic Inflation that is every bit as robust as today’s best scientific theories. Read on. That’s the punch line of this Song.

The second set of story lines focuses on the Cosmic Rabbit Hole, implying an emergence from a Lewis Carroll-style ‘Wonderland’ where rules of normal reality hold little or no sway. Our particular take on this brings forth a swarm of Pink Easter Bunnies as a metaphor for the first objects of creation.

There’s a purpose to such madness—a Sense to the nonsense, so to say. It’s a way of visualizing what can be difficult to visualize; and it shifts focus away from the cold, objective sciences of Particle Physics and Cosmology and toward the intimate and arguably crucial perspective of the thing that emerges—what does it ‘experience’ and does it make Sense … at every step along what may have been a very long and winding path from there to here.

Third and last, we work hard to make sense of the limited clues that Science has provided about these unobservable earliest moments of creation. There does seem to be enough evidence to piece together a simple sketch—perhaps only a ‘Song’, as we like to call it—that gets us across that paradoxical threshold between ‘nothing and something’.

Vital to the Science story is the strange phenomenon called “Inflation.” Here in Song 23 we’re continuing to drill down into this concept in new ways, but first we need to establish the basics of what science knows about this Inflation thing and what it doesn’t.

What we know: Something that is given the vague term “Inflation” caused the universe to look like it started as an unbelievably hot dense speck that ‘exploded’—becoming ridiculously huge in a tiny fraction of a second and sending everything hurtling apart from everything else in an expansion that is still continuing today.

That expansion was what Edwin Hubble first discovered less than 100 years ago, in 1929. It turns out that our reality doesn’t work if there isn’t an expansion like that. If stars weren’t moving away from us, eventually becoming invisible because they’re so far away that their light can no longer reach us, then there would have to be infinite stars out there, so that the entire sky would be as bright as the surface of the average star and we’d be burned to a crisp. It’s called the ‘Olbers Paradox’ and Hubble’s Expansion solved it.

Of course, that means that if you try playing the universe ‘video’ backwards, you see that everything was once all together in one spot, and that’s why it makes sense to talk about an origin—a start to our universe—rather than the idea that the universe just always existed.

Since Hubble’s discovery there have been many, many other discoveries and observations that all agree with that expansion story. Most significantly, just a little over 60 years ago (1964), Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were looking for bird poop in their microwave antenna in New Jersey, trying to figure out why it was giving them a hissing noise when looking at empty space. They were not far from Princeton where physicists at the time were thinking about what kind of radiation might be coming from the early universe when all the stars were packed together in a single spot. Long story short, Penzias learned about the Princeton research and invited the physicists to check out the hissing noise, and it turned out to be exactly what the physicists expected. It’s now called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (the CMB). It is light that has been travelling across the universe for 13.8 billion years, coming from that long-ago time when everything was packed together and hot, but by now the radiation has cooled down to just a couple degrees above absolute zero—easy to miss without sensitive instruments.

The CMB confirms the ‘Hot Big Bang’ expansion theory. There’s hardly any other reasonable way to explain why it is there. The story it tells is that there seems to have been a sort of hot explosion early in the universe’s life.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the CMB is its uniformity across the sky (we’ve previously talked about it—the observable universe seems almost perfectly “isotropic and homogeneous”). No matter what direction you look, the CMB’s light looks the same, down to one part in 100,000. This makes no sense at all when you think of an explosion of a bomb here on Earth, and especially when you realize that the CMB light that is reaching you from different parts of the sky cannot even have been causally connected. If you look at the CMB in the direction of the North Star and compare it to that coming from the sky above the South Pole—those two signals originated in parts of the sky that are moving apart from each other *way* faster than the speed of light. These two parts of the sky could never have had any contact or any way to share information, so how could they have exactly the same properties?

Enter Alan Guth with a brilliant solution: Inflation. Stretch the universe way faster than the speed of light. Before Inflation those two parts of the sky would have been right near each other.

