Down to the flickering sea of quarks

Exploring the profound flaw that underlies all our current theories of the universe

This is a sequel to a piece I posted back in May called In Cosmology, All Our Errors Lean The Same Way. That piece was popular, and I was happy with it, but it ended rather abruptly. Recently I’ve been working it up into a chapter for the book, and in doing so I’ve added a couple of thousand words to the ending, filling out some important concepts. This post is that new ending. If you haven’t read In Cosmology, All Our Errors Lean The Same Way, I recommend you do so (before reading this); it’s good! But you don’t have to: I have started this new piece with the last few paragraphs of the old piece, so that it works as a stand-alone post. Some of the ideas here, you will be familiar with from other posts, some not. (I’m still working out the best ways to phrase a few of these ideas, and where to put them in the book.) I’m particularly happy with the new section on how weird and wonderful the proton is, and would appreciate feedback on it. But please do put your thoughts, positive or negative, about anything at all here in the comments. What have I under-explained? What have I over-explained? What lines/ideas do you hate? What lines/ideas do you love?

IT’S NOT JUST A FLAW IN THE THEORY

Let’s return to the problem that these breakthroughs always point in the same direction: the universe is larger than we expected; the universe is more complicated than we expected; the universe is more structured than we expected; the universe is more energy-efficient than we expected; that energy is more meaningfully directed than we expected.

The fact that these repeated errors all point in the same direction is a sign that there is a major flaw in our entire approach. And that the flaw is likely to be an unexamined assumption underlying the whole theory, rather than an explicit and visible part of the theory itself.

If there were merely a flaw in the theory – a mathematical error of some kind, say – then those repeated identical errors should, by now, have given us the necessary information, the necessary feedback, to find the flaw in the theory, and fix it. Our errors should no longer all lean the same way.  But with a flawed underlying assumption that isn’t explicitly articulated inside the theory, you can go wrong in the same way again and again and again, without getting useful feedback.

PHYSICS IS PHYSICS; BUT…

Of course, there is a sense in which it shouldn’t matter whether you are studying an egg or a rock; physics is physics, and the same rules apply. But there is another sense in which it matters a lot; the way physics plays out in an egg is different to the way physics plays out in a rock of roughly the same size and chemical composition. Same physics; very different outcomes. In the egg, the energy that moves through the system does so along routes shaped by evolution, and so organises the system; in the rock, the energy that moves through the system does so randomly (as there are no evolved channels) and so disorganises the system. Eggs develop; rocks decay.

And so my argument is that until the mainstream scientific community change from a universe-as-rock paradigm to a universe-as-egg paradigm – to an evolved universe paradigm – they will continue to be blindsided by the unanticipated complexity of our universe’s structure; by the startling underlying efficiency of its messy processes; by the unexpected discovery of new, dynamic, out-of-equilibrium systems at all levels; by the surprising intricacy of its interlocking parts… In other words, by the many unanticipated ways in which the basic parameters of matter have been fine-tuned by evolution to interact, under specific developmental conditions, so as to generate structure, complexity, order, and efficiency, so as to ensure reproductive success (for our universe), through the mechanisms we discussed in the previous chapter.

EGGS DEVELOP, ROCKS DECAY

And, above all, until they start using egg physics rather than rock physics, they will be blindsided particularly badly in the early universe; particularly in the first billion years – the last refuge of randomness – where they thought they would, finally, find random matter blindly obeying arbitrary laws – and where instead, again and again (as I predicted), they are finding the structure, and order, of a fine-tuned, highly-evolved organism efficiently and rapidly proceeding along a clear developmental path.

GOT MYSELF A CRYING, TALKING, SLEEPING, WALKING, LIVING UNIVERSE

The phrase “a living universe” has been ruined by a million well-meaning, but scientifically illiterate, New Age books that can’t tell a galaxy from an asteroid; and yet, what else can you call a universe that, as it unfolds, spontaneously generates things like us, and the living world around us? A universe of which we are just a tiny sub-unit?

We have only just discovered, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, that spiral galaxies (made mostly of simple hydrogen and helium) rapidly self-assemble, star by star, around startlingly large supermassive black holes – far more rapidly than the mainstream anticipated.

