Our universe always turns out to be bigger, more structured, more complex, and more weirdly efficient, than we've anticipated. So what are we doing wrong?
I would benefit from you discussing these ideas with mainstream cosmologists working in the trenches, perhaps in a podcast. Would be great to hear them say "Interesting idea, but I'm a bureaucrat physicist and that's above my pay grade" or "You are bonkers, that runs into X, Y and Z problems".
Also, what is the best book to read on Cosmological Evolution?
Andrew! Lovely to see you here. (Check out his Substack, people; interesting stuff on language and consciousness…)
I’m delighted you said that, because it’s a thing I’ve been thinking of doing. I had a couple of good conversations lately with interesting scientists from various areas of relevance to my work (including one of the authors of the Universe Breakers paper; extremely interesting conversation), and afterwards I wished I’d recorded them for possible podcast use here. So, I will try.
Best book… well, there isn’t really a book for a general readership (which is one reason I’m writing one here). But the original book by Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997) gives you all the physics behind the idea. It’s quite dry and abstract, but gives by far the best basic overview. Here’s a link…
Hi Julian, it's a thrilling polymathematical exercise, and a seemingly inevitable direction from you after all the physics asides in your novels! Also a far more interesting way to do pop-sci history than the well-trodden path. Hope you're feeling a bit better.
I have only dipped my toe into your project, and am a particle physicist rather than cosmologist, but I would query the extent to which the historical development suggests that the universe itself is evolutionary, rather than it being our perception of it which has necessarily been iterated and refined. And recursive complexity can mean fractal simplicity rather than evolutionary development -- I'm sure you have or will touch on chaotic inflation and the like + anthropics as a mechanism to generate that "naturallly". Much debated, though.
Anyway, just wanted to give a -- maybe -- conventional physicist view, and see your thoughts on what options there might be beyond our quasi-established picture.
Andy, I'm delighted you are joining the conversation. And even more delighted you've read some of my fiction! Glad the rather cheeky particle accelerator scenes in Jude in London didn't put you off my work... (ASIDE TO OTHER READERS, so you'll know what the hell we are talking about here: no, we don't know each other, but I do know that Andy has done a lot of important work at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is both the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and home to the biggest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider. He's a heavy, heavy dude in the world of particle physics.)
I agree with you fully that our perception of the universe has been iterated and refined over the past few hundred years, and that in some ways it's obvious that it had to turn out to be larger and more complicated than a bunch of apes recently descended from the trees would have expected. But that's not quite what I'm talking about here, and I hope, over time to win you over...
I think one of the things that needs to be explained is the bunch of apes descending from the trees, which is a rather startling thing for a cloud of hot gas to, eventually, generate; and which, of course, particle physics doesn't see as its problem. ("We totally understand the particle interactions, and they lead to that, so... problem solved.")
But why, and how, would a random universe of seventeen fundamental particles and a handful of laws, all with arbitrary-seeming characteristics, and with values that are all over the shop (fine structure constant, anyone?), generate something like that that, and so swiftly? (To go from a dense hot soup of particles to a complex, stable biosphere in a few billion years... it's ABSURDLY fast. A few billion years is NOTHING.) I think there needs to be an explanation; there needs to be a reason; there needs to be a mechanism. The unlikelihood is otherwise so far off the scale that it's beyond ridiculous.
Any given organism living on earth right now is basically an ongoing, single, continuous, ever-complexifying metabolic reaction that started three billion years ago, and hasn't been interrupted, even once, in that time. Every single living organism today is a tiny, membrane-bound, open system that happens to have been fed the right amount of energy and matter to continue climbing the cliff of entropy every single day, for several billion years. It just happened to happen? Randomly? In a one-shot universe with arbitrary characteristics? Come on! The closed system of the universe that generates and sustains those tiny closed subsystems has to be implicated in what happened. The conditions under which DNA life can emerge and DNA evolution can occur: they are astonishingly odd, and they require explanation.
We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here is just dodging the question. And evolution is the only mechanism we know of that can move matter from simplicity to that kind of hyper-complexity (given enough iterations, with inheritance). So, if evolution can cause the suite of 96 naturally-occurring elements to generate DNA-based life, then evolution can cause far something simpler and earlier to generate the suite of 96 naturally occurring elements.
You're right that recursive complexity can mean fractal simplicity rather than evolutionary development; but... aaaargh, this is turning into a post, not a brief answer to a comment. Actually, your points are good, I might take this offline and write a proper post in response. Or two: I'm already writing a post on the anthropic principle, and how it doesn't solve the problems that an evolved universe solves. So you will get your answers in time.
