Here’s the recipe to make a universe:
You start with nothing, and then you proceed to *take stuff away* …
You work your way inward, e.g., to smaller and smaller space and time slices, yet seeming to produce bigger and longer lasting constructions (as we perceive them from the inside).
There are a few tricks involved here (the magic, you might say, though there’s nothing supernatural involved). We’ll briefly introduce four of them before returning to that all-important ‘nothing’ that you start with.
First is a primary focus on point-of-view, or perspective. The internal perspective is literally the inverse of that perceived by an external observer. The innermost layer is the most important to the internal observer but is the least significant and least observable from the outside.
The second is to follow a causal path that incorporates sequential additions to the construction project. Viewed from the outside, the observer sees constantly branching worlds at each step; and there is no way to discern which ones ‘work,’ meaning which branch is ‘preferred’ by the internal system, i.e., which one creates the most internally useful improvement.
A third bit of apparent magic is to recognize that, in a successful construction project, there are new emergent structures (added complexity) that develop at certain crucial steps. Emerging with these new structures are more sophisticated perspectives, made available by the added complexity.
Fourth, from the inside, each added ‘layer’ of complexity offers more interaction choices, which expands the perceived time and space available, even though, from the outside, each new step seems to be more remote, tinier and more ephemeral than the last. From the outside, the first few causal steps along the path are just about all that can be studied. Yet, from the inside, the preceding causal steps appear as surrounding shells, and the outermost of them can fade from view, sometimes being literally censored. For a construction project that is succeeding, these outer layers function as protective shells to the emergent inner reality (the experience of the internal perspective).
Great. Back to the Nothing that you start with.
You’ve got to have the right kind of ‘nothing’ as the ground on which your construction project is set. We talked about it at length in Song 1. It’s no abstract, intolerant ‘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. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty deep dive, so feel free to skip over the next five paragraphs to get back to the natural language basics.
It was only 150 years ago that George Cantor first realized that there were different kinds of or degrees of infinity, i.e., greater or lesser than one another. It has taken mathematicians much longer to come to terms with the different kinds and degrees of nothing. They started ‘coming around’ in about 1907-1908 when the brilliant Dutch Mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer who, we argue here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters, succeeded and wholly superseded the equally brilliant David Hilbert, who was a generation his senior, when he developed the concept of Intuitionistic Logic.
 |
| L.E.J. Brouwer obit photo. Source: http://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbm/article-pdf/doi/10.1098/rsbm.1969.0002/907805/rsbm.1969.0002.pdf |
This way of thinking tells us, flat out, that the idea of ‘not being there’ (nothing) is not the same as ‘a constructable thing that is not there’ (a particular instance of nothing). Also called Constructivist Logic, this thinking directly led Kurt Gödel to his first incompleteness theorem, and later to the crucial application of the concept of Nilpotency to quantum field theory, where it is central to the process of Renormalization, which is, in turn, central to achieving the wildly successful Standard Model of Particle Physics.
These are deep logical and mathematical concepts, generally unfamiliar to the average person, but the Logic it espouses has a wonderfully simple true ring: “Instead of truth via absolute existence, it requires a constructive proof—meaning you must actually be able to construct or find the evidence for a statement to prove it.”
One of the most useful aspects of this approach to understanding the underlying math of physical reality is what’s called “Higher Order Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis,” (HOSIA) which only came into its own in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. *This is the framework that lies at the very core of our entire Song of Everything’s approach to the universe’s origin story.*
In a nutshell, this analysis says that there are many nothings that can be considered distinct. In previous songs, we talked before about the equation, shown in the image above, which is not a legitimate equation in traditional or mainstream formalist math: 0 = 1/∞ . In HOSIA it comes into its own. The zero (the nothing) is defined as a chosen, (ultimately fuzzy-edged in any real physical system) infinitesimal part of a given constructed (defined and proven) object, such that at a specified chosen power of that infinitesimal and for all larger powers, all derivatives are zero. Another term for this that I love is ‘Synthetic Differential Geometry.’ The important consequence is that there is no useful discontinuity between the nothing and the object; and the nature of that object can be any of a nearly unlimited variety. We’ll try to elaborate further for those interested in the deep nitty gritty. Stay tuned.
