The Theory of (N)everything

My fascination with Physics has grown in parallel with my interest in Philosophy. Debates arise as to the merit of either discipline in the understanding of our world. I see no distinction of importance between the two (Carlo Rovelli: Why Physics needs Philosophy) as I maintain that the empirical and the metaphysical are equally crucial for the understanding of the universe. Without the right questions, we would never find the right answers.

As things became very small with the study of Quantum Mechanics, a link was needed to the very massive (Einstein's Theory of General Relativity), in what is supposed to become a Theory of Everything, also known as Quantum Gravity. I've played with the idea and philosophised about it and these are some of my musings, which I call the Theory of (N)everything. The silly title is to emphasise my total awareness of my shortcomings both in scientific and philosophical terms.

In the beginning, there was coffee. Scattered coffee, to be precise. One spring morning I was preparing the brew the Italian way, with a little espresso maker. Inevitably, as I piled and pressed the grains into the metal holder, some of them spilt over onto the tabletop, and without a second thought, I brushed them off, sending them onto the floor (I swept it all up afterwards, honest).  A thought occurred to me then: if I could shrink to the size of bacteria and I found myself in front of one of those grains, what would I know about it? The kitchen floor would be the equivalent of a sizable portion of the universe and a grain of coffee that of a small planet. I would know nothing about other grains, let alone their distribution in the surrounding emptiness. After the equivalent of hundreds of years later, my bacterial descendants might find the next coffee grain and record the distance between the two. Then another, and another and so forth, until enough information would start to form a picture, not only of the number of grains but also of their most likely provenance (the Big Bang if you like), as they would be more scattered in one part of the room and clumped together in the opposite direction (origin point). The same thing happens in space. What we see or detect is information. All the information since the beginning of time (or the infinite) has been there for us to gather and analyse. From that data, we have formulated theories, laws, and speculations as to the nature of the cosmos and its life within. We are also made of information and how we work is down to its synergy with the entropy it creates. This is what reality (consciousness) is to us (but not necessarily what it is): a processing, filtering and subsequent derivative of the multitude of interactions... but also our soul and/or the result of the connection between body-brain and the universe around us.

With a limited understanding of how we are created and function, we have pursued to measure and quantify ourselves and the world around us. One of these fundamental measures is Time. Over the centuries and up until recently we have thought of Time as an inalienable measure of past, present, and future. We have calculated it according to our own experiences (life) and the observable universe. Thus, we have devised hours, days, months, etc as benchmarks of our connection with the Sun, our source of life. We have a concept of beginnings and ends because we are born and die. Our cells produce that transformation and as we experience it we give it a meaning, scientific or spiritual. But our life on Earth is only a tiny fraction of the life of the planet itself. We've been around, as modern humans, for about 0.2 million years and our ancestors for 6 million years. That's only 0.13% of the age of our planet (4.5 billion years). In cosmic terms, not a lot. But at the beginning of the 20th century, time became entwined with space in the fabric of the universe, as spacetime. We now know it's elastic throughout space as it stretches around gravitational objects (proved by the recent detection of Einstein's brainchild: the gravitational waves).

Time, in human terms, is simply an anchoring system, where the values have been arbitrarily chosen and averaged as to be usable. According to Christophe Galfard in his book The Universe in your Hand, reality can't ever be known exactly; observations and experimentations, however accurate, always give an approximate answer with an error margin. There's always something in between two points of reference. Our understanding of that limitation manifests itself in the use of averages in our collective imagination. Average, because the very numbers that are used to measure are arbitrary. 

One way to visualise this is to think of the old-fashioned electricity meter, the one with dials as shown in the picture below. The arm in the first dial rests on the 6. Is it really on the 6, or the 5? To be sure we then look closer at the unit's subdivision on its right. The second dial says it's past the 0, and towards the 1, so the previous dial cannot be a 5 anymore but inside the 6 towards the 7. If even the second dial had been unclear, we would've moved on to the third dial and so on. Until we choose how accurate we need to be.

We do that with ordinary numbers. When we say number 27, we imagine that entity. When is a number, whole? It's either to one side or the other of the imagined number until we find it acceptable for our purposes to declare it. This is because we choose units of measurements according to the need of the task.

This is translated into our understanding of time, where the present is simply an anchoring between the past and the future, but never tangible (therefore even past and future are fictitious). It is a paradox: as soon as we think we are, we have been and move into the will be all at the same time. We're either approaching a state or we are regressing from it. The past, therefore, is how we organise the memory bank, while the future is a concept that receives that information to be processed with new information and transferred to the memory bank. It is a matter of perspective, of where we position the marker for our measurements.

How we can calculate and observe, shows our limitations in processing the information we can or could extrapolate. What we can confirm by experiment is limited by the technology we can produce as things span from the micro to the macro, from the neutrino to the Cosmic Microwave Background (the furthest snapshot of our past, or 380,000 years after the Big Bang). To go further in either direction it would mean a leap in dimensional interpretation.

The difference in behaviour from the massive to the very small is the ratio between mass and energy. An electron appears to be where we observe it to be and in two places at the same time, it being both particle and wave. It has different states as opposed to a massive object like a star. A photon travels at the speed of light because it has no mass. Any other object with mass, the faster it travels the more massive it becomes, the more energy it needs.

