The Fundamental Questions
It can perhaps be a little stark, but equally profound and humbling to at least once in a while consider that the distance between us and mites on a leaf is likely far closer than the distance between us and understanding the universe as it is. Of course, we aren’t clueless, we have come exceptionally far, relatively speaking. Unlike any other living thing, we are not only aware that there is a universe that surrounds and inhabits us, but we are also able to create models and equations out of it that have allowed us to extract understanding and fundamental laws of nature from the very surface of nature itself. However, despite our profound abilities and achievements, we still have some of the most basic essential questions left unresolved on the table of everything. Unknowns that permeate into the quintessence of our existence and our experience of our existence that no one has been able to figure out since the start of it all.
At a young age, we are taught how to tell time and off we go, flying through it, trying to keep up with it and use it as best we can. For the most part, time exists fairly casually in the background of our lives. However, to paraphrase the early theologian philosopher St. Augustine, “when someone asks what time it is, we know, but when someone asks what time is, no one has any idea”. Starting from the big bang, everything moves outwardly through time and space in an increasingly complex and disorderly manner. By way of the second law of thermodynamics, we know that everything moves towards entropy, from order to disorder. This creates what is known as the arrow of time, which as far as we know, only moves forward. Unlike in the dimension of space in which you can drive somewhere realize you forgot something at home and then turn around to go back and get it, you obviously can’t turn around and go backward in time, what you forget in the past stays there. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton proposed that time not only moves forward but also moves at an absolute fixed rate throughout all of the universes. This makes perfect sense as it is how we intuitively experience and understand time, your minute is just as long and short as everyone else’s. However, a couple of hundred years later in the early 20th century, Albert Einstein provided his theory of Special Relativity which disproved Newton by revealing that time is far more malleable. According to Einstein’s theory, time is not constant or real in the way that we are intuitively accustomed to. Rather it is personal, relative and partly perceptual, as in, everybody has their own experiences of time and the rate at which time passes can change depending on what someone is doing or where someone is. This, however, would only become noticeable in extreme instances as if someone were near a black hole or were approaching the speed of light, wherein both cases, time would significantly slow down. Although profound and revolutionary to our understanding of time, this still doesn’t answer what time is or why we appear to only move forward in it or why time is a dimension at all, leaving room for plenty of additional theoretical models and arguments to be made. There are valid theories of the universe that don’t include time as a dimension, like the theory proposed by an equation known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Other theories suggest that time can be nonlinear and go back on itself at the end of itself and a sort of loop of displaced cause and effect. Or, congruent with Einstein’s Theories, all moments in time are occurring at the same time just like all locations in space are occurring at the same time and the perception or sense that there is a past, present or future is merely an illusion as a result of our continuous forward direction through it. Of course, the point here is we don’t know, we simply live with time, experiencing every moment though it, coordinating every activity on it and allowing it to pressurizer every decision and sensibility. And yet, it could merely be an illusion created by the brains’ feeble attempt to understand something that extends beyond its limits.
In an ironically similar string of events, Isaac Newton proposed what is known as the universal law of gravitation in the same work that argued for absolute time. In his theory, Newton explained that every particle attracts every other particle with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance between the center of each particle. In simpler terms, objects move toward each other in space because of their force of gravity, which is dependent on the relationship of their masses and the distances between each other. Some years later, again, Einstein proved that Newton was wrong. With his new updated version of relativity, known as the theory of general relativity, Einstein discovered that gravity is not the force between two objects, but it is the mass of the object distorting what is known as space-time. Which, is the combination of the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time, creating one singular fabric of the universe. As a result, gravity works somewhat loosely, like putting a bowling ball in the middle of a sheet pulled tight on all ends. The Bowling ball would cause the sheet to dip down towards the center and bend around it. If then a tennis ball was added onto the sheet, since the tennis ball has less mass, it would gravitate towards the bowling ball, but only because of the distortion or bending of the sheet. This completely revolutionized our understanding of gravitation and the universe as a whole, however, it still doesn’t answer what gravity is. We can measure it and calculate it, but unlike other forces, gravity has no particle, so we can’t know what carries it out. We know that mass creates a gravitational effect, but no one knows why mass creates a gravitational effect, it just does. All the galaxies and solar systems, the earth in orbit, us on earth, it all just seems to pull together with no discernible explanation, so far as we can tell, yet.
We know that everything, that’s anything, is made up of matter and energy, being interrelated aspects of the same thing. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. However, if this is true, the obvious question is, what created it in the first place. It appears that either something had to have come from nothing, or, something has always been. In the case that something has always been; if time can, in fact, be nonlinear and can infinitely regress in a loop going back on itself at the end of itself, it would then be possible that there is no beginning or end of the universe at all, but a continuation of the same thing. As if the universe were breathing in and out, filling up its lungs with everything, and then emptying them back out over and over. Or, similarly, everything is, was and will always be across space-time for all eternity. Every moment in time, location and space have a coordinate on the map of space-time and the map exists at all times, at the same time, forever. However, in both cases, if something has always been something, where did that something come from. Who or what made it, how can anything be anything without having been made by something else? If the universe is entirely based on cause and effect, which it appears to be, how can there be no first cause for there to be an effect. Alternatively, what is known as quantum field theory, physicists have also found that particles known as virtual particles, can come in and out of existence from apparent nothingness, which is to say it perhaps possible that a feature of nothing is to create something. However, if a feature of nothing is to create something, how can it be nothing, and if nothing is nothing, what is it and what made it? Even if someone subscribes to the notion of a god, that’s fine, but that resolve the question of where God would have come from. Everything ultimately brings us back to the same question, how can anything come from nothing or something is infinite, and neither concept seems to concur with any human sensibilities. Meaning, there is some mystery of everything that our brains can’t seem to comprehend, as if the rules of the game were made of logic but the reason for the game was made of something else.
The only truth is, of course, no matter what anyone says or how they say it, nobody has any idea what’s going on beneath their feet, inside their brain, and above their head. Maybe at some point in the future, we or some iteration of us will know precisely how everything works and why with one little equation. Maybe Newton will be wrong, and Einstein will be wrong and thousands of other Einsteins of the future will be wrong, until someone, somehow, isn’t, and maybe for some reason that’s where we’re heading. However, perhaps what matters is less about what it is or why it is, but that it is. That during this position of time and space, and in this form of matter, we can look into the nature of everything and see nothing is simple and everything is insane and the only thing more insane will be to waste is by never marveling at how insane it truly is. Never appreciating that we experience time, what it is, in a way that allows us to experience it at all, that the effects of earth’s gravity is just strong enough to keep us on it, but not so much that we can’t move around. That the exact structure of matter, their exact forces, form just perfectly enough over billions of years to allow us to emerge out of the darkness for a little, able to do this right now, able to enjoy the apparent magic show off everything, contorted somehow, just right, for us.