Well, I still think that it is all about self-replicating information in action on the grandest of scales, but ...
About 10 years ago, I posted What’s It All About? as I was about to turn 60 years old. In that posting, I explained that I was then heading into the home stretch and that I thought that it would be a real shame to have gone through my whole life without ever having figured out what’s it all about or understanding where I had been or how I had even gotten there in the first place. Now in October 2021, I will be turning 70 years old, and surprisingly, I am still here! So I thought that it might be a good time to take another look and to also think about where things are heading for humanity after we are all long gone. In What’s It All About?, I proposed that our Universe, and the whole Multiverse for that matter, was just a form of self-replicating mathematical information and that our Universe might just be one instance within an infinitely large Multiverse of universes. In this view, our Big Bang is just one of an infinite number of Big Bangs of mathematical information exploding out into existence. People have long debated whether mathematics is something that always existed and that was slowly discovered by human beings or is mathematics simply something thought up by human beings all on their own? Is mathematics just a set of rules that we thought up like the simple moves in a game of chess that can lead to incredibly complex things or is mathematics the Fundamental Essence of the Universe that has always existed and that we slowly discovered with our Minds? For me, most of mathematics is something that has always existed even before there were Minds to contemplate it. We slowly discovered mathematics by observing the attributes of the seemingly physical things that mathematics has brought forth. That is still my working hypothesis, but a lot has happened in the past 10 years to slightly modify that working hypothesis. Again, all of this is largely my own speculation tinged by a bit of the science of our times. But since I will not be around when all of this is finally figured out, if that ever happens, it is the best working hypothesis that I can come up with at the moment. I know that it is "wrong", and there is no shame in that, but I do hope that it might be at least close.
The most accurate effective theory of our Universe is now the quantum field theories of the Standard Model (1973) that depicts our Universe as a collection of quantum fields vibrating in spacetime. Some of these quantum field vibrations produce fermion particles of matter with a spin of 1/2 ħ of intrinsic angular momentum like electrons. Other quantum field vibrations produce force-carrying boson particles with integer spins of ħ intrinsic angular momentum like photons with a spin of 1 ħ that carry the electromagnetic force between electrically charged fermion matter particles like electrons. It is thought that these fermion and boson quantum fields simply consist of a mathematical value for the fermion and boson quantum fields at each point in space. In essence, these quantum fields are just made of pure mathematics at heart. In this view, all of the physical objects that we interact with are just figments of mathematics as I outlined in The Software Universe as an Implementation of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis that covers Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. That means it is all about software. There is no hardware at all. It is just software at the deepest of levels.
But How Can Pure Mathematics Explode Out into a New Universe in the Multiverse?
Currently, we have two models that provide for that - Andrei Linde's Eternal Chaotic Inflation (1983) model and Lee Smolin's black hole model presented in his The Life of the Cosmos (1997). In Eternal Chaotic Inflation, the Multiverse is infinite in size and infinite in age, but we are causally disconnected from nearly all of it because nearly all of the Multiverse is inflating away from us faster than the speed of light, and so we cannot see it (see The Software Universe as an Implementation of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis). In Lee Smolin's model of the Multiverse, whenever a black hole forms in one universe it causes a white hole to form in a new universe that is internally observed as the Big Bang of a new universe. A new baby universe formed from a black hole in its parent universe is causally disconnected from its parent by the event horizon of the parent black hole and therefore cannot be seen either (see An Alternative Model of the Software Universe).
Figure 1 – In Andrei Linde's Eternal Chaotic Inflation model there is a mathematical Inflaton field that causes the spacetime of a Multiverse to constantly expand much faster than the speed of light. Periodically, the Inflaton field decays into a new universe that continues to expand at a very much slower rate because the Inflaton field has decayed into the matter and energy that the occupants of the new universe perceive as their Big Bang. Inflation continues on between these little spots of slowly expanding spacetime and causes the newly created little universes to rapidly fly apart.
Figure 2 - In Lee Smolin's The Life of the Cosmos he proposes that the black holes of one universe puncture the spacetime of the universe, causing a white hole to appear as the Big Bang of a new universe.
Now how do you get one of these Inflaton fields going? Well, calculations show that all you need is about 0.01 mg of mass at the Planck density. The Planck density is 1093 times the density of water, so that is a little hard to attain, but thanks to quantum mechanics it is not impossible. Recall that in quantum mechanics, particles and antiparticles are constantly coming into existence due to fluctuations in their quantum fields, so if you wait long enough you will get a quantum fluctuation of 0.01 mg at the Planck density. To put that into perspective a U.S. 5 cent nickel has a mass that is 500,000 times greater than 0.01 mg. But why worry about waiting for quantum fluctuations to generate something with 0.01 mg at the Planck density when we already have black holes doing much better than that? Black holes can easily produce several solar masses at the Planck density and the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can produce several billions of solar masses at the Planck density and beyond. And there are plenty of black holes out there. It is estimated that our Milky Way galaxy has about 100 million stellar-sized black holes that formed from the supernova remnants of very massive stars. There are also about 200 billion galaxies that we have detected in the observable Universe and if each has about 100 million stellar black holes that comes to a very large number. Plus, each of those 200 billion galaxies seems to have a supermassive black hole at its center. The Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) in Europe consists of 20,000 antennas at 52 observing stations across the continent with an effective aperture of about 1,000 kilometers or 600 miles. LOFAR records radio signals at very low frequencies below 250 Megahertz from the accretion disks of supermassive black holes. With a great deal of processing power, the LOFAR team has been able to combine the signals from the 20,000 antennas to plot the locations and intensities of supermassive black holes for the first time over 4% of the night sky as seen from Europe.
