You start with nothing, and then you proceed to *take stuff away* …
You’ve got to have the right kind of ‘nothing’ to do that, of course. It’s no abstract ‘Empty Set’ from the world of mathematics. It has fewer rules than that! Clearly, we’re already taking stuff away—we’re on the right track! This form of ‘Nothing’ does not insist on preventing things that don’t exist from sharing its empty realm—every possible kind of nothing is included in its set. That’s a very important philosophical nuance.
Let’s delve even deeper into that strange concept. How can things that don’t exist but aren’t the entirety of the ‘parent nothing’ help us? Be patient. The important idea is that these things are less than their parent nothing. If we focus just on such things, we’ve taken other things away—removed them from consideration.
Let’s now home in on just one such thing that doesn’t exist. For our human mind, which is so dependent on space and time to conceptualize things, we’ll ‘picture’ it as a featureless dot (among an inexhaustible sea of such dots within the parent nothing’s realm). Yet we’ll try to keep in mind that it’s a thing with no size. That doesn’t mean that it’s infinitesimal, because that defines a size—it just doesn’t have the attribute of size at all.
Now … to build our universe, we take that dot and *work inward.*
To work inward, we imagine various further subsets that we can define within our chosen dot. These are also things that don’t exist but that there’s no rule preventing them from being included in the recipe, just as with the parent nothing.
We’re going to take up residence in this one chosen dot, so we get to decorate it. We get to say which of the subsets of that dot are going to be ‘keepers’ and which are going to be banished, ignored, quarantined, or ‘put in the back of the closet’. Among the keepers we choose are a field that can manifest space, and another that will actuate time.
Bingo! Right?
Here we have something with reference points that we can work with and talk about, though it’s all only inside that dot we’ve chosen. But inside there … Voila! … Because there are no rules to prevent it, we’ve got ourselves a foundation on which we can build stuff.
Out of nothing? Outrageous!! Ridiculous!!! Radically Twisted!!!! Completely off the Wall, and Downright Certifiably Insane!!!!!
Great. We’re insane, so we need this next step … we carefully, surgically remove all evidence of the ‘cognitive We’ from that ‘picture’. Which dot got chosen and which initial ingredients worked to create space and time are just look-back descriptions we’re borrowing from our particular ‘cognitive We’ perspective in this particular universe. They’re not meaningful in any general sense, and therefore not really useful to the construction project.
That’s because our Song of Everything is, emphatically, NOT an Anthropic argument (Anthropic meaning that we’re only seeing this because a ‘cognizant we’ exists to observe it. See the Wikipedia page on the “Anthropic Principle”).
NAE, lads and lassies! Dinnae fall for ‘at wee trap. This Song 27 is far more subtle and Outrageous than that.
The ‘cognitive we,’ which provides the philosopher’s putative ‘Observer Selection Effect’ is nothing special—it is ill-defined at best. The concept can be extended to become essentially universal to ALL “objects” in any *physical* universe (meaning a universe that allows excitations of its intrinsic [quantum] fields—things that can be interpreted as discrete entities). Such an ‘observer’ needs no cognition or awareness of its experience.
For example, the simple electron qualifies.
It can be any object of any sort that crosses an internally defined (self-defined) threshold such that it can be said (by its interactions with other objects) to have an existence—meaning that it can be described/defined as an entity that can interact meaningfully or usefully with other sub-dots within its one-dot realm in order to build some sort of internally describable structure.
As said, this “observer selection” is effectively *universal.* If it has any usefulness as a philosophical concept, perhaps it is in discussing ‘decoherence’—distinguishing objects from their universal fields. And not everyone would agree that making such a distinction is helpful at all.
Fields interacting with other fields is a process that is happening all over the ‘parent nothing’ realm. It is definitely NOT random (because ‘random’ is a rule for behavior). Rather it ‘results in’ or ‘exhibits as’ an inexhaustible supply of complex connected puzzle pieces (dots with sub-dots with sub-sub-dots, etc.) with self-defined rules linking the sub-dots. Each connection (interaction) is an “observer selection” that qualifies as a bona-fide construction project all by itself.
Outrageous? Yer damn tootin’!
The key point that I’m harping on over and over here is that whatever structure or meaning is produced by the participants can only be seen and defined from the inside—from the participants’ perspective.
