The Delusion of a Well-Ordered, Self-Consistent Universe

We live in a world that is, objectively, vastly different from what we think it is.  Here is an example of one of our most common biases.  It's called Pareidolia—the tendency to find meaning where there is none.   Top photo taken by the author on Easter Island, 21 October 2018.  Bottom photo is from NASA, taken by the Viking 1 Orbiter, 25 July 1976.

The human mind is a marvelous thing. Thirty-seven trillion individual single-celled beings have gathered into a massive, complex colony, and assigned the task of executive management and decision making to a hodgepodge of specialized cells in a cobbled-together organ protected inside a bony case.  It's just two percent of the total colony, yet it consumes a full 20% of the available energy supply.  This organ's operating system has been undergoing tuning and refinement for hundreds of millions of years.  It works spectacularly well to gather inputs (observations) and create models regarding what these inputs mean.  Over time, the production of these models got more and more efficient—astoundingly successful at filtering the input data to produce survival strategies—and the resultant species proliferated across the planet.

The key word in the paragraph above is 'models'.

The human brain's operating system is an extremely sophisticated and efficient filter, designed to identify existential threats to the colony, and opportunities as well, with an excellent track record of success using a strategy that assures that very few true instances of threat and opportunity are missed (very few false negatives), but at the expense of a huge number of false positives.  Exhibit A is the image at the top.  If something doesn't 'make sense', the operating system does not just reject it.  It has been tuned to go to desperate, even ridiculous extremes to find any sort of match (to past experience) that it can.

We are hopelessly immersed in this operating system.  It is telling us, over and over, that the world works in a way that it can model (via mental pictures and/or narratives), at least well enough to reliably function.  Repeated successes inevitably prop up the illusion that everything has some order and self-consistency that careful evaluation and repetitive experience can take advantage of.  Even the random and unpredictable extremes can be factored into the model and reliably managed (think insurance policies). It's how we got where we are, dominating the ecosystem of this planet.

But when we move beyond survival and personal success within our community, and the community's success within the planet's ecosystems, the operating system loses its experiential edge and increasingly shows its weaknesses.  As the inputs become more abstract, the observations that can't be found to contribute to a useful model are much more likely to be simply rejected.  Such inputs are judged to be random noise until proven otherwise and must be filtered out to extract the useful signal.  Random noise is, of course, not well ordered and not self-consistent, and in almost every field of study that humans undertake from our own Genome to the make-up of the universe, that noise appears to be prodigious.

To wit, Exhibit B:

What the universe is made of according to the 'Standard Model of Cosmology':  Signal that we understand: 4.6%.  Noise (stuff we cannot explain): 95%.

A similar pie chart describing the Human Genome would show only 1-2% of our DNA as Protein Coding and conserved during reproduction (the actual Genes - the equivalent of the Atoms), 3-8% as functional "machinery" which is non-coding but is conserved during reproduction, and the rest gets biochemically transcribed, and yet contains no describable function beyond what is expected of the null hypothesis (the term science uses to say 'there is no known meaning or purpose applicable to any theory we currently have').

Science is all about using repeatable experiences to discover the order and structure of the presumed self-consistent universe.  Exhibit B shows how much success this approach has had.  Everything that is understood falls in that tiny light-blue wedge labeled 'Atoms'.  All the rest, the stuff called 'Dark' stuff, is understood to exist, but we haven't yet figured out what it actually is.  Even within that 4.6% that we understand (that we can make useful predictive models about), 93% of that is more random noise—free-floating gas in empty space.  Only 7% of it is consolidated into galaxies, stars, planets, pie charts, and you and me.  In our own solar system, the sun contains 99.86% of all the mass, while the Earth contains just 0.0000000003% of the solar system's mass.  Life, of course, is just a thin layer of 'slime' on and around the surface of our planet, and the human species makes up just 0.01% of the mass of living things.  Yet how much of our brain power is devoted to sorting out the complexities of living among our fellow humans?  How much of the machinery of scientific and technological model-building is devoted to things right here on this single planet?

We are making models of the stuff we know about; and it's patently obvious that they've been astoundingly successful.  As a key example, science has developed the 'Standard Model of Particle Physics' that explains how that 4.6% of the universe that is made up of Atoms and their constituents work and how they interact in simple, controlled situations.  That Standard Model has made extraordinarily accurate predictions, sometimes down to the tenth decimal place, that have proven to be correct, including predicting the existence of the Higgs Boson long before its 2012 'discovery'.  Yet I am now going to offer the Standard Model as my Exhibit C, in making my case for the power of Confirmation Bias and for our continuing delusion that the world is Self-Consistent.  At the heart of the formulation of the Standard Model, which is a lot of very difficult math, is a rather esoteric procedure given the name of Renormalization.  Renormalization has been key in unlocking the Standard Model's ability to make those highly accurate predictions.  But to do so, the 'raw math' had to be tweaked—adjusted to fit the observed properties of the particles it describes.  To reinforce that: The model becomes well-ordered and self-consistent only when the observed properties are forced into it manually.  Why the particles have those specific properties is not explained.  Furthermore, those properties only apply to our relatively quiescent corner of Space and Time where gravity can be effectively ignored (it's called 'Minkowski Space'), where the enormous seething activity found in the early universe has all but dissipated, and where the effects of the vacuum (the deep, enigmatic emptiness that our universe is apparently headed toward, and which seems to be related to that vast reservoir of Dark Energy) are also essentially neglected.  Bottom Line: Renormalization only works to reinforce what we experience 'locally'.  The big picture is left as a complete mystery.

Yet our real lives beyond the realm of science offer plenty of evidence that the universe is far from self-consistent, and seldom well-ordered.  A simple personal example will serve as Exhibit D:  My best friend, when I was in third grade, suddenly hauled off and sucker-punched me in the gut, as hard as he could.  He never explained it, never apologized, and yet we remained best friends.  The brain's sophisticated management system must leave science behind when there seems to be no model that applies.  How did my eight-year-old mind decide that my friend's overtly hostile act was not grounds for rejecting him as a friend?  It was a unique single event, beyond the realm of repeatable experience, and yet it required an immediate response.  Eye for an eye?  Should I punch him back?  Should I walk away?  As it happens, I did neither.  We were not verbally confronting each other or even having a significant conversation before the event, as I recall it, and what happened afterward seems to have been an effort to discount the event and restore normalcy.  Why?  In hindsight, I've learned that this friend was a serious troublemaker.  (One of his antics cost him his life at the tender age of twelve.)  But at that moment, the subtleties of body language seem to have held sway.  Those cues do not even reach the conscious portion of the operating system, yet they influence it profoundly.  Here we cross into the shady realm of 'instinct' and 'intuition' (hunches and gut feelings [literally]).  The desire for normalcy is one of our strong human biases, and it reveals a deep-seated emotional need for a well-ordered, self-consistent world, even when the evidence of experience points in a contrary direction.