His 1997 book, which your author is shown studying in the opening image, describes his research path, as a recently graduated post-doc, which led to the discovery of Inflation in December 1979. Inflation gives us a picture that explains how the CMB, and the distribution of stars and galaxies across the cosmos, can be so strikingly similar in every direction. Before Inflation, they were all packed together in a single spot. What did this spot look like? Where did it come from? We’ve given our version in previous songs, and we’ll reiterate it here in a little while.

Inflation, then, is the thing that spread the universe out. It is described as some stuff that is extremely densely packed and has a dominant property that does the heavy lifting—a large value of what’s called ‘Potential Energy.’ That energy has a specific single value, and when it somehow came into existence, the huge pressure that it contains causes a super-powerful gravitational repulsion.

The physics of this repulsion is described by a highly simplified solution to Einstein’s General Relativity equations. For those who care to delve a little deeper, we’re showing you the equation that gives a clear explanation of why the intense pressure causes the huge repulsion.

The Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) metric first derived from Einstein's General Relativity theory barely over 100 years ago in 1922, describes the expansion of a simple type of space containing a perfect fluid that is the same everywhere in the universe—smooth and continuous and featureless.  The equation shown explains how a negative pressure fluid produces a big gravitational repulsion.  This is a snip from the Wikipedia page entitled Expansion of the Universe, retrieved 11 February 2026.  The text describes the density parameter ρ as the energy density, but in the equation as written, it has to be the matter density (mass per unit volume).  Wikipedia is as near perfect of a model as we have for maintaining a curated, ever evolving, dynamic information base, but, of course, it is always a good idea to double check sources and stated facts.  Errors are inevitable.

This equation is undergraduate or even high-school-level math—nothing more than calculus—simple as a first Germ Universe ought to be!  That's why our Song of Everything is featuring it.  Our complicated messy universe offers plenty of brain-bending puzzles, but it should have started simple (that's our fundamental story), and the complications should have been added one at a time, step by step, over many generations of universes, to get us to the complexity that we see today that enables us to sit back on our sofas and relax and not worry about metric tensors and Lagrangians and infinite dimensional Hilbert Spaces.

Note also that although this equation was derived from a specifically three-space-dimensional model, it contains only one space dimension.  We take this as a HUGE HINT that the first Germ Universe was itself one-dimensional.  Note that the first ingredient in our proto-universe recipe was a one-dimensional dipole entity--the Higgs-like quantum oscillator.  We are going to call this particle the Yin-Yangon or YYon for short, and it, itself is a one-dimensional entity (meaning having only one macroscopic dimension), which is probably why physicists haven't discovered it yet. (Though there may be clever ways to ferret out its existence).

To dig even further into the math and science of Inflation, there's a good undergraduate physics major level tutorial by Syracuse U physics professor Gary Scott Watson on arXiv.

This gigantic, unchecked repulsion expanded the tiny initial germ particle into the vast expanse of our universe in way, WAY less than a second.

Then it stopped.

How? Why?

Physicists are still trying to figure out the logistics of what started Inflation, what stopped it, and what happened next. There is no known believable answer to that yet, and there are big gaps in the timeline where nobody has the slightest idea what was going on.

There isn’t even a solid explanation of what Inflation itself actually is. It is being called a paradigm rather than a theory.

People are speculating far and wide, exploring ideas, testing them when possible, or just making more calculations that do not yet have a way to be proven or disproven. Some of the early proponents of Inflation are even rejecting it, claiming that Inflation theories have proliferated so much that the concept can never be ‘falsified’ and so they’re looking for other ideas.

The Song of Everything enters the fray: What the heck is wrong with something that can never be falsified??? That pretty much means ‘it's a lock.’  Science doesn’t like to deal with that kind of freedom, but simple common Sense sure can! No calculations here, just a story—a Song.