But, before I go... the chaotic inflation theory you mention is an interesting one, as it is possible to make it an evolutionary theory of universes, if you can have inheritance. Though it's usually not used that way; the universes are usually assumed to be random in their values. As such, it can't explain what we see when we look around us. (A random bunch of universes that didn't inherit anything from their parent universes and which generate new random universes with no inheritance... it will just be a mess forever. Imagine DNA life... but without inheritance.) And chaotic inflation does have some of the virtues of Smolin's cosmological natural selection, in that it gives you a universe of universes that has always existed, and always will. So it solves the "where did it come from?" problem. (And the "where is it going?" problem.) So I'm certainly open to the possibility of a chaotic inflation theory that allows for inheritance. What I want to explain is why our universe cascades upward into complexity. I think evolution at the level of universes is the only mechanism that can lead to a universe behaving like that. I'm not so worried about the specifics of how that evolution happens; I think Smolin's is the best theory, for a bunch of reasons, but chaotic inflation is not entirely out of the running.
OK, this is way too long! I need to answer some more people... But we will get back to these fascinating subjects soon, I hope, and I do appreciate you getting involved. Please, please give me feedback when you think I've got something totally wrong in your area, or draw it to my attention if I have reinvented the wheel; both these things will happen sometimes, as, having only one life and a zillion fields to cover for this book, I have most definitely not read all the literature.
Thanks for mentioning how all life in earth is a singlw metabolic process. Sarah Walker says "life is a planetary scale phenomenon.". Chris Fields has a good lecture on YouTube about all life having the same continuous cytoplasm since LUCA.
These kinds of things are fascinating and I wish I had learned them much younger. Because it changes the story! That matters to how we behave. Who knows what kind of effects on politics or the environment a cultural shift towards appreciating that Earth can be thought of as a singe life form would bring. If we could thnk of the whole universe that way ... that I can't even imagine. Stories matter.
I appreciate that you are open to other mechanisms like chaotic inflation. Follow the data, not the dogma, you never know what you might discover!
I wonder if scientists shy away from speaking as if cosmic process have any kind of purpose to avoid giving fuel to the intelligent design / Biblical literalist crowd.
I think that's a mistake - natural selection has won the battle of public opinion on humans origins and that's not going to change. Now it's time to move along from the defense mode and get curious about what we see. Open up new avenues of inquiry and ways of talking a about cosmology.
Enjoyed this and can definitely get on board with the Universe (or bigger...life?) being a living, evolving, growing 'thing'. Hints of process theory it seems like.
And, in physics terms, Ilya Prigogine makes a distinction between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming"... I'm definitely more interested in the physics of becoming. Egg physics!
Janet, it is a delight to learn of you reading this on Bainbridge Island. (My mother-in-law lives not that far north of you, in Bellingham; a place I'm very fond of. My old friend Phil "The Punk" Rose lives there too!)
Thanks, this is a great write-up. This is exactly why I started writing a hard sci-fi novel set on contemporary Earth: in order to explore the science of strange physics (aka physics that evolve as the egg matures) you need either to go into a lifetime of academic studies - all of which are tainted with a materialist bias. I've been thinking a lot about the "separation" of church and science with the Copernican revolution, and which biases that were inherited by science. The materialist bias (God as a maker of the universe, separate from it, and Jesus as a carpenter are perhaps the two foremost examples in religion) has stunted both our understanding of consciousness and the universe by separating them.
I wanted to write something light, so it's a mystery with both humans an aliens involved, and the aliens give me opportunities to explore the possibilities of consciousness being a fundamental (repulsive) force of the universe. For my aliens, evolution of consciousness and cosmology are the same, with biology being a branch of cosmology just like astronomy. Your quote "the flow of energy through the universe is such that, step by step, it builds out and protects complexity" is very much in line with the basic tenets of quinten force as my aliens understand it.
Hi Julian, it's the first time I read you... You give a list of examples of our errors in the 'same direction': universe is larger... more complicated... more efficient...
The list is missing "the universe is older than expected". The redshift-velocity-expansion interpretation has been contested since Hubble discovered the redshift-distance relationship. Just because all alternative explanations of redshift have failed (so far) doesn't mean that we have proved that redshift means expansion.
Unfortunately, any attempt at studying the universe outside the redshift-velocity-expansion dogma is met with "that's been proven wrong", which is no better than a strawman argument.
The video suggests an alternative cosmology that deserves to be studied seriously: "these are small, the ones out there are far away, and none of them are receding from you."
