—Evermind Books—
Preface to "On the Origin"
"I want to know why the universe exists; why there is something rather than nothing."
Stephen Hawking, from his armchair,
in an interview with Dianne Sawyer,
ABC World News, 2010
The Big Question, “Why is there something rather than nothing,” is not a question that can be answered by physics because one must identify the cause of what there is, which cannot be seen through a telescope or under a microscope. Even if there was no Cosmic Microwave Background, which prevents us seeing the first moments of the universe, one has to identify the cause of space, time, and universal content.
Beyond hand waving, established physics can’t presently say what space and time is, or where these come from— both are taken as given. Instead, this is a question for what is known as first-philosophy, a question for thought alone, independent of hints and tips from our experience of the world. Until this book, first-philosophy has made no progress in this area—no progress at all. For me, this was not an issue, until it smacked me down in 1992.
Physics from the Outback
The year before, 1991, I moved to Charleville, Queensland, on the ancient lands of the Bidjara people of Outback Australia. Charleville is an 8-hour drive from the nearest reasonably populous place, nine hours to Meanjin, the ancient lands of the Turrbal people—the place we now call Brisbane, Queensland. To get to Charleville, my family and I drove for hours through mulga country. “Mulga” is a bushy, silvery-leafed tree with an amazing capacity to survive drought that covers the land from horizon to horizon. Into the night, I drove with a weather-eye out, watching for kangaroos. Not the little ones, the 2-meter high Big-Red. They weigh around the same as an human adult. Meeting one, you might be lucky, and it might jump over your bonnet (your “hood” if you are from the good ol’ USA).
I moved to Charleville, population 3,500, so I could study physics. While sparsely populated, and 900 km to my university, Charleville provided a good job and allowed time for part-time study by correspondence toward my physics degree. This was the only way I could meet my inner urge to pursue my need to understand the world.
This was seven years before anyone realized that the universe is accelerating slightly, against gravity, for no known reason. We later invented the name dark energy to explain this, but at the time, no one knew anything about it. At the time of writing, they still don’t. An answer will lift out of our reasoning in this book, "On the Origin."
At that time, I was not trying to find the origin of the world. I thought it all covered. You know—the Big Bang. I did not know then that the origin-of-all is not a question that physics can answer. I did not know that the idea of the Big Bang is actually the conclusion one gets if one assumes things like the law of conservation of mass/energy, then runs the universe backward (as one does!). This conservation law makes sense to us in the here-and-now, but it doesn’t actually make sense back at the origin of the universe. Specifically, why does the universe have the amount of mass and energy it has and not some other amount? Luck? Unlikely. Ernst Mach, of “Mach 1, Mach 2” fame, noted in 1894 (p. 5), “[T]o-day, after forty-seven years, the law of the conservation of energy, wherever civilization reaches, is accepted as a fully established truth and receives the widest applications in all domains of natural science.”
For the majority, he says, its success is its proof. However, there is no deep-going analysis of this law. Mach then comments that this success may later blind us to facts which do not fit with our favorite conceptions. For example, while we can identify various forms of energy, we still cannot identify what energy is in itself. Photons? Not really—a mass above the Earth has gravitational potential energy, for example. “Energy” is just giving a name to a situation.
I mention this because the universe is not only growing in size; it is accelerating slightly, against gravity. If acceleration is attributable to energy (we assume dark energy) then this energy does not obey the law of conservation of energy. Worse, if there is dark energy, it makes up around 68% of what there is; far more than the mass energy of the other items of our awareness, such as in atoms and in their motions. Dark energy seems to come from nowhere, so it massively violates the idea of the conservation of energy. This leads to various engaging theories that cannot be verified.
We’re left with core questions: Why does the universe contain this much mass and energy and not some other amount? Why is space expanding—and accelerating—at all? And where does dark energy—if there is such—come from?
What is needed is the ability to identify why the world exists and why it comes to be as we find it. Many people do not realize that identifying the origin of our beautiful universe is outside science, exactly because the scientific method is founded on experiment, but there is no experiment one can do, no observation that can be made, that penetrates the Cosmic Microwave Background, the supposed afterglow of the Big Bang, well after the supposed Big Bang happened.
Sitting at my desk in Charleville, in 1992, I knew nothing of these problems as I read a first-year physics textbook. My university, Central Queensland University (CQU), Rockhampton, on the ancient land of the Darumbal people, was some 900 km distant. At the time, the internet was just an imagination for most of us, and was spelled with a capital I.
CQU provided “distance education”—a book arriving every once in a while. There was no easy access for support other than expensive long-distance phone calls, assuming someone might answer. I recall asking a lecturer about a question in an assignment. He said on the phone, “I don’t know what to say, it’s so easy!” For the record, it wasn’t easy—there was a problem with the question, an assumption in the question. The bother was that I am not good at accepting assumptions, which leads to this book. Because of the isolation, I created world-models without the redirection of professors. More difficult, but one might end up with unexpected results.
The Fatal Flaw in the Foundation
Charleville is firing hot in summer (42 degrees C, around 108 F is not unusual) so I hid inside and studied physics, seeking to understand how the world works, and why it exists. I did not know that physics cannot answer such questions. My physics book said, “A hammer dropped from an air balloon at 200 meters (or whatever units) passes through all points on its way to the ground.” The book wanted me to calculate the velocity of the hammer at the moment it hits the ground.
Now, this is a simple physics question, but have you ever considered how the hammer gets there? To do so, for any point “in” the hammer, it must pass through an infinity of points. Yet to move from one point to the next must take a finite amount of time. If so, going from any point to any other must take infinity times a finite amount of time. But this is an infinite amount of time! If so, movement is impossible, the world freezes up, even if mathematics or equations provide an answer that says the opposite! Clearly, there was a problem with points, and so a problem with space and time and, well, everything!
