The brute force of “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
Question 4: Scale
“Why -- rather than nothing–
-- is there something – so ‘law-like’ ,
such that physics is possible,
-- and of
a scale that is incomprehensible in itself?”
This is unexpected – there is NO REASON
for our something to be such.
Current estimates:
·
the radius of the observable universe is
around 10**26 meters,
·
our smallest objects (quarks) are around
10**(-20) meters,
·
and the smallest ‘classical’ distances are
measured on the Planck scale around 10**(-35).
That is a scale range of 60+ orders of
magnitude, with ourselves (the ones who see and measure these things…) about in
the middle. And—as far as we know – this scale seems to still be growing (i.e.
the ‘expanding universe’ and ‘event horizon’ realities)…
This is a staggering scale, and even if we
--- as observers—were the largest known ‘unit’ in the universe [a supercluster
of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, 10 billion
light-years across] we would still be ‘small’ compared to the observable
universe diameter of 93 billion light-years.
And, under current versions of Inflation
theory, our universe is TINY compared to what existence was initially. Note
this colorful description:
“It’s tempting to picture the embryonic
universe, before the big bang, as a seed, pregnant with all the
possibility of the cosmos to come, ready to germinate. But as far as we
understand, the universe was already growing when it began. Which means it
wasn’t a beginning at all, but rather the start of a new phase of its existence.
But for simplicity’s sake, and since all stories need a beginning, let’s say
that our universe began with growth.
“But this was not the generative growth
of a germinating seed. This was a lacerating, annihilating growth, one that
destroys, tears, and rends. It was the growth of space itself.
“At the start of everything, the cosmos
grew at a truly terrifying rate, expanding exponentially. Space begat
space begat space. Reality was stripped
of all form by space’s expansion, becoming a tenuous, near-featureless void.
If you could have sat on an atom—though there were no atoms, not yet—and gazed
out at the rapidly expanding universe, you would have seen nothing, only a
freezing, suffocating darkness. The remorseless stretching of space would have carried all other objects far out of sight,
faster than the speed of light, beyond an unreachable horizon.
Paradoxically, as space expanded, the world visible to any
would-be observer shrank to a tiny, inescapable nutshell, binding every
speck within its own isolated sphere of nothingness, separated from all
other such specks by an ever-growing void.
“This age of extreme expansion has been
given a rather mundane name: “inflation.” How long inflation went on we do not
know.
“But we do know that at some point
inflation ended, and as it ended, the universe roared into being. As the
force that drove inflation dwindled, its power birthed innumerable particles,
filling the gasping void with a searing, subatomic fire, the primordial plasma
from which all objects in the cosmos would later form. From darkness, light.
Within a trillionth of a second, the forces of nature came into existence
and with them the first and greatest blaze of light in cosmic history. Though
inflation had ended, space was still expanding, albeit at a less ferocious
rate. As the cosmos continued to grow, the primordial fire began to cool.
Elementary particles, the building blocks of everything yet to come, fused to
form the hearts of the first atoms. Over the next few minutes, the nuclei of
the first chemical elements were forged: hydrogen, helium, and lithium.
“As we saw briefly at the start of this
chapter, the standard cosmological model begins with a universe dominated by
a powerful form of repulsive energy. This repulsive energy caused an
incredibly rapid period of expansion, which cosmologists call inflation.
In an extremely short time—around ten billionths of a trillionth of a
trillionth of a second—the universe exploded in size by a factor of ten
trillion trillion.
“The next thing that happened was that
inflation ran out of puff and the repulsive energy that drove it converted
into a mixture of matter and radiation. This created a fiery inferno of particles that rapidly filled the nascent universe
and led to what cosmologists call the
hot big bang. It is from this maelstrom that all the objects in the
universe today would ultimately form. From this point onward, the history of
the universe was dictated by precisely what kinds of matter and energy emerged
from the death of inflation and in what quantities.”
[Cliff, Harry. Space Oddities: The
Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (pp. 11-12,
22-23). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
But this distance scale may seem miniscule
compared to the vast amounts of ENERGY in the universe. There are no estimates
of how much is stored in ‘ordinary matter’ (<5% of the content in the
universe), but a glimmer can be seen from the fact that the small amount of
hydrogen in a liter of water--about 0.111 kilograms--is equivalent to 1 x 10^16
joules, or the energy produced by burning a million gallons of gasoline.
What might this
staggering immensity of our universe (not to mention the number of ginormous
objects in it) imply about some ‘maker’
of our SOMETHING? [And how might it affect our
expectation of being confronted by such an OTHER, in some possible port-mortem
situation?]
Would
this suggest that the OUTSIDE OTHER had unimaginable and incomparable abilities
and energy itself?