In previous Songs we addressed the initial conditions that might have preceded Inflation (totally speculatively). Here’s a quick reminder: start with a dipole quantum harmonic oscillator—two balls connected with a spring—that pops out of the Big-V Vacuum. That’s step one. In step two, the spring begins to oscillate when it interacts with a precursor General Relativity ‘particle pair’ that we’ve called the ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ that fortuitously appears out of the Vacuum and interacts with the quantum oscillator. Here we’re going to elaborate on what happens next—what started the Inflationary Epoch.

We actually already hinted at our proposed way to start Inflation in Song 22. Flip a fair coin 1000 times. What are the odds of the coin coming up heads every single time? Well, write down a number with 300 figures before the decimal point.

It’s called ten to the 300^th power. That’s how many times you need to flip 1000 coins in order to have one chance of getting all heads. How big is that number? It’s a Googol times a Googol times a Googol. If we imagine that our universe extends far, *far* beyond the limits of what we can observe (because we’re limited by the cosmic speed limit—the speed of light), then there could perhaps be as many as Googol number of fundamental particles in that ‘Googolverse’.

This could be a version of the FLAT WORLD realm, or a piece of it containing only closely related universes, that we introduced in Song 21. This piece would contain hundreds of trillions of universes similar in size to our own—about 100 times as many universes as there are galaxies in our observable universe; and Inflation theory suggests that the existence of this much stuff is very likely—it is what science has called the multiverse, and Inflation theory says it almost has to exist even though we can never observe it.

Now … each of those individual fundamental particles in this Googolverse/multiverse/Flat World would have to actually secretly be a tiny Googolverse of its own with that many particles inside of it; and then you have to go down into a third layer of the onion where each of those particles would also have to be a mini-mini-Googolverse with that same number of particles.

Whew! Now, down on that third level inside the onion, you’ve finally assembled enough particles such that each one of them could do the 1000-coin flip test simultaneously; and (on average) just one of those particles, somewhere in all of that ridiculous expanse would be the winner.

Well, guess what? A number that big is chump change to the Big-V Vacuum. Remember that Big-V is a realm without time—inexhaustibly patient—and without space. It just lets things that are possible sort-of ‘happen’. And among those things that are possible are the very unlikely statistical ‘outlier’ events like a flip of 1000 coins all producing heads.

Now, the key attribute of Inflation is that it takes all the kinks and wrinkles of space and smooths them out. In its simplest description, it is what’s called a scalar field—like a weather map showing the temperature across the land—only one in which the temperature is the same everywhere in this Inflation object’s ‘sight’ (its internal perspective) …

… like a map of coin flips that all came up heads …

… smooth. Homogeneous and isotropic.

This is our Song of Everything’s story of the emergence of time itself—how the first ‘something’ popped out of the mysterious ‘nothing’ that is the Big-V Vacuum. Still sticking with the physics story, an extremely strong instance of the ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ had squeezed the quantum dipole into a highly gravitationally repulsive state just as a rare zone of Vacuum smoothness came along to interact with it—or really to fail to act the way the Vacuum would normally act—to destroy its smoothness. This zone of smoothness can be considered an ‘entity’ of its own—a very different sort of vacuum fluctuation—so we’re giving it the name ‘Vacuon’ which is also a play on the Chinese word ‘Yuan’ ( 元 ) meaning ‘origin,’ ‘source’, or ‘beginning.’  The zone of smoothness did not have to be endless. In order to match the observed smoothness of the CMB, it only had to enable Inflation to explosively expand space through about 85 doublings in size ‘*before*’ the Vacuum’s frothing randomness returned and slammed it down.

Note well that that term ‘*before*’ applies only within the internal perspective of the repulsive-gravity Inflation field. And here’s where our Easter Bunny analogy-metaphor comes in handy to improve our understanding.

In Song 22 (our last post), our pink Easter Bunny was playing the role of the mole in the Whac-a-Mole arcade game.

