The Atacama Desert of northern Chile
—a stand-in for our Song of Everything’s Great Cosmic Desert—a range of scales equivalent to the difference between a single atom and a Great Blue Whale—in which science can tell us practically nothing. One thing seems certain, based on what we observe today. As we cross that vast trackless landscape, we pick up a lot of baggage along the way.
Our Comfortable Universe Song of Everything’s story of how our Universe began has reached the point where it begins to obliquely intersect with, or becomes parallel with, the earliest things that the science of Cosmology can detect—the end of the epoch of Inflation. What science knows about that time is sketchy at best. It is a vast stretch of mostly unknown time and physical processes—if knowledge were rain, this would be one of the driest deserts that we’ll need to cross.
The gap between the end of Inflation and the ‘symmetry breaking’ event that produced the physical system that governs today’s universe is a vast seventeen orders of magnitude in space scales within which we have no touchstones—no known processes, no known particles. Translating this gap in space scales to our macroscopic world, it is the difference between the size of an atom and the size of a Great Blue Whale—the largest living thing on Earth. It is as if we knew nothing at all about the whale’s internal structure other than that it was made of a whole lot of atoms swarming around. No molecules. No chemistry. No DNA. No cells. No known rules to organize the cells into bones, muscles, organs, or any kind of structure at all within the whale.
It’s as if, somehow, beyond the reach of science’s understanding, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms “magically” organized themselves into this gigantic, awesome, living, breathing, swimming, self-reproducing creature!
In order to properly depict the Cosmic Desert and put it in the perspective of ... Everything, we need to present a graph from a technical review article, even though it is a busy mess and surely too technical for most readers to understand. The reason it has to appear here is because it provides an overview of all the stuff we can perceive and explain and puts it in a context that shows what is beyond. It’s called the “Triangle of Everything.”
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| The Triangle of Everything Adapted from Figure 2 of: |
Charles H. Lineweaver, Vihan M. Patel; “All objects and some questions”. Am. J. Phys. 1 October 2023; 91 (10): 819–825. https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0150209
Given our lack of knowledge about how we got through that desert, there are many speculative ideas being proposed and discussed in the scientific literature (peer-reviewed journals and their non-reviewed but moderated arXiv system).
Two features of virtually all of this work are noteworthy for our purposes here at the Comfortable Universe. First, the vast majority of those papers operate on the assumption that today’s laws of physics apply. One could almost accuse physicists of treating these laws as ‘Canon,’ though they would deny that. It’s more a matter of simple publishability. If speculative work is not rooted in widely accepted existing work (with a demonstration of knowledge of that work through citations), it is very unlikely to pass peer review. What these papers do, then, is to explore extensions or modification of the existing laws. But, as many other commentators have noted, that may be a trap—a straight-jacket or prison—that prevents science from finding the breakthroughs needed to advance.
The second feature of virtually all of the work in the field of particle physics and cosmology, including but not limited to the speculative work trying to explain the physics of Inflation and the path through the Great Cosmic Desert, is that they must make simplifications and assumptions to the governing laws in order to find solutions. The equations of Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, and General Relativity are gruesomely difficult math that cannot be solved in general. Progress is made through various clever simplifications—most often this takes the form of neglecting smaller terms in equations—terms that represent higher-order effects of small quantities, for example, or terms that are deemed not relevant to the process being studied.
Our Song of Everything operates on a very different set of founding assumptions: First, the accepted theories of Quantum Fields and General Relativity are known not to be valid final descriptions of the Universe. They are simplifications themselves. But even if one grants that they are perfect representations of our universe, there is certainly no law that requires the most important phase changes, selection events, and rare anomalous behaviors that these laws produce to be mathematically tractable. Most likely it is those neglected small terms that would produce the kind of low-probability events that lead to interesting but extremely rare behaviors.
Second, and even more fundamental is our strongly held assertion that the universe didn’t ‘know’ about our laws of physics when it began. We assert that it began very simple, with the simplest possible set of functional laws and no a-priori constraints on its rulebook other than being possible. It began with minimal rules that were compatible with one another, which our currently acceptable laws are not. So, it makes sense, we argue, to play with simple scenarios, ‘let’ them ‘shake out’, in ‘stories’ such as our Song of Everything, and look for pathways that lead to the final product that we observe. The current laws of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity probably have roots in those early compatible scenarios, but possibly only very obliquely.
