matter> infinoverse p1> p2> p3
page three - continuing the story of the infinoverse....
chance and symmetry
A blip. A bang. A fine mist of particles in an expanding void.
This in
a nutshell is science's currently favoured version of cosmogenesis -
the modern story of creation. And back to the Big Bang, the details are
almost certain.
The way protons were synthesised, the prevailing temperatures and
pressures, stellar evolution, the point at which forces and particles
were unified - there are now so many converging lines of evidence to
tell us these things happened that to doubt would be unreasonable.
Events during the very first second of the Universe's existence are
more open to interpretation. However something like an inflationary
spurt must have occurred to stretch out matter and space, so setting up
the crucial divide between the positive energy of mass and the negative
energy of gravity.
And regardless of inflation, most physicists agree with the tactic of
applying quantum theory to the very earliest moments of the Universe.
During the first 10-43 seconds, anything that
existed must have existed
as a Planck-scale blip and so ought to have followed the rules of the
quantum realm.
Thus there is a robust body of theory to explain the general structure
of our Universe. But what about the Hard Problem of existence itself?
Has science shed any light on the age-old question of why a something
rather than a nothing? We can see that in a bid to escape the apparent
need for a prime mover, a first cause or even a divine guiding
intelligence, cosmologists have found themselves being drawn towards
two key ideas - chance and symmetry.
A chance event, a random fluctuation, is something that appears to
escape the need for a particular cause. Toss a coin in the air and it
can fall on either face. Wait for a uranium atom to decay and it could
pop off at any moment. Allow enough time and, by definition, even the
most improbable event has at least some small probability of occurring.
So plain blind luck can potentially explain a way a lot when it comes
to the causing of our Reality.
Cosmologists have applied this type of thinking to make more sense of
the inflaton field, for example. They suggest an inflaton field might
crumble in an almost infinite variety of ways. Such collapses would be
chaotic and hence unpredictable. This would lead to the production of
an immense range of different universes, each with a quite randomly
chosen set of physical parameters.
Most of these universe would naturally prove violently unstable. They
would self-destruct in a puff of smoke almost as soon as they formed.
Others would turn out too stable, developing into dull expanses of
non-interacting particles or myriad black holes.
However, even with long odds, at least some universes would be bound to
strike on the right cosmic balance to develop a rich atomic structure.
And it would be only in these lucky few that we would discover
twinkling stars and intelligent life-forms gazing up in wonderment,
marvelling at the unlikeliness of it all.
The official name for this approach to cosmology is the anthropic
principle. We find ourselves existing in a beautifully poised world
because it is the only in such a world that we could have found
ourselves existing. Our Universe might look a gazillion-to-one shot.
But that's no problem if there are a gazillion universes and we could
only have appeared in the gazillionth.
So chance can explain a lot. And then given the mechanism of inflation,
chance doesn't even have that much to explain. Inflation says the whole
of our Universe could have sprung from a teaspoon's worth of false
vacuum, the inflaton field. Moreover, this blip of primal material only
had to exist for about 10-43 seconds because
inflationary pressure took
over after that. Thus as a lucky quantum fluctuation, the origin of our
Universe seems almost modest in scale.
It is not as if chance had to generate the mass for some 100 billion
galaxies in one fell swoop. And, of course, the smaller the false
vacuum seed needed to construct our Universe, the more likely it is
that we are just one among gazillions of Universes. The lower the
quantum threshold for making a particular world, the greater the
probability that a wide variety of worlds will be thrown up by chance.
So randomness and statistics rob our creation of much its supposed
special nature. When we look around the world, everything seems to fit
together just too neatly for there not to have been a designer - an
intelligence or purpose operating behind the scenes. But modern
cosmology says throw enough bricks in the air and eventually some will
come down houses.
Symmetry is the other big idea in cosmology as it suggests that you can
always split a nothing to make a something. There appears to be no cost
involved in symmetry-breaking. Crack a zero into a plus and a minus, a
positive and a negative, and the sum still adds back to zero.
You might only be able to make a temporary borrowing. The debt must
eventually be paid back. But in the meantime you can make hay. For so
long as the two mirror halves are prevented from collapsing each other
out of existence, you have the ground for yet further
symmetry-breakings.
Once even a very small, quantum-scale, seam in the void has been
opened, there is nothing to stop it being worked larger and larger,
creating more and more levels of stuff. The evolution of Reality can
proceed hierarchically, building in complexity with each fresh split.
there is always something
Chance and symmetry are indeed a cunning pair of loopholes for science.