We added a few twists to the game, saying that the Bunny’s goal was to escape the game entirely before the monstrous Big-V Vacuum, with its big black mallet, could whack it out of existence.

But here’s the thing. You can’t really escape the Game. We notice the ‘little-v’ evidence of the Big-boy Vacuum all around us all the time. Remember, this monster doesn’t abide rules or limitations. That new space-time realm that Inflation is manufacturing, represented by the speed that our Bunny is running, is like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. It’s a dream. It’s all inside the Bunny’s head.

What that means to us, in practical terms, is that we’re going to get Whacked in the end. Nothing lasts forever; and since Big-V is totally the poster-boy for Nothing … well, our universe is stamped with an expiration date.

But thanks to that 1000-flip zone of smoothness (the Vacuon), and the 85 or more doublings that it has allowed Inflation to achieve, the end doesn’t come for a very long time (as we measure it); and here’s why: Current estimates are that at the time Inflation ended (a process that we’ll be discussing in a bit), the universe we can now see was just a few centimeters across but the whole ‘FLAT WORLD’ realm that Inflation manufactured would have been bigger than the size of today’s universe, possibly much bigger. We (our Comfortable Earth and all the stars and galaxies that we can observe—everything all the way out to the Cosmic horizon billions of light years away) are a precious little package wrapped in cellophane deep inside a ridiculously gargantuan shipping container filled with a helluva lotta packing peanuts. We seem to be just about totally Whack-proof.

(It’s getting just a little ahead of the Story, but that moment when we finally get hit with the mallet will not hurt. It’s far more likely to be a ‘not with a bang but a whimper’ story where our universe just expands and expands and expands until it just effectively dissolves back into the Vacuum.)

Now we come to the shocking punch-line. Ancient sages knew about Inflation millennia before science did. It’s time to tell the story from that Spirit perspective.

We’ve already begun that tale. In Song 20 we showed the correspondence between the first lines of Chapter 42 of the Tao-Te Ching and the proposed physics of the first emerging particles. And way back in Song 8, we used that same quote along with others to introduce the Cosmic Egg story—the story of the primordial Giant, Pangu:

“In the beginning …” —Genesis 1:1

“… there was neither non-existence nor existence …” —Rig Veda, 10:129

“… The Tao (the ineffable) gave rise to One” (the Tao that can be spoken).

“The One begat Two, ...

All emergent things seethe with the conflicting properties of Yin and Yang—desperately desiring to endure yet desperately seeking to return to the Womb of their creation. From modern quantum mechanics, this fits the interpretation of the “quantum froth,” detected even in a complete vacuum as a cloud of virtual particle pairs [a particle and its anti-matter counterpart] that are constantly appearing and self-annihilating. Here is our quantum harmonic oscillator—two balls with a spring. To give it a particle name, let’s start calling it the ‘Yin-Yangon.’

“... The Two begat Three.

“And the Three gave birth to all the things that we find around us.”

—Tao-Te Ching, Chapter 42

When an unusually strong ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ fluctuation in the ‘ether,’ the ‘void,’ the ‘first Nothing,’ the ‘Cosmic Rabbit Hole,’ the ‘Tao’ begins to actualize a separation between Yin and Yang, the Quantum Oscillator begins to sing.  The two opposing forces increasingly clarify and balance as they oscillate back and forth; but to keep them apart a third entity is needed. Thus, according to Chinese folklore recorded in the Classic of Mountains and Seas from about the 4^th century BCE, there emerged a legendary primordial being named Pangu. He hatched from this cosmic Yin-Yang egg brimming with strength and resolve: with 氣 (qì, meaning vital energy).  In honor of Pangu we’re naming the ‘Balloon-Squeezer’ particle the ‘Qion.’

'Baby' Pangu escapes from the Cosmic Egg.

As the macroscopic world materialized, Pangu was tasked with keeping the two opposing influences physically separated. Legend says that with his immense strength, he stood holding up the sky and keeping it separated from the ground. Each day the sky grew ten feet higher, the earth stretched ten feet wider, and Pangu grew ten feet taller; and this continued for eighteen thousand years!

