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 First of all, the holes have become our familiar Cosmic Rabbit Holes, the moles have been replaced by pink Easter Bunnies, and the big nasty black Mallet is wielded by the primordial “Big-V Vacuum,”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 thing 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, random loopholes, a little luck and some patience and persistence ... and here we are, leaning back in our sofas, lifting our drinks for a toast, and belting out a rowdy old bar Song!
*** 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.
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 its parent organism, and to explain how it 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.
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