I am curious what you think would be the mechanism of this 'evolution'. 'Natural selection' doesn't seem credible, not that it seems credible even in terrestrial biology. I mean are two parent universes getting it on and the universes competing in some sense with a 'survival of the fittest'?
To be clear, I agree with your premises but I don't think that I see the conclusion in sharp enough focus to have an opinion on it one way or the other.
... but that's quite a long, detailed post, and I think I need a snappier one to use as a quick answer.
Oh, I also answer the question in this new Youtube interview with The Zone – but it's over two hours long, so that does not solve the snappiness problem!
Snappy version: Evolution at the level of universes is a very basic and straightforward form of evolution, in many ways simpler than DNA evolution because you don't have competition, sexual selection, etc: it's just driven by simple differential reproductive success.
This is the reproductive mechanism: Every black hole (which is a contracting singularity leaving the parent universe) "bounces" to become a big bang (which is an expanding singularity generating a child universe – a brand new bubble of spacetime). That is, a black hole and a big bang are simply the same thing (a singularity) seen from opposite sides.
Actually, I'm just going to quote myself from my earlier post here, because I put it fairly succinctly: "Lee Smolin’s marvellous leap was to realise that if the basic parameters of matter in the new baby universe varied very slightly from the parameters in the parent universe, then that would lead to either more or less black hole production in that new universe: that is, to more, or less, reproductive success. And if the variation was slight (and not large and totally random, as Wheeler had imagined), then it would be heritable.
Successful universes would have more offspring, who would inherit that successful variation, and, in turn, vary it slightly.
That iterated variation would make the evolution of universes, generation by generation, inevitable…"
So, that's how universes evolve. There is no competition, because universes are not competing for resources in a shared environment; each universe is both organism AND environment. (Which is why so much of a universe goes toward efficient energy production, through fusion and gravitational collapse; each universe has to provide an entire lifetime supply of energy, enough to fuel the entire developmental process, as there is no exterior environment to supply it.)
Hope that was helpful! Ask follow-up questions if that wasn't clear.
I can see why that would select for a universe that produces singularities, but it seems to me that anytime you have enough mass and it isn't so low density as to preclude a big crunch scenario you will get one or more singularities, unless we assume that differences in the properties of the matter make that rather less certain.
1)Is the mass /inside/ of the child universe proportional to the mass of the parent singularity?
2)What happens to the parent singularity when the child universe either goes Big Crunch or Big Chill?
3)If a universe goes Big Crunch, is the universe created by its collapsing into a singularity an identical clone of the parent?
4)Other than selecting for a slow-burn universe(efficient use of energy), how does this select for the complexity of your egg? The energy generation of a star would actually seem to slow its collapse into a black hole versus a body with nothing to push against the gravity but the same mass/density. Wouldn't the most prolific black hole generator be a universe in which space time expands but stars are dark bodies. If we assume that the cascading organization(cascading isn't quite the right word but I'm not sure what a reverse cascade is, the organization at multiple levels anyway) is useful to increase efficiency of energy use, what is its connection with black hole production?
5) How are the parameters of the parent-universe communicated to the child and what would cause them to be similar but slightly varied? This in itself would be the most important feature. What 'evolved' this feature?
Really neat idea. Lot to think about. I finally know what 'the egg' is and what 'the rock' is. So, very cool.
>Lee Smolin’s marvellous leap was to realise that if the basic parameters of matter in the new baby universe varied very slightly from the parameters in the parent universe
Oh interesting, so it's part of the theory's construction. Kind of funny to think of the universe parameters as "sticky" when being reborn through a black hole. You need them to vary just a little in order to be conditioned on the parameters of the parents, otherwise there is no evolution.
If I remember right, elsewhere he talks about black holes making new universes, with some randomization of the parent universe's base parameters. So holes are still involved, but it's asexual.
Do you have any advice for learning more about this from a starting point of zero (or maybe even less than that...)? I found this post super interesting but don't know what to do with that
I don't buy the use of the term "multiverses". The word Universe is defined as everything that is, so even a prior big bang would still be a part of the universe. I don't buy big bang theory but if one does, the word multiverse is not acceptable to my pedantic side.
The Big Bang was originally proposed br George's LeMaitre, a Belgian Priest. In my opinion it was an attempt to protect the idea of creationism once we knew that the universe was much older than 6000 years.
In my view there is no beginning or end to the universe (spatially or temporally). With each new observation, latest being Webb, we see more (much more) of the same thing.