Finally, it is astounding to realize that even in the domain of the purely abstract (mathematics and logic), there is no possibility of self-consistency.  One needs to go no further than the 'Liar Paradox' ("This sentence is false.") to see the problem.  The fact that such self-contradictory statements can exist in 'natural language' is a warning sign.  The discovery that they can be translated into pure math was the death sentence—they become the basis of the well-known Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

If you can't find solid ground here in the simple realm of numbers and reason, how in the world (literally) can you hope to find it anywhere else?  The Foundations of Mathematics (the link is to a Wikipedia article that I'm presenting as Exhibit E) has a long and storied history, but what was never taught to me in my entire science education and career is how the field went through a foundational crisis in the late 19th century that exposed such unresolvable paradoxes and eventually resulted in a 'Standard Model' for mathematics that doesn't pretend to be either complete, consistent, or decidable in all situations.  That Standard Model is called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF), and it limits itself to doing calculations within its specified 'Domain of Discourse'.  Its axioms are set up so as to avoid Russell's Paradox, a conundrum that notes that the "set of all sets that do not contain themselves" is a fundamental contradiction.  Gödel's incompleteness theorems proved that any sufficiently strong mathematical system (model) has to either be inconsistent or incomplete.  ZF is not immune from that.  It can't prove its own consistency.  It is a 'work-around' that declares that not all groups of things can be considered 'sets'.  Instead, there are things that are just excluded (not deemed 'well-founded') or that (in other models) get called 'proper classes'.  There is a very real parallel here to the idea of 'Renormalization' in physics.

One of the axioms in ZF that I find especially bizarre is the Axiom of Infinity, which declares that there is a 'Completed Infinity'—a bulk thing that is called 'countable'.  Now, I'm not about to refute the value of the ZF model, but neither am I alone in questioning this particular axiom.  I was just in 8th grade when I had an epiphany that I understood the nature of infinity, and it hasn't troubled me since.  And it definitely is not countable in any practical real-world sense.  One of the positions taken by some modern mathematicians is that the field is no longer necessarily relevant to or rooted in physical reality.  Hmmm.  I put myself in a different camp, which Exhibit E (the Wikipedia article linked to above) calls 'rough and ready realism'.  It quotes Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman:

"People say to me, 'Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?' No, I'm not ... If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it – that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers ... then that's the way it is. But either way there's Nature and she's going to come out the way She is. So therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn't predecide what it is we're looking for only to find out more about it."

And with that, I rest my case.  The world is awash in a sea of uncontrollable chaos.  We often go to extremes to protect ourselves from it, both physically, and psychologically.  But the reality is that "shit happens"; and most of it is not 'Renormalizable'.

There is no 'Standard Model'.

Please note that this is not a call to reject science.  Far from it.  Science has an important job to do.  Its process—its ability to endlessly self-correct—is our best hope for a better life.  The 'religion' associated with science is, unfortunately, just as dogmatic as any other religion.  The place of science is not to discover some underlying absolute order, like a nice clean 'Theory of Everything', but to continue to systematically sort through the intrinsic noise of reality to find more hidden 'gems' of useful, standardizable, stuff.  I am confident that future scientists will have access to even more clear understanding of the human brain's biases and limitations and will thus be well-positioned to work at that exciting frontier where the well-ordered, self-consistent realm meets the realm of what I call 'Big P' Paradox.  It has always been at that interface where the 'fantastic' (the fantasies that science calls Hypotheses) becomes the future 'normal' every-day experience.

Sketch Pad - The View from Outside the Box: Big breaking news in Cosmology

The "Creation of Reality" out of the Virtual Vacuum: a co-equal superposition of "nothing" and "something" spontaneously becomes "everything" thanks to what Physicists call Dark Energy. 

(Last update: 3 May 2025)

Inspired by the March 19, 2025, release of new results from DESI - the experiment that is studying millions of galaxies to understand how our universe evolved.  This outside-the-box analysis and commentary starts with an equation that Mathematicians will tell you isn't even right.  That's because it isn't math ... it's reality.

What if, at the time of the Big Bang, Dark Energy and Planck Energy had the same absolute value, and were the 'particle pair' that started it all?

That breakthrough idea comes from a thought experiment that follows from the cartoon above.  The resulting scientific hypothesis, which I call the Dilution Hypothesis, offers a seemingly compelling solution to three and possibly four of the most profound mysteries (unsolved problems) in physics.

First it presents a physical resolution to the 'worst prediction in all of physics' - the so-called Cosmological Constant Problem.

Second, it explains the 2022 Nobel Prize Winning observations proving that what Einstein called "Spooky action at a distance" is real - the essential non-locality of reality known as Bell's Theorem. 

Third, it resolves the 'Measurement Problem' in quantum physics, most famously described in the 'Schrödinger’s Cat' thought experiment in which it appears that an "observation" (the ill-defined action of making a measurement) is required to change the fuzzy probability of a quantum field state into a real physical state.

The last mystery that it addresses has been called the biggest problem with the currently accepted Standard Model of Particle Physics, and it's called the Hierarchy problem.  The discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 was the crowning jewel on the Standard Model.  Problem is that its mass is an unexplainably low number.  The Higgs' interaction with the Vacuum should give it ginormous mass.  The fact that it doesn't may be explained by the Dilution Hypothesis. 

* * *

The latest news from the world of cosmology may be the biggest news since 1998.  It certainly is for me—an avid follower of all the news about the very biggest picture of our reality.  I had a front row seat on that big news of 1998, while working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.  It was the discovery that our universe is expanding at a rate that is accelerating.  Some mysterious force or influence seemed to be ripping our universe apart faster and faster.  That unknown force was given the name of Dark Energy.

It's hard to believe that was 27 years ago already.  The research earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011, and the discoveries made back then have become mainstream science that almost everybody has heard by now, yet back then it was a totally unexpected shock result.  It led to the formulation of what has become known as the Standard Model of Cosmology. In a nutshell, the Standard Model's basic story is that all the stuff we know about and understand (stars, galaxies, planets, chairs, and Easter Bunnies and all the light and other forms of energy that make them tick) makes up less than 5% of the total stuff of the universe.  All the rest of it is pretty much a total mystery, divided into two bins.  26.5% is "Dark Matter"; and nobody knows what that actually is.  Despite massive searches, it hasn't been observed yet.  We only know (or suspect) that it is there because of its gravitational influence on the behavior and structure of galaxies, among other things.  Finally, the vast majority of the universe's material (about 68.6%) consists of that mysterious stuff called Dark Energy, which seems to be steadily, inexorably ripping the universe apart.

The standard model says that Dark Energy is a constant, unchanging in time and space.  The so-called Cosmological Constant was first proposed by Einstein himself back when he was developing the General Theory of Relativity well over a century ago.

Since 1998, work has been ongoing to understand Dark Energy and to quantify it more precisely.  Astrophysicists have developed some very clever ways to study the influence of Dark Energy and, in particular, the way it might have been influencing the universe at various times in the past.  That's where this week's big news comes in.  

Screen shot from a Lawrence Berkely Lab article published on the day of the announcement of the results of three years of DESI observations

The DESI experiment, which has been ongoing for about four years, released preliminary results a few years ago that brought to light the first suggestions that the Cosmological Constant may not actually be constant at all.  Dark Energy appeared to be weakening with time.  Last week's newly released analysis of much more data has strengthened this finding, and, although it doesn't reach the strict "5-sigma" threshold for a confirmed new discovery (which means that there is only a 0.00003% chance that it is not), it has opened up a 4.2-sigma gap between the Standard Model and some new model of Dark Energy that evolves over time—a model that would specifically say that Dark Energy is weakening as the universe expands.

Okay.  That's the gist of the news that has inspired this post.  Maybe Dark Energy was very much stronger in the early universe than it is today.  Maybe it even ties in (seamlessly?) with the rapid explosive growth of the universe right after the Big Bang that has been called 'Inflation'.  Maybe it is entangled with the Higgs Boson's Mass (gosh, maybe the Higgs Field and Dark Energy and Inflation are all closely related—perhaps unified in the early high-energy epochs of our universe). And maybe Dark Energy will all but disappear in the far distant future as our universe continues to expand and cool.

