The hard-working staff at Comfortable Universe headquarters has been developing a story, called our Song of Everything that starts with an origin story of how our Universe came to be. We’ve rambled some, but basically it has taken 25 Songs to develop the origin story to this point: a picture that our universe started with a very simple Germ Universe with just a few ingredients that emerged from the primordial Vacuum.
Here we summarize the technical details of our specific example. It’s technical, using physics jargon, and yet it is still just a generalized sketch. The story starts with a one-dimensional quantum dipole harmonic oscillator field (excitations of which are colorless proto-gluons or unified proto-quark-gluon amalgams that we’ve dubbed YinYangons or YYons for short, and would be their own anti-particles). This ‘particle/field’ brings ‘proto-space’ or the potentiality for space to the party. In our present-day observed universe, typical Quantum Fields can be viewed as harmonic oscillators, like little springs attached to every point in space, but the YYon field has more heavy lifting to do. It needs to articulate (be able to actualize) the very idea of space itself. Its virtual ‘structure’ carries the potential for two points in a potential one-dimensional space as well as the spring—a full one-particle universe, so to speak, and yet it is only a potential—not fully physically existing any more than any quantum field exists without an observation.
The action (literally) gets started when we introduce a “Squeezing” proto-time entity that we’re calling a Qion after the Chinese term “Qi,” meaning Vital Energy. The Qion emerges from the Vacuum and, perchance, interacts with the YYon, sending it into excitations. The Qion is a proto-de-Sitter-space-like gravitational field excitation (it is NOT a cosmological-constant-style vacuum energy but a proto-quantum-gravitation field—the first-emerging essentials of General Relativity). It has an anti-particle that is proto-Anti-de-Sitter-like that does not participate in this first interaction. It would naturally gravitationally collapse back into nothing—but watch for later in this post—a later step in our universe’s evolution may have taken advantage of this anti-Qion to initiate the first matter—Dark Matter!)
The “Squeezer” Qion would have had to have enough amplitude (energy) to cross the threshold to initiate what we recognize as Eternal Cosmic Inflation. (Note, however, that this is “proto-physics,” involving just the two fields mentioned, with far simpler precursor laws and different ‘universal constants’ and coupling constants than we have today.)
Even then, that high-energy excitation of the YYon would have only created a tiny fleeting Potential Energy fluctuation (a tiny little “Block Universe” with just a tiny bubble of space-time that wouldn’t be good for much) because of the incessant interference from Vacuum noise. What allowed our big, functional core of nearly flat, homogeneous, and isotropic time and space to establish (along with the required highly non-linear and necessarily approximate and fuzzy shell/edge/boundary—defining that ineffable transition zone between the non-existence of the Big-V Vacuum and a functional internal reference frame for the nascent Germ Universe) was another major statistical outlier—a highly anomalous ‘quiet zone’ within the primordial Vacuum. We call that third ingredient the Vacuon, which evokes the Chinese term “Yuan,” meaning “Origin.”
That’s only a sketch—a story—and probably one of an unlimited class of possibilities. We’ve chosen these ingredients because they fit the clues that we are able to observe within our reference frame and because they seem to be able to seamlessly continue the story through the many steps ahead that would lead to our universe. To wit:
The next step in our story involves the ‘magic’ of self-replication. Using the same established ingredients, the early Universe (our Germ Universe or Mama Easter Bunny) was able to give birth to babies. The ingredients were already built in. The Germ Universe consisted of these two fields only (YYon and Qion), and they had already ‘proven’ they could make a universe (obviously), so the self-replication process would have been pretty much like ‘falling off a log’. The Vacuon had done its job. There was ‘room to play’ here in this new Germ Universe. So, with the occasional strong-enough excitations of the two fields, the Mama would quickly be surrounded by babies.
Of course, in order to start the journey from the simple Germ Universe to the complex real world we observe, the replication process needs to allow mutations. We can identify at least three basic forms that these would take. The first involves simple quantum uncertainty. A parent universe consists of an all-pervasive set of fields representing all of its various components. (We are sure of 17 of them in our observed universe today but posit that there were just two in the original Germ Universe. For future reference, we are also positing that there are probably actually something like 200 fields that have affects in today’s universe.) These universe-wide fields and their interactions fluctuate at each point in space within the parent universe, and so the place where the birth of a Baby Universe is triggered has specific excitation energy-momentum values, not necessarily identical to those that initiated the parent.