It is likely that red shift we observe is the result of something other than doppler effect. Some natural change over time of the wavelength of light which increases with age. One proposal I toy with speculates that time itself speeds up and that the ancient light only appears stretched because our clock runs faster today. That also explains the CMB as light so ancient that it appears stretched into the radio spectrum..and beyond into extreme longcwavelengts.
Mathematics can emulate infinity, but cannot actually calculate against a value of infinity. Since science requires mathematics, the idea of an infinite universe lies outside of science and is labeled "supernatural".
My substack has a couple of essays with this layman's thoughts on Cosmology.
It seems that the Big Bang is our way of humanizing the universe by giving it the attribute of birth and death. Perhaps this is out of jealousy that we must die and the universe will go on.
The majority of matter is inanimate and non living. Only a tiny percentage evolves into life under the right conditions. Matter/energy does not require birth nor death. It is in motion and constant conversion from one form into another and this process could continue forever.
I am not an atheist attempting to challenge the scriptures. I believe they were written by wise men as an operating manual for living a better life. Perhaps Genesis is not a description of the creation of the universe, but a description of our own birth. Perhaps the story of Armageddon is a lesson in the personal struggle we encounter as we near death.
Most of the great scientists were religious in nature but non dogmatic. Einstein wrote of the beauty of nature being always far beyond the grasp of mere mortals.
In my earliest religious instruction I recall being told that God is infinite and eternal, which is a beautiful thought for me. So why would such a God sit around and wait until a specific point in eternity to will the universe into being? I propose there was never a period of waiting or contemplation. It simply always was and always will be, infinite and eternal, seen and unseen.
Pantheism, or something similar is, in my opinion, a good practice for anyone who believes that faith and science are more than compatible. The two are quite complementary in my opinion.
This is only a half-formed thought — I loved this update, and I got genuinely hot under the collar at a fellow Russell's sidelining of a evidence-driven voice due to alliances with The Institutions of power, gender, and tradition. However, I also found myself knee-jerking at the implications and connotations of a few words that you chose. When you say that the Universe generates and protects complexity, I read that as stating or implying intent and direction.
Now, I am a fully-fledged member of the narrative that has erred on the side of assuming that the universe is entropic, and tends toward nothingness and eventual heat-death. So I recognize that my perspective (some might call it nihilistic) is being challenged by any evidence that — and here's a word you didn't use, but which floated to the top of my brain as associated with the words you did choose — environments that support complexity are being *nurtured* by cosmological processes. Which feels like a bridge too far in terms of personification of cosmic forces. Fine for Stan Lee and Steve Englehart, but not my particular cup of tea.
So that's an instinctive, protective response to my worldview being challenged, and I don't really have much more to share than an awareness of that and an investment in further discussions and discourse on this topic, because now I'm defensive but intrigued to figure out if I need to update my own underlying assumptions. A process which is always hard. With all the tangents you hinted at pursuing in future posts, maybe also: how does dogma get changed?
This website is FILLED with the "mavericks" of science who were snubbed, dismissed and ridiculed - who turned out to be correct! Eddington and Chandrasekhar is so egregrious - because it's also got the intersections of race + colonialism working against the quest for truth.
There is so much investigative science happening right now that is suggesting a much more compassionate, nurturing and self-conscience universe that is making me hopeful for our collective future as descendants of Creation. Sheldrake for one...
I think we need to write the "observer" - the subject directing attention in the observation, into the equation. I think that will solve the TOE problem and unite all scales. We can't come to any real understanding of the universe while simultaneously trying to stand outside of it.
Thank you, Lezley. Yes, it's an interesting time for science generally! I'm a huge fan of mainstream reductionist materialist science, as it has proved INCREDIBLY effective at uncovering useful truths, but I am not a fan of the scientism which some of its adherents have slipped into. There are truths reductionism can't uncover, and there are other equally valid routes to truth; so my approach is that of the enthusiastic improviser; to reductionism I say , "Yes! And..."
And yes, I do love Rupert. I definitely don't agree with him on everything, but his analysis of the dogmas of science is useful, accurate, and beautifully expressed.
I would benefit from you discussing these ideas with mainstream cosmologists working in the trenches, perhaps in a podcast. Would be great to hear them say "Interesting idea, but I'm a bureaucrat physicist and that's above my pay grade" or "You are bonkers, that runs into X, Y and Z problems".
Also, what is the best book to read on Cosmological Evolution?
Andrew! Lovely to see you here. (Check out his Substack, people; interesting stuff on language and consciousness…)
I’m delighted you said that, because it’s a thing I’ve been thinking of doing. I had a couple of good conversations lately with interesting scientists from various areas of relevance to my work (including one of the authors of the Universe Breakers paper; extremely interesting conversation), and afterwards I wished I’d recorded them for possible podcast use here. So, I will try.