A Third, more specific feature of our Song of Everything’s pathway from the early Germ Universes to today is the assertion that the early universe quickly found a way to spawn Baby Universes. This is a topic that we’ll be discussing in great detail going forward. Universe self-replication opened up the opportunity for gradual, step-by-step evolution of the physical laws, following a meandering trial-and-error pathway from the early simple state to the complex final product we observe.
Our simple Germ Universe concept with minimal presuppositions about its initial state and laws of physics lies far beyond the realm of the objective scientific method. It is a story—a Song—but we suggest that this analog to the biological story of Abiogenesis is the most plausible paradigm to navigate the vast Cosmic Desert—plenty of rest-stops at Oases along the way! Plenty of opportunity to build structure, step by step, inventing molecules, chemistry, DNA, bones and muscles and organs, to get us from a tiny Germ to a Great Blue Whale.
Perhaps that’s how the primordial giant, Pangu, fits into the story. What did he eat to allow him to grow so huge during his 18,000-year vigil to expand the universe from its Cosmic Egg?
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| The primordial giant, Pangu, from Chinese Legend, tasked with keeping earth and sky separated. Looks like he was eating pretty well! |
Now let’s delve into the problem of what happened at the end of Inflation—how our universe gets across that empty desert, and the baggage that it inevitably acquires along the way.
The Song of Everything is able to provide an example of a coherent story, or sketch, based on our distinctive view, as just described, and making use of the few clues that science has provided in ways that scientists and philosophers haven’t explored—perhaps haven’t yet fully appreciated.
Before delving into Our version, we check in on these clues that scientists have explored, without going into a lot of depth about their story. That is the consensus story—the stuff we seem to agree on—what science has found to be useful in making predictions.
Cosmologists’ consensus story of how the universe has evolved through time is called the Standard Model of Cosmology, or more technically the ‘Lambda CDM’ Model (link). The ongoing, very sophisticated and technical work being done combines many avenues of ‘detective work’ needed to look at and ‘behind’ the curtain of light released by the cooling universe 380,000 years after Inflation ended.
We’ve already talked about that curtain of light. It’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The clever techniques and avenues of analysis Cosmologists employ cover a vast range of cutting-edge physics. They study high-energy particle physics data taken at massive particle accelerators like the LHC—the Large Hadron Collider—a seventeen-mile-long ring of super-high-powered magnets and sensors built in a tunnel on the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. They study high energy particle collisions that mimic the energy levels that were happening in the very hot early stages of the universe.
On the other end of the scale, Cosmologists make use of some of the biggest and most sophisticated telescopes on Earth and in orbit to study galaxy formation, statistics of the all-sky population of galaxies and how their structure and composition seem to have changed over time. And they make use of and develop theory and models based on particle physics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, chemistry, and beyond.
It isn’t the purpose of our Song of Everything to summarize or describe all that amazing work. It is always at the core of our story, of course, providing the basis for our wider perspective. But science that is ‘settled’ is the bailiwick of peer-reviewed journals, text books, and usually some very well-done non-technical popularizations. A fine jumping-off point for the most relevant work, with many primary sources cited, is the Wikipedia page titled “Chronology of the Universe.” This is what Wikipedia refers to as a “Level 4 Vital Article” in the Physical Sciences category,* which means that it is one of the 10,000 most important articles among the more than seven million on English language Wikipedia. So, it gets special monitoring and review and is likely to benefit from considerable expert volunteer editorial effort to make it balanced and trustworthy.
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* Since it is the mission of our Song of Everything to cover … well … everything, a good, up-to-date encyclopedic reference source seems essential. Without question (and even with), we believe that Wikipedia has filled that niche in the way it ought to be filled in our information-saturated, disinformation-saturated, AI garbage-saturated, modern knowledge landscape. The image below shows a tabulation of the subject categories of those 10,000 Level 4 articles and the 1,000 Level 3 articles that encompass them. Wikipedia’s community continually debates the big picture of how to balance this content across subject areas as well as the nitty-gritty of each of the articles. Here at Comfortable Universe headquarters, we subscribe to this process and its result as the best dynamic (ever-changing) moderated and curated, truly all-encompassing Song of Everything for stuff that the human enterprise has agreed upon.
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| Wikipedia’s Level 4 and 3 Vital Article distribution by topic category. |
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The niche that this series of Comfortable Universe – Song of Everything posts seeks to carve out for itself is to explore new ideas that lie beyond what has been agreed upon, and often outside of the realm of what it is even possible to discover by experiment and direct observation. There are three analogies that apply to our process.