And how do you even get supermassive black holes that massive, that early, that fast, without evolutionary fine-tuning of the starting conditions for our universe, so that the vast cloud of gas required is so lacking in turbulence and disorder that it can smoothly collapse in one go, without fragmenting on the way to form countless stars instead (as large gas clouds would do later in the development of our universe)?

So what we seem to be seeing is (as I predicted) a smooth early universe optimised for supermassive black hole formation; with those supermassive black holes, once generated, then shocking and enriching the entire surrounding environment, optimising it for star formation.

We know, too, that the stars in those galaxies go on to manufacture, in a multistep process, through stellar fusion – and widely distribute, through astonishingly powerful supernova explosions – the entire periodic table and its suite of heavier elements.

Which then self-assemble into not just planets, but rich, complex, self-regulating biospheres like our own Earth’s.

Which generate complex intelligent biological lifeforms, like us.

Which generate complex meta-intelligent networked technologies, like books, communication satellites, the internet, and (eventually, building on those foundations), artificial intelligence.

Which leads to another step-change in the rate of change, as that artificial intelligence forms a positive feedback loop with the people and technology that formed it – massively accelerating the potential rate change for the entire interdependent, and intimately entwined, biological, cultural, and technological system.

We live, then, in a living universe, endlessly generating orderly complex structures, at higher and higher levels of complexity, in sequenced, integrated, steps. A universe where all the various parts work surprisingly well together – and do so with all the exuberant, wasteful, brilliant, messy, improvisational logic of an evolved system at such a scale.

It’s a system which, over the lifetimes of countless ancestor universes, has – to borrow the language of evolutionary biology – random-walked its way through an immense possibility space to a local fitness peak.

And it is, crucially, a universe of Darwinian evolutionary processes nested inside other Darwinian evolutionary processes – with each moving more rapidly than the last, because each can run on rails laid down by those earlier evolutionary processes.

What is particularly fascinating (from a human point of view) is that human beings are currently at the growing tip of that living universe – our technological society is the hyperactive transformative point at the very top of that immense stack of evolutionary processes, driving the development to maturity of our specific universe.

No wonder it feels weird to be alive in this moment: we are the universe undergoing puberty.

In the past few decades, human beings have created – in labs here on Earth – temperatures colder than can exist naturally anywhere in this radiation-saturated universe; colder than the freezing voids of deep space. Meanwhile, by colliding particles at close to lightspeed, we have created temperatures of trillions of degrees; 250,000 times hotter than is found in the heart of our Sun. In our factories and laboratories, we have called into being hundreds of thousands of chemicals, compounds, and forms of matter which have never existed in the universe before.

Of course, other intelligent life forms on other planets around other stars may well have called them into being too: in an evolved universe, fine-tuned to generate life (because that ultimately leads to more efficient small black hole production, and thus more reproductive success for the universe itself), we are most definitely not going to turn out to be alone.

We are important, but we are not unique.

NESTED EVOLUTIONS

No, nature cannot produce these strange new materials unaided, just as she cannot turn sand into thinking computer chips, or advanced AI. But nature – our evolved, fine-tuned universe – can produce us (and others like us, on other worlds), and we can then perform these miracles of thinking sand. Thus the extremely rapid (because consciously directed and intentional) evolution of our technology (with human beings as the replicators), from the abacus through the primitive punchcard-mainframe computer to advanced cloud-based AI…

…All of this nested inside the slower (because less consciously directed) evolution of our societies (with, again, human beings as the replicators); from hunter-gatherer cultures, through the agricultural and industrial revolutions, to the exponentially faster change of technology-based societies, moving at the speed of software updates…

…All nested inside the faaaaar slower (because undirected) multi-billion year evolution of DNA organisms; from one-celled prokaryotic bacteria to giraffes, and giant redwoods, and Homo sapiens…

…All nested inside the unimaginably slow evolution – through generation after generation of ancestral universes – of matter itself, chemistry itself. An evolution invisible to us, because it occurred outside the lifetime of our specific, individual universe – the evolution that fine-tuned oxygen, carbon, phosphorus: evolution at the level of the proton and the electron; of the strong and weak nuclear force.

