The Tunguska Event — VIII

Bill DeSmedt
Sep 3, 2018 · 9 min read

Before the Beginning

How much does it really take to make a universe, anyway?

The universe starts out as the oldest trick in the book. You know the one: that old something-for-nothing scam.

That’s nothing as in nothingness. Nothingness is the bedrock reality: no space, no time, no-thing. But it’s a strange sort of nothing, one that contains everything that is, was, or ever will be, if only you look at it the right way.

Quantum mechanics is that right way.

Quantum mechanics — it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law. And the law says that, down at the subatomic level, some old familiar physical properties become what we call complementary to one another. Meaning, in order to nail one of them down, we’ve got to loosen our grip on the other one. Think of a toy balloon: squeeze it one place and it just pops out someplace else. It’s like there’s this minimum amount of uncertainty that we can’t ever get rid of, try as we might.

Werner Heisenberg called it the “Uncertainty Principle.” And you can forget what you may have heard about how that uncertainty’s all just a limitation in our instruments, how they’re too blunt and fumble-fingered to measure subatomic phenomena properly. Our tools aren’t the problem — we are, what with how we’re forever trying to make two separate macrocosmic phenomena out of what’s really only one single microcosmic reality. Deep down where it counts, the universe is just plain “fuzzy,” and we may as well get used to it.

That’s for another time, though. Right now we’re just talking about complementarity. And the textbook example of complementarity is position versus momentum. How you can have one or the other but not both. How, if you clock an electron’s speed with pinpoint precision, its location smears out into a cloud of probabilities. And vice versa.

But there are other complementarities. Not so well known maybe, but even more important if, like the seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, you wonder why there’s something and not just, well, nothing.

I’m talking about the uncertainty relationship between energy and time.

Used to be, when it came down to that short list of things you could put your total faith in, Conservation of Energy was right up there with Motherhood and Apple Pie. Not any more. Measure the energy of any system over a certain period of time, and you’ll see it doesn’t stay constant; it’s always dancing around some average value — doing a quantum jig, so to speak. And the more you narrow down the time-slice you’re measuring over, the wilder the swings can get. Make the interval really short and the energy’ll wind up all over the dancefloor. As long as it all averages out in the end, there’s no harm done.

Now, the thing of it is, this trick works even when there’s nothing there! Go far out in space, to the emptiness between the galaxies — out to where you’d think the energy level’d just have to go to zero and stay there — and what you’ll find is that quantum mechanics won’t let it! Zero would be a precise, unvarying value, after all, and the Uncertainty Principle can’t abide that! Instead, in the absence of anything else, the vacuum itself starts churning away, with quantum energy fluctuations pulling virtual particles and anti-particles out of nothing into momentary existence, then letting them annihilate each other again. (And don’t let that word “virtual” fool you, either. Those fluctuations are real. They have consequences — as we’ll see when it’s time to talk about Bekenstein-Hawking radiation.)

Meanwhile, you could think of the nothingness between the stars — and the nothingness before the beginning — as sort of like a bank. You know how you can write a check for more money than you’ve got in your account, and it’s okay, provided you cover the shortfall before the check clears? You can “create” fifty bucks to tide you over a weekend, for instance, as long as you pay it back Monday morning. Same thing here.

Except, what if Monday morning never comes? We’re talking about a time before time itself began, after all. How much of an energy overdraft might’ve slipped past the Cosmic Bank Examiner when all the clocks are stopped?

For that matter, how much energy does it actually take to get a universe up and running? There’s some reason to think the answer is: not that much at all. Here’s why:

Everything in existence has two kinds of energy: rest-mass and gravitational potential. We’ve only really known about the first kind since Einstein — it’s what you’d get if you could convert a thing’s whole mass into energy (E=mc-squared and all). But that second kind goes all the way back to Isaac Newton. It’s the energy that comes from universal gravitation, from the fact that everything in the universe is pulling on everything else.

The kind of energy, in other words, that a rock’s got when it’s sitting on top of a hill. You can’t see it in that form, of course (that’s why we call it “potential”). But let a big enough rock come tumbling down the slope, and you’ll definitely see how that potential energy can turn into kinetic energy, energy of motion — you’ll feel it, too, if you don’t get out of the way in time!

Now, the way we calculate the potential energy between two objects is to multiply their masses and then divide by the distance between them. That means the further up the hill our rock is perched, the more potential energy it’s got. Move it way out in space before you let it fall, and when it hits it’ll have enough kinetic energy to gouge out a meteorite crater. So, if you could somehow move that rock out an infinite distance away from the center of the earth, you’d be giving it the most potential energy it could possibly have (can’t fall further than that).

How much energy would that be, exactly? Well, we’re dividing by distance, remember? — an infinite distance in this case. And when we divide any finite amount by infinity, we get zero. But, if zero is the maximum potential energy any two objects can have between them, then any finite separation will give you less than that. Meaning that all real-world gravity potentials wind up being less than zero.

Now for the main question: If all the Einsteinian rest-mass energy in the whole universe adds up to some big positive number, and the Newtonian potential energy of the whole universe works out to some big negative number, then what are the chances those two big numbers cancel each other out?

