The brute force of “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
Question
5: Complexity, Patterns, Space, Time, Matter, Fields, Energy, etc.
“Why --
rather than nothing–
-- is
there something – so ‘law-like’ , such that physics is possible,
-- of a
scale that is incomprehensible in itself,
-- and containing levels of complexity and
patterns that stagger the mind?”
This is
unexpected – there is NO REASON for ‘our something’ to be such. It could have
been law-like, massive in scale, and BLAND and/or UNIFORM – could have been all
‘solid rock’ or even TRULY empty space everywhere…
And—according
to the best theory—it should have been EMPTY anyway:
“But the cosmic story has more than just
gaps; in some places it contains outright paradoxes. One of the most
troubling of these concerns how matter came to exist in the first place.
Particle physics tells us that every matter particle has a mirror image,
identical in every way but with the opposite charge. These mirror particles are
called antiparticles. The good old negatively charged electron that we find
whizzing around every atom has an antiparticle with positive charge known as
the positron. Likewise, for each of the quarks that make atomic nuclei, there
is an equal and opposite antiquark. Now, according to our current best theory
of particle physics, whenever you make a particle, say by bashing some atoms
together very hard, you must also make an antiparticle. Similarly, when a
particle meets its antiparticle, the two will annihilate each other,
disappearing from existence in a flash of radiation. This state of affairs
has been confirmed by every experiment we have ever conducted. However,
when we apply this understanding of particles and antiparticles to the very
first moments of the universe, things go disastrously wrong.
“In the first millionth of a second after
the big bang, the universe was so hot that particles and antiparticles were
continuously being created out of energy, emerging from the seething primordial
plasma before annihilating again. Each time a particle was created, so was an
antiparticle, and whenever an antiparticle was annihilated, so was a particle.
Equality between matter and antimatter reigned.
“However, around a millionth of a second
into cosmic history, the universe expanded and cooled to the point where there
was no longer enough heat in the primordial fireball to make new particles and
antiparticles, and an event known as the great annihilation took place.
All the particles and antiparticles created in the first millionth of a second
rapidly destroyed each other in a fearsome blast of radiation, leaving a
universe made of naught but light.
“In other words, particle physics tells us that the universe should contain nothing:
no stars, no planets, no you or me.
“And yet, perplexingly, here we are. Our
very existence, and that of the material universe, is an enormous challenge to
our understanding of particle physics. Again, what we see in the universe
at large—that there is anything to see at all and that we are here to see
it—conflicts violently with what we have learned by studying the smallest
components of matter. Something deep is clearly missing from our current
telling of the cosmic story.”
[Cliff, Harry. Space Oddities: The
Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (p. 25-26).
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
But instead of emptiness or ‘blandness’,
we have a few basic ‘forces’ and a few basic ‘particles’ and a few basic types
of ‘wave-carrying fields’—all of which interact in ways that produce increasing
levels of complex forms, events, actions, compounds, and organizations of even
galactic structures.
“Our modern understanding of matter—the
stuff from which we and everything around us are made—ultimately comes from
picking up bits of it from our surroundings and doing some rather unpleasant
things to them. By means of smashing, boiling, melting, burning, dissolving in
acid, electrocuting, hurtling through particle accelerators, and many other
torturous practices, humans have slowly discerned that all objects in the world
around us are made up of the same basic building blocks: elementary particles. Somewhat miraculously given the enormous
variety of things that exist in the world, there appear to be only a
tiny number of different types of these particles. You are made from just three—electrons and two types of quarks
(more about those soon)—held together by some handy quantum mechanical forces
that stop all your bits from falling off.”
[Cliff, Harry. Space Oddities: The
Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (p. 15).
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
At the bottom of the scale we have the
Standard Model of Quantum physics, with its various ‘particles’. [Omitting
discussion here of the differences between Quantum mechanics and Quantum Field
Theory.]
And –at the ‘bottom’– the solidity we observers
experience in our daily lives, disappears. These few, building-block basic
‘forces’ and a few basic ‘particles’ and a few basic types of ‘wave-carrying
fields’—are somehow all the ‘same’??
They are all seemingly interchangeable and
are different ways of ‘seeing’ (and therefore ‘doing science on’) this ‘bottom’
substrate.