So ... let’s delve deeper into that strange concept of a nothing that includes lesser nothings in its set. 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 active consideration.
We 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). In Song 1, we used the tried-and-true methodology of what are called Feynman Vacuum Bubble Diagrams. The one featureless dot can be pictured as such a mathematical object representing, for example, a pair of virtual particles. We’ll try to keep in mind that such a bubble is a thing with no measurable 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 as expressed on its outside (it naturally ‘presents’ as a piece of nothing within a cloud of nothing, so to speak) ... but ...
... we can work with that!
In order to build our universe, we (‘~magically~’) assume ourselves to take up residence within this nothing-dot and proceed to *work inward.*
Remember. There are no rules that prevent us from performing such an outrageous act of prestidigitation. We’re starting with nothing. If there was a rule, then it wouldn’t be nothing.
To work inward, we imagine various further subsets that we can define within our chosen dot.
Simple example: Nothing can be divided into a Vacuum Bubble made up of a virtual electron and its anti-particle, a virtual positron. Science has established this as a useful way of looking at the world on the tiniest scales; and many different observations have proven the theory to be correct. They’re called virtual particles because they cannot be measured or observed.
Scything through some philosophical weeds.
The careful thinker might read the previous paragraph and scoff: the virtual particles do not emerge from nothing; they emerge from the electron quantum field.
Here’s how our Song of Everything breaks this down to demonstrate that it indeed emerges from nothing.
First, we presume that any field that has zero value everywhere (no excitations) cannot possibly be distinguished from nothing, or from the absence of such a field. This is the kind of nothing without restrictions on attributes that our construction project story is based on (as opposed to the sterile Empty Set version of nothing.)
Second, we recognize that the presence of virtual particles means some sort of minimum excitation, which, in our universe, is required by well-established notions—a non-zero Planck's Constant (defining what is effectively a smallest grain of our observed reality, and the closely-related Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. These are universal phenomena in our universe, presumed to be the same everywhere, so that if they had nothing to act on, they cannot be said to be distinguishable from nothing either.
Planck’s constant is the fundamental defining parameter in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Technically, Planck’s constant defines the minimum possible ‘action’ (defined as momentum times distance, or mass times velocity times distance) that an object or entity in today’s universe can have. It is a constant that we, here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters, will be arguing has to have been tweaked and adjusted through the evolution of our universe, because, like everything else, it has to emerge from our antecedent nothing gracefully. It, or its antecedent or underlying attributes, have to display Asymptotic Freedom—meaning it relaxes to zero (to nothing) at the smallest scales. (This is a key example of using the discipline of Higher Order Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, discussed in the five inset paragraphs above, to describe how our universe got started.)
So ... the electron field, or more correctly its Wave Function, with zero excitations gets its excitations by interacting with *something* else from the library of nothings held in the Big-V Vacuum—something that behaves like an agitator creating quantum excitations the way that our Qion wave function does to excite the YYon Wave Function (see Song 23 for the discussion of these proto-entities that might have got our universe started). Maybe it’s the same thing. Or maybe the Qion is one of a class of entities that we’re calling ‘Throb.’ Either way, the amplitude of these entities has a potential range from zero (most common) to who-knows-how-big (really rare) which is randomly manifest (like a symmetry breaking) when it interacts with a wave function of the YYon form—in this simple example the Electron Wave Function. The amplitude that got chosen for our universe is what we observe as the fixed value of Planck’s constant.
We leave just one weed standing: The *LEFT HANDED* Electron!
So back to the (maybe not so simple as it seemed) example: For our construction project, we start with this virtual particle pair (the electron and its anti-particle the positron) that can’t be said to truly exist, and we choose a subset of this nothing. What we choose is only the electron, and only the one with left-handed chirality to its spin, (this strange trick happens to be what our universe chose, and we’ll talk more about that later), and we *reject* or exclude the positron and the right-handed electron (we find clever ways to wall them off, set them aside, or throw them into the back of the closet). These are virtual entities, which are things that don’t exist, and there’s no rule preventing us from picking and choosing among them to be included in our construction project.