Between them, they reduce the need for a first cause, the first
creative act, to almost nothing. The problem of the origins of
existence is rendered so small that it just about disappears up its own
fundament. However look carefully and we will spot that there is always
a something rather than a nothing still lurking in the shadows of these
concepts.
Chance events do not require a specific cause. But they do require a
general cause. There has to be a general process that is throwing up a
variety of outcomes. Someone must be tossing the coin. Some set of
forces must be causing the radioactive decay. The bricks have to be
heaved in the air to give them a chance to rain down houses. So even if
nothing else seems to exist, there would still have to be some variety
generating process to give a concrete Reality its chance to exist.
And not only does this background process have to have existence, it
has to have an exceptionally tightly controlled existence. The process
has to be set up just right if it is to be able to generate a variety
of individual outcomes, each of which is "uncontrolled".
Take for example the tossing of a coin. The coin has to be flat and
evenly weighted with two faces. It has to be tossed onto the right
surface, so not on a rumpled bed. The whole situation has to be
controlled to ensure there can only be two outcomes – heads
or tails – and not some other outcome like standing on edge
in the crease of a blanket or lost down the back of the bed.
Then the toss itself has to be executed in a way that is fair
– in a way that gives you no control over what happens. So a
high, fast-spinning, flick off an expert fingernail. Only after paying
a lot of care and attention to the process can we be satisfied that we
will get a properly random result.
In fact it turns out to be exceedingly difficult to find genuine
examples of a chance process in nature as there is a basic paradox at
work here. For an event to be completely a matter of chance, the
circumstances - the boundary conditions in physics-speak –
have to be completely determined. And the real world is just too messy
and complex for that.
So it seems the idea of naked chance is a just a convenient
mathematical fiction, an idealisation. Real-life processes - even
quantum and chaotic ones – can only aspire to randomness,
never actually achieve it in the perfect way imagined by the
mathematician.
But regardless, even a perfectly random process would still be a
something that existed prior to existence itself. So appeals to quantum
blips and anthropic principles don't actually get cosmology off the
hook. Chance events can only take place as local features of some
globally definite process or context.
Symmetry-breaking is likewise always the breaking of a something at the
end of the day. To say everything comes from zero and adds back to zero
is once again a convenient mathematical fiction as, in any real-life
example, we will soon find ourselves talking about the division of some
sort of substance or state.
Big Bang theory says our Universe is the result of the
symmetry-breaking of an inflaton field. Such a field might be
featureless, structureless, void of direction or event, until its
symmetry gets broken. But nothing happening is not the same as true
nothingness – the absence of anything including a blank
potential, the absence of even absence itself.
So no matter how cosmologists might twist and turn when talking about
fluctuations in a void, they cannot help but make this void sound like
a primal substance or arche – the fundamental ground of being
sought by ancient Greek philosophers.
Chance and symmetry-breaking can lead us back to the simplest possible
arche – the most reduced incarnation of Universe-spinning
stuff. But there seems no escape from the need for an initial something
that could then be transformed into a something else.
Well, if as scientists and philosophers we are stuck with having to
posit a something rather than a nothing, why not turn to the other
extreme? Why not begin with an initial state of everythingness and then
see how chance and symmetry-breaking might whittle this down to a more
constrained state of something-ness? Why not start with an Infinoverse
in other words?
the shape of everything
Now the fun can really begin. How should we imagine the Infinoverse?
The Infinoverse need not contain literally everything - every possible
quality, entity, shape and material.
Plato famously believed that there existed a realm of timeless form, a
kind of template Universe which held one perfect triangle, one perfect
table, one perfect dog, as well as various perfect qualities such as
beauty, truth and goodness. Our own material world was then constructed
from these ideal examples like shadows cast on a wall – flat
and distorted reflections of a bolder, stronger, reality.
But the Infinoverse of modern physics does not have to be a catalogue
of all that has evolved in our particular world. It would be much more
primal in its nature. So let's start by considering the Infinoverse as
an infinity of dimensions. Or go even further and think of it as a
realm of absolutely continuous dimensionality that has then been
constrained to form a finite number of specific, or discrete,
dimensions.
Dimension is a good candidate because all modern physical theory has
been boiling down to a dimensional tale. Newton collapsed the physical
world into a set of particles and forces - tiny balls ricocheting about
a space. Einstein treated gravity as dips and hollows in the fabric of
space – a curvature in the three dimensional world. He also
reduced time to being a dimension so that Reality became a solid,
eternally-existing, block of dimensionality in which even history was a
physical direction.