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| Sherlock Holmes … quote from The Sign of Four: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” |
The first analogy is to a Sherlock-Holmes-style mystery story, where we sleuth out obscure clues, use abductive reasoning to interpret them in ways that might not be the currently popular ways, applying them to models than have been popularly considered in hopes of arriving at conclusions that have not previously been given serious attention.
The difference between our mission and that of Sherlock Holmes, of course, is that this is not fiction. The clues are from the real world and the conclusions have not been written into the plot by an omniscient designer (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), but rather by the mysterious machinations of Mother Nature, whose role as ‘designer’ is itself an open question and subject for inquiry. The conclusions may not be hard facts at all, but rather a fresh perspective or a new insight into how or world might work and where it might be headed in the future.
The second analogy requires some novel insights and fresh perspectives right from the start. We place our Sherlock Holmes inside a human body. He and Dr. Watson are individual cells within this vast 30-trillion-cell organism—say red blood cells that have the capability of freely traveling around and gathering clues.
The mysteries to be solved from this ‘deep down inside’ perspective are: Where did this giant, complex entity (the 30-trillion-member colony of single cells) come from? Did it have a beginning? Was it a simpler, smaller colony at some time in the past? If so, how did the observed structure develop and what is its purpose? Does it have the aspiration and capability to establish new colonies somewhere far beyond the realm that can be observed?
In other words, all the questions we want to ask about the one universe that we are deeply embedded inside and therefore severely restricted in our ability to observe.
The analogy is far from perfect, but we’ve been making the case that it is a surprisingly useful and appropriate way of interpreting the clues we have available, and we’ll be continuing to add evidence that supports that case.
Which brings us to our third analogy—that of a jury trial. Once Sherlock has gathered all his evidence, he needs to ‘take the case to court’ to try to get a conviction. Is his ‘preponderance of evidence’ sufficient to convince a jury of his peers?
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The Song of Everything is a journey of exploration and discovery. Maybe there’s another analogy here—in this case a metaphor. We’re a modern-day young Darwin, embarking on our round-the-world expedition on the HMS Beagle.
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| Charles Darwin by G. Richmond ca. 1830 and HMS Beagle, in the Straits of Magellan by Robert Taylor Pritchett, 1890 |
So … what evidence has the scientific process uncovered? What clues do we have about Inflation and its ending from observations? The big one is a strange attribute of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (and of the arrangement of all the galaxies in front of it)—the fact that it is all spread out so unnaturally evenly in every direction across the sky—the Cosmologists’ term is “homogeneous and isotropic”.
Think of a traveler setting out from the shores of Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio, USA, intent on exploring our planet. She plans to travel just about 70 miles each day and explore the world in great detail, eventually getting a look at almost the entire surface of the Earth. Now, imagine that every day she encounters a new city, and it’s just like Cleveland—almost exactly the same size and shape and sitting beside another body of water very much like Lake Erie. All the topography she passes through is low rolling hills never more than about 210 feet high. No matter what direction she chooses to travel the next day, she finds another Cleveland and another Lake Erie, over and over, for her entire round-the-world trip!
That’s the strange picture that we see in the sky in every direction: galaxies arranged in clusters and filaments with voids between them that look the same everywhere in space. In the background, we see the little perturbations—little bumps—in the Cosmic Microwave Radiation that started these structures. Mysteriously, these bumps vary by no more than one part in 100,000 across the entire sky, with a ‘power spectrum’ (meaning the arrangement of sizes of the perturbations compared to their distance scales) that proves that the universe is nearly perfectly flat. Why such teeny-tiny bumps and none bigger all across the vast expanse of the Cosmos? We’ll be all over that question in a second.
There’s much more subtle detail to the CMB and to the biggest structures in the universe—those clusters and filaments of Galaxies—that science is picking apart, trying to figure out what it means. Our Song of Everything is following this research closely, and sleuthing out the clues that are not fitting the standard and accepted models—reading between the lines. Looking for the cracks in the floorboards to see what might be underneath.
Scientists naturally want to emphasize their successes—the amazing discoveries and advances of our understanding of this Origin Story—and so far, they remain pretty confident that the Standard Model—the Lambda CDM model—of our universe is the best coherent description—it fits a lot of the evidence extremely well, and it fits most of the evidence better than any other proposed model.
Most.