The aging giant Pangu.  Tasked with keeping sky and earth separated, he stuck to his labor for 18,000 years, growing ten feet taller every day.

Here is the vast expansion that we now call Inflation, described wonderfully by the Taoist sages two thousand years before Alan Guth.

How and why did Inflation stop? In the Chinese myth, Pangu was so exhausted from his 18,000-year vigil holding up the sky that he laid down to take a nap. It would be his last conscious act. As he settled onto a soft bed of grass, his breathing stilled and his heart stopped beating.

It was a sad, sad moment. Suddenly all the world fell into a great silence—a mournful stillness of such majestic proportion that it has never been felt again.

But in dying, the real power of Pangu’s being was just beginning to reveal itself. Out of that stillness, Pangu’s material form started to change. His last breath became the clouds. His arms and legs became great mountain ranges. His left eye became the sun, and his right eye became the moon. Pangu’s flesh spread out to become the soil. His arteries became the river valleys and his blood poured out of his body to fill them. His hair drifted on the wind and rose to become the stars filling the heavens. His teeth and bones turned into metals, his bone marrow into precious gems.

The Three had given birth to all particular things. There is a great illustrated video that recaps the entire story of Pangu—a fun 8-minute journey:

Again, the Legend of Pangu is just about as good of an explanation of Inflation as any that science has come up with, and here’s a figure from a modern peer-reviewed scientific journal that explains why. It comes from a recent comprehensive 67-page paper that reviews the current research on the very early universe (Allahverdi, et al., 29 January 2021: “The first three seconds: A Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the early Universe”. The Open Journal of Astrophysics. 4 (1): 1. arXiv:2006.16182. Bibcode:2021OJAp....4E...1A. doi:10.21105/astro.2006.16182.).

BBN = Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, RD = Radiation Dominated epoch, meaning that more energy was in the form of light than in the form of solid matter, MD = Matter Dominated epoch, which happened as space stretched and the light cooled but the solid matter stayed steadfast.  The dark black line represents how much of the whole realm of space we can see compared to how much we can see today.  It is based on the FLRW metric equation shown earlier.  That black line begins to dip at the end—the right side of the graph, because the mysterious Dark Energy has begun to cause our universes expansion to accelerate.  Note that the left and right ends of that line could be matched up—both having the same direction and height on the chart.  There’s a big implication here that Dark Energy could be the same thing as Inflation, and it suggests a more speculative possibility that we’ve entered into the very early stages of the next Inflation cycle.  What would that imply for our future?  What does that say about the opportunity for our universe to spawn baby universes that start with an Inflation of their own?  These are subjects for many future Songs!

The horizontal axis of the graph is effectively a timeline, but it’s on a logarithmic scale, so that the actual beginning (time = 0) is infinitely far off the chart to the left. Everything that came before Inflation isn’t shown and isn't being discussed much (by Science) because it is so completely beyond the reach of observations and experiments. Inflation ends a tiny, tiny fraction of a second after the Beginning—specifically 10^-32 seconds (0.00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds) after the moment time began. BBN, which means Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (coalescing of the first atoms out of a hot plasma of free-flowing quarks and gluons), began about 20 seconds later. In terms of temperature, the difference between those two moments is way more than the difference between an ice cube in your freezer and the thermonuclear furnace in the middle of the sun. It’s a HUGE gap, during which Science can only offer a question mark.

What happened during that time is so completely unknown, and yet so critical to how our universe works, that there is room for many, MANY stories.

Our version, our Song of Everything, fearlessly plunges into that mysterious gap with Song 25. Song 24 is sort of an interlude--a digression that is relevant, but more about process that your host needed to get off his chest.