That representation of Dark Energy dwindling over time has always made more sense to me, and this post is here to discuss how and why.  It's an outside the box discussion, and I'm going to begin it at the farthest reaches of our comprehension of reality and work my way back in.

I'll start with nothing.  A blank piece of paper on a sketch pad.  Let the thought experiment begin.

That blank represents what we call 'the vacuum', and in it, I am now drawing a single dot.

The pencil I used to draw the dot is a special one—infinitely sharp—so that the dot itself has no dimensions.  It is an infinitesimal dot.

And here's where the cartoon at the top of this post comes in.  Our creator (or the unguided process that led to our universe's creation) began his work with that single dot expressed as an 'equation'

0 = 1/∞

As mentioned in the caption, Mathematicians will tell you that this is not a valid equation.  The valid way of expressing this relationship uses 'Limit' notation:  Zero is the limit of the quantity 1/n as n approaches infinity.  They're not wrong.  They're just suffering from a sort of self-inflicted 'myopia.' 

Also as mentioned in the caption, this expression is meant to be a depiction of reality, not of math.  The number zero represents nothing.  The lack of stuff and things.  The absence of every imaginable and unimaginable entity.  It is that blank sheet of paper on my sketch pad.

The number one represents 'something' or 'anything' in the sense that it is the opposite of nothing.  A presence of 'stuff' of any sort—the foil in the absurd question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" that philosophers have wasted their time discussing for millennia.

The thought bubble by our wise creator in the image up top attempts to depict the absurdity of that question by posing the expression as the answer:  The two-sided 'equation' demonstrates the co-existence of nothing and something in superposition.  And the glue that binds them is that most mysterious Paradox known as "infinity"—unrestricted 'bigness'—a 'numerical' or virtual entity that nicely straddles the gulf between the "necessary" (abstraction—an 'absolute') and the "contingent" (actualization—anything that can be realized).  Because it resides in the denominator of the expression as written, we're dealing with the inverse of bigness—unrestricted smallness—the infinitesimal.

How to understand the infinitesimal?  Let's explore the dot that I drew on the sketch pad.  In order to see it, you have to zoom in, right?  Let's start with a million-x zoom lens.  Zoom in a million times magnification, and my dot is still infinitesimal.  Another million times?  Still the same.  No matter how many times you repeat the zooming-in process, the dot does not get any bigger in your new view.  And it never will.

What's the difference, then, between a dot you can never see and pure nothing?  If you say 'No practical difference - they're equal - and your expression is obviously valid' then you're on board with my meaning.

Yet there is unquestionably a difference between something and nothing, right?  It is as obvious as the difference between black and white.

In the abstract, idealized (myopic) realm of Mathematics, that is right.  An infinitesimal point in a parameter space is completely different from the lack of specification of such a point and of a 'space' in which it resides. Clearly, "Nothing" seems conceptually simpler.  Its counterpart opens a Pandora's Box filled with all sorts of enigmatic questions and contains all sorts of messy stuff (e.g., how to define an 'axiomatic' all-inclusive, unrestricted parameter space to begin the enquiry).  That's the black-and-white thinking that leads to the absurd question "why did something show up at all, when Nothing seems the preferred state of reality?" In the real world there is no practical, physical difference between the two. Nothing and something cannot be cleanly separated.  The science that we call 'physics' (study of the physical) offers many different ways of expressing the ambiguity that results in trying to resolve smaller and smaller things or trying to remove things from a 'box' until nothing is left.  The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a good start.  It says that the more accurately you try to zoom in on the location of the dot (to box it in), the more it is likely to be buzzing in and out of that box (uncontrollably tunneling through the walls of the box).  Specifying an absolutely perfect location will take you to a blur of random motion that will put the actual dot at that location only once in ... forever.  It is effectively NOT 'there'.  Physics has come to recognize a tiny length scale, called the Planck Scale, below which nothing can be resolved - nothing that small or smaller can have any physical significance, not even in principle.

I've probably belabored this point more than I should.  Let me just step back to say that many people who practice science and math suffer from an existential angst when told that their black-and-white conception of reality just doesn't work.  Their classic response has been succinctly expressed as "Shut up and calculate."  In philosophical space the same issue is confronted when trying to bridge the gulf between Necessary and Contingent.  How can a thing be both?  I've offered a primer on that above—the key is that entity known as Infinity.  It's bigger than you can imagine, but also fully realizable if you embrace the intrinsic blur it includes at the limits of conceptualization.  I was lucky enough to have figured that out while sitting in my High School library during a 'Study Hall' period when I was in the eighth grade.  (That was in 1962, even before the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation was discovered!  It's astounding to realize how far the science of Cosmology has progressed in my lifetime.)  I'll never forget that moment.  I was imagining holding the end of a string in my hand—a string that did not have another end.  You just have to get over your angst, people.  Something and nothing happily co-exist in superposition, and we'll continue to explore further the idea that for a necessary thing to be actualized, it has to be observed by some kind of interaction/entanglement with the contingent physical world (an 'observation,' in the broadest sense of the word, is required).

Now the fun begins.  As I said at the start, this is a thought experiment where that blank piece of paper represents the vacuum – a 'place' where there is supposed to be nothing—a completely unrestricted 'lawless' nothing – and the dot represents ... well, let's go all the way and then backtrack.  That dot is the universe.

You see, there is no rule that prevents my infinitesimal dot from having attributes.  Fundamental particles like the electron are point particles—they have no dimension—and yet they have charge, spin, and mass.  If we allow string theory into the picture, then the electron may have more than three dimensions as its operational 'realm'.  (This may be important later in this discussion.)

The dot that I drew could have negative pressure.  That would set in motion an exponential gravitational repulsion, expressed only within its confines, which can readily give rise to the entirety of our universe and much, much more.  Maybe that's too much for the layperson to swallow in one felled swoop.  Carl Sagan might say 'let the dot be blue and step back and marvel at our insignificance amid the vastness' (of the whole of the sketch pad).

The "pale blue dot" - a famous photo of distant Earth taken by Voyager 1 from beyond the orbit of Neptune in 1990 as reprocessed for its 30th anniversary in 2020.  (Look for it in the middle of the streak of sunlight, which is an artifact of the camera lens.)

But maybe the dot is blue only from 9 to 10PM on Thursdays when Carl Sagan's show is live on your TV, and pink the rest of the time.  Whatever.  It could have as many attributes as needed to characterize it as indistinguishable from our ridiculously complicated universe.  Remember, it sits in a 'lawless' realm (the vacuum—the sketch pad) and so it is entirely free to acquire and experiment with (pick and choose, modify and refine) any sorts of laws that work for it.

And here's the thing.  That sketch pad doesn't have to have any of those attributes.  It only has to permit me to draw them in (to permit them to become manifest).  In our thought experiment, the sketch pad is the vacuum—a completely indifferent realm that isn't even arguably real; and calling it a source of 'possibility' is too vague and inadequate.  The vacuum is the closest there is to a 'Necessary' (starting point), but its 'being' is entirely Contingent on observation by some coherent (physical) entity that emerges within it.  Again, the Necessary and the Contingent must coexist.  Must.  The best term I've found to accurately characterize the philosophical and physical status of the vacuum is that it is Virtual—similar to a 'memory' but without need of a conscious mind, and without the element of time involved—"real but not actual, ideal but not abstract."  A Virtual object can be (and obviously is) the source of things that are 'actual' (allowing the emergence of existence itself).  This virtual-actual perspective can be credited to the French thinker Gilles Deleuze from the second half of the 20th century, and people who subscribe to his concepts are called Deleuzians.  (I'm not making this stuff up!)