In our particular case, there seem to have been a tremendous number of participants (sub-dots) brought into the project, which worked to construct and then reinforce a safe bubble for us, surrounded by a protective buffer, or no-mans-land—a gauntlet of ramparts and bulkheads, alligator-infested moats and razor-wire fences and crenellated battlements that keep out stuff that we don’t need and stuff that would be destructive …
… until what’s left deep down inside of this outrageous self-selected subset of the *nothing of zero size* is our nice relaxed Comfortable Universe.
Easy as pie. Throw it in the oven and bake at 325ยบ for 25 minutes.
This is no joke. This is the astounding, outrageous, paradoxical pathway that leads to a coherent “existence” without requiring any preconditions.
We’ve talked about it over and over in various ways—how we got ‘something from nothing’. And we’re going to talk about it again before this Song 27 is over, because it is just so damn important.
Our Song of Everything’s specific version of the recipe chooses to start with a simple ingredient list that produces what physicists call ‘Inflation’—the earliest event or entity that we have observable clues about.
Here’s a more complete playbook for our particular Outrageous “impossible” construction project:
First, pick a few ingredients from the “Nothing” (what we’ve been calling the Big-V Vacuum), ignore all others, and create endlessly self-replicating space-time, which is given the name of Inflation by the Cosmology community. We’ve depicted that as our Cosmic Easter Bunny believing that it can “run really fast” and escape the Big-V Vacuum’s destructive mallet in the Cosmic Whac-a-Mole Game (see Songs 17, 22, and 23 for all those details).
 |
| As our Easter Bunny desperately runs at lung-busting pace to elude the Cosmic crush of the Big-V Vacuum's mallet, it finds that it is acquiring useful allies from the extensive library within old Big-V. Not everything is trying to destroy it, though the vast majority of things *are*. The trick is to construct a buffer. Here we depict three possible such allies who get recruited, allies that will eventually coalesce into the Strong Nuclear Force and the particles in its domain. Truth and Beauty, Horizon and Navel, and Charm and Strange. |
Second, start “re-heating”—a ‘phase-change’ or end to Inflation that creates a ‘junk pile’ of disorganized building materials. Physicists call this event “re-heating” because the Standard Model of Cosmology, when projected back in time, implies that there was something extremely hot before Inflation came along. Our Song of Everything says that Inflation itself was the first event, so when the ‘heating’ task gets started, it is virginal, carrying no baggage. I think that’s important, because it is a simplification where there is no justification to add any complications.
Third, start picking up baggage. Sort through the junk pile of building materials and select stuff that builds useful structures. The “re-heating” starts without most of the laws and constants of physics that we’re currently locked into, and without *any* particles as we know them; but as we cross the vast uncharted landscape of the Great Cosmic Desert (see the graph below), eventually what started as pure clean gravity—raw potential energy—gets ‘contaminated.’ At least that’s our Song of Everything’s version of the story.
Constant bombarding by the Chaos of the Big-V Vacuum produces the ‘junk pile’ or, to use another analogy, a bunch of ‘dust-bunnies’ (made of particles and strands of dust and lint) and eventually this stuff settles and coalesces into the first structures. This may not be anything we recognize, but (as we’ve discussed before), because of the Asymptotic Freedom that the Strong Nuclear Force exhibits, the first structures are probably ancestral versions of that—say, for example, colorless proto-quarks and gluons. (We presume that many of the strong force-related attributes, including the three families, color charge, isospin, came in later steps).
How this happens—the steps along the path—nobody knows. As we’ve discussed at length in Song 25, the Great Cosmic Desert covers a colossal range of scales—the equivalent of starting with a single atom and ending up with a Great Blue Whale or a Towering Skyscraper.
We emerge from the Cosmic Desert observing an expanding universe that our current best theory (The Standard Model of Cosmology, also called the Lambda CDM Model) projects backward to an ‘Instanton’ with Planck Energy and Planck Length size. (See the graphs below.)
Now, here is something that is truly outrageous—in the uncomplimentary sense—something that is just plain beyond the pale of common sense.
Consider: The Planck Energy is enough energy to propel me and the sub-compact car I’m driving from here (the Blue Ridge of Central Virginia) to Cleveland—a full tank of gas! Yet this amount of energy is concentrated into an object no bigger than the Planck Length, which is twenty *orders of magnitude* smaller than a single proton! Take a proton and expand it to the size of the observable universe. Then this Instanton thing is supposed to be the size of just one single cell in my body!).