Best book… well, there isn’t really a book for a general readership (which is one reason I’m writing one here). But the original book by Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997) gives you all the physics behind the idea. It’s quite dry and abstract, but gives by far the best basic overview. Here’s a link…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos
Hi Julian, it's a thrilling polymathematical exercise, and a seemingly inevitable direction from you after all the physics asides in your novels! Also a far more interesting way to do pop-sci history than the well-trodden path. Hope you're feeling a bit better.
I have only dipped my toe into your project, and am a particle physicist rather than cosmologist, but I would query the extent to which the historical development suggests that the universe itself is evolutionary, rather than it being our perception of it which has necessarily been iterated and refined. And recursive complexity can mean fractal simplicity rather than evolutionary development -- I'm sure you have or will touch on chaotic inflation and the like + anthropics as a mechanism to generate that "naturallly". Much debated, though.
Anyway, just wanted to give a -- maybe -- conventional physicist view, and see your thoughts on what options there might be beyond our quasi-established picture.
Andy, I'm delighted you are joining the conversation. And even more delighted you've read some of my fiction! Glad the rather cheeky particle accelerator scenes in Jude in London didn't put you off my work... (ASIDE TO OTHER READERS, so you'll know what the hell we are talking about here: no, we don't know each other, but I do know that Andy has done a lot of important work at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is both the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and home to the biggest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider. He's a heavy, heavy dude in the world of particle physics.)
I agree with you fully that our perception of the universe has been iterated and refined over the past few hundred years, and that in some ways it's obvious that it had to turn out to be larger and more complicated than a bunch of apes recently descended from the trees would have expected. But that's not quite what I'm talking about here, and I hope, over time to win you over...
I think one of the things that needs to be explained is the bunch of apes descending from the trees, which is a rather startling thing for a cloud of hot gas to, eventually, generate; and which, of course, particle physics doesn't see as its problem. ("We totally understand the particle interactions, and they lead to that, so... problem solved.")
But why, and how, would a random universe of seventeen fundamental particles and a handful of laws, all with arbitrary-seeming characteristics, and with values that are all over the shop (fine structure constant, anyone?), generate something like that that, and so swiftly? (To go from a dense hot soup of particles to a complex, stable biosphere in a few billion years... it's ABSURDLY fast. A few billion years is NOTHING.) I think there needs to be an explanation; there needs to be a reason; there needs to be a mechanism. The unlikelihood is otherwise so far off the scale that it's beyond ridiculous.
Any given organism living on earth right now is basically an ongoing, single, continuous, ever-complexifying metabolic reaction that started three billion years ago, and hasn't been interrupted, even once, in that time. Every single living organism today is a tiny, membrane-bound, open system that happens to have been fed the right amount of energy and matter to continue climbing the cliff of entropy every single day, for several billion years. It just happened to happen? Randomly? In a one-shot universe with arbitrary characteristics? Come on! The closed system of the universe that generates and sustains those tiny closed subsystems has to be implicated in what happened. The conditions under which DNA life can emerge and DNA evolution can occur: they are astonishingly odd, and they require explanation.
We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here is just dodging the question. And evolution is the only mechanism we know of that can move matter from simplicity to that kind of hyper-complexity (given enough iterations, with inheritance). So, if evolution can cause the suite of 96 naturally-occurring elements to generate DNA-based life, then evolution can cause far something simpler and earlier to generate the suite of 96 naturally occurring elements.
You're right that recursive complexity can mean fractal simplicity rather than evolutionary development; but... aaaargh, this is turning into a post, not a brief answer to a comment. Actually, your points are good, I might take this offline and write a proper post in response. Or two: I'm already writing a post on the anthropic principle, and how it doesn't solve the problems that an evolved universe solves. So you will get your answers in time.
But, before I go... the chaotic inflation theory you mention is an interesting one, as it is possible to make it an evolutionary theory of universes, if you can have inheritance. Though it's usually not used that way; the universes are usually assumed to be random in their values. As such, it can't explain what we see when we look around us. (A random bunch of universes that didn't inherit anything from their parent universes and which generate new random universes with no inheritance... it will just be a mess forever. Imagine DNA life... but without inheritance.) And chaotic inflation does have some of the virtues of Smolin's cosmological natural selection, in that it gives you a universe of universes that has always existed, and always will. So it solves the "where did it come from?" problem. (And the "where is it going?" problem.) So I'm certainly open to the possibility of a chaotic inflation theory that allows for inheritance. What I want to explain is why our universe cascades upward into complexity. I think evolution at the level of universes is the only mechanism that can lead to a universe behaving like that. I'm not so worried about the specifics of how that evolution happens; I think Smolin's is the best theory, for a bunch of reasons, but chaotic inflation is not entirely out of the running.