Now the thought experiment is ready for the big reveal—the scientific hypothesis.  Our universe is a dot of no size on an independent vacuum substrate.  It has no size because the vacuum is devoid of time and space—those 'dimensions' are hypothesized to be attributes that were acquired (emerged and got selected) in the formation process out of which the universe originated.  Our way of interrogating the vacuum can only be via its interactions with our reference frame from within our universe, but from the outside-the-box, virtual 'perspective' of the vacuum, its interactions with the dot remain unchanged as our universe goes about its evolution.  When our universe was tiny, right at its inception (the Big Bang), the influence of the vacuum was concentrated, behaving more like the way we observe the influence of the vacuum on a closely examined electron that can suddenly interact with a virtual electron-positron pair and switch places with the virtual electron, making it suddenly the real electron, or the way quarks and gluons maintain the vast majority of the mass of protons and neutrons by a constant buzz of virtual motion—in other words the influence is HUGE.  It may be that at the earliest moments of 'creation', Dark Energy and Planck Energy were the same.  But as our universe expanded, the (aggregate) influence on whole-universe fields (on the universe as a 'particle') got diluted from our observational point of view.   Physicists have lamented the 'worst prediction in all of science' as the difference between the calculated vacuum energy (which is based on its influence on individual particles) and the 10-to-the-120th-power smaller value of the Cosmological Constant as it acts on our gargantuan present-day universe as a whole.  Maybe this thought experiment (the outside the box perspective) explains why.  Maybe it can even lead to a calculation of the true size of our universe—not the observable universe, but the whole ball-o-wax!

The hypothesized 'Dilution Effect' described in the thought experiment is meant to address the Cosmological Constant problem—that 'worst prediction in all of physics'.  It already has one very powerful observational line of support for it, and its perspective on the solution to the quantum physics 'Measurement Problem' and to the 'Hierarchy Problem' related to the Higgs Boson's mass offer further weight to the value of exploring it further.  

The support from existing known physics is that it perfectly explains the inherent non-locality of reality that Bell Tests have demonstrated.  Experiments proving the Bell Theorem won the Nobel Prize in 2022.  From the outside-the-box 'perspective' of the timeless, dimensionless, lawless (unrestricted - free of both attributes and restrictions) vacuum, all particles that emerged within that 'dot' on the sketch pad (anything from a given universe on down) are functionally in the same 'place'.  

The perspective on the 'Measurement Problem' starts by considering the process known as CSL—Continuous Spontaneous Localization.  The Measurement Problem has plagued physicists for a century.  Besides the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox, another famous example is the 'double slit experiment' in which a beam of electrons that are sent through a pair of slits produces an interference pattern on a detector screen behind the slits that can only be explained if the electrons are behaving like waves and not particles.  Careful experiments that have been performed with single electrons have confirmed that the electron actually appears to effectively pass through both slits at the same time—a superposition of states.  And yet the electron then produces just a single dot on the detector screen. CSL explains such phenomena as a spontaneous collapse of the wave function due to the electrons becoming entangled with the quantum field of the detector screen, or even of the scientist that analyzes it.  The greatest feature of objective-collapse theories such as CSL is that they produce experimentally testable predictions that can distinguish them from the predictions that simple quantum mechanics makes.  The supposed worst problem with CSL is that it does not conserve energy.  The generalization of the process requires all particles in the combined entangled system to acquire a slight 'buzz' or 'hum' of Brownian Motion—basically heating up the whole system with no known source of that heat.  It might just be that this 'worst problem' is the key that unlocks the new physics described by the 'dilution effect.'  What if the source of the heat is a reduction in Dark Energy?  Think of the collapse of the quantum superposition of states into a single classical observed state as a phase change that happens when the system gets big enough that the effects of the vacuum on it become sufficiently diluted.  In this view, the quantum field actually contains 'hidden' or virtual dark energy, and the fruitful line of research would be to reformulate quantum mechanics to include that 'potential energy'.  There's a 2017 Physical Review Letters scientific paper that discusses this idea (behind an institutional paywall).  See also two popular summary articles about this paper here and here.

Okay.  The hypothesized 'Dilution Effect' is absent (or minimum) for individual fundamental particles on the tiniest scales, it begins to show up when systems have enough mass to begin to be seen in our macro-scale experience of the world, and when acting on our universe as a whole it is reduced by 10-to-the-120th power from the calculated quantum zero-point energy of the vacuum to the observed value of 'Lambda'—the Cosmological Constant or its time-varying counterpart.  Similarly, perhaps an ancient physicist weighing the Higgs Boson back in the early universe might have found it to have much greater mass than it does now because the Higgs Field was more concentrated. (Are there any clever observational methods to actually test this?)

The 'Dilution Effect' has the correct sign and seems to have approximately the right magnitude in our present epoch.  Quantitatively it requires more detail fleshing out from these bones.  The DESI result shows that Dark Energy seems to be about 10% lower today than it was 4.5 billion years ago.  The present value of the Hubble Constant produces a 7% increase of the size (scale factor) of the universe in a billion years.   But theoretical physics contains a wealth of potential modifiers to the simple scaling to the size of the universe.  The set of Grand Unified Theories require two dozen or more Higgs Fields that are characterized by positive vacuum energy at zero field value and offset vacuum minima.  The unknown shapes of these curves could provide plateaus where high energy matter could reside in quasi-stability and contribute to a negative pressure inflation-like expansion.  The vacuum ought to have greater virtual effect on particles that operate in more space dimensions as offered by string theory.  In both of these high-energy 'far outside of observational experience' realms, there seem to be multiple solutions that share comparable validity; and any one specific (e.g. renormalized) solution could be characterized as the DNA of its resulting universe.  Further, the current working 'Cosmological Principle' that says that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic could be a local simplification.  Dark Energy (perhaps in conjunction with a selection of laws that fine-tune the speed of light—the rate of exchange of information) could have created this 'zone' for us as a sort of Cell Membrane to prevent regions with different laws from corrupting our space.   Here is where I want to confront the science community with an accusation of closed-mindedness and bias.  There does not have to be one unique path from the Big Bang to our current universe.  Multiple valid solutions are a good thing.  Is there only one unique solution (only one correct model) for creating a human being?  Or for generating the human species from a non-living chemical starting point?  What law declares that the universe we live in is in any way a unique solution to anything?

We do not even know if the original initiation of a universe from vacuum fluctuations is closely related to the characteristics of our universe (no more than the original single-celled "Last Universal Common Ancestor" of all life on Earth is closely related to me).  If there is any way that universes self-replicate, then ours is the offspring of the offspring ... of the offspring of any original.  If any precursor universes to ours harbored intelligence capable of and interested in simulating its origins, then our universe could be no more than an easily calculated 'toy universe'.  That would explain why it is so tantalizingly mathematically tractable, wouldn't it?  Interesting perspective: Could our universe be the virtual playground of the 'Gods'?  Maybe their real world is a dystopian mess, and our world is the idyllic place they come to escape their problems!  Post card from God:  "Looks like you're having a wonderful time.  Wish I was there."

But back to our own perspective:  Yes, this is a wonderful time to be alive.  Science is presenting us with some tantalizing new cosmological clues.  I see a vast array of avenues of inquiry and re-evaluation that can spring from the fertile soil of this new DESI result.  This is the stuff that burns hottest within me.  There is so much ground that is yet to be explored and so many keen young minds out there capable of expanding the boundaries of thought and understanding.  Let's get to it!