The second, more fundamental type of mutations will be caused by fluctuations that lead to small changes of the underlying laws and constants, which can be viewed as the coefficients (strengths) of individual non-linear terms (e.g., the Fourier transform) in the governing equations. In the early two-field Germ Universe, there were only two velocities (the speed at which inflation expanded the bubble of space-time, or the effectively useful flat part of it, as perceived from the internal reference frame of the universe, and the speed of propagation of the energy-momentum excitations, which becomes the speed of light when photons arrived as a later mutation) and so only their relative values had meaning. Matter, and particles in general, would only appear later in the evolutionary journey—a result of mutations of the third kind.
This third kind of mutation introduces new localized fields to the parent universe at locations where babies are generated. These new fields become incorporated into the baby, and therefore become universal in its reference frame. The Big-V Vacuum is always there, lurking, insistently churning, making available its inexhaustible supply of potential ingredients, most of which would be useless or destructive. It is the constant ‘battering’ by the Big-V Vacuum ‘noise’ that is the source of the new fields.
Because of its obvious importance, we take the time, here, to digress and discuss one early addition to the original two Germ Univese fields: Matter. It probably was among the early additions, and based on the preponderance of Dark Matter in our Universe, we argue that Dark Matter is likely to have been the first kind of matter to appear.
We will offer a very loose and crude sketch describing one way that Dark Matter may have ‘materialized,’ if you’ll pardon the pun. We’ve already hinted at it. (It’s pretty technical physics talk and yet only a broad-brush discussion thereof.) The “Balloon” side of the Qion field takes a localized form equivalent to a spacetime with negative vacuum energy, though it is not actually vacuum energy, but a field (and an intrinsically unstable one). However, to the extent that it has properties similar to Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space (the shape of space with negative vacuum energy), perhaps it participates in the well-known correspondence to Conformal Field Theory (CFT) in one less dimension. CFT would apply in conjunction with a physical ‘renormalization’ representing the emergence of mass from massless AdS excitations.
We’re presuming that this anti-Qion exists in one space dimension and one time dimension, which would result in a Conformal Quantum Mechanics with only one dimension (time) and would result in a point object emerging and manifesting gravity.
There is a whole lot of hand-waving here! The AdS2/CFT1 correspondence is very poorly understood, and certainly hasn’t been studied in the context of simple particle physics of a proto-universe. Almost every aspect of such a study is open to exploration and almost none has been explored. As we’ve suggested earlier, there is not likely to be a single unique falsifiable pathway (model) that represents that process. But the key take-away is this: a point object (zero space dimensions) manifesting gravity, probably incapable of interacting with anything else because with no space dimension CFT1 is not associated with a field, sounds a like a seriously good candidate for Dark Matter. It’s at least a direction to look if you’re not operating under the constraints of today’s laws of physics but on the assumption that the universe got its start in much simpler functional configurations and then evolved toward the complexity we see.
Okay … in general, this third and most significant form of mutation during universe self-replication brings in new fields from the Big-V Vacuum’s ‘library’. We know that we have three large space dimensions, so the two additional ones would be introduced as needed, and we know we have at least 17 quantum fields in today’s universe—one for each of the fundamental particles. We know that the theory is incomplete and so there are probably more. If Inflation and Dark Matter are Qion particle and antiparticle acting on the one-space-dimension YYon, we have two more fields right there—deeper underlying fundamental fields that get us through the Great Cosmic Desert.
We will do a little more speculating on the order that things appeared after we emerged from the Desert, based on their energy levels, with the higher energy level things coming first as the universe expanded and cooled and slow-rolled out of what we call ‘Inflation’. But we’ll save that for later. The main point, here, is that we argue that the new universe-defining fields and attributes appeared one at a time in ‘selection events’ that proved beneficial as universes continued to self-replicate and were subjected to mutations, most of which would be useless or destructive, yet may have resulted in a seriously meandering path from ‘there to here’.
Stepping back and perusing the picture we’re presenting, it is a new, rarely discussed ‘metaparadigm’ in which universes reproduce and mutate following some form of Darwinian Natural Selection. This has been discussed at length in two older posts on this blog: The Firestorm in the Universe post and the USeR Cosmology post. Here, as a reality check, we’ll just present a brief Q&A discussion:
Can universes really have babies? (Our known laws of physics seem to allow it and definitely do not prohibit it. In fact, there are multiple possible ways; but there’s certainly no proof that it happens. Our problem is that the proof is effectively censored from us. Somewhat like the interior of a black hole, the new universe disappears as it is formed—it is unobservable. We’re in a strongly constrained perspective within our universe, and the baby universes would develop their own, entirely separate internal perspectives. Imagine if biologists were trapped inside a single organism, say a human body, and unable to observe any other. What a daunting task it would be for them to figure out the story of biological evolution!)