The Standard Cosmological Model is utterly silent about how Inflation works, about how the universe exited the epoch of Inflation and crossed that vast uncharted Cosmic Desert, and about what 95% of the universe is even made of!!!
That’s the most telling clue—the ordinary physical matter that you and I and our comfortable sofa are made of makes up only about 4.8% of the stuff of the Cosmos. The Lambda CDM model requires the rest of the stuff to be divided into two huge bins of entirely unknown stuff, which are appropriately called Dark Matter (making up 25.8% of the universe’s stuff) and Dark Energy (the remainder—a whopping 69.4%). NOBODY knows what those two biggest ingredients of the universe are made of or how they came to be. We only know about them because of what they seem to do to the ordinary physical matter. Even more mind-boggling is that only 5% of the ordinary physical matter (5% of the 4.8%, meaning just ¼ of one percent of all the stuff of the universe) is useful stuff like stars and planets and star-forming nebulae. The rest is just free-floating gas lost in deepest intergalactic space or matter trapped inside black holes.
Bottom line: the Lambda CDM Model has some huge cracks in its floorboards—rich fodder for further exploration. Here’s where our Song of Everything finds its niche: new perspectives on the things Science hasn’t figure out. We put Sherlock Holmes on the case, using abductive reasoning applied to the biggest big picture we can imagine, containing all the clues *and* all the missing elements and unknowns—seeing if there are patterns that make sense, piecing clues and unknowns together, sketching out step-by-step processes that fit the evidence, even if they’re not necessarily the only paths from there to here. It’s a journey that can be surprisingly instructive.
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| Abductive Reasoning, adapted from art by Pivot Design Group |
There are two really basic mysteries about the CMB, both related to that ‘all Cleveland all across the sky’ structure.
First, in order for galaxies to have that structure, and not to have failed to form or to have formed into clumps that were so dense that they all collapsed into black holes, the structure of space at the time of the CMB had to have no more and no less than that 1-part-in-100,000 unevenness. 1 part in 10,000 and the galaxies all collapse in on themselves. One part in 1,000,000 and they wouldn’t have had time to form yet. Why such an unnaturally narrow range of fluctuation size?
Second, extrapolating back to the time of Inflation, the allowable range of variability at that early time has to be completely implausibly tiny—almost infinitely perfectly flat and smooth—no quantum fluctuations allowed.
Well, our Song of Everything has already revealed the most plausible (we feel) explanation for that extreme smoothness at the time of Inflation: it’s what we’ve called the Vacuon—the extremely rare 1000-heads-in-a-row coin flip scenario making a rare appearance within the general chaos. The Vacuum got silent ‘long enough’ for our whole ‘Block Universe’ to emerge—all time and all space that our universe occupies. The key idea here is that the universe began as a single particle of basically no size—so no room for fluctuations.
After Inflation ended, matter and radiation showed up. Science has no idea how. These two forms of ‘stuff’ were battling it out in a hot dense plasma, and the fluctuations, originally quantum scale, became sound waves. When the fog cleared and radiation and matter got decoupled from each other, that was the moment that the CMB was formed. The sound waves froze in place, so to speak, and those are the 1-in-100,000 fluctuations we see—literally the ‘echoes’ of those sound waves.
But why and how could the waves be restricted to such an unnatural range of sizes. As we described in our all-Cleveland-everywhere analogy, the seventy-mile patches of identical terrain on the scale of Earth represent the dominant scale of the fluctuations, and a one-part-in-100,000 fluctuation compared to the radius of the Earth implies that all the terrain on Earth would be limited to hills no more than 210 feet high.
Okay … maybe the analogy is the clue! Our real Earth does have a very limited range of elevation—not every possible size. If our real Earth was all water, the size of the waves would be even smaller—the range of possible wave heights. What limits the fluctuation sizes on Earth’s oceans (and really also on land if you ignore erosion)? The answer is gravity. That pull of gravity is always working to damp down the biggest waves. The analogy suggests that somehow the CMB structure is limited by a (pretty weak) gravitational pull toward some sort of ‘center.’ In this case, because of the precepts of Relativity (called the Cosmological Principle), that center has to be relative to the observer. Problem is, that in the Standard accepted model, which is well-supported by data, there is no ‘center of gravity,’ relative or not, because the universe is flat, homogeneous, and isotropic.