Since Einstein, the idea that everything might be spun of naked
dimensionality has been only gathering pace. Recent years have seen the
rise of superstring, loop quantum gravity, and brane theory. The old
idea of particles and forces – tiny lumps of substance
exerting little pushes and pulls – has been giving way to
purely dimensional descriptions of Reality. The fundamental features
are becoming loops, knots, surfaces, lattices and manifolds.
Superstring theory, for example, says that the Universe has its three
conventional spatial dimensions (plus time to make four). But then
curled up at every point of this space are a further set of
micro-dimensions. Tucked into the Planck-scale fabric of the Universe
are another six or so directions in which you could head. Like our own
expanded Universe, these dimensions would actually be circular so that
any straight-line path through them would form a loop.
The difference being, of course, that in our expanded Universe, it
would seem that events could never do a full circuit, whereas at the
"stringverse" scale the distances would be so short it might seem a
journey was complete as soon as it started.
We will have to examine this idea in more detail. But the point is that
loop-like ripples or vibrations in the stringverse could be what we see
– from our macroscopic position in the expanded part of the
Universe – as the play of particles and forces. The
substances and processes which seem the building material within our
three dimensions may in fact be themselves just resonances in a set of
much smaller dimensions.
In this new physics, God would be a geometer. Or rather a topologist.
And what has particularly excited theorists is that there maybe
something mathematically special about the arrangement of dimensions we
inhabit.
We have to ask why do we exist in just three extended spatial
dimensions? It seems such an arbitrary choice. Why only the three
distinct directions in which to turn of up, down and along? Why only
the three kinds of measurement of height, breadth and depth?
However it turns out that being confined to three dimensions has
important physical consequences. For one thing, forces like
electromagnetism and gravity would dilute too quickly if they had to
propagate through more dimensions. In our Universe, forces wane with
the square of the distance. But if space were four-dimensional, they
would drop with the cube of the distance, falling off so fast that they
would operate only over short distances. Contrariwise, in a
two-dimensional realm, a plane, forces would weaken only in linear
proportion to the distance and thus stay overwhelmingly strong.
The implications for creating stable structures like particles and
stars are huge. Again we seem to live in the Goldilocks' realm of all
possible Universes where the number of dimensions is just right for the
kind of complex atomic and cosmic order that we feel needs explaining.
But there is more. The equations for a Universe that includes a
stringverse - a curled up set of six further dimensions concealed
within its fabric - also hang together in a curiously satisfying way.
The mathematics seems almost too tidy. And then the entire package of
ten dimensions - six for the strings, three for expanded space, one for
time - appears to condense quite naturally out of a eleven dimensional
story known as brane theory, or M theory ('brane being short for
membrane).
The 11-dimension brane world would be like a surface in which all
possible versions of a ten dimensional stringverse are slipping and
sliding across each other, knotting and unknotting to explore every
available state. So randomly the brane world would be generating a vast
number of different dimensional solutions - universes with different
numbers of expanded and curled-up dimensions, and thus different arrays
and balances of forces and particles.
Most of these solutions would prove unstable or infertile. However, out
of the welter of alternatives would emerge some with the internal
coherence and stability to exist, to persist. And as the anthropic
principle states, it would be no surprise that we find ourselves living
within perhaps the most fruitful possible balance of dimensionality.
There is no need to worry about the details just yet. The point is that
modern physics is comfortable with the idea that the whole of Reality
may come down to a story about dimensionality. And an evolving,
self-collapsing dimensionality at that.
So it is a natural next step to suggest that this neatly nested
hierarchy of constraint formed by the Universe, stringverse and
brane-world – which we may describe using set theory
terminology as [branes [ strings [spacetime]]] – may lie at
the end of a still longer trail of dimensional reduction. There may
once have been an Infinoverse that possessed an infinity of directions.
Or more properly, an unbroken continuity of direction. If you could
find yourself in such a place, you would be pointing in absolutely
every direction at once and thus in effect pointing in no particular
direction at all. No real change would be possible as you would already
be oriented to wherever you could want to go.
It would be like sitting in a dinghy in the middle of a thick sea fog.
You might be moving, you might be not. How could you tell when
everything remains the same and there is nothing to mark your departure
or arrival from a point, no landmarks to betray that you even have a
direction?