OK, this is way too long! I need to answer some more people... But we will get back to these fascinating subjects soon, I hope, and I do appreciate you getting involved. Please, please give me feedback when you think I've got something totally wrong in your area, or draw it to my attention if I have reinvented the wheel; both these things will happen sometimes, as, having only one life and a zillion fields to cover for this book, I have most definitely not read all the literature.
Thanks for mentioning how all life in earth is a singlw metabolic process. Sarah Walker says "life is a planetary scale phenomenon.". Chris Fields has a good lecture on YouTube about all life having the same continuous cytoplasm since LUCA.
These kinds of things are fascinating and I wish I had learned them much younger. Because it changes the story! That matters to how we behave. Who knows what kind of effects on politics or the environment a cultural shift towards appreciating that Earth can be thought of as a singe life form would bring. If we could thnk of the whole universe that way ... that I can't even imagine. Stories matter.
I appreciate that you are open to other mechanisms like chaotic inflation. Follow the data, not the dogma, you never know what you might discover!
I wonder if scientists shy away from speaking as if cosmic process have any kind of purpose to avoid giving fuel to the intelligent design / Biblical literalist crowd.
I think that's a mistake - natural selection has won the battle of public opinion on humans origins and that's not going to change. Now it's time to move along from the defense mode and get curious about what we see. Open up new avenues of inquiry and ways of talking a about cosmology.
Enjoyed this and can definitely get on board with the Universe (or bigger...life?) being a living, evolving, growing 'thing'. Hints of process theory it seems like.
Yep, you may well detect hints of process theory. There is certainly some process ontology, or process philosophy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy
And, in physics terms, Ilya Prigogine makes a distinction between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming"... I'm definitely more interested in the physics of becoming. Egg physics!
Yea, sorry, that's what I meant...theory. Egg-on sir!
Shifted my perspective so I can now see from the two points of view. That’s progress. That’s the point. Yes?
Good morning read here on Bainbridge Island, 30 minute ferry ride from Seattle inside the watery flexed arm of Washington State.
Janet, it is a delight to learn of you reading this on Bainbridge Island. (My mother-in-law lives not that far north of you, in Bellingham; a place I'm very fond of. My old friend Phil "The Punk" Rose lives there too!)
Another brilliant one. Thank you for this.
Thanks! And you’re welcome!
Thanks, this is a great write-up. This is exactly why I started writing a hard sci-fi novel set on contemporary Earth: in order to explore the science of strange physics (aka physics that evolve as the egg matures) you need either to go into a lifetime of academic studies - all of which are tainted with a materialist bias. I've been thinking a lot about the "separation" of church and science with the Copernican revolution, and which biases that were inherited by science. The materialist bias (God as a maker of the universe, separate from it, and Jesus as a carpenter are perhaps the two foremost examples in religion) has stunted both our understanding of consciousness and the universe by separating them.
I wanted to write something light, so it's a mystery with both humans an aliens involved, and the aliens give me opportunities to explore the possibilities of consciousness being a fundamental (repulsive) force of the universe. For my aliens, evolution of consciousness and cosmology are the same, with biology being a branch of cosmology just like astronomy. Your quote "the flow of energy through the universe is such that, step by step, it builds out and protects complexity" is very much in line with the basic tenets of quinten force as my aliens understand it.
Hi Michael! Yes, I would be in full agreement with your aliens: biology should be seen as just as much a branch of cosmology as astronomy is.
Best of luck with your novel...
Hi Julian, it's the first time I read you... You give a list of examples of our errors in the 'same direction': universe is larger... more complicated... more efficient...
The list is missing "the universe is older than expected". The redshift-velocity-expansion interpretation has been contested since Hubble discovered the redshift-distance relationship. Just because all alternative explanations of redshift have failed (so far) doesn't mean that we have proved that redshift means expansion.
Unfortunately, any attempt at studying the universe outside the redshift-velocity-expansion dogma is met with "that's been proven wrong", which is no better than a strawman argument.
The video suggests an alternative cosmology that deserves to be studied seriously: "these are small, the ones out there are far away, and none of them are receding from you."