How does this baby creation work? (We’ve identified at least nine different possible ways. This is the subject of those two older posts on this blog, links provided above. In the discussion below, we’ll be highlighting the two most promising ones—the ones our Song of Everything is “putting its money on,” so to speak.)
Is there sex involved? (Not necessarily, particularly with the early Germ Universes, but it is not ruled out. There could be. One far-out speculation is that universes have ways to interact with each other in the hyper-realm that we call FLAT WORLD (a version of the Multiverse). We introduced Flat World back in Song 21, and hope to elaborate on the ideas further in future Songs. Known examples of such potential interactions include wormholes and colliding multiverse bubbles. A version of the wormhole scenario can be considered analogous to sex. One can imagine that colliding universes with different governing laws might create a ‘hybrid zone’ where the two spacetimes are interacting. This could be chaotic and perhaps usually disastrously destructive, but perhaps—at least in this simple and generic hand-waving thought experiment—occasional hybrids could find ways to ‘shake out’ into a new and useful equilibrium.)
Can the babies inherit the parent universe’s laws of physics? (Yes. The formation of the baby universe within the parent universe, by any of the relevant means described in the USeR Cosmology blog post, begins with ‘stuff’ that is infused with the quantum fields and other properties of the parent universe.)
What is the equivalent of DNA that carries the inheritance information? (Those quantum fields that pervade every bit of the spacetime of the parent universe—two in our model of the Germ Universe, and at least seventeen in our observed universe.)
Is there a mechanism that allows mutation during the reproductive process? (Three ways this can happen were discussed earlier. The intrinsic uncertainty of quantum entities from a localized patch of space in the parent universe as they are transferred to the baby seems to make it almost unavoidable.)
Is Darwinian-style Natural Selection possible with self-replicating universes? (The simplest possibility is that it is just a numbers game. The types of universes that have the most babies statistically dominate the population. But interactions between universes, and perhaps even with an ‘environment’—simpler and/or very distantly related universes within the FLAT WORLD realm—would provide a venue where universes compete with each other on some sort of fitness landscape or landscapes.)
What are these ‘fitness landscapes?’ If Natural Selection is driving universe evolution, what are the competitive or selection pressures that would guide it? (Here is where we stop climbing this ladder of speculation and simply assume we can ‘take a leap’ and not crash. Where we land is on FLAT WORLD, and beyond the clues that modern physics has accumulated that various versions of multiverses seem inevitable, our FLAT WORLD construction is entirely fictional. Our Song of Everything boldly presumes an analogy to life, and argues that interaction between universes is involved. Such interactions are embedded within theoretical extensions of our known laws of physics, and, in general, are definitely not ruled out or prohibited; and yet the mechanisms are so far beyond observational verification that the discussion becomes pure fantasy. We stick by the analogy to life, and entirely rely on that to move forward. The competitive environments and selection pressures in Darwinian Natural Selection seem nearly unlimited, and new and subtle ones are constantly being discovered, including topics that are called ‘Post-Darwinian’ such as Epigenetics and Niche Construction. Universe evolution may employ a different mix of the available mechanisms than biology does. Who knows?)
Could biological life itself play a role in the selection processes that drive universe evolution? (It is conceivable, and if it does, then the analog between universes and biological entities suddenly becomes a robust correspondence—far more concrete and closer to a practical reality. We anchor our biggest-picture thought experiments on this idea, and argue that it is certainly possible, almost guaranteed not to be impossible; and therefore, in a vast quantum-governed multiverse landscape, it will have happened. Whether it can be said to have happened in the case of our particular universe or its putative ancestry would be rank speculation. We will be proposing some physical processes by which this can happen within our observable universe or something close to it.
***(Teaser: localized sub-light-cone-sized bubbles—where inflation ended early, perhaps just a few such spots in our entire observable universe (therefore easy to miss)—leading to star formation and heavy element nucleosynthesis far earlier than standard cosmology suggests—during the era when the CMB temperature was between 0º and 100ºC, making the *Entire Universe* a “Goldilocks” habitable realm—redshift greater than 100, universe barely ten to 15 million years old!) Look for the elaboration of those ideas in future Songs; but since we don’t yet have any evidence for life anywhere but here on Earth, and haven’t observed stars older than several hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the proposed processes cannot rely on much, if any, actual supporting evidence.)***
Could life, therefore, have guided the evolutionary selection of universes toward ones that are especially favorable for life’s existence? (This is the ultimate ‘Fine Tuning’ argument, and it continues to be widely discussed in the literature. Our Comfortable Universe approach simply suggests that there is a natural course of events that could, indeed, lead to this universe of ours being favorable to life, and that this seems the least objectionable, most natural way to explain the attributes of the universe that we observe. This is the bottom line of why Universes having babies is such a powerful idea.)