The Closer to Truth PBS Television Series - a Review and Commentary

I've just completed viewing all 290 episodes of this long-running philosophical discussion series.  It was a four-month undertaking - watching and absorbing nearly 130 hours of video.  Having invested all that time, I now feel a need to react by way of offering a review of sorts, pointing out "the good, the bad, and the ugly", and also by way of injecting some commentary on selected elements of the content.

I started here by presenting the slick one-minute introductory and promotional video at the top of this post.  Well done, but perhaps promising more than can be delivered.  After all, the goal is no less than attempting to explore, in depth, the biggest questions of reality.  Can't get much more ambitious than that.  These are questions that the world's greatest thinkers have been pondering for nigh onto three thousand years without great concurrence (perhaps without real progress).

It's a good quality effort.  The majority of the episodes, at least, are definitely worth the time.  It's a pretty level-headed attempt, and a true passion of the series' host, who is also its executive producer, Robert Lawrence Kuhn.  He summarized his 'mission' succinctly during the series' first season (2008).  It appears at the end of the 13th and last episode of the season, an exploration of the idea or reality of God titled "Does God Make Sense?", and it was the summary statement at the end (see minute 25:15).  Speaking about how the best arguments for and against the existence of God both contain "circularities, endless regressions, dead ends."  He goes on to say:

“Many people seem certain of their beliefs. I wish I were certain. (Switching to a sing-song voice:) I may continue lurching and lapsing in my beliefs. (Changing to a firm assertive voice:) But I will never cease wondering, striving, searching. (Passionate voice) My search is what this entire series is all about—an exploration of Cosmos, Consciousness, and God. (Finally trailing into a workmanlike tone for the tag line) For me, for now, passionate uncertainty … is Closer to Truth.”

The tone and emphasis of that last sentence was of special interest to me.  His passion is obvious and laudable.  But he is no real fan of uncertainty as an intrinsic part of physical reality (e.g. the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) or as inherent logical, philosophical, and even mathematical attributes of the realm of the abstract.

Quite the contrary. He was using the term in a very different sense as he crafted the summary of the episode such that the title would come out as the very last words spoken—something that he makes a point of finding a way to do for each and every episode.

The structure of most episodes is designed to highlight philosophical friction points--a sort of humanized version of uncertainty.  He loves to juxtapose these arguments - the more passionate the better.  That is what he means by that last sentence in the quote.  

I would hope to see him explore the far deeper philosophical concept of ‘big U’ uncertainty itself, the underlying fundamental physical superposition of contradicting descriptions of the world (like wave-particle duality), which I call 'big P Paradox'.  But no.  He always dismisses this intrinsic uncertainty - never delves into it.  His bias is one that most scientists and philosophers share, and that human curiosity craves almost like a drug.  He is still looking for the 'bedrock' underlying reality.  He uses that word frequently.  He seems blind to that alternative view of physical and abstract 'Truth' that insists that there is no such bedrock (implicitly, fundamentally, not even in principle).

So, the series sticks to the goal of pursuing ‘Truth’ through interviews and conversations with some of the best thinkers of the day.  He moves back and forth across the gulf on both sides of an issue, contrasting a diverse array of seemingly competent and coherent arguments on each side, and leaves it at that.  Think of a man standing on a bulkheaded shoreline before a raging chaotic sea, pondering its fury (that intractable gulf between the opposing positions), and yet never once appearing to consider actually jumping in to experience it - to seek to come to terms with it.

The strength of this series, and the reason I strongly recommend it to others, is the quality of the people he interviews. There are exceptions.  He countenances a few crackpots, but I won't name names.  The greatest weakness of the series comes out when Kuhn can’t help but inject his personal biases, which are most evident in the topics of Consciousness and God.  I note that quite a few of the episodes are 'funded in part by' the John Templeton Foundation, which has a distinctly spiritual, even religious emphasis, though also an exemplary organization for pursuing critical thinking and embracing the role of the scientific process.

I was drawn to the series many years ago because of the Cosmos content. From my physicalist perspective, the other two foci (Consciousness and God) seem far inferior, of far less universal importance. For me, 'Cosmos' as a topic is Universal (more-or-less by default, actually), whereas I construe Consciousness and God as human-focused particulars that lie deep inside the Universal theme and, even then, as cherry-picked Western-culture-oriented members of a much larger set of such particulars.

To be sure, there is a perspective in which a metaphysical 'Consciousness' and/or a Supreme Creator Being stand on an equal footing with the scientific investigation of the Cosmos.  One can argue, and Kuhn frequently does, that if either of these two concepts/entities is fundamental, then all else subsumes to them.  Assuming one can define it adequately, consciousness could be viewed as fundamental using the old Descartes argument: "The only thing that is demonstrably real to me is my own thought".  Everything else that I experience is filtered through that processor known as 'mind'.  And, of course, a Creator God, if demonstrated to exist (think the Junior High School girl in a hyper-intelligent civilization in some higher universe who created our universe as a simulation for a School Science Fair Project), also trumps all other explanations of reality.

I highlighted the 'if' in the last paragraph.  One must necessarily choose their 'axioms' - the precepts that they decide are 'given' rather than subject to question - in order to construct any coherent system that describes reality.  To me, Consciousness, in particular, utterly fails as a foundational axiom.  I could go with either of the other two - Our Cosmos being physical or being a hyper-advanced civilization's or mind's experimental test of some hypothesis or other (or even just a video game).  But given that Consciousness has been shown to be the highly selective, error-prone, heavily processed internal narrative that the brain generates in order to cohesively direct its collective community of trillions of living cells toward best survival outcomes, it could hardly be considered fundamental.  Many aspects of the idea of 'self' and first-person experience cannot be generalized or described objectively (e.g. what does 'red' actually look like?).  Science takes great pains to remove the individual from the 'facts' through a process of reproducible experiment.  Even the oldest eastern faith traditions recognize the problems of individual 'attachment' and 'desire' as hindrances to achieving 'Truth'.  It seems to me that Western individualism is on the wrong track, and I would argue that only an ego-centrist, dare I say a Narcissist, would consider a specialized human mental function to have a fundamental role in reality.

Yes, there is that interesting 'Measurement Problem' in quantum mechanics, which posits that some as-yet-undefinable form of 'observer' is required to entangle itself with the system before an observable's 'wave function collapses' or its information is resolved within the observer's 'universe'.  I worded that last sentence very carefully because I think the best interpretations of this process only get us closer to the primacy of 'Big P Paradox' rather than any fundamental role for Consciousness.

Universe Self-Replication Cosmology - Nine Pillars of an intriguing Metaparadigm

 

This drawing is from Alan Guth, MIT Dept. of Physics.
It is what physicists call an 'embedding diagram'.  It represents three-dimensional space as a two-dimensional surface that is 'bent' or curved by gravity.  This diagram depicts one of the basic ways that an existing universe (e.g., the one we live in) can generate, via quantum tunneling, an entirely new and separate child universe.

Currently known and accepted laws of physics appear to allow this — a quantum 'phase change' of a small 'seed' of matter (just a few grams) into a peculiar state called a 'false vacuum' or something like it, which has negative pressure, and can therefore expand into a whole universe at an astounding rate.

 The diagram depicts the moment that the 'umbilical cord' (wormhole or Ellis Drainhole) connecting the parent and child universe snaps, and the child universe becomes a completely separate new universe.
See Farhi, Guth, and Guven (Nuclear Physics B, Volume 339, Issue 2, 30 July 1990, Pages 417-490) for all the detail.