I am curious what you think would be the mechanism of this 'evolution'. 'Natural selection' doesn't seem credible, not that it seems credible even in terrestrial biology. I mean are two parent universes getting it on and the universes competing in some sense with a 'survival of the fittest'?
To be clear, I agree with your premises but I don't think that I see the conclusion in sharp enough focus to have an opinion on it one way or the other.
Good question, and one I am asked a lot, so I may write a short post just to address it. I do answer it, at length, in one of my earliest posts:
https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/in-which-i-tell-you-about-my-next
... but that's quite a long, detailed post, and I think I need a snappier one to use as a quick answer.
Oh, I also answer the question in this new Youtube interview with The Zone – but it's over two hours long, so that does not solve the snappiness problem!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFkjb6ZEGy8
Snappy version: Evolution at the level of universes is a very basic and straightforward form of evolution, in many ways simpler than DNA evolution because you don't have competition, sexual selection, etc: it's just driven by simple differential reproductive success.
This is the reproductive mechanism: Every black hole (which is a contracting singularity leaving the parent universe) "bounces" to become a big bang (which is an expanding singularity generating a child universe – a brand new bubble of spacetime). That is, a black hole and a big bang are simply the same thing (a singularity) seen from opposite sides.
Actually, I'm just going to quote myself from my earlier post here, because I put it fairly succinctly: "Lee Smolin’s marvellous leap was to realise that if the basic parameters of matter in the new baby universe varied very slightly from the parameters in the parent universe, then that would lead to either more or less black hole production in that new universe: that is, to more, or less, reproductive success. And if the variation was slight (and not large and totally random, as Wheeler had imagined), then it would be heritable.
Successful universes would have more offspring, who would inherit that successful variation, and, in turn, vary it slightly.
That iterated variation would make the evolution of universes, generation by generation, inevitable…"
So, that's how universes evolve. There is no competition, because universes are not competing for resources in a shared environment; each universe is both organism AND environment. (Which is why so much of a universe goes toward efficient energy production, through fusion and gravitational collapse; each universe has to provide an entire lifetime supply of energy, enough to fuel the entire developmental process, as there is no exterior environment to supply it.)
Hope that was helpful! Ask follow-up questions if that wasn't clear.
I can see why that would select for a universe that produces singularities, but it seems to me that anytime you have enough mass and it isn't so low density as to preclude a big crunch scenario you will get one or more singularities, unless we assume that differences in the properties of the matter make that rather less certain.
1)Is the mass /inside/ of the child universe proportional to the mass of the parent singularity?
2)What happens to the parent singularity when the child universe either goes Big Crunch or Big Chill?
3)If a universe goes Big Crunch, is the universe created by its collapsing into a singularity an identical clone of the parent?
4)Other than selecting for a slow-burn universe(efficient use of energy), how does this select for the complexity of your egg? The energy generation of a star would actually seem to slow its collapse into a black hole versus a body with nothing to push against the gravity but the same mass/density. Wouldn't the most prolific black hole generator be a universe in which space time expands but stars are dark bodies. If we assume that the cascading organization(cascading isn't quite the right word but I'm not sure what a reverse cascade is, the organization at multiple levels anyway) is useful to increase efficiency of energy use, what is its connection with black hole production?
5) How are the parameters of the parent-universe communicated to the child and what would cause them to be similar but slightly varied? This in itself would be the most important feature. What 'evolved' this feature?
Really neat idea. Lot to think about. I finally know what 'the egg' is and what 'the rock' is. So, very cool.
>Lee Smolin’s marvellous leap was to realise that if the basic parameters of matter in the new baby universe varied very slightly from the parameters in the parent universe
Oh interesting, so it's part of the theory's construction. Kind of funny to think of the universe parameters as "sticky" when being reborn through a black hole. You need them to vary just a little in order to be conditioned on the parameters of the parents, otherwise there is no evolution.
If I remember right, elsewhere he talks about black holes making new universes, with some randomization of the parent universe's base parameters. So holes are still involved, but it's asexual.
Yes, that's about right, and much snappier than my reply!
Do you have any advice for learning more about this from a starting point of zero (or maybe even less than that...)? I found this post super interesting but don't know what to do with that
Overall fascinating idea. Cosmology seems due for a shaking up.
I don't buy the use of the term "multiverses". The word Universe is defined as everything that is, so even a prior big bang would still be a part of the universe. I don't buy big bang theory but if one does, the word multiverse is not acceptable to my pedantic side.
The Big Bang was originally proposed br George's LeMaitre, a Belgian Priest. In my opinion it was an attempt to protect the idea of creationism once we knew that the universe was much older than 6000 years.