“However, rather strangely perhaps
considering its name, the standard model of particle physics isn’t really a
theory of particles at all. Instead, it describes the world around us as
being made of rather more mysterious and nebulous objects known as quantum
fields. Particles are fairly easy to picture, conjuring images of little
spheres whizzing about in space. Quantum fields are far harder to get our heads
around.
“Even if we might struggle to picture
them, we have all felt the physical reality of a quantum field. I imagine that,
given you are reading this book and therefore have more than a passing interest
in physics, you will at some point in your life have played with magnets...
But what I find most captivating is taking one in each hand and forcing their
two like poles together until they start to push back. If you do this, you
will feel the undeniable presence of a physical thing pushing back from between
the magnets. Look as hard as you like and you won’t see anything in that gap,
but there is absolutely no denying that there is something there.
“The thing that’s there is a quantum
field, in this case the magnetic field. It may be invisible, and you may
not be aware of it except when you’re playing with magnets, but nevertheless it
is ever present. And it is not simply the case that magnets generate a magnetic
field close to their poles. In truth, the magnetic field permeates the
entire universe, connecting my little magnets to the magnetic dynamo of the
Earth, the Sun, and even the most distant galaxy. There is only one magnetic
field, and it’s everywhere.
“The “quantum” bit of a quantum field
comes into play when we try to understand what a particle is. If quantum fields
are like invisible fluids filling all of space, particles can be thought of
as little ripples in these fluids. The reason you are able to read these
words is that a torrent of uncountable particles of light known as photons are
bouncing off the page and smashing headlong into your retinas. Each photon is a
tiny undulation in something called the electromagnetic field (of which the
magnetic field is just one aspect). What we think of as a particle,
therefore, is simply the smallest possible amount of wobble that can travel
through a quantum field.
“It may seem counterintuitive to think
that it is the invisible influence of fields that governs the universe. But in
fact, it’s even stranger than that. According to the standard model, fields
explain not just light and photons but even the particles that make up the
apparently solid world around us. Atoms are ultimately made of subatomic particles—electrons
and quarks—which aren’t tiny hard spheres, as we’ve been trained to imagine,
but instead little ripples in underlying fields. Electrons are little ripples
in something called the electron field, while quarks are tiny wobbles in the
quark fields.
“It is these fields, not particles, that
are the ultimate constituents of our universe. Each of us is made of fields.
Deep down, we are all vibrations in the same invisible oceans.”
[Cliff, Harry. Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding
of the Universe (p. 17-19). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle
Edition.]
And we have no idea WHY they are like
this—or how they ‘got here’:
“One
of the greatest mysteries still facing us is why the standard model is the way
it is. We have six quarks—down, up, strange, charm, beauty, and top—and six
leptons: the electron, muon, tau, and their three partner neutrinos. Then there
are the three forces, each with its own associated particles that interact with
some of these matter particles, but not others. We have no real idea why these particles exist; we simply observe them in
nature and put them into the theory, a bit like a zoologist collection species
of butterflies.
“However, there are tantalizing patterns,
in particular the fact that the matter particles come in what physicists refer
to as three generations. The first generation comprises the ordinary stuff that
makes up the universe around us: the electron, the electron neutrino, the down
quark, and the up quark. For reasons we can’t yet fathom, there are two more
of these so-called generations, which comprise heavier copies of the
first-generation particles. The muon, for instance, is the
second-generation version of the electron, while the beauty quark is the
third-generation of the down quark.
“Why do particles exist in these repeating
patterns? It’s as if nature were telling
us that there’s some deep principle at work here, perhaps some profound
symmetry that connects all these apparently disparate fragments. But even
though it might be staring us in the face, we haven’t yet been able to discern
from this structure a deeper truth.” [PS:SO, 173-174. Space Oddities: The
Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe. [PS:SO] //
Cliff, Harry // Doubleday:2024.
And
“While particles with color are
representations of the symmetry group SU(3), particles with the internal
properties of flavor and electric charge are representations of the symmetry
groups SU(2) and U(1), respectively. Thus, the Standard Model of particle physics
— the quantum field theory of all known elementary particles and their interactions
— is often said to represent the symmetry group SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1), consisting
of all combinations of the symmetry operations in the three subgroups. (That particles
also transform under the Poincaré group is apparently too obvious to even mention.)