Everythingness has the advantage that it looks exactly like
nothingness. However, unlike nothingness, the featureless symmetry of a
block of dimensionality can be broken. Or rather, because the
Infinoverse is continuous, its unlimited variety could be constrained
in ways that led it to behave as though it were actually a more limited
set of directions.
construction and constraint
We are entering into some very subtle ideas about the general process
of creation here. Is creation a matter of construction or constraint?
These seem to be diametrically-opposed methods for making things.
But they may arrive at the same ends! One way of producing things
– construction – may be thought of as mechanical.
The other – constraint – is organic. Everyone
brought up in the modern western world is familiar with the mechanical
view of how things are made. But very few have a clear understanding of
what might be meant by an organic model of causality.
To get a quick idea of the difference, think about Euclidean geometry.
About 300 BC, the Greek philosopher Euclid took what had been
discovered about geometry and saw how it might be built up from what
appeared to be just a few self-evident truths. He began with what
seemed the most fundamental geometric fact - a point is that which has
no parts. That is, a point is pure location, pure existence. It has no
elements or extension. It is an entity of precisely zero dimensions!
Euclid then went on to construct all other geometrical figures from
operations on a point. He said stack up an infinity of points and you
have built the one dimensional object of a line. Stack up an infinity
of lines and you have built the two dimensions of a plane. Stack up an
infinity of planes and you have the three dimensions of something
solid.
And yet there is another way to get the same result - more or less. You
can start with a solid and then constrain it to make a plane by
squashing it as flat as possible. Euclid made his plane by imagining
gluing together an infinite number of lines. But you could just as well
push down hard on the three-dimensional world to restrict its third
dimension to an infinite degree.
And once you had a plane, you could squeeze the life out of this so it
was restricted to being a line. Finally constrain the length of the
line to an infinite degree and you would be left with just a point. Or
rather you would have confined the possible location of whatever had
existed in a more general fashion to a particular spot with no
measurable dimensions.
Euclid's way of creating geometry was the familiar mechanical method of
building up from nothingness. The organic idea of creation is instead
one of imposing limits on a tendency towards everythingness.
And when you think about it, this seems to be more the way we really do
things in life. If we want to manufacture a two-dimensional object like
a coin or a sheet of paper - things that are valuable to us because of
their very flatness of shape - we have to constrain their depth until
there only seems to be a surface. Yet, of course, even the thinnest
sheet of paper still has to have some depth, some cross-section, so
that it hangs together.
The same is the case if we want to make a one dimensional object like a
thread of cotton. We create something with length by minimising its
width and depth. But again it still needs its two other dimensions to
hang together as a real thing. Even a pencil dot retains its three
dimensions. No matter how lightly we dab the paper to mark the zero
dimensions of a location, we still leave behind a small mound of
graphite.
So physical reality seems to be essentially continuous rather than
discrete. We can restrict the expression of its dimensionality through
careful manoeuvres of constraint. But we cannot actually shrink any of
its dimensions out of existence. Its "everythingness" remains even if
it becomes almost hidden from our view.
We can appreciate that continuity is generally a good idea as it holds
things together. If you think about a world made of particles and
forces acting out their lonely dramas in a void, there is always the
problem of how the particles can push and pull each other across empty
space.
A certain amount can be explained by the Newtonian picture of atoms
banging into each other. But then there is the problem of "action at a
distance" - the way forces like gravity, electromagnetism, and the
strong and the weak force, act across a gap with nothing to connect
them. Physicists usually have to imagine space being filled with fields
of some kind - even though they will then hastily add that the idea of
a field is only a metaphor as Einstein ruled out the existence of any
actual physical medium, such as the infamous ether.
But what if we turned the Newtonian idea of crashing about particles
completely on its head and suggested that space is instead a solid
block of connectedness? So what we think of as solid particles are
actually more like the holes in a Swiss cheese. Or better still,
bubbles trapped in a viscous fluid. Particles would still exist, but as
voids in a material rather than materials in a void.
Whatever metaphors we eventually find most useful, we can see that
there are usually two ways of looking at everything. And this must be
an interesting fact in itself. We are finding one group of ideas that
go naturally together - nothingness, discreteness, construction,
atomism. And another set of ideas that also harmonise - everythingness,
continuity, constraint, hierarchy. The first we have labelled the
mechanical. The second, the organic. The question is which gives the
truer picture of Reality?