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Universe Self-Replication Cosmology: A Metaparadigm worth discussing?

Peter J. Wetzel, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, retired

(last updated 27 August 2025)

SUMMARY

Universe Self-Replication (USeR) Cosmology is the hypothesis that the physical laws of our universe permit it to self-replicate.  Six different mechanisms by which this may occur are identified, including mechanisms that restart the universe chronology from an early epoch and mechanisms that only act upon a current state and then advance the multiple 'copies' forward in time.  The robustness of the hypothesis stems from this abundance of different non-prohibited mechanisms rather than relying on the (still debated) details.  Some of these mechanisms allow for mutation during the replication process.  The important consequence of the hypothesis is that in a USeR Cosmology, any given universe is nearly certain to be the offspring of a previous universe.  There is an inheritance of physical laws and constants during replication, which seems analogous to the process of reproduction in living things, and thus points to a correspondence with Darwinian Evolution.  Even evaluated in a narrow sense, this analogy points to the possibility that the physics governing the earliest epochs of our universe need not have been a predictable (falsifiable) or even a unique sequence of events.  To paraphrase Einstein: "God had a choice."  Further consequences of this analogy are discussed, and some specific research questions are posed.

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Introduction and Personal Note:  This manuscript addresses in broad-brush conceptual terms the simple, hard, physical argument of whether and how a universe with the physical laws that ours has can self-replicate.  Six largely independent theoretical ways that this can occur are addressed.  The details of each mechanism are in various states of uncertainty/debate, but the over-arching argument gains its power from the fact that it stands on at least six different independent pillars.  The far-reaching consequences that seem to inevitably result are discussed.  Many of the self-replication mechanisms have been under discussion in published technical literature for decades (see the headline figure for perhaps the earliest example), and yet discussion of the over-arching big-picture implications seems largely absent.  It is argued that the consequences are so significant that they are worthy of 'a seat at the table' in the Cosmology discourse regardless of, or independent of the particulars of any one mechanism.

The author is not a Cosmologist, but a PhD Atmospheric Physicist who worked at NASA GSFC (Greenbelt, MD) as a Civil Service research Atmospheric Scientist for 25 years.  As of this writing, he is approaching the age of 77.  This manuscript is written at a non-technical but scientifically literate level.  There could be mistakes and/or naive misunderstandings in some of the detail presented here, which will be corrected as we become aware of published work that constrains the ideas proposed here.   Despite any shortcomings, it is believed that the basic premise is robust enough to be worthy of further consideration and rises above technical issues with any of the six pillars on which it stands.  Yet that belief is just that—an opinion.  This proposed hypothesis is intended to be a catalyst for further scholarly discussion among a new generation of physicists who have an interest in expanding the horizons of Cosmology and Cosmogony and Foundational Theoretical Physics (especially into an interdisciplinary overlap with Developmental, Evolutionary, and Theoretical Biology).  Most importantly, it is a call for rigorous consideration (mathematically as well as philosophically) of the potentially intrinsic *hard* unpredictability (strong emergence) that the paradigm seems to imply, and, in parallel, the search for experimental evidence supporting any of the aspects of this hypothesis.

Question 1:  Does a universe with the physical laws that our observed universe currently exhibits permit self-replication?

Answer:  We do not understand the full set of physical laws describing all aspects of our universe's behavior.  In particular, the earliest period (the 'birth') of our universe seems to be best described by extrapolating toward high energy and small dimensions, which is the realm where the two highly successful models we have of our universe, Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, would need to merge (actually emerge [going forward in time] perhaps via some form of symmetry-breaking in a more fundamental, more general theory). To date, despite at least a century of intensive theoretical and experimental study, no satisfactory (generally accepted, experimentally confirmed) form of such a theory has been identified.

One way of attacking this question is to assume that the two models of our universe are both correct, and that no fundamental merger is required because self-replication can occur within the framework (domain of scales) of either model.  The physical systems that both Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity describe include mechanisms that do appear to allow self-replication (see next question).

We have no experimental evidence that self-replication has happened, though there are scenarios where the event could be undetectable.  Importantly, there is also no evidence that self-replication is prohibited.

Question 2:  What are the six ways that our currently accepted physical laws permit self-replication to happen?

First way:  Within Quantum Mechanics:  a natural, spontaneous quantum tunneling.  It seems to require very high density and high energy, states that have very low probability, but not zero probability.  A number of papers, over the years, have been published describing how a universe could spontaneously form from vacuum fluctuations.  In 2012, Lawrence M. Krauss wrote a popular-level book on the subject, 'A Universe from Nothing,' which hit the NYT best-seller list.  The popular interpretation of these discussions is usually along the lines that our universe could appear from some kind of pure vacuum, i.e. from no prior substrate and no prior laws; but, as critics have noted, that argument is not well posed.  'Nothing' is an absolute.  You can't chip a piece off of it and get 'something.'  The best we can do in our contingent, non-abstract, non-absolute world, is argue that what is at the root of it all is a core irresolvable, inexplicable, Paradox (antinomy)—a virtual superposition of nothing and something, as represented by the relationship 0 ~ 1/∞.  What we observe emerging from this Paradox when we interrogate this 'nothing' (the observable vacuum) is a quantum froth.  And that's just fine for purposes of this discussion.  Since vacuum fluctuations are an essential part of the quantum theory of our universe, the arguments work if some pre-existing state of our universe was the starting point of the process of emerging (or tunneling).  Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen, in 2005, proposed such a mechanism that is favored in the late universe, assuming the persistence of a cosmological constant.  As the universe continues to expand, and all available hydrogen fuel is spent, and all black holes have evaporated, the resulting empty space would be prone to form low-entropy fluctuations that could initiate inflation.  Perhaps we do not have to wait for the entire universe to achieve 'emptiness' for this mechanism to be actuated.  Two possibilities are in an advanced laboratory (see the Third Way below) and in the heart of the vast Cosmic Voids between galaxies, galaxy clusters, walls, and filaments, as these voids continue to expand.

Second way:  From General Relativity: Lee Smolin has discussed the reproduction of universes on the inside of black holes.  His 'Cosmological Natural Selection' theory, and the related 'Black Hole Cosmology' are not commonly accepted General Relativity solutions.  Standard General Relativity solutions lead to intractable singularities at the heart of Black Holes, but various transient high-energy processes that lead to them, such as Super-Nova explosions, Neutron Star mergers, etc., concentrate matter and energy into high densities, within which conditions found at the earliest times of our universe might be replicated.  This is a generalization rather than a theory, but if Quantum Mechanics is then invoked to describe what is possible within such high-density matter, the probability of quantum tunneling producing a 'false vacuum'-like (inflation) state should steadily increase as the energy density increases.

Third Way:  Technology.  'Creating a baby universe in a test tube.'  In general, there is no theoretical prohibition to generating the kind of high energy density that black holes produce within 'normal' space, i.e., not beyond the event horizon of a black hole.  This is the thought experiment discussed in the 1990 Nuclear Physics B article cited in the caption to the introductory image at the top of this post—Creation of a child universe in the laboratory or in a particle accelerator.  We do not possess the technology to achieve these conditions, but there seems no theoretical barrier.  It boils down to an engineering problem, and the successful creation of a child universe should produce a detectable signature.  Perhaps the application of metamaterials can bring the needed conditions closer to achievability in the less-remote future.