Okay. The preceding discussion has blazed one pathway through a thought space that is full of HUGE questions that are hugely speculative.
Physicists rarely, if ever, go beyond that first rung of the ladder (Can universes have babies?) and would argue that there is no evidence at all that our one and only observable universe can give birth to babies. Certainly, there’s no evidence that our universe came from a mother universe out there ‘In Back of Beyond’ on the other side of the epoch of Inflation.
However, there are physicists who have used theories of Inflation to explore the possibility of creating a Universe in a test tube. The earliest one may have been from Alan Guth and collaborators—a paper from 1990. That paper is not an open-source document, but Alan Guth also discusses it in his 1997 book “The Inflationary Universe.” This is one of just 13 books that Nobel Laureate Physicist Steven Weinberg included in his all-time list of best Science books for the General Reader.
It deserves that place. Guth’s writing is amazingly meticulous, careful to remain true to the science, not glossing over things, and yet he manages to explain things clearly without using equations. The discussion of the Universe in a test tube work is found in Chapter 16 (pages 253 to 269). For our Song of Everything, the key takeaway from Guth’s discussion is that if or when your universe-creating laboratory is able to reproduce, or get close to energy levels where all the forces and fields appear to converge (which is called the Planck Energy, about 10**19 GeV corresponding to a density of 10**93 grams per cc) then the probability of creating a baby universe is essentially 1—it will happen. By comparison, our entire observable universe today contains only about 10**54 grams.
Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen extend this work in a 2004 paper ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0410270 ), taking it from a Test Tube in the lab of a high-tech advanced civilization to a spontaneous event in normal space in the distant future of our universe. Many of the details of Carroll’s approach go in a different direction from the ‘Universe from nothing’ studies that the paper refers to. It is those papers that more closely relate to our Song of Everything approach. But the 2004 paper lays much of the groundwork for our approach before going into its specific model. The key take-away from that paper for the purposes of the discussion here is that any universe that continues expanding (does not collapse back in on itself) will eventually produce localized fluctuations that initiate Inflation and a baby universe. It happens naturally—no ultra-advanced laboratory full of hyper-intelligent aliens required.
(There is a peer-reviewed companion paper, Carroll and Chen 2005 – PDF at Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0505037 – The published paper is not open source: Carroll, S.M., Chen, J. “Does inflation provide natural initial conditions for the universe?” Gen Relativ Gravit 37, 1671–1674 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-005-0148-2. This is the Essay article with no equations—pretty easy to read.)
But both these ideas—the brute force high-tech approach and the patient late-universe approach— were developed assuming that today’s laws of physics have to apply. Well … how can they not? We sit here immersed in those laws of physics; and we are trying to make a baby. What else do we have to work with?
Well, it’s not the ingredients you work with—it’s the way you use them! The Song of Everything offers the argument that there is a subset of conditions embedded within the laws of our universe that the early Germ Universes took advantage of, and that can generate babies with far less energy in a step-by-step equivalent to fetal development.
This is analogous to saying that the sperm and the egg that initiate a baby human being do not have to already have brains and livers and fingernails fully formed and functioning when the baby is conceived.
What we perceive as a ridiculously high density at the origin point of our universe has little to do, we argue, with the density needed by the first simple Germ Universes in order to produce babies. The difference is the difference between the ‘fetal development’ of our known, highly complex universe, and the ‘evolutionary development’ involving many selection steps between the Germ Universe and ours. This is one of the major examples of how Universe Self-Replication can ease the tension associated with unexplained mysteries of our early universe, and we take that to be a significant bit of evidence in support of the hypothesis.
In the fetal development of a complex organism such as we human beings, we begin with a stem cell, and it divides into two.
If our universe is capable of having babies, then it would have scrupulously maintained that capability to produce an analog to a stem cell. Perhaps it still only takes those two original fields, the YYon and the Qion. This claim remains nothing but wild speculation until those simple stem-cell laws of physics are identified. But maybe there is hope. Those laws ought to be simple, and a ‘stem cell’ produced by our universe would have to be simple and compact relative to its general chaos and complexity. However, there’s a significant caveat: There is no guarantee that the appropriate conditions that these ‘stem-cell-laws’ describe lie within the censorship guard-rails of the observable portion of our universe.