I did not know that this was one of the main problems of ancient philosophers. 2,500 years ago, Zeno of Elea had identified this problem along with a number of related problems, following the reasoning of his teacher, Parmenides. I did not know that thousands of years of thought had not properly solved the problem.
Zeno’s paradoxes are sometimes shown to students of philosophy, then quietly swept under the carpet. Mathematicians sometimes claim to have solved it, but they use a fancy whisk to send the problem out of sight. Never having heard of Zeno of Elea, I found a solution to his paradoxes, as I will show later. The solution implies a unique origin and evolution of the world.
We will find that the solution magically produces things like the Planck time, (the shortest sensible amount of time) the Planck mass (a core value of quantum mechanics that presently makes no sense) and the Bekenstein-Hawking Universe Information Bound (the amount of information required to fully describe the universe but presently with no reason for having the value it has other than observation). And we will find the origin of protons, electrons, neutrons, quarks and quanta.
Moving Beyond the Big Hack
Here, we will begin with the antithesis of present scientific practice, being independent of experience, which is perfectly reasonable, because there was no basis for empirical science “before” the universe existed. I took my lead from Galileo Galilei. His book, A dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, written in 1632, led to his house arrest by the Catholic Church, who confined him to the small village of Arcetri, outside Florence (a lovely place, worth a visit). Published when he was 68, his arrest was for pushing the then riotous idea that the Earth moves around the Sun, not the Sun around the Earth as was believed at the time. His argument was held to contradict Holy Scripture. Consequently, he remained under arrest until the end of his life. Sad. Pitiful.
In the time of Galileo, the aim of university lecturers was to instruct pupils in the ideas of the Ancients, through the works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and Pythagoras for example. Following these Ancients led to a physics in which objects move only when acted upon, projectiles shot from a cannon should move in a straight line, then fall to Earth, and the Earth itself stands still relative to the “heavens”, with the Sun and Moon orbiting it. The world for these people was a nice, certain, if complicated and contradictory place to live. Galileo found these early ideas challenging to the point that when young, he left university with no qualification and began his study essentially independently. To him we owe a lot.
Equally, when On the origin of species was first published, Charles Darwin found a similar response. The idea that we descend from the apes led to him being hounded by the ministries, by the newspapers, and by people in general. That is, people poked out their bottom lip—who wants to descend from the apes? Fortunately, by Darwin’s time having a contrary view rarely ended with one’s imprisonment, only derision. To this we might add Wegener’s proposition of the 20th Century that the continents of the Earth move. Had he died of old age, rather than dying in the ice of Greenland, he might have felt more satisfaction when people finally accepted his view. Lastly, we might consider the pushback against Einstein’s seemingly crazy idea that time dilates (“slows down”) if you move faster. This never gained him a Nobel Prize.
Our scientific challenges are as odd now as they were then. Our cosmological theories have no answer as to why the world exists, or for the positive acceleration of structures in the universe beyond reinstating a symbol in Einstein’s equation of General Relativity. The symbol, $\Lambda$, represents a cosmological constant, originally only placed there to make the universe match the expectation that the universe should be in a steady-state, neither expanding nor contracting. Einstein didn’t like adding this symbol, he felt it was a hack—and it is. Instead, I will argue that the expansion is not caused by “dark energy.” I will show that energy is simply a co-effect of the actual cause. Unexpectedly, if we begin with thought alone, we will find that the hot Big Bang was more likely an immensely cold growth of structure.
This should not be unexpected. It has often been noted that for all its explanatory power and beauty, the Big Bang cannot answer several vexing questions (Shackelford, 2007): What banged? Why did it bang when it did, and seemingly everywhere at once? What existed before it banged? But science begins at best just after the origin; it does not and cannot begin at the beginning.
For the mathematician, this book later explains the origin of number and geometry, and “no” it isn’t just “there.” We will show that there was no space, time, number or geometry at the origin—these lift out of an inescapable condition that relates to all that can be.
A last bother with present ideas is less obvious—more hidden. That is, there is necessarily just one world, one totality, by definition. If so, physics, first-philosophy and relevant mathematics should simply be different ways of looking at the same thing. Yet they don’t agree. Worse, they are presently disconnected. That is, while all our supposed knowledge of the world should reduce to tonal variations of the same world, instead, many inconsistencies, paradoxes and impossibilities arise. We will fix these later.
So, perhaps brace yourself. This book begins by washing the slate clean, the way of the Endpoint-Skeptic, and we will begin with an entirely different method. This book does not assume space, time, particles, or fields. We begin only with necessary truth and show what must follow. Nothing is assumed; everything is derived. This shift dissolves the paradoxes explored in the chapters ahead, and produces space, time, protons, electrons, quarks, quanta and a basis for all there is.
A Gentle Suggestion for the Reader
As you continue, you may find the need to suspend familiar intuitions — not because they are wrong or naïve, but because they are downstream. Much of our experience as humans sets us to interpreting the world in three spatial dimensions and one dimension of time. This framework is enormously effective, but it is also a preference: a way of engaging with the world that has evolved through habit, perception, and survival, rather than through ontological necessity.
In what follows, we will be forced to accept that this familiar picture is not privileged. It is one valid representation among others. This will become clearer as we move forward. The reason some parts of this book may feel cognitively challenging is precisely because they aim to loosen this representational habit and to examine what must be the case prior to any particular way of seeing the world. Human spatial and temporal intuition is a representational habit, not an ontological guide.