Fourth way: 'Mitosis'.  This covers any number of related concepts, most of which would benefit from rejecting the Standard Model of Cosmology's hypotheses that the universe would appear the same as we see it no matter where we happened to be in it, that is, perfectly flat, isotropic and homogeneous.  The unexplained phenomenon known as 'Dark Energy' is effectively self-replicating.  It creates new space and that new space contains the same amount of dark energy as pre-existing space.  As of about 4 billion years ago, so much dark energy has been created, that it has begun causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.  If Dark Energy is constant, as the Standard Model assumes, the result is that parts of the universe that are currently visible to us will eventually be receding from us at greater than the speed of light and will thus causally separate from us.  These separated parts then evolve completely independently.  If there is any mechanism for 'mutation', by which the laws of physics in these separated regions could diverge from each other, then 'interesting things' such as selection processes could happen.  Further, if dark energy is variable in time, which the latest results from the Dark Energy Survey Instrument studies suggest, it could also be variable in space.  Various forms of Quintessence Theory, in which Dark Energy is hypothesized to be a separate force/particle, give it this ability.  This is mere speculation, but areas where Quintessence clumps (if it does) would yield more rapid expansion, and would, through time, create voids that would separate individual 'cells' and cell-connecting filaments organized in a manner similar to the structure of galaxies and galaxy clusters in our observable universe.  Note that a sufficient concentration of Quintessence could behave like inflation, perhaps initiating a new universe on its own after a manner similar to the 'universe in a test tube' mechanism just discussed.  Unification of Dark Energy and Cosmic Inflation is a topic of active research, potentially via Quintessence or other aspects of the String Theory Landscape of diverse vacuum states and a set of conjectures known as the Swampland.

Fifth way: Many Worlds.  The so-called Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics taken to be a truly physical process.  The Many Worlds interpretation seems to be gaining favor among quantum physicists largely because it stays truest or least invasive to the formalism of the theory.  What annoys me about it is the compounded, seemingly inexhaustible fecundity of a new universe being required to form each time any particle 'encounters' another—the "ontological extravagance" as David Wallace recently put it.  The basic concept of this interpretation is that each physical interaction that 'forces' a quantum superposition to actualize into a specific state, causes a split in the timeline (e.g. into two separate Worldlines), such that the original superposition is preserved across the combined Worldlines.   For the purposes of Universe Self-Replication, it seems useful to hypothesize one or more thresholds or 'gatekeepers' that contains/restricts this overwhelming fecundity.   Foremost among those is a distinction between Strong and Electroweak interactions.  A further form of threshold that might be considered is the bound beyond which perturbation theory can no longer be applied (i.e., where the excitation being studied mathematically develops too great of an amplitude).

In the simplest form of this mechanism, Strong Interactions are ignored because all Worldlines that are created are on the scale of femtometers (the scale of protons and neutrons—the effective limit of the range of the Strong Nuclear Force).  In the case of Electromagnetic and Weak interactions, each virtual particle (or more generally, each excitation of the quantum field) that is generated during an interaction between real particles is automatically endowed with an 'inner life' that is the complete state of the universe that spawned it (a Worldline is created).  Each such actualization is thus imbued with the current laws of physics and values of constants, etc., in force at the time of the interaction or excitation but also subject to mutations associated with the 'dressing' of vacuum excitations that envelop the interaction.

Inherent in this mechanism is the assumption that our universe itself amounts to nothing more than one more quantum excitation—just another virtual particle, albeit with a stunningly elaborate 'inner life'—within the greater 'frothing sea' of the vacuum.  How it achieved that astounding complexity is at the crux of this discussion.  As said, the 'dressing' of vacuum fluctuations (interference from fluctuations of other fields during the particle interaction) provide the opportunity for the newly emergent world to be 'born' with effective mutations.  If so, then we have all the processes needed for Darwinian evolution, lacking only sexual reproduction.

An adjunct or extension to this view includes two more difficult questions/considerations: first, the vacuum fluctuations that 'dress' real particles at all times, even when no obvious interactions are taking place, and second, the virtual entities that make up the so-called quantum foam, which pervades space even in the complete absence of real particles.  Do these excitations also represent new worlds when they appear?  Given that no 'observation' has taken place (with 'observation' defined in the minimalist sense of an interaction—any event where one real particle is affected by another—or, alternatively, defined by some further unknown threshold criterion that governs interactions, if any), I suspect that these virtual entities are representative of the general vacuum, which I formally define in a manner consistent with the simple mechanism described above, as the complete 'frothing sea' within which our universe is merely one virtual entity.  This extension might speculatively suggest that the some or all vacuum excitations in general population of this 'greater sea' may also be 'other worlds', not necessarily closely 'related' to our own.  The vacuum, then, would be the virtual venue where inter-universe interactions—an instantaneous exchange of influence between universes—may take place.  This adjunct mechanism—a physical process that is ubiquitous—is here taken to its logical end (or extreme), where it points to the possibility of a form of 'sex' between universes.

Sixth way:  Simulation.  Current computer power allows scientists to simulate selected physical systems in great detail, but such calculations fall far short of being capable of simulating processes in sufficient detail to address some of the fundamental questions that we do not yet have answers to, such as how life emerged and how self-aware 'intelligent' beings emerged.  But there does not seem to be any obstacle that would prevent us from someday being capable of answering such deep questions via simulation.  If future technology makes such robust simulations possible, and because our known universe contains only a finite amount of information, there is no known physical or philosophical reason to expect that we could not someday create a simulated subset of our universe (say, of the human brain and all its sensory inputs) that could pass any pre-established arbitrarily test of 'adequacy'.  The first such simulation is likely to focus on an individual 'AI being' that will surpass human intelligence and will profess to be conscious, and this may not be more than a few years or decades away.

Simulations can be analog models as well as digitized mathematical ones.  The creation of physical analog models doesn't seem to get the attention or volume of research work that digital simulations do.  But there is an overlap in the area of life's genetic code.  Experimental efforts to produce synthetic life starting with inorganic chemicals is a primitive example.  There seems no barrier to extrapolating such work toward far more complex systems, perhaps creating an Artificial Biological Intelligence that could rival human intelligence and perhaps exceed the self-replication capability of any digital form of Artificial General Intelligence.  This is not a projected area of thought that seems to be given much attention, but perhaps it should.

Much existing work discusses the possibility that our universe, as a whole, is a simulation.  There is certainly no law that limits the amount of information that could be contained in a universe.  A simple thought experiment frequently posed is the idea that our universe is merely a video game or school science project of a kid (who might have 6 x 10^80 bits of information—the total amount in our observable universe—in a single eyelash), living in some advanced civilization in a universe with far greater information content/density and complexity than ours.  The simulated 'toy universe' could represent a physically simplified version of the progenitor universe.  Perhaps only in that higher-order realm could the physical conundrums that we face (the myriad unsolved problems in physics) be correctly resolved.

Simulated universes have some interesting consequences for the world's religious communities.  For example, simulations that are intentionally created clearly have a creator, which could be thought of as a true, real 'God.' You and I could also have an effectively real, truly immortal afterlife as an archived dataset containing all data describing our mind and body at any point in our lives.  At the will of the 'creators', these simulations could be re-activated at any time.

Question 3:  What are some consequences if universes like ours can self-replicate?

Answer:  Analysis of the potential consequences of this cosmology have been sparse.  Three of these consequences are of particular note:

First:  Our universe came from a 'preceding' parent universe.  If self-replication is occurring, then it is nearly certain that it is the explanation of the origin of the particular universe that we observe.  Our universe, with all its complexity, was not original - not cut from whole cloth, so to speak.  If self-replication is accompanied by mutations, then theoretical models that have been criticized for being unfalsifiable because they can predict nearly any outcome, such as Quintessence and String Theory, can play a role in a manner analogous to the way models of cell biology can lead toward the 'prediction' of the particular evolutionary outcome that is the human species.  In Cosmology, we do not have the benefit of studying the examples of other 'species'.  We can observe only our one example.  But perhaps we have a more grounded theoretical basis than models of cell biology provide life scientists.  We can, at least pursue this hope/expectation.