How such a monstrous thing could exist seems to defy credibility. And, indeed, scientists readily acknowledge that this projection of the Standard Model can’t possibly be trusted.
Our Song of Everything takes the position that no fundamental object with anywhere near that much energy ever existed. And we offer a concrete alternative. We propose that such prodigious apparent energy is like the Skyscraper emerging from the Great Cosmic Desert. In its actualization, it was built brick-by-brick through many lost evolutionary steps, each with much smaller energy involved, each of which happened gradually and patiently through a long genealogy—a family tree of universes.
Homing in on that analogy to the Skyscraper: the early universe, when viewed from our present-day vantage point appears as a tall Skyscraper of impossibly high energies because all the details of how it was built have been lost. Our crude particle accelerators smash into the top of the Skyscraper and break stuff off, and the pieces appear to free-fall all the way back down to the ‘ground,’ because the patiently evolving laws of physics that built the tower, brick by brick, through generation upon generation of ancestor universes, are utterly lost—out of sight—only present in that “gauntlet of ramparts and bulkheads, alligator-infested moats and razor-wire fences and crenellated battlements” that these ancestor universes have built for us.
Fourth, we emerge from the Great Cosmic Desert when the particles that make up today’s universe appear via a wildly outrageous process that’s called the “Electroweak Phase Transition.” It produced a ‘Left-handed universe’ (WTF?) with outrageous naked particles that seem to have more and more energy the closer you study them (requiring yet more mathematical trickery called Renormalization to correctly describe these particles when they’re properly and modestly “dressed” for a life within our Comfortable observable realm.)
Here’s a bit of the flavor of this bizarre construction project: Somewhere along the way through the Great Cosmic Desert, particular fields connected with, and acquired the property called ‘Spin,’ which is just a different, more complicated way than simple velocity for a thing to interact with spacetime. Another property also got acquired, which we know as Electromagnetism.
Significantly, Electromagnetism is the only physical thing that operates at all ranges across spacetime (other than, perhaps gravity—if that is not merely the ‘warp and weft’ of spacetime itself—i.e., the essence and end-product of Inflation).
Working with these two oddly unrelated attributes, in order to build structures that have solidity like tables and chairs and comfy sofas, a bizarre tool had to be plucked from the Big-V toolbox that was effectively a left-handed ‘wrench’ (called a W boson) that only operates on those particles that have left-handed chirality to their spin. The right-handed ones are just ignored!
Who ordered that?
This looks, for all the world, like a cheap gimmick—hardly something that feels fundamental or basic. And yet this is how our universe constructed all of its important structures, from atoms and molecules to stars and planets and Easter Bunnies and nice comfy sofas.
There’s a fun PBS Space-Time video that imparts some of the sense of oddness about these laws of physics, which depend on properties called isospin and hypercharge that we haven’t even mentioned here in our Song of Everything. It’s a little ‘deep’ but if you just sit back and enjoy the ride, it’s a fun immersion into the weird world of Quantum Field Theory.
Physicists have a pretty firm handle on the peculiar and esoteric mathematical gymnastics that govern the Electroweak Phase Transition (the theoretical work didn’t even start until I was in High School in the 1960’s, got a big boost when the W boson was first observed in 1983 after I had started my career at NASA, and wasn’t wrapped up until the Higgs Boson was finally confirmed after I had already retired from NASA in 2012).
With that underpinning, science can pretty well explain everything that seems to be useful to our everyday lives (which, as we’ve pointed out before, is actually pretty insignificant compared to the stuff that is not understood that is lurking out there. It’s a mere 5% of all the stuff the universe is actually made of. Dark matter and dark energy remain totally unexplained), so we won’t cover this in any detail. It’s expertly covered elsewhere.
Here, our Easter Bunny has recruited the help she needs from that master conjurer called Inflation, from the proto-matter guru that came from (re)heating (the apparent hot Big Bang as seen in the background), and from the Higgs and W/Z boson construction workers, ready to get to work. Our exhausted Easter Bunny, having run her heart out to escape the Big-V’s Whac-a-mole mallet, can finally sit back on her sofa and relax for a bit.
The parts of our Song of Everything’s creation story that are agreed upon—that are ‘text-book’ material—are perhaps best summarized by the Wikipedia Page titled “Chronology of the Universe”, which we’ve discussed before.