That unimaginably slow evolution at the level of universes shaped matter itself so that matter could shape the chemistry that allows for stuff like DNA, so that stuff like DNA could shape things like us, so that things like us – so that we, in this specific case, in this specific universe –could shape our silicon computers, AIs, and whatever it is we are going to do next…

There were earlier versions of all these things, at all these levels, in earlier generations of universe, that were less good at doing what they do: but by now, all of them, at all those levels, have been refined by the simple, subtle, patient, tool of evolution.

Our universe is coming to life through us. The very rocks are starting to think our thoughts. Because our specific universe evolved to do just this: it’s not a bizarre, inexplicable, unlikely, one-off accident – it’s a developmental process playing out, like gestation, or puberty, in a specific evolved human being.

And so it is evolution all the way up… and all the way down.

If we, and our technologies, and our thinking sand, are up there at the tip of the growing universe, and the top of the stack of nested evolutions, then let’s go back down, to see how this works; how the same force – evolution – shapes everything, at all levels, all scales, over all time horizons, inside our universe and out.

Yes, let’s go all the way down.

A delightful infographic that tries to show you a snapshot of all the quarks and gluons that make up the proton, as they pop in and out of existence. It’s pretty wild, huh? We are a long way from “A simple elementary particle with a positive charge.” PHOTO CREDIT: D. Dominguez / CERN

DOWN TO THE FLICKERING SEA OF QUARKS

Without the fine-tuned, highly evolved, complex structured perfection of, for example, the proton, there can be no stars, no galaxies, no technology-wielding organisms: no self-aware, matter-manipulating complex, structured universe.

Fine-tuned? Highly evolved? Complex? Structured? Yes. But you have to zoom in to see it…

As our tools have grown more sensitive over the past century-and-a-bit, our understanding of the proton has gone in exactly the same direction as everything else. Slowly, step by astonished observational step, the proton has transformed in our understanding from a simple lump of positive charge to a thing of almost infinite complexity – a process rather than an object – with three quarks held together by the strong force, mediated by gluons, floating in a sea of virtual quark-antiquark pairs and further, transitory, gluons, which constantly flicker in and out of existence to help maintain the proton’s remarkably unlikely, highly dynamic, out-of equilibrium stability.

Which is to say, our misunderstanding of the proton leaned in exactly the same direction as all our other misunderstandings. Our misunderstanding of stars. Our misunderstanding of galaxies. Our misunderstanding of the universe itself. Not a simple, dead object; instead a rich, lively, orderly process. Not random and unlikely; instead, evolved and necessary. Not arbitrary; instead, simply one layer of evolved, structured complexity, fine-tuned by evolution to play its part in a universe-sized system of such interlocking layers.

In cosmology, all our mistakes lean in the same direction.

If you just had a single universe, a random one-off, where matter had arbitrary qualities – well then, happening by chance to get a structured, complex, longterm-stable proton such as we find in our universe, and the structured, complex, longterm-stable universe (containing quintillions of black holes) which it allows to develop, would be far, far more than a quintillion-to-one-shot.

The wonderful recent paper (which I have mentioned before, yes, and will mention again; it’s terrific) by Michael L. Wong, Carol E. Cleland, Daniel Arend Jr., Stuart Bartlett, H. James Cleaves II, Heather Demarest, Anirudh Prabhu, Jonathan I. Lunine, and Robert M. Hazen – On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems – makes exactly this point, without quite making the leap to an evolutionary explanation. (But I am talking to a couple of them about maybe making that leap!)

One strategy for identifying important aspects of our complexifying universe is to imagine a “possible world” with the same initial low-entropy state that marches through time in full accordance with the second law, but does not produce any systems of increasing complexity. What would be different about that world that prohibits order, diversity, and function to arise?