In my view there is no beginning or end to the universe (spatially or temporally). With each new observation, latest being Webb, we see more (much more) of the same thing.
It is likely that red shift we observe is the result of something other than doppler effect. Some natural change over time of the wavelength of light which increases with age. One proposal I toy with speculates that time itself speeds up and that the ancient light only appears stretched because our clock runs faster today. That also explains the CMB as light so ancient that it appears stretched into the radio spectrum..and beyond into extreme longcwavelengts.
Mathematics can emulate infinity, but cannot actually calculate against a value of infinity. Since science requires mathematics, the idea of an infinite universe lies outside of science and is labeled "supernatural".
My substack has a couple of essays with this layman's thoughts on Cosmology.
It seems that the Big Bang is our way of humanizing the universe by giving it the attribute of birth and death. Perhaps this is out of jealousy that we must die and the universe will go on.
The majority of matter is inanimate and non living. Only a tiny percentage evolves into life under the right conditions. Matter/energy does not require birth nor death. It is in motion and constant conversion from one form into another and this process could continue forever.
I am not an atheist attempting to challenge the scriptures. I believe they were written by wise men as an operating manual for living a better life. Perhaps Genesis is not a description of the creation of the universe, but a description of our own birth. Perhaps the story of Armageddon is a lesson in the personal struggle we encounter as we near death.
Most of the great scientists were religious in nature but non dogmatic. Einstein wrote of the beauty of nature being always far beyond the grasp of mere mortals.
In my earliest religious instruction I recall being told that God is infinite and eternal, which is a beautiful thought for me. So why would such a God sit around and wait until a specific point in eternity to will the universe into being? I propose there was never a period of waiting or contemplation. It simply always was and always will be, infinite and eternal, seen and unseen.
Pantheism, or something similar is, in my opinion, a good practice for anyone who believes that faith and science are more than compatible. The two are quite complementary in my opinion.
This is only a half-formed thought — I loved this update, and I got genuinely hot under the collar at a fellow Russell's sidelining of a evidence-driven voice due to alliances with The Institutions of power, gender, and tradition. However, I also found myself knee-jerking at the implications and connotations of a few words that you chose. When you say that the Universe generates and protects complexity, I read that as stating or implying intent and direction.
Now, I am a fully-fledged member of the narrative that has erred on the side of assuming that the universe is entropic, and tends toward nothingness and eventual heat-death. So I recognize that my perspective (some might call it nihilistic) is being challenged by any evidence that — and here's a word you didn't use, but which floated to the top of my brain as associated with the words you did choose — environments that support complexity are being *nurtured* by cosmological processes. Which feels like a bridge too far in terms of personification of cosmic forces. Fine for Stan Lee and Steve Englehart, but not my particular cup of tea.
So that's an instinctive, protective response to my worldview being challenged, and I don't really have much more to share than an awareness of that and an investment in further discussions and discourse on this topic, because now I'm defensive but intrigued to figure out if I need to update my own underlying assumptions. A process which is always hard. With all the tangents you hinted at pursuing in future posts, maybe also: how does dogma get changed?
I recently read an interesting quote.
"Life is nature's answer to entropy."
Yessssssssss. I've thought this about science for years - just as dogmatic as religion. The scientists are SO ANGRY when that is suggested.
http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html
This website is FILLED with the "mavericks" of science who were snubbed, dismissed and ridiculed - who turned out to be correct! Eddington and Chandrasekhar is so egregrious - because it's also got the intersections of race + colonialism working against the quest for truth.
There is so much investigative science happening right now that is suggesting a much more compassionate, nurturing and self-conscience universe that is making me hopeful for our collective future as descendants of Creation. Sheldrake for one...
I think we need to write the "observer" - the subject directing attention in the observation, into the equation. I think that will solve the TOE problem and unite all scales. We can't come to any real understanding of the universe while simultaneously trying to stand outside of it.
Thanks for doing this work. It's reaffirming.
Thank you, Lezley. Yes, it's an interesting time for science generally! I'm a huge fan of mainstream reductionist materialist science, as it has proved INCREDIBLY effective at uncovering useful truths, but I am not a fan of the scientism which some of its adherents have slipped into. There are truths reductionism can't uncover, and there are other equally valid routes to truth; so my approach is that of the enthusiastic improviser; to reductionism I say , "Yes! And..."
And yes, I do love Rupert. I definitely don't agree with him on everything, but his analysis of the dogmas of science is useful, accurate, and beautifully expressed.
"Yes! And..." <3
Oh, thanks!