The Standard Model reigns half a century
after its development. Yet it’s an incomplete description of the universe.
Crucially, it’s missing the force of gravity, which quantum field theory can’t
fully handle. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity separately describes
gravity as curves in the space-time fabric. Moreover, the Standard Model’s
three-part SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1) structure raises questions. To wit: “Where the hell did all this come from?”
as Dimitri Nanopoulos put it. “OK, suppose it works,”
continued Nanopoulos, a particle physicist at Texas
A&M University who was active during the Standard Model’s early days. “But what is this thing? It cannot be three
groups there; I mean, ‘God’ is better than this — God in quotation marks.”
[“What is a particle?”, Natalie Wolchover, in QuantaMagazine, November
12, 2020.]
And at the top/edge, the super-galactic
structures consisting of gazillions of stars and other objects have levels of
cascading complexity:
“The rest of the universe is mostly dotted
with galaxies; there's no evidence that there are lone stars
floating between galaxies. This is fairly new information; as recently as one
hundred years ago, astronomers thought that stars were sprinkled evenly
throughout space. They had no idea that
stars clustered together into galaxies until they built powerful-enough
telescopes to notice what those blurry distant objects actually were. What a
revelation that must have been, to discover that our galaxy, which at the time
seemed like an entire universe unto itself, was just one of billions and billions of galaxies we can see in the
cosmos. It follows the discovery that our world is not the only planet in the
universe and that our Sun is one of many, many stars. In each case, the scale
of our unimportance grows by leaps and bounds.
Fairly recently we learned that the galaxies themselves are not distributed
evenly throughout the universe. They tend to clump together into loose groups and clusters, which themselves group together into massive
superclusters, each with dozens of clusters. Our supercluster weighs in at
about 1015 times the mass of our Sun. Heavy stuff.
So far, up to the scale of galactic
superclusters, the structure of the universe is very hierarchical: moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars,
stars orbit the center of galaxies, galaxies move around the center of their
clusters, and the clusters zoom around the centers of superclusters. The strange thing is that it ends there.
Superclusters don't form megaclusters, superduperclusters, or uberclusters,
but instead they do something much more
surprising: they form sheets and filaments hundreds of millions of
light-years across and tens of millions of light-years thin. These sheets of superclusters are impossibly vast
structures, and they curve around to
form irregular bubbles and strands that surround huge empty cosmic voids in
which there are no superclusters or galaxies and very few stars, moons, or quintillionaires.
This organization of superclusters is the largest known structure in the universe.
If you continue to zoom out, you see the same
basic pattern of stars-galaxies-clusters-superclusters-sheets repeating
elsewhere, but no larger-scale structure is formed. The bubbles of
supercluster sheets don't form into interesting complex megastructures. Like
random Lego pieces on the floor, they are spread
evenly across the cosmos. Why does the pattern end at this scale? Where do
the supercluster bubbles come from? Why
is the universe so uniform at this level?”
[We Have No Idea--A Guide to the Unknown Universe.
Cham, Jorge and Daniel Whiteson.
RiverheadBooks:2017. (256-258)]
What
might this staggering complexity of our law-like universe (of staggering size,
scale, and energy) 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
complexity and ‘skill’ itself?
But reality check here—
So far, we have this OUTSIDE OTHER that is
1. able to
produce SOMETHING without using pre-existing materials (e.g. other somethings),
2. able to
encode laws and causality into it,
3. able to produce
it with unimaginable scale in size and energy, and
4. able to produce
it with staggering complexity (while still being law-like and predictable).
Our
estimate of the ‘character, perspectives, and skills’ of this OUTSIDE OTHER
needs to be proportionate to at least the above features—with ourselves
literally insignificant in comparison and without any ability to ‘challenge
it’!
This question is a lot like the first
question—unanswerable—but our only result of asking it might be an intuition.
It might be the obvious STRONG intuition
that whatever MADE that first infinitesimal point of existence that ‘big
banged’ into the massive universe we know now (and/or some ‘inflationary
situation’) MUST HAVE HAD MORE ENERGY--and the ability to STRUCTURE the release
of that energy--at ‘its disposal’ than what ended up over in OUR SIDE of
existence.