From that outrageous real example, we return to the general case
The parent nothing has this illimitable sea of such virtual dots (even the concept of counting doesn’t apply), which represent all possible potential ‘internal workspaces’ for attributes and characteristics and all possible rules for interactions among these attributes, yet none of it is actualized—it’s only potential, only possibility until some internally defined construction project self-selects. The individual dots that are elements within the parent set are various limited collections of the potential attributes and rules that could yield a useful construction, but not all of them.
A nothing with potential attributes that can only be expressed internally and have no external source, indeed no external manifestation of any kind whatsoever?
That's what we’re being asked to wrap our brains around. Literally. That’s where we live!
It works (and is philosophically and logically consistent) if you recognize that the full set of attributes have no limitations at all. It’s just an endless pile of pure chaotic garbage, out of which the good and patient scavenger (whose simplest manifestation is Unguided Trial and Error—although Creator Gods certainly can’t be categorically ruled out) can pick and choose parts that can be made to work together.
Sigh ... it is just so tough—indeed impossible—to adequately speak of this boundary or threshold or gateway between what-isn’t-but-could-be, and what is. But now we’ve taken yet another shot at trying to speak about it anyhow.
Okay. Time to decorate our home.
As said, we’re going to take up residence in 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 Wave Function that can manifest space, and another that will actuate time.
Bingo! Right?
Here we have something with reference points that we can sink our teeth into, 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!!!!!
More weeding quickly needed: removing the bias of Human Thought, and ...
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 of perspective can be extended to become essentially universal to ALL “objects” in any *physical* universe (meaning a universe that allows excitations of its intrinsic [quantum] wave functions—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.
... converging on a basic Universal Wave Function.
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 wave functions. And not everyone would agree that making such a distinction is helpful at all.
Wave Functions interacting with other Wave Functions 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’! What has been called the ‘Universal Wave Function’ is a whole lot more than just our piddling little universe.
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 325º for 25 minutes.
This is no joke.
This is the astounding, outrageous, paradoxical pathway that leads to a coherent “existence” without requiring *any* preconditions.
*... deep breath ...*
Your staff here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters has rambled on here for nearly 2000 words—two or three pages (maybe a lot more, depending on your screen) to get to this very basic point.
We’ve talked about it before, too—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.
* * *
Now, at last, the Creation Story unfolds before your eyes:
Our Song of Everything’s specific version of the story chooses to start with a simple list of materials that produce what physicists call ‘Inflation’—the earliest event or entity that we have observable clues about.
Here’s a more complete blueprint for our particular Outrageous “impossible” construction project:
First, pick a few ingredients from the “Nothing” (what we’ve been calling the Big-V Vacuum or the Uncaused Continuum), 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, Easy and Hard, and Charm and Strange. |
Second, start “re-heating”—a ‘phase-change’ or end to Inflation that creates a disorganized ‘junk pile’ of even more building materials. Physicists have dubbed 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 (emergent) 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 useful physical 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, etc., 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.)
That ‘Instanton’ 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 whole observable universe. Then this Instanton thing would be the size of just one single cell in my body!
How such a monstrous concentration of energy 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, with each brick representing a small, reasonable energy contribution. The overall tower of energy developed gradually and patiently through a long genealogy—a family tree of universes.
Looking back from our present-day vantage point—making the calculation of what the early universe must have been like, it appears to have such 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.
What we see in our observable universe are the traces of our own fetal development, which can be significantly different from the evolutionary steps that got us here. There’s an interesting perspective to consider here: What if “RENORMALIZATION” is more than a mathematical trick to get rid of infinities in quantum field theory on the very short time and space scales, but is how our observable Universe actually solved some of its construction problems as it developed?
In today’s universe, the appearance of always unstable high-energy short wavelength states might be an illusion. From the POV of our universe’s fetal development, the applicable fields could have been the equivalent of dormant genes that did not activate until the energy got low enough to exhibit their observable “dressed” behavior (the way they appear in today’s universe). If the mathematically unmanageable raw, or “naked” states were dormant, that could mean that Effective Field Theories are FULLY SUFFICIENT and actually the most accurate descriptions of our world, even in theory!