In this patternless world of our imagination, systems smoothly march toward states of higher entropy without generating any long-lived pockets of low entropy, for example, because of an absence of attractive forces (gravity, electrostatics) or universal overriding repulsive forces. That is, no barriers exist that prevent systems from taking a direct path to thermodynamic equilibrium as they evolve. It may not even be possible to draw boundaries between different macroscopic “entities” in such a universe: Can anything be distinguished if the entire universe is just a soup of matter and energy, quickly dissipating random fluctuations, and cooling off indefinitely?

Our universe is not that imaginary universe: It produces entities that do not take the most direct paths to their highest entropy states. Something “frustrates” and sometimes directs the dissipation of free energy, permitting the long-lived existence of disequilibria.

–From On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems

Aaaaaargh, they are so close!

But if you have a long evolutionary series of universes, where the fundamental qualities of the matter vary slightly with each generation (loosely analogous to the variations in DNA in each generation of a biological organism), and where reproduction is through black holes/big bangs, and where those universes producing more black holes, big bangs, and thus baby universes, get, by definition, more chances to explore the nearby possibility space for those qualities of matter that they happen to have… well, yes, you could eventually get that unlikely, fine-tuned proton, in a universe producing unlikely numbers – quintillions – of black holes… and a heck of a lot of those pesky, hard-to-explain, “long-lived pockets of low entropy”. Reproductive success is rewarded, it leads to ever-finer fine tuning – and our black-hole-packed universe is clearly at the end of a very successful evolutionary line.

The naive anthropic principle would helplessly have you believe that structured, complex universes containing life (and extraordinary numbers of black holes), such as our own universe, are remarkably unlikely – their argument being that, given an infinite number of random universes, you’ll eventually get one or two like ours which – by pure chance, and against all odds – happen to generate life (and extraordinary numbers of black holes – which also don’t mean anything). Of course, they say, we’re not in any of the others – the infinite number of lifeless others – because they don’t contain life, and so have no one to observe them. We’re here because we’re here. We see this universe because we could see no other. We are freaks in a quintillion-to-one-shot, random, universe.

MAKING CHANCE GO AWAY

But if, instead, universes are the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process, then structured, complex, reproductively successful universes such as our own are not remarkably unlikely; they are instead highly likely – they are the majority; they are the rule. Down this evolutionary line, the vast majority of universes should by now produce (as ours seems to) hundreds of millions of supermassive black holes, then quintillions of smaller, stellar-mass black holes, and then (through matter-manipulating, energy producing-and-consuming lifeforms like us) incalculable numbers of (technologically-produced) ultra-small, energy-producing black holes. These are the three great (evolved) breakthroughs in reproductive success, down our universe’s evolutionary line.

In other words, in our specific universe: yes, the laws of nature and the properties of matter are fixed, just as a specific individual’s DNA is fixed. The basic properties of matter in our universe, and the DNA in our bodies, are both highly unlikely, and non-random: yet both got to that point of highly unlikely-looking, non-random, structured complexity through a lengthy, blind, random-walk evolutionary process that long precedes the birth of the individual. And in both cases, reproductive success provided the feedback that, generation by generation, moved the system away from randomness and towards its current structured complexity.

What we see, therefore, in the ongoing development of our universe since it was born in the Big Bang, is not random and arbitrary. But nor is what we are seeing here teleology – that is, purpose-driven behaviour due to the actions, or design, of some external God. It is, instead, what biologists would call teleonomy: purpose-driven behavior due to a code or mechanism. And that mechanism is evolution; that code is the basic parameters of matter, fine-tuned, over countless previous generations of ancestral universe, by that evolutionary mechanism.

This book will explore that process (indeed, that series of nested evolutionary processes) for our universe. The process of Darwinian evolution that led, step by step, from the earliest and most primitive, crudely duplicating, single-cell-of-a-universe, to this wild peacock, this giraffe, this blue whale of a universe, filled with thinking, feeling, living matter like me and you, transforming everything we touch; magic-making monkeys hurling ourselves exuberantly into space; sending our metal proxies to study other planets; teaching the very sand to think and argue and play chess and conjure visions and draw and design and build wild new machines (while both creating and solving astonishing new problems) – and all of it better and faster than we ever could alone.

We are the evolved universe coming alive, coming into being, coming into its power, and this book is the story of that universe, and how it came to be.