Because of this, the smaller the object, the faster it moves compared to us, while the bigger the object, the slower it seems to us. Our perspective takes shape because of the scale and dimensions and where our point of view is placed in relation to that scale.

Imagine you're far out in space, far enough to observe our galaxy, the Milky Way. It would look majestic but static, you couldn't register the enormous speeds of its travelling stars.

Could you, from that vantage point, even imagine the existence of planet Earth or its 7 billion carbon-based inhabitants? Even if we could see humans with incredibly powerful telescopes, we still couldn't fathom the presence of one hundred billions of neurons inside one of those humans. 

In the same way, we could, in theory, build a machine powerful enough to observe a quark, but we might ignore the presence of a whole universe inside that quark, the different dimension inside the smallest of particles in our observable world. It could even be the reason why the elusive Dark Matter (27% of our universe) and Dark Energy (68% of our universe) cannot be found. There is a possibility our universe is porous and energy from another dimension is encapsulating ours, filling the seemingly empty space and affecting the rotation of galaxies and how much they clump together. This would explain why in our faster expanding universe, matter diminishes (as it should be as the area gets bigger) but Dark Energy's density remains constant: whatever it is made of, it might be seeping through the very fabric of our universe, thus filling the gaps.

Imagine pouring some milk into a cup full of water. Immediately, the milk finds its way into the denser liquid and spreads evenly so that the whole cup reaches the same temperature (as observed in the Cosmic Microwave Background just after the Big Bang). After that, the difference in matter between the two liquids allows for clustering and clumping, giving a sense of void where the water is clearer (not unlike what happens between galaxies and dark matter/energy). But rather than thinking of the event as happening inside a container, I imagine it in a dimensionless object in spacetime, expanding rapidly as the leap of matter is triggered by the exceptional amount of energy stored in a singularity, causing a tear in the fabric (possibly the reverse side of a supermassive black hole). All matter then spreads in every direction, giving our observable universe the flat quality we experience (parallel lines would otherwise end up colliding with each other, like on a sphere). Where that matter from the singularity comes from is most likely a build-up of density/energy in a black hole from the universe without. In this way, the information that falls into a black hole is not lost but transferred into another dimension but still accounted for in the original dimension as it contains both of those dimensions.

This tear expands exceptionally fast at first, then it slows down as the amount of interacting matter forming it runs out of the initial energy. But not unlike in a balloon, the initial burst of energy warms and expands the balloon, allowing for more matter (like in a second puff) to enter freely, thus accelerating the expansion. This fabric is porous. It allows for an energy-driven expansion, but its space is filled proportionally by the infinitely small particles of the container universe. These particles are charged with properties that interact with our known particles in the form of undetectable gravitational force. This would account for the provenance and increase of dark energy in our expanding universe and the missing force from the micro-universe that drives the macro universe in a cosmic dance.

We assume the realm of the very small belongs to the quantum world as we calculate it. But that is simply how far our understanding and technology can take us. It is therefore conceivable that our observable universe is contained inside a particle in another dimension. We now know our empty space is teeming with virtual particles, appearing and disappearing almost instantaneously as soon as they pair up with their anti-particle. Now, think of one of those virtual particles and their incredibly fast (to us) lifespan. If we were inside that particle, we could be existing in another dimension, where everything that has happened and will happen in our timescale was created and undone in a blink.

So, given our limited technological capabilities for observation, and knowing that time is an illusion, why do we keep on thinking of the Big Bang as a beginning? Our Universe could be a continuum from another universe, another dimension. It could be one of an infinite number of universes happening one at a time or all the time. Dimensions are the various facets of our reality. For instance, you can interact and get to know someone on Twitter or Facebook. Data is passed between an account and yours. This is through the language of ones and zeros of the computer world. The other account is not physically real, it is virtual in that dimension. If you then meet in person, you'd use a completely different set of parameters to experience the encounter. What you are experiencing is a transposition between two dimensions. One is two-dimensional in appearance (digital screen), the other is three-dimensional (physical presence). But you can't experience both at the same time, they are different dimensions. Particles were used in both instances but behaved differently according to the interaction. What happens at the quantum level follows the rules of that dimension and we simply don't know if inside the smallest of particles there are further dimensions that interact with our accessible world. Or, even in reverse, whether our universe is a particle inside another dimension. 

But how did our visible universe begin, and more importantly... did it have a beginning? Could the singularity t=0, where before the Big Bang the whole of this universe was crushed into a single point with zero volume but infinite density, temperature, and curvature of space, be explained as a portal between universes/dimensions? Could black holes create a tear in the fabric of spacetime?

We have exponential growth of information that allows us to piece together the meaning of the universe we observe. Technology allows us to look deeper and further into our origin but it also hinders our understanding as it is limited to what we know and can build to know further. Like with all those coffee grains, the information that tells us everything is there, it is part of our existence, our universe. We are gathering that information and slowly making sense of it all. We upgrade our knowledge as we broaden the spectrum of contributing factors. A unified understanding of the universe is there for the taking, we simply need to gather it into a translatable format fit for our consciousness.