That’s a radical new idea—exactly the kind of idea that we here at Comfortable Universe HQ get most excited about, because it suggests we can relax. We know more than we thought we did!
On the smaller scales, then (in the UV, as physicists call it, there simply is no ‘There There.’ *** The admonishment to “don’t sweat the small stuff” can be true even for physics! ***
Renormalization isn't the right word then. It’s “Proto-normalization,” Really the activation – the “shaking out” – as further cooling rendered all the exotic particles from the top of the Skyscraper that we see in our particle colliders basically irrelevant to today’s world. We reiterate this for emphasis in the next step of our outrageous “impossible” construction project:
The fourth step then, and perhaps the most outrageous of all, is this: We emerge from the Great Cosmic Desert when the particles that make up today’s universe appear via a wildly improbable process that’s called the “Electroweak Phase Transition.” It produced a ‘Left-handed universe’ (WTF?) with absurd naked particles and forces that have the exact opposite of Asymptotic Freedom—they seem to have more and more energy the closer you study them (requiring the aforementioned developmental Pre/Renormalization to correctly deal with 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 fourth step in the construction project: Somewhere along the way through the Great Cosmic Desert, particular Wave Functions connected with, and acquired a 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, specialized 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 constructs all of its important physical 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, standing by, 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! And she certainly deserves the break.
Paraphrase of Chapter 16 of the Tao-Te Ching:
“Let your mind settle into silence.
All that has come to be returns to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness—the steadfast way of nature.”
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 … we now go back and revisit those first impossible statements at the beginning:
Can you really start from Nothing and build something inward by taking stuff away?
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,” and the “Uncaused Continuum;” 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 a formless, unbounded, unfathomable, lawless blur.
What it does have is an unlimited supply of what we’re calling virtual dots, (potential Vacuum Bubbles). These are the 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 physically exist but they sort-of ‘point to’ realistic ways that physical 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 the other dots, and so useful things are bound to hook up with each other and organize themselves.
They are still just dots, but by their internal organization, they are more sophisticated than the garbage dots, because they’ve cooperated with other dots to construct something useful as experienced from their own internal viewpoint … 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 limited ranges and/or coupling strengths between them.
Sophisticated dots have sorted and organized themselves such that the garbage dots don’t matter much anymore, 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 over-arching 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 their realm from the general population of garbage dots and other less useful dots (effectively stowing them on the back shelves in the closet).
The result 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 a grand encasement made of a 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 the outrageous madness.
How lucky we are!
-----------------
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 in the upper version, which represents the projected 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. Therefore, in the second graph, we’ve offered an alternative view that escapes this problem but replaces it with more than one possible solution. We posit that there are many possible paths that describe our sojourn through precursor and small-scale laws of physics. These seem very unlikely to be unique solutions and are also well-hidden from the probing eyes of science because many of the ‘tracks’ have been 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 sophisticated dot that 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 ridiculously 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 observed universe by proposing a version of the theory of General Relativity that includes quantum processes and settles toward Asymptotic Freedom at the smallest size scales. There are candidates for such a theory, and we’ve discussed aspects of them at length in Song 19.
The widening depicted along the bottom edge of the ‘Triangle’ is actually very conservative. No stable particle heavier than the proton exists (labeled ‘p’ along the Compton Limit line on the graph). Surprisingly, the Compton Limit does not have its own Wikipedia page. It is a CENSORSHIP LIMIT below which particles no longer make sense. Because every particle is described by a wavelength in quantum mechanics (the equivalent of the wavelength of a ray of light that has the same energy as the whole particle), if you try to ‘look’ at a particle more closely than this wavelength, your process of looking (the energy your observation device needs in order to look that closely) causes the particle to start blurring into a cloud of virtual particle pairs.
It seems very likely that the ‘Construction Zone’ that we’ve 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’ on the Compton Limit line 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 (PBHs, 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 when the ENTIRE UNIVERSE was in a Goldilocks zone where water was liquid—long before the Standard Model's accepted isotropic, homogeneous 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 next, in Songs 28 and 29!
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!
No comments:
Post a Comment