There is another explanation besides gravity that could work. Another thing that damps down the size of fluctuations in a fluid is its viscosity. What if the stuff in the early universe was sort of gooey, like molasses? Observations and theory seem to agree that this isn’t the case. The early hot dense matter was apparently a near perfect fluid with little to no internal damping friction. Although alternative models of the early universe with viscosity have been explored, anything gooey enough to damp these sound waves seems to be entirely ruled out.
We’re always open to new ideas; but for now, these seem to be the only two, and so our Song of Everything is going to fall back on the ‘Sherlock Holmes rule’: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Gravity it is. And here’s how it might work. We go back to the ‘Block Universe’ that was created by the cooperative efforts of the YYon, the Qion, and the Vacuon. It is not infinite in size. It only has to be big enough, from the perspective of whatever is within it (our pink Easter Bunny), to have a meaningful internal ‘life’. In Song 23 we talked about how our universe seems to be comfortably shrink-wrapped in cellophane and packed in a gigantic shipping crate full of packing peanuts. The walls of the shipping crate are where the Cosmological Principle requiring homogeneity and isotropy break down. When Inflation’s intense gravitational repulsion ended and its Potential Energy began to break up into particles, they did have an effective center. Within our shrink-wrap, we sort-of see a consequence of that in the CMB, which seems to display a preferred reference frame. We are moving more than a million miles per hour relative to the frame in which there is no ‘Doppler shift’ in the CMB. That’s twice as fast as our solar system is rotating around the center of our galaxy. That says that the ‘rest frame’ of the CMB should be several million light years away—roughly the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy. But that just confirms all the galaxies in our local group are all part of the same ‘Cleveland-sized’ patch of sky and therefore all of us see the pull of our possible Cosmic Gravity as being basically in the same direction. The visualization is a bit tricky, but the Earth analogy helps. When you’re standing on Earth, the center of gravity always seems ‘down’ even though that is a different direction for different observers in different ‘Cleveland patches’ around the planet. Each galaxy cluster around the cosmos, including ones that are moving rapidly away from us in the general expansion would see the CMB reference frame as being pretty near to them. They wouldn’t see us as stationary at all relative to their perspective of CMB’s rest reference frame. They see us as roaring away from them as fast as we see them roaring away from us. The center of gravity can be there—a small deviation from homogeneity and isotropy that observations are suggesting does exist—which would be tugging at everything, and damping the fluctuations. It’s called the “Cosmic Dipole anomaly” (link: https://arxiv.org/html/2505.23526v1 ) and it is still ‘Breaking News’; but here at the Song of Everything, we’re always trying to connect the dots regarding things Science is still trying to figure out, and this is one apparent confirmation of the clues we’ve been looking at. We’re including a video from an independent for-profit organization who disingenuously call themselves NASA Space News despite having no affiliation with NASA at all. The video is well-grounded in the facts, so I have to overlook the reprehensible co-opting of the name of the government agency where I worked for 25 years.
On scales much bigger than our observable universe, therefore, the fluctuations could be bigger or smaller, because they ought to have any possible size, right? What rule would prescribe the size of the fluctuations to be ‘just right’ for galaxy formation and the structure we observe?
Our Song of Everything jumps in here and offers just such a rule—a form of ‘natural selection’ via the evolution of universes.
In the early Germ Universes, there were no galaxies—just the pure inflation field. Here in our Song of Everything, we’re carefully and patiently advancing toward the full story of what happened next and how it happened, which involves Germ Universes self-replicating—having babies. For now, we ask readers to just accept this idea without justification and look at its consequences. The overall size of the shipping crate—that is, the size of the entire Block Universe—that allows the very center (the cocoon all wrapped up in cellophane) to be flat and smooth and in our ‘just right’ goldilocks zone of 1 part in 100,000 is the result of selection processes in exactly the same way that humans and fleas and Great Blue Whales have a preferred size. Our Song of Everything’s Natural Selection argument is based on multiple lines of evidence, much of which we’ve already discussed on this blog in a post called ‘Universe Self-Replication Cosmology - Nine Pillars of an intriguing Metaparadigm’ (LINK), but here in this series of Comfortable Universe posts, we’re digging even deeper, including introducing an entirely unrecognized, entirely ordinary and boring process that may vastly increase a universe’s production of offspring:
Rocks.
Talk about a teaser! You’ll have to stay tuned for the big reveal. This is a patient story, and Song 25 has gone pretty long in the tooth. It’s time for a break. Stay tuned for the Songs to come.
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