By contrast, our Comfortable Universe blog posts specialize in extending and expanding the boundaries of known science into unexplored territory. We leave the known and accepted stuff to the vast available published material and boldly venture into the beyond.
Please stay tuned.
* * *
So … Okay … as promised … back to those first impossible statements at the beginning:
Can you really start from Nothing and build something downward and inward?
Well, that really isn’t the key question. The key question is what’s going to stop you?
In order to fully flesh out that paradoxical picture of “taking stuff away from nothing and building inward from that”, we once again go back to the very beginning—the Big-V Vacuum. The wise old sages who wrote the Judeo-Christian Bible weighed in on this. They gave the Big-V another name, which appears in the second verse of the book of Genesis: the “formless Void.”
I’ve lost count of how many different attempts I’ve made to describe this ‘Essential Nothing’ even though I understand that it is intrinsically forever indescribable.
I’ve tried calling it the “quicksand at the foundation of reality”, and the “The Great Empty Everything;” but the best name for it is the oldest—it is the “Tao that cannot be spoken.”
Now … as repetitive as this might seem, we’re going to struggle through that quicksand yet again, on the idea that the more ways one speaks about ‘That which cannot be spoken,’ the better will be our approximation.
Although there are no adequate ways of explaining the inexplicable, every way of approaching it adds value. By exploring as many ways as possible, one comes closer to the ‘core essence’ of what’s ‘hidden behind the veil’—forever just beyond reach, yet, by its manifestations, intimately and centrally underlaying the nature of Everything that can be spoken—Everything for which a Song can be sung.
After all (by our carefully, patiently, sometimes tediously developed argument over these past 26 Songs), this thing that cannot be spoken is at the very core of our origin—it is the very most foundational and important thing to speak about.
This time I’ll start by trying to envision a thing that has no time or space. It’s tough, even for starters. But then you have to add the global idea that this thing has no other reference frame either. It obeys no rules of any kind (except, beautifully paradoxically, the “rule that there are no rules”)—it’s just formless, unbounded, unfathomable, lawless chaos.
What it does have is an unlimited supply of what we’re calling virtual dots, or elements to its set—an illimitable ‘sea’ of them, if you can ‘picture’ a sea that has no time or space. A good way of thinking of these dots is that they’re like ‘ideas.’ They don’t really exist but they sort-of ‘point to’ ways that things could exist.
Ideas! Ahhhhhhh - a light at the end of the tunnel???!
The best ideas are ideas that could be used to make something useful. Most of the dots in this ‘sea’ are just garbage; but since there is no time or space, all the dots touch all other dots, and so useful things are bound to hook up with each other and organize themselves.
These are still just dots, but they are more sophisticated than the garbage dots, because they’ve cooperated with other dots to construct something useful … like, say, … no less than our whole effing universe!
This is our thought space for the origin of Everything.
What is the usefulness of a ‘sophisticated’ dot lost in an illimitable sea of garbage?
It’s all a matter of perspective.
It is only useful to itself. The value and meaning are entirely relative, defined only within its individual internal perspective.
In that timeless, spaceless ‘sea’, remember, this sophisticated dot is always interacting with all the other dots. Each dot can manifest arbitrary rules and attributes that define the usefulness of other dots to its construction project, and can acquire more rules and functions by means of interactions with these other dots, and can, for example, define boundaries and/or coupling strengths between them.
Sophisticated dots have sorted and organized themselves such that the garbage dots don’t matter much any more, or are ‘kept in the closet.’ These have pieced together a functional ‘internal life’ defined by the interactions with the selected dots that *are* useful to them. This is the fleshing out of the idea that you start with ‘Nothing’ and ‘take stuff away’ (or put some of it in the closet) in order to build our meaningful reality.
Dots that employ (or acquire) the reference frame we call spacetime can internally refer to this ‘piecing together’ as a sequence of events. But that’s only for its internal reference. Each dot remains just a dot—a ‘block’ with no ‘external’ characteristics at all.
And that is critically important philosophical groundwork. There is no external perspective—there is no ‘God’s Eye’ point of view.
Because of the complete lack of restrictions from without, the really sophisticated dots have constructed a whole realm of sub-dots of their own, entirely internally, with rules that can increasingly (but never absolutely) insulate the realm from the general population of garbage dots and other less useful dots (effectively stowing them on the back shelves in the closet).