Maybe, just maybe, you could total up all the energy in the universe and it’d come out to zero (or as close as makes no never mind). And that’d mean there’s not all that much difference between the void before the world began and everything we see around us. From that angle, the universe is just a “re-expression of the vacuum.”

The way our friend Leibniz phrased it: Omnibus ex nihil ducendis sufficit unum. (All it takes is a single thing to bring forth everything out of nothing.) In other words:

It might not take a whole lot more than nothing to make a universe.

It happens like this, maybe: Nothingness is just sitting there, minding its own business, doing (as you’d expect) nothing. Then, in the twinkling of a never-mind-how-long, things change. The Auditor gets caught napping, and — Bang! — before you know it, the nothing has borrowed just enough energy from nowhere to make a something — a universe seed. In all the empty annals of forever, this must’ve happened countless times. And by “countless,” I mean countless!

What happens next depends. Andrei Linde at Stanford thinks just about all those seeds — bubbles, he calls them — go on to become full-fledged universes in their own right, each with its own spacetime, its own physics, even its own indigenous life, maybe. Me, I expect that most of those bubbles pop and sink back into the nothingness they came from, and that at most only a few get to hang around for a while. Our own universe among them.

Why should a few universes live on while all the rest die? Quantum mechanics again, maybe. Like that complementarity notion implies, it takes an act of observation to make certain physical properties “real”: an electron has neither position nor momentum until somebody decides to take a look and measure one value or the other.

So far this is just an updated version of that old puzzler about a tree falling in the forest when no one’s around to hear it. But Princeton physicist John Wheeler took it one giant step further when he suggested that maybe the significance of the observational role doesn’t end there at the subatomic level, that maybe a universe as a whole is a “self-exciting circuit” that isn’t viable unless, at some point in its history, it generates minds capable of perceiving and appreciating it — and in the process validating its own reality [1].

Now. for the sake of fairness, I ought to point out that this whole story about how it takes a conscious observer to trigger the collapse of the wave function — to make reality real, in other words — has fallen into disfavor over the past couple decades. Nowadays, physicists are more likely to explain the fact that we don’t see quantum uncertainty in the everyday world around us in terms of a phenomenon called decoherence.

According to decoherence theory, quantum effects don’t begin to show up till a particle has been placed in a “coherent” state, isolated from its environment, kind of like the way the waves of coherent light can synch up crest to crest and trough to trough in a laser. That could mean it doesn’t really take a conscious mind (or a deliberate act of measurement, same thing) to break a subatomic particle out of its quantum uncertainty; all it takes is any interaction with the environment that could interfere with its coherent state — like when laser light scatters off some object to produce an incoherent jumble.

That’s all well and good, except for a couple things.

First, even some of the leading proponents of decoherence still seem uneasy about the role of consciousness: “It’s not clear you have a right to expect the answer to all questions,” Wocheck Zurek told Scientific American way back in 1997 [2], “ — at least until we develop a better understanding of how brain and mind are related.”

Second, and more to our own point, decoherence requires an environment for it to work. It’s by entangling a quantum object with its environment that the uncertainty gets dissipated (not eliminated) enough to make reality real. Problem is, at the moment of the Big Bang, there is no environment! The Bang itself being all there is, it’s got no place to bleed off its uncertainty into and achieve actuality.

And, if that’s so, John Wheeler just might have been right after all.

And so might Yogi Berra, when he says: “you can observe a lot by watching.”

But whatever the reason our universe has stuck around so long, you can bet it’s not esthetics. From that standpoint, nothing beats something any day: Timeless, changeless, flawless, nothingness is the height of perfection; it’s existence that represents the step down, and down, and down …

From the moment of its birth, the universe has been moving in the direction of ever-increasing disorder, as its primal symmetries warp and shatter in the transition from each new phase of existence to the next.

But the greatest symmetry-breaking — the one that gets the whole shebang up and running — comes with that first, fateful phase transition from non-being to being.

* * *

The above article is the eighth in this series exploring the science behind my technothriller Singularity — and if you’ve stuck it out this far, you might be interested to know that, for a limited time only, you can get a copy of Singularity as part of the baker’s dozen of great science fiction and fantasy novels being offered in Wordfire Press’s “Adventure SF Bundle” — see here for details.

Notes

[1] John Archibald Wheeler, “Genesis and Observership,” in R. Butts and J. Hintikka, eds., Foundational Problems in the Special Sciences, Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1977, pp. 3–33; reprinted in John A. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, New York NY: Springer-Verlag, 1996, pp. 23–46.

[2] Philip Yam, “Bringing Schroedinger’s Cat to Life,” Scientific American, June 1997, pp. 124–129.

Further Reading

Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report, New York NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Richard P. Feynman, QED — The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton University Press, 1988.

David Lindley, Where Does the Weirdness Go? Why Quantum Mechanics is Strange, but Not as Strange as You Think, New York NY: Basic Books, 1996.

Martin Rees, Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others, Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997.

Bill DeSmedt

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The future remains unwritten, but I'm writing as fast as I can!

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