Our example story for the early Germ Universe’s baby-making process began with the YYon interacting with the Qion, which produced a spacetime with the fields of those two entities pervading it, and NO OTHER fields. Those two fields then interacted locally within the spacetime of the parent, and a baby was born in the same manner that the original universe was created out of the Big-V Vacuum, except in this case, the requisite fields were already established.
In the case of a universe with added complexity, more fields have been added during the evolutionary steps that describe the ‘family tree’ of our present universe. Each of those steps could have appeared through processes with relatively reasonable *COMFORTABLE* energy densities, but from our ‘look-back’ perspective within the mature universe, all the steps *seem* to have happened at once, and their energies all get added together into one utterly impossibly large *apparent* energy. This is a heuristic argument, of course, not scientifically rigorous, but it is consistent with all the discoveries of particles in the Standard Model of Particle Physics, wherein particle colliders with greater and greater energies are employed, and they produce unstable particles that quickly decay into multiple products with lower energies. The structure of the universe does not require stable high-energy particles. The closest we come is the ubiquitous ‘quark-gluon plasma’ that sits confined in the heart of every proton and neutron.
Now, at long last, we come to the teaser presented at the end of Song 25.
ROCKS!
Our highly complex human bodies have evolved a very elaborate way to reproduce. Given a blank slate on which to design a reproduction mechanism for a complex biological organism such as ours, which contains between 200 and 400 different kinds of mature cells, one could imagine thousands of different possible ways reproduction could be achieved. How a highly complex universe would do this is likely to have just as many potential options, so the option we choose is no more than an exercise. We look to one simple example for our design.
As just noted, humans and other complex multi-celled organisms have many different mature cell types that developed out of the initial stem cell. Each type of cell might be thought of as an analogy to one fundamental particle within our Standard Model of Particle Physics, or, more specifically, one quantum field. As mentioned, the total number of such known fields is seventeen. Taking the analogy to complex life forms built from individual cells seriously, we speculate that the number of fields that actually come into play to create a complex universe could be in the hundreds. Whatever the number, each field is required to be represented in the “DNA” of the “stem cell” that gives rise to the baby universe.
Unless we’re missing something (which is possible), all the necessary fields extant in our universe come into play to describe the simple lowly rock.
Imagine a chunk of cold solid matter that got ejected from a planetary system. Imagine that it had enough velocity to even escape the gravitational well of its parent galaxy and its local galaxy cluster. It is just about impossible to argue against this idea that uncountable numbers of such rocks have taken to wandering the vast expanding void of space, and will continue to do so as the universe ages.
With it rides a small package of excitations of every field that constructed the parent universe. Maybe that’s all that’s needed. In the inconceivable expanse of time during which our expanding universe goes through its heat death, the lowly rock just wanders on and on (we’re presuming that protons do not decay but are completely stable).
This simple example, taking its cues from the ‘spirit’ of the Carroll and Chen 2004 paper, declares that, perhaps, if no natural reproductive process happens sooner (i.e., more easily, and it probably can if just YYons and Qions are involved in the presence of the other fields), then we can fall back on excitations nucleated by the rock as it eventually finds itself alone in its own light cone—the last and only entity left in its universe—sort of a default ‘stem cell’ of last resort.
And on it goes—a stable, coherently bound bit of matter at near zero temperature that might be practically eternal in such a setting. (Assumptions about diffusion of individual atoms vs. the rock’s gravitational attraction, and about quantum tunnelling of particles within the rock both need to include a stabilization of the mass balance between incoming and outgoing particles—there might be a ‘Ship of Theseus’ discussion to be had here!)
And so, in the vastness of that sort of time landscape, our simple rock might act over and over as a catalyst and nucleation site, because its localized quantum field structure is highly distorted relative to the immensity of the surrounding empty void of space. Perhaps a significant sized quantum of its mass is required to generate a complex baby universe (i.e., the YYons and Qions might not be sufficient). That seems to be the case in the Universe-in-a-Test-Tube model, for example. In such a case, one could argue that our lowly isolated wandering rocks might be the most essential commodity produced by our universe—its very reason for existence!
How many such rocks exist today, having been ejected into intergalactic space by violent collisions and/or gravitational sling-shotting from its parent star system? A few simple assumptions seem to almost certainly lead to a number far exceeding the number of stars in today’s observable universe.
How many of these rocks give birth to Baby Universes as they patiently wander into their own Hubble Volumes (their own light cones with nothing else inside) and drift on and on through a time scale measured by a count of years where the digits in the number itself just grows and grows without any known limit?
Thoughts to ponder.
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