Comfortable Universe, Song 22: Surviving the Vacuum Catastrophe

In the last post (Part 3 of Comfortable Universe: The Song of Everything) we were discussing the deep question of how our Universe might have got started by exploring an analogy to a Cosmic Whac-a-Mole game.

In the original arcade game, there are holes in a table out of which pop little mechanical moles. The player has a mallet with which s/he attempts to whack the mole before it disappears back into its hole. As the game progresses, the speed of the moles and the number of appearances keep increasing, making hitting them an ever-increasing challenge.

In our analogy, we added a few twists. First of all, the holes have become our familiar Cosmic Rabbit Holes, the moles have been replaced by pink Easter Bunnies, and the big nasty black Mallet is wielded by the primordial “Big-V Vacuum,”

Most importantly, the Bunnies don’t just pop back down into their hole. Their goal is to escape the game table entirely and become free-agent baby universes. The role of Big-V Vacuum is to prevent this by whacking the Bunny back into the hole (back into the oblivion of the Vacuum) before it can make its escape.

The Bunny has some tricks up its sleeve. It is carrying a set of internal rules that it is going to pit against Big-V’s skill with the Mallet. Big-V doesn’t seem to respect any rules, however, and claims that its reaction ‘time’ with the Mallet is virtually instantaneous because it doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of time.

There seems an intractable conundrum here. What rules can our Bunny invoke that would work when Big-V seems entirely lawless, refusing to acknowledge, let alone obey, rules of any kind.

To address this conundrum, Our Song of Everything seeks clues from what Science can tell us about the ‘little-v vacuum’ that we can observe from within our universe (which is presumed to be a successfully escaped Easter Bunny, so to speak).

But here we find that things begin to look more challenging for the Bunny than we could ever have imagined. Turns out that Big-V is a true MONSTER! The calculated energy of just the bits of the little-v vacuum that we can interrogate, is gigantic! As discussed in the opening video from PBS Space Time, one teacup of the stuff would be enough to boil away all of Earth’s oceans. And we have a whole universe full of this stuff—the vacuum is everywhere. With that much energy lurking in the vacuum—with that much force and intensity wielding the Mallet—our Bunny, and every possible universe it could have hoped to create, should have been thoroughly and completely smashed back into its hole within a tiny fraction of a second.

That’s the Vacuum Catastrophe. No universe anything like ours should ever be possible. ***(But see the important footnote below.) And yet, somehow, our oceans haven’t boiled. We’ve been spared. That calculated monstrous energy has obviously not shredded our real universe into bits. In fact, it seems to have done nothing at all.  

This is the mysterious clue that we have to work with. It has been called the biggest mystery in physics, and also the worst disagreement between theoretical prediction and actual observation in all of science. (Stay tuned for Song 23 in our Song of Everything, where we will be offering a pretty solid explanation for this paradox that supports our relaxed, one-step-at-a-time picture of the way the Universe got started.)

What rule, or what loophole in Big-V’s seemingly unlimited power and its apparently impenetrable disrespect for rules, could the Bunny possibly hope to come up with?

This is not a question that science is prepared to answer. It may never be.

It is not even a question that logic or reason can answer.

It needs a Song!

Back in Song 17, we introduced the Whac-an-Easter-Bunny analogy and declared that the Bunny could run faster than Big-V could wield the Mallet.

Well, that doesn’t seem to hold up under close scrutiny. Running requires some sort of running track—Space. ‘Fast’ requires a measure of Time. Big-V scoffs at such foibles.

In Song 18, we doubled-down on the idea that any rules that the Bunny comes up with only really reside inside its ‘head’—meaning from a perspective that is internal to it and particular to it. The critical rules that allow its internal perspective to survive and flourish have to somehow ‘trick’ big-V into not ‘noticing’ the escaping Bunny in ‘time’ to Whack it. Because of the raging maelstrom of Big-V’s vast energy resource, the best way to be not noticed seems to be to ‘slip through the cracks’—to be as tiny and insignificant as possible.