Second:  The 'Fine Tuning' question: In the cases where self-replication occurs in the 'open' universe, i.e., not inside the event horizon of a black hole, and particularly in any of the set of scenarios where intelligent beings (or even simple forms of life) are present to interact with or direct the replication process, there is a potential for the laws of physics in the offspring universes to be skewed favorably toward the living forms involved.  This could provide a natural explanation of what has been called the 'Fine Tuned Universe' conjecture or hypothesis or question, which asks why or how our universe seems to be so well-suited for the development of life, when such an outcome is estimated (by the majority of physicists) to have a prohibitively low probability within the range of possible sets of governing laws and constants.

An intriguing consequence of the 'Universe in a Test Tube' replication mechanism (and also of the whole-universe-as-a-simulation concept) is its implication for the Fermi Paradox, which asks "Where are the intelligent aliens?"  Advanced civilizations, which are capable of creating child universes (say, the way we create Higgs Bosons in our accelerators, or by creating exceedingly cold, empty vacuum states) do not have to exist in our present universe, only in an 'ancestor' universe.  Perhaps there is some 'Great Filter' that makes appearance of stable advanced intelligence extremely rare, but given a vast genealogy of precursor universes, the odds of one successful emergence rise dramatically.

Third:  Evolutionary processes (mutation and some form of selection), analogous to those that pertain to the development of complex life forms from simple ones, if operative during universe self-replication, would push back the difficult question of the ultimate origin of reality (e.g., the mechanism or process that produced the "Big Bang") into a veil of obscurity that might be even more difficult to unravel than the question of abiogenesis—the means by which life emerged from the approximately 92 natural elements of the Periodic Table, as generated by cosmic and/or stellar nucleosynthesis.

The example of the development of photosynthesis in early cyanobacteria, and its consequent Great Oxidation Event is good stark example.  New chemical pathways have emerged that did not occur in the evolutionary process that led to them, and the earlier forms of anaerobic life, to which oxygen was poisonous, died out, leaving little trace of the chemical pathways from which these life forms originated.  If there is any analog between the evolution of life and a not-prohibited process of universe self-replication with mutations, and Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog have proposed that there is, then the questions of emergent physics and lost physics become relevant.  Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity in the form that we observe them could, conceivably, not have directly participated in the physical processes that were extant in simpler ancestor/precursor universes.

Stephen W. Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018)  NASA photo from 21 April 2008.

Hawking and Hartog's 'Top-Down Cosmology' (see also Phys. Rev. D73 (2006) 123527) echoes this perspective.  It confronts the certainty that we do not understand the initial conditions that lead to our universe by positing a 'no initial boundary condition' theory that incorporates the string theory landscape and allows us to decipher a series of selection events and quantum accidents that lead to the late time (present-day) boundary conditions that we observe.  These selection events and accidents can be viewed as a series of symmetry-breaking processes that "describe the beginning of a new, independent universe with a completely self-contained ‘no boundary’ description" with the previous state becoming irrelevant.  They are silent about whether each of these 'beginnings' could represent 'genealogy with mutation' self-replication events in which a parent universe gives birth to a child with new traits; and they would probably argue that it does not matter, since we can only observe our one universe.  It does matter, however, if that (unobservable) process carries explanatory power toward what can be observed.  Nearly all of this evolution appears to have taken place in a tiny fraction of a second, as we observe the resultant effects.  An ancestral line of precursor universes provides a more natural time frame for all these improbable events to have occurred.  If our universe is not the simplest self-sustaining and self-replicating model that its physical laws allow, and it certainly appears to be far from it, then the biological analog seems favored.  This does not rise to the level of a testable hypothesis unless or until some observable consequence is identified.  On the other hand, the biological analog suggests an entirely different perspective, not often discussed in the physics community, in which it might be rigorously provable (philosophically if not mathematically—e.g., advancements in the theory of complex adaptive systems), that the observed outcome (our universe) is not a predictable result of precursor conditions, any more than the human species is a predictable consequence of cell biology.

Pursuing that analogy to life processes further, we conclude with a thought experiment: Imagine that our universe's Hubble volume (meaning everything that the speed of light allows us to observe) lies within one single neuron cell in a grand, diverse organism such as the human being—just one of thirty-seven trillion cells in this 'multiverse'.  In the development of a human being from its original stem cell to mature adult, there were multiple cell-differentiation events that produced the observed attributes of the neuron, and the multitude of steps along that pathway represent symmetry-breaking events where specific genetic instructions are activated and others de-activated, radically changing the final cell's function and morphology.  Note well that the analogy is to cell differentiation only (or to the process evolutionary development).  A living cell is not a self-contained system as the universe seems to be.  It requires input of nutrients and export of waste products.  It is rank speculation (and not parsimonious based on our current best effective theories) to suppose that our universe could be part of some greater structure, let along some sort of functioning organism.

Research Questions and some Foundational Questions (this section is under construction):

1.  What can be said about entities that lie outside of the observable universe? This discussion equates 'the universe' with that region we can now observe, which leaves open the term 'multiverse' as a valid concept ...

2. Is there a protocol for quantifying the probability of the existence of other universes (the various manifestations of the concept of the multiverse)?

3.  If the multiverse exists, does the Copernican Principle apply?  In other words, what is the validity of the assertion that our universe is nothing particularly special?  What are the implications of that application of the Principle?

4.  What is the simplest theoretical non-trivial self-sustaining, self-organizing, and self-replicating universe as based on the available flexibility within the laws of physics and the values of the physical constants?  What is the simplest such universe that could sustain life? Is our universe that simplest entity, or, if not, what can be said about the relationship between our universe and those simpler constructions?  How does inclusion vs. exclusion of the speculative suite of Quintessence, Dark Energy and Inflation proposals affect this analysis? In natural language terms, is Dark Energy a key feature of universe self-sustenance (creating the 'theater' or substrate on which more complex physics can emerge) and self-replication?

5.  Using Complex Adaptive Systems theory (including further work on formalizing it and/or building upon it and/or some other protocol), can it be rigorously proven whether or not the emergent outcomes are predictable based on initial boundary conditions?  Conversely, is it possible to retrieve initial boundary conditions from observed current state of Complex Adaptive Systems such as the human being?

6.  Can the answers to 5 be applied to our observable universe? Is Complex Adaptive Systems Theory applicable to the Hawking-Hertog top-down cosmology proposal?  What is the system adapting to, other than the trivial answer: "to the current observed state", i.e. what are some of the possible (physically actualizable) selection criteria and/or adaptation pressures?

7.  Extending the parable of the 'Blind men and the elephant' to cell biology, what could be learned about cell biology using nothing but the internal behavior of a single cell.  Starting with several different kinds of living cells, from an archaeon to a human neuron, from a cell in a banana leaf to the eye of a fruit fly, etc., how would the information that is gleaned about general cell biology be different?  How much of what is concluded would be incorrect?  (Conducting this 'blind' study would require great care that the results are not contaminated by the researcher's bias based on knowledge about patterns of similarity between different cell types.  The purpose is to apply Hawking-Hartle 'top-down' methods to cell biology in order to gain insight into their proposed process of universe evolution.)