Puzzle Universe 1:
Making a Universe
So the universe started with a big bang.  That accounts for a lot of evidence, but to a naïve mind it sounds like magic. 
Fig. 1

It gets worse.  Shortly after the bang, the universe enlarged faster than the speed of light.  But special relativity says E= mc2, and you can’t exceed the speed of light.  Don’t worry about proving the theory; it’s just algebra working on well proven scientific laws.  Einstein was kind enough to write the explanation – actually a proof – suitable for a general reader, who would be about like me.  Ok.  I took calculus in high school and a couple of semesters in college and actually passed, which left me with less competence in math than I would have expected.  Reading Einstein was like listening to a conversation in a language similar to your own, like French or German if you speak English.  With the help of a few words you know, you might be able to catch the drift.  English would not help that much in say Chinese or Japanese. 

I picked my way through it, recognized a few things like the Lorenz contraction and Maxwell’s field equations and concluded it was watertight.  You can’t exceed the speed of light. 

Ah, but it wasn’t the matter in the universe that exceeded the speed of light.  Space itself was expanding.  That’s not much help for the naïve mind. 

At the beginning, everything was photons and other primary stuff: no ordinary matter.  But the only way to go from primary stuff to ordinary matter is for stuff to be “observed,” to react with ordinary matter, and there wasn’t any.  There had to be a “big observation.”   Sounds sort of biblical: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.  That proves nothing, but I think a prudent person might be forgiven for being very cautious. 

After the Big Observation, the laws of nature were established, and they turn out to be just right for life.  The universe appears to have continued to expand but at a moderate rate. 

Most of the matter is normal matter with vanishingly small amounts of anti-matter.  This is a jolly good thing for life since the collision of a star with an anti-matter star would disrupt things far and wide.  “Jolly good” of course means it stinks of magic.

There were random fluctuations in the initial energy, and they can be seen, but they aren’t really big enough.  No problem, that initial expansion smoothed them out like you’d get wrinkles out of a sheet by tugging on it.  But it should have taken more than one tug.  A sheet sure does.  Also there would have been random fluctuations in the distribution of matter.  That would have to be straightened out at the same time, like straightening a sheet and blanket at once with a single tug.   Tricky.

Then there is life; energy comes in, makes life and the energy goes away at a lower temperature.  Ok, but why pause; why not just interact with matter and get re-radiated as heat?

energy matter   life   energy                           

or

energy matter   energy   

If you look at a galaxy, the stars are moving as if there was more mass than the stars themselves have.  The rest is “dark matter.”

If you look at distant galaxies, it looks like the expansion of the universe is speeding up.  This is called “dark energy.”  Seems a bit spooky to me. 

Anything science can learn can be taught to a computer.  Alan Turing proved that a computer cannot do abstract reasoning.  As with Einstein’s theory of relativity, I’ve had a look into it and emerged without a total understanding, much less now remembering, but being convinced.  It matters not if you look for a massively parallel quantum computer with deep learning and so forth.  The proof does not change.  A computer can work with anything science offers.  So in spite of a lot of money being spent and many capable people drawn away from work that might actually be productive, we can neither understand nor build a machine that can do abstract reasoning.  But we do abstract reasoning.  

Take the number zero.  What is it in Roman numerals?  You know, “I is one, IV is four, V is five and VI is six.”  I suppose you could say IIIIIV is zero, but the Romans never did.  Zero is tricky.  A child cannot really understand it until age 4.  The Mayans are said, (I don’t know; I wasn’t there.)  to have had a formal way of expressing zero in their knotted string notation.  Apparently they got it from the Olmecs, so it dates back some centuries BC.  In western civilization the formal written number zero started in India about the time Europe was entering the Dark Ages.  But recent work suggests the bees are able to learn to understand zero.  Since our ancestors split from theirs about the time of the Cambrian era, it can hardly have been inherited, nor can it be considered an emergent property of our super large brains.  So abstract reasoning is somehow a property of the universe that will never be explained by science. 

People, even animals, understand fair and unfair, if maybe to different degrees.  How? Again, it’s not an emergent property of the brain, so moral order has to be a property of the universe. 

There was no evident life for a long time after the Big Bang.  In some billions of years, the energy in the universe will be so diluted out over the expanding space that it is difficult to belive that life will continue to be possible.  Thus:

No life life  no life

What’s the point?