So, our Song suggests that our Bunny builds its rules inward—deeper and deeper inside itself. Maybe it even has to shed layer after layer of rules as it runs a gauntlet through the Rabbit Hole—like the way the outer layers of an onion die and form a skin protecting the deeper layers within.

We aren’t trying to claim that we know the rules that the Bunny used. In fact, our Song of Everything takes the firm position that there is nothing special, distinctive, or unique about the rules that resulted in our observed universe. But our Song does insist that these layers of rules emerged one at a time, randomly, testing Big-V’s reaction, and probably also exploiting its complete indifference.

In Songs 17 and 18 and then in the physics details discussed in Songs 19 and 20, our approach was minimalist. There is some secretive way that our Bunny can ‘run fast’ that Big-V doesn’t ‘care’ about—at least not enough to take a whack at it. Maybe the random chaos within Big-V’s realm actually generated a bubble of ‘un-whack-able-ness’ that the Bunny has exploited. Think of flipping a fair coin 1000 times and coming up heads each and every one of those 1000 flips. This is the kind of rare anomaly that the timeless, utterly indifferent Big-V will necessarily produce every so often, simply because it is possible.

And that’s all we needed. Secret rules tuned to chance loopholes (big bubbles in the random froth), with a little luck and some patience and persistence ... and here we are, Winners of the Lottery, leaning back on our sofa, lifting our drinks for a toast, and belting out a rowdy old bar Song!  Our Song of Everything!

***  Important footnote (the rest of this post)

The Vacuum Catastrophe calculation, as Dr. Matt O’Dowd discusses in the PBS Space Time video up top, has some underlying assumptions that are peculiar to our universe’s physics. The big one, for the purposes of our Song of Everything, is the selection of the Planck Scale as the cut-off energy scale. (If you include smaller scales, that just makes the catastrophe even worse!)

The Planck Scale was introduced by Max Planck way back in 1899, well before the laws of Quantum Physics and General Relativity were known, and yet it unifies them at short length scales (what physicists call the UV). The Planck Length is the teeny-tiny size of a unit of space at which Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity seem to want to merge. It’s unimaginably small—take a meter stick and cut in half. Take one of those pieces and cut it in half and keep doing that for a total of 117 times and your smallest piece is the Planck Length. Interesting thing about your attempt to make that last cut, though: any kind of scissors or power saw or laser beam that can be sharpened or focused tightly enough to make that final cut has to have such concentrated energy that it would automatically collapse into a black hole before it could accomplish the cut, so that making sense of anything that small or smaller, within our currently accepted laws of physics, is literally impossible.

The mission of the Song of Everything is to look beyond our current laws of physics, because they are known to be incomplete and inadequate. There is far more territory that is unknown than known, not the least of which is what’s going on at and below the Planck length scale, where it is most likely that our universe got its start.

It is at this tiniest scale that our Cosmic Rabbit Hole exists in the Whac-an-Easter-Bunny game. The Easter Bunny that pops up is very likely to be at or below that scale, and its first steps, as it escapes the marauding Mallet of Big-V Vacuum are likely to be that tiny as well.

In the long footnote on Song 19, in the previous post (Part Three), we introduced and emphasized the notion of Asymptotic Freedom—an attribute of at least one important part of the currently accepted laws of physics—because it provides the pathway from these tiny scales to the larger. An entity that has Asymptotic Freedom sheds the shackles of the physics laws that govern the larger scale processes when it operates at the Planck Scale. This notion, therefore, is essential to our Song of Everything’s approach to the Creation Story. It is what allows the tiny germ that leads to our universe to pop out of the Big-V Vacuum and begin its journey to becoming the universe that we observe.

Every rule carried by our Easter Bunny as it emerges from the Cosmic Rabbit Hole has to be compatible with the notion of Asymptotic Freedom. Black Holes are a complete fail in that regard. They’re pretty much the poster child for an anti-Cosmic-Rabbit-Hole that does nothing but swallow up Easter Bunnies. The Song of Everything, therefore, categorically declares that Black Holes were not a feature of the laws of physics of the Germ universe that first emerged.