Or perhaps the story is that the two combine to define Reality's
limits. They are the extremes of what may be the case. And so we should
expect to find Reality somewhere in-between - indeed, maybe only
exactly in-between!
what is a dimension?
These are difficult thoughts. More metaphysics than physics.
Metaphysics has become a derided term in modern science, so sure has it
grown about its relationship to truth and knowledge. Yet if we really
want to make any sense of how a something could come from a
nothing, to be able to say why existence should be possible in any form
let alone its particular form, we must be prepared to re-examine the
sources of our ideas about the world.
Science has filled our heads with many images and impressions about
what is fundamental to existence. But just how secure are notions like
particle or force, motion or location, space or time, energy or mass,
nothing or everything, creation or existence? We rely on these words
rather heavily in building a mental picture of the physical world. And
yet we find we have so little to say about what they actually
represent.
Certainly, we are going to have to probe more deeply into what is meant
by a dimension. It is normal to think of dimensions as a direction. A
place where movement is possible – where motions can be
constructed step by step. Each dimension is discrete and standalone,
distinguished by its relations to other dimensions. In a Euclidean
space, each axis of possible travel stands at a right angle to all the
others. It is orthogonal. And absolutely straight.
Of course, if space is a curved hypersphere as suspected by
cosmologists, or warped by gravity as in Einstein's models, then the
axes are not straight and the angles work out as either more or less
than 90 degrees. But still, the general idea is that any kind of space
can be carved up by a finite number of axes. There is an invisible grid
by which any kind of change can be measured. And of course the grid
remains even if no change is taking place, no motions are occuring.
The Infinoverse (or is it now the Continuoverse?) may demand quite a
different notion of a dimension. A particular direction might only
emerge as a constraint on a field of possible motions. The initial
pressure or desire to move might be undirected in itself. It would be a
vague urge, a potential. But this urge, in the context of many other
things that also might want to move, could only find its expression in
some common solution. There might have to develop a particular
arrangement of paths that optimises the dissipation of the various
impulses.
So a distinct dimension, rather than being pre-existing to events,
might only arise as a dynamic negotiation of "event-hood".
Dimensions would be more like the self-organising patterns of
constraint that appear in a jostling crowd, a draining flood of water,
a cooling bar magnet. They would be a kind of symmetry breaking in
other words.
Well if we think a little more about a dimension, it really means a
degree of freedom. Take away the spatial element and it boils down to
the idea of a consistent vein of happening. It is a crisp
“direction” – spatial, energetic,
temporal, cognitive, however we might define it - in which we can go.
It is always some system’s property. There is a something
that is located, some kind of part. There is a something that is
global, some sort of context that permits certain changes and forbids
others. Dimensionality emerges as the intersection between the allowed
and the proscribed – that which it is possible to construct
and that which is constrained.
This kind of abstract thinking is hard on the brain. What seemed to be
known dissolves into a confused mush. But we have to get away from a
simple concrete mental response to words like dimension, particle, and
force; or even more metaphysical ones like substance, form and process.
To glimpse an answer to the hard problems of “how a something
from a nothing?” and "why anything anyway?”, we
have to relax then rebuild our intuitions about what is natural to the
world.
To this end, we had better go back to the very beginnings of
metaphysics itself. Just where do we get this conviction that nothings
must come before somethings rather than the other way round?
back to the beginning then
The Infinoverse is not a new idea. Indeed it is a remarkably old idea.
Apparently even a very obvious idea given that it has cropped up so
many times across so many cultures.
Much has been made of the fact that other world religions, such as
Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, all take a more organic view of Reality;
one quite unlike the mechanical view generally adopted in the West. The
story goes that the West has been driven by its desire for power over
nature. We want to dominate Reality through our rationality and our
technology. And this has distorted our understanding of nature's
essence.
We see bits, not wholes. We treat everything as accidental, not the
expression of a purposeful order. We insist the Universe must erupt out
of pure nothingness – creatio ex nihilo – and have
little time for the idea that it might have emerged from some reality
larger than itself. Even when we do believe in a God, this god is a
manufacturer of worlds; a technocrat, a controller. The Christian god
is an individual with a plan rather than a divine potential, an organic
ground for the development of worlds.
But while it’s true that almost every other culture seems to
have a creation myth that echoes the Infinoverse tale – a
Universe born from a flux of everythingness – we don't even
have to play the East versus West game here. Let's simply head back to
the root of our rational, scientific, intellectual tradition. Let's go
back to ancient Greece, for there is quite a surprise in
store.