And why is there anything at all?

So there are a lot of things that look like magic.  And I don’t like magic.  If there is magic, then nothing makes sense.  Any prospect for the future you might devise must include, “Magic permitting.”  Begging your patience, I’ll try to get rid of any need for magic. 

We’ll not be able to get rid of everything that looks like magic, but maybe we can reduce the number of things.  First let me borrow a neutron; L   (I frown will mean I must resort to magic.  A smile means I have dismissed something that seems like magic.) I won’t need your neutron long.  The use of this neutron constitutes our first use of magic. 

We shall assume there is nothing, which is the whole point, and call this nothing “Out There.”  So what must it be like Out There?

• No matter.
• No rules of logic.  (You can’t have logic without a universe to be logical about.)
• No dimensions and an unknown number of potential dimensions, at least 3.
• Time undefined, so we shall set it at zero and neither going forward nor back.
• No moral order, good or bad. 

So we set your neutron loose.  It follows an irregular course, because places where it bunches up tend to pull the path inward by gravity; you lent me gravity when you lent me the neutron, because a neutron has mass. The reason all neutrons are alike is because it’s all the same neutron.

Eventually the neutron flies right up its own tailpipe, and I can give it back to you at exactly the time and place you lent it to me.  Let’s say the path of the neutron was, a tad simplified, like this.

Fig. 2

 
The notice where you gave me and then took back the neutron.  The path is clumpy because gravity tends to pull the neutron into a place where there are other neutrons.  We shall declare the clumps to be mass.  Of course, the neutron may turn into a proton and electron and a bit of energy, and the same process can go in reverse.  There’s not much anti-matter because the neutron you lent me was a garden variety one.  

Now that we have collections of mass, we can define time.  If you are looking down at something heavy, and I am down there shining a light up to you, the light has to climb against gravity, which makes it lose energy, which gives it a longer wavelength, so it wiggles slower.  I don’t make much of that up when I come up to you.  So time is moving slower for me down here than it is for you up there.

Fig 3  Down a gravity well. 

Now suppose our tangle of neutron path is so dense that light cannot escape at all.  The upgoing wiggle above comes to a dead stop.  That is a black hole; ours will be three dimensional.  Now that we have a black hole we can define a difference between In Here and Out There.   

Fig 4

Out There time can wander around in any direction in any place; on average it will be slightly the opposite of time In Here.  But In Here it has to move always in the same direction, since our black hole, the contents, are contracting and the gravity well us getting deeper.  We will say that Out There time is moving forward while In Here it moves backward.  Not only can nothing get out, nothing that falls in can catch up with what’s already here so In Here we are truly isolated.  Of course, it all has to wind up crunched in the middle, the opposite of the big bang, which didn’t happen; it just looks like that from In Here. J
Once the crunch starts, nothing can stop it, because strong things carry sound faster; eventually that sound would exceed the speed of light, which it can’t so there’s runaway collapse. J  Since matter is pulling on space, we aren’t surprised that it looks like space itself is falling in.  J

Either the laws of nature came with the neutron or the fact that the universe was going to have to produce life (wait for it) the laws had to be suitable. J

Now if you take a universe that contains a photon and a warm particle and change the size of the universe, the photon will change right along with it.  It doesn’t take any more information to find the photon since it occupies the same fraction of the universe, which is to say or “In Here.”  And the information content, and the energy equivalent, of knowing where the particle is changes because the temperature of the particle changes on average.  (If you’ve forgotten Maxwell’s Demon, ask that guy over there later.) 

But something is missing.  Particles of matter act differently  If you look at the energy of the particles in a gas, they are distributed along a curve such that the lowest energies have the most particles. 

Fig 5

At absolute zero, they all have no energy.  Therefor the information about their location is zero.  Their location is indeterminate – absolutely indeterminate.    

Fig 6

Frequency

Energy

That would mean that their location was somewhere in unlimited space.  Each could with equal probability be anywhere In Here, in fact it could just as well Out There, and since Out There has to be a lot larger than In Here, the chance of it even being In Here is vanishingly small.  Steven Hawking worked it all out – it was his masterpiece – and the phenomenon is called Hawking radiation.  It hasn’t actually been observed, but serious workers do not question Hawking’s calculations. 

Script directory.

Home page.