How could there be laws of physics in the ‘ancestry’ of our universe that were so radically different from the laws we observe today? The very term that we chose to use here—‘ancestry’—provides our explanation. The Song of Everything’s one-step-at-a-time approach to the Origin Story is most suited to a story in which universes have ways to self-replicate, so that we actually do, truly, have an ancestry. We have a parent universe and our universe will give birth to (or already has) child universes.

Each succeeding universe in the ‘genealogy’ provides opportunity for new physics to emerge out of the Library of possibilities in the Big-V Vacuum and be tested. Furthermore, just as with living things, old laws that are no longer useful fall by the wayside, disappear, and can be completely lost, and new laws that evolve, create contradictory, even destructive situations that could not have existed in the earlier generations, such as Black Holes ... and Vacuum Catastrophes.

Let’s explore that in more detail using an example from our own ‘ancestry.’ We human beings evolved from some sort of vertebrate that lived in the ocean at some time in the distant past. That fish-like thing breathed water, and would die if it was thrown out onto dry land. If we are submerged deep in the ocean, we would also die. Yet one came from the other. The laws that allowed us to breathe water are completely lost, and we do not even know for sure what the fish-like thing we came from exactly looked like, what it ate, etc. Of course, there are mammals that have returned to the sea (although none that I know of have resumed breathing water – yet.)

In the case of our universe, many of the current laws do not allow Asymptotic Freedom. That’s why they predict the Vacuum Catastrophe. In the early universe there were probably no such laws. Instead, the original set of laws had to have emerged with Asymptotic Freedom; and some, or even most of those laws must have since been completely lost and are not necessarily recoverable, although future universes could re-discover them if necessary. The analogy is to convergent evolution, in which the same useful trait or structure has evolved independently multiple times.

When we apply the analogy of the evolution of life to the development of our universe, even assuming that such an analogy is highly predictive, valid, and appropriate, there is still one major difference that we have to recognize. It can be neatly characterized by a simple equation.

N = 1

The ‘N=1 problem’ states that we have only our one observable universe to study. (It also applies to the number of technologically advanced civilizations that we know about and the number of individual minds whose perspective we experience first-hand.) It’s a big overarching problem, this N=1 thing, and Our Song of Everything will probably return to it.

The point to be made here is that when we study life, N is HUGE.  We have a vast branching tree of life full of living species and many more fossils to study; but in the case of a putative genealogy of universes, and the possible interaction between them in the FLAT WORLD realm (introduced in Song 21), we are hopelessly trapped inside a small portion of this single functioning unit and have zero knowledge of any other individuals in our own species let alone of other more distantly related universes. It is as if a single cell (even, perhaps a super-advanced neuron) in an organism was tasked with trying to describe the true full function of the organism it lives in, and to explain how that organism got so huge and complex. With Darwin’s help, and with the benefit of all the other species we have to study, we have been able to piece together a rich story of the evolution of life. But in the case of our N=1 universe, we are forced to operate with severe blinders on.

How appropriate is this analogy to biology? This is a subject that our Song of Everything claims is wonderfully low hanging fruit, ripe for discussion—long overdue and vastly underrecognized and underappreciated. On this blog there are several discussions already posted addressing this. They are very much to be considered adjuncts to the Song of Everything.  Given the tremendous complexity our universe allows, and assuming that some version of our Song of Everything appropriately describes how simple Germ universes got their start emerging from the Big-V Vacuum, then it seems almost mandatory to consider a step-by-step evolution linking such a Germ universe to today’s observed universe. 

Did an especially energetic amoeba one day just happen to give birth to Einstein?  Right. What a crazy idea it seems to assume that our cozy, exquisitely well-prepared Comfortable Universe just suddenly happened all at once in one giant leap.