So, finally, here is the outrageous construction project of which Song 27 sings.
Out there beyond the reference frame of our particular sophisticated dot with its internal ‘sub-dots’, there could be an over-arching hierarchy of dots—dots that encompass ours and other dots such that ours could just be a ‘sub-dot’ to it, etc.
There is no way of identifying or defining a ‘top level’ of dots or of knowing how many layers down from said ‘top’ our universe resides.
Trying to make such a presumption (i.e., by defining a top layer) would imply an abstract absolute. How could such a top layer come into being, and how does one know that it is, in fact at the top?
Such an absolute cannot have any practical meaning, truth or function. Our Song of Everything adamantly insists that no absolutes have any useful relevance to our collectively defined existence.
And so, we’ve come full circle in this latest attempt to explain the intrinsically unexplainable.
* * *
At the end of the day, we settle for this:
There’s a dot in the midst of this madness, and that dot is our universe. Less complex dots in layers above ours can represent precursor universes—ancestor universes—and are reflected in what we perceive as the early development stages of our particular observable universe.
All this stuff at the fringes and beyond represent the bubble-wrap, the packing peanuts, and the shipping crate in which we sit comfortably insulated from the vast, vast majority of all that outrageous madness.
How lucky we are!
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Back in Song 25, we presented two versions of a graph from a paper in the peer-reviewed scientific literature (please go there for the citation), which does a great job of giving an overview to the entire development and evolution of our universe. It’s called the Triangle of Everything. Here are the two versions of the graph:
The left vertex of the triangle shown in the upper version, which represents the origin of the universe as described by the Standard Model of Cosmology, is almost certainly wrong, because it comes to a point at a singularity—a point where physical law and mathematical description break down. In the second graph, we’ve offered an alternative view that escapes this problem but replaces it with more than one possible solutions that describe pathways through precursor and small-scale laws of physics that are very unlikely to be unique solutions and are also well-hidden from the probing eyes of science because many of the ‘tracks’ are erased by subsequent activity.
Note also, more fundamentally, that this graph does not have any natural edges—it could be extended *without limit* both to right and left and up and down off the top and bottom. One could zoom out until the part that is shown appears to be merely an infinitesimal dot. It just happens to be the dot we’re in. What prevents equally useful dots from being anywhere else on the scale? Nothing!
Further: This graph just depicts a space and energy scale. There could be many other scales added, in order to comprehensively describe the realm in which we find ourselves.
These graphs are outrageously busy, and yet everything mentioned in them, in the top graph especially, can be easily searched on the internet. Most of the named items have their own Wikipedia page.
In the bottom graph, we’ve taken the liberty of widening the pathway to our universe by proposing a version of the theory of General Relativity that includes quantum processes and settle toward Asymptotic Freedom at the smallest size scales. There are candidates for such a theory, and we’ve discussed aspects of them at length before (in Song 19).
The widening depicted along the bottom edge of the ‘Triangle’ is actually very conservative. No stable particle heavier than the proton and neutron exist (labeled ‘p’ and ‘n’ along the Compton Limit line on the graph). It seems very likely that the ‘Construction Zone’ labeled ‘Preheating’ and ‘Building the Mass Gap’ includes all the space to the left of, and curving downward from, those two particles (i.e., a gently curved line extending to the left of ‘p’ and ‘n’ and curving downward through the heart of the ‘dark matter’ ellipse toward the lower left corner of the graph.)
On the upper end of the widened zone, the speculative presence of primordial black holes (for which there is a very extensive Wikipedia page) would also point to a class of even more abundant ‘just a little less dense’ primordial star-forming pockets that we’ve depicted on the graph as ‘Goldilocks pockets of reheating,’ represented by yellow asterisks with red shadowing.
How could you possibly get one without the other?
These rarely discussed entities (which we presume are statistically rare within any given Hubble Radius—i.e., within any observable portion of a universe), which explains why observations haven't confirmed them, are one of several super-super intriguing hot-spot mechanisms that could have produced stars, heavy elements, and ultimately life at times long before the accepted isotropic, homogeneous Standard Model of Cosmology predicts that the first stars should have formed. This is a not-so-subtle teaser for an amazing and exciting story that’s upcoming in Song 28!
And that is as good a place as any to end Song 27—leaving the reader in suspense—wanting to read on, right? We hope so. Stay tuned!