Even if we downsize it (from ‘something’ –
ANYTHING) to be about our universe: “how did the universe come into existence?”
And this is often restated as “what
CAUSED the universe to come into existence?”
·
It is commonly believed now that the
universe HAD a beginning, in the range of 13 – 14 billion years ago. [All of
the ‘eternal universe’ scenarios have failed.]
·
It is also commonly believed that space,
time, and matter/energy are all “aspects” of the universe.
·
There is no ‘time’ without ‘space’.
In other words, there was/is no “when or
before” (apart from the universe), there is no ‘where’ (apart from the
universe), there is no ‘what’ (apart from the universe), and there are no
‘forces’ or ‘fields’ (apart from the universe).
The universe as a whole is not ‘somewhere’
or ‘inside’ of something. The universe as a whole is not ‘before’ or ‘after’
something. There was no matter or energy ‘prior to’ or ‘outside of’ the
universe because they are dependent upon both space and time for their
existence/nature.
IOW, matter ‘occupies space’ and interacts
with other matter (involving energy, and mediated through fields), and is
convertible into energy. Forces (e.g. gravity) and fields (e.g.
electro-magnetism) are properties of matter, space, and time.
The impact of this for our question here
is this:
1. The producer/generator/cause
of time must be independent of time (must be timeless or meta-temporal, not just
‘eternal’)
2. The producer/generator/cause
of space must be independent of
space (must be non-spatial, not just ‘omnipresent’)
3. The producer/generator/cause
of matter must not be ‘made of matter’ (must be immaterial, not just a
bigger chuck of matter nor the sum total of all matter nor a ‘mass of virtual
matter’).
4. The producer/generator/cause
of energy (of the kind in the universe) must not be dependent on such
energy (must be ‘meta-powerful’ not just ‘all powerful’).
5. The producer/generator/cause
of forces (of the kinds in the universe) must not be a force itself (of
the kinds in the universe).
6. The producer/generator/cause
of fields (of the kinds in the universe) must not be a field itself or
IN a field itself (of the kinds in the universe).
In other words, there can be NO SCIENTIFIC
OR NATURALISTIC EXPLANATION for the origin of the universe (itself a subset of
‘something’!), since everything we would use to EXPLAIN IT, cannot have existed
‘before it itself came into existence’. Every tool a scientist would use to
explain the cause of anything INSIDE the universe and inside space-time (e.g.
how a piece of metal rusted, how a batch of Uranium turned into a batch of
Lead) needs explaining ITSELF when it comes to how IT ‘appeared’.
Another way of seeing/saying this is that
‘before the Big Bang’ (or pre-BigBang Inflation) there
was NOTHING within our vocabulary or imagination that could have CAUSED the BIG
BANG.
[Speculative cosmologies—as noted above--
that posit infinite universes, multi-verses, infinite oscillations in a
‘universe field’ solve nothing—they just create bigger problems than the one
they attempt to solve! And they still use tools / concepts like ‘force’ and
‘existence’ and ‘fields’ and ‘fluctuations’ and ‘waves’ in the process of
trying to EXPLAIN the origin of such elements of our universe.]
So, the materialist, naturalist, and/or reductionist
scientist simply cannot comment here. They know—from every experience of
everyone from all of time—that the universe HAD a beginning and therefore HAD a
cause, and they know that they/we can have no way of even SPEAKING about such a
cause (much less explaining it).
Notice that this is not just something in
the category of “well, science cannot explain it NOW, but I am confident that
SOMEDAY they will be able to” (a faith position), because any FUTURE laws,
forces, fields, or other naturalistic phenomena will themselves be ‘inside the
universe’ and therefore unable to speak about ‘outside’ the universe.
And so we are stuck with this weird set of
statements:
1. Whatever
caused the origination of the sum total of energy (and matter convertible into
energy) must have ‘more energy’ (and a different ‘kind’ of energy) than that.
2. Whatever
caused the origination of the complex set of interacting forces and fields,
must have a complexity level ‘greater than’ that set (since there would have
been no additional source of complexity to add to the mix).
You either
look at the caused-universe and say there must be a producer outside of, and
superior to, this universe; or you
have to successfully ignore the mental force
of this intuition, and find some rationale for discounting all of human
experience (that all effects are caused; and that all causes are ‘greater than’
their effects).