Figure 3 – The image above is not a star map. It is an image of the 25,000 supermassive black holes that LOFAR has detected over 4% of the sky as seen from Europe.
For more on LOFAR see:
A map of 25,000 Supermassive Black Holes Across the Universe
https://www.universetoday.com/150248/a-map-of-25000-supermassive-black-holes-across-the-universe/
Here is the paper published by the LOFAR team:
The LOFAR LBA Sky Survey
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2021/04/aa40316-21.pdf
Figure 4 - Above is a movie of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy that is 55 million light years from the Earth. This black hole contains 6.5 billion solar masses of matter compressed to a state beyond the density of the Planck density.
Personally, I favor a hybrid model in which the black holes of one universe launch a new rapidly expanding Inflaton field that then decays into an infinite number of new universes that all have their own black holes doing the same.
The net effect of all this inflation is that shortly after a Big Bang we end up with a new universe made of “nothing”. Indeed, the WMAP and Planck satellite mappings of the CBR now show that our Universe is flat to within an error of less than 1%. That means that the total amount of positive energy in our Universe, arising from its matter and energy content, exactly matches the negative gravitational energy of all that stuff pulling on itself. Our Universe also seems to have no net momentum, angular momentum, electrical charge or color charge too, so it really does appear to be made of “nothing”. It’s like adding up all of the real numbers, both positive and negative, and obtaining a sum of exactly zero. All the mathematics just adds up to "nothing".
Now the hard thing about inflation is not getting inflation going, the hard part is getting inflation to stop because once it gets going there does not seem to be any good reason for it to ever stop. It should just keep going on creating more and more space containing the Inflaton field with a positive energy density and a corresponding gravitational field with a negative energy density that zeros out the Inflaton field positive energy. But don’t forget that the Inflaton field is a quantum field. Since the Inflaton field has a positive energy that means it can decay into something else with a lower level of energy, and turn the surplus energy into something else, like you and me. In general, energy-rich quantum fields will decay into other quantum fields with a lower energy with a certain half-life, and as the positive energy of the Inflaton field decayed, it created all sorts of other quantum fields, like the electron and quark quantum fields that we are made of. But what if the expansion rate of inflation exceeds the half-life of the Inflaton field itself? Then we could have little spots in the rapidly expanding space where the Inflaton field decays into matter and energy and rapid inflation stops. To the inhabitants of these little spots, it would look like a Big Bang creation of their Universe. In between these little spots, where the Inflaton field decayed with a Big Bang into a universe, inflation would continue on and would rapidly separate these little universes apart much faster than the speed of light as portrayed in Figure 1.
Figure 5 – As the newly created Inflaton field that arises from a black hole in one universe decays it produces huge numbers of new universes with their own black holes. These new universes rapidly expand away from each other as shown in Figure 1 because the Inflaton field between them continues to expand the spacetime between the new universes.
But How Do We Account for the Fine-Tuning of Our Universe for Intelligent Beings?
In Lee Smolin's The Life of the Cosmos, he proposes a cosmic form of Universal Darwinism in action. Lee Smolin proposes that since all forms of Design in our Universe seem to be produced by the Universal Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection at play that these same Darwinian processes should be responsible for the apparent Design of our Universe. Universes that are good at creating black holes, should also be great at creating new rapidly inflating Multiverses of self-replicating mathematical information that then go on to produce an infinite number of little universes producing even more black holes. Lee Smolin suggests that the progeny of a universe inherit most of the mathematics of their parent universe but with some slight modifications. Natural selection then comes into play to select progeny that also can produce black holes. Those that cannot produce black holes never self-replicate successfully.
An infinite number of infinities is a very large number so many cosmologists are now coming to the conclusion that the answer to Brandon Carter’s Weak Anthropic Principle (1973):
The Weak Anthropic Principle - Intelligent beings will only find themselves existing in universes capable of sustaining intelligent beings.
is that we just happen to exist in one of the rare universes capable of supporting intelligent beings, but because infinity is infinite, there still would be an infinite number of such universes. Furthermore, intelligent beings should likely find themselves in a universe that just barely qualifies for sustaining intelligent beings, since there would be far more universes that just barely tolerate the existence of intelligence, compared to those that openly welcome intelligent beings with cordial affection. And our Universe certainly seems to be such a universe that is far less than welcoming to intelligent life. If you think of all the places in our Universe where complex intelligent carbon-based life can exist, you come up with a very small portion of the available real estate, and I think the findings to date of the Kepler space telescope bear this out. When Kepler was fully operational, it searched for planets as they transited in front of about 100,000 stars and came up with many thousands of confirmed planets to date, but still, when we look out into our Universe we still see no signs of Intelligence whatsoever.
Granted, our Universe has the proper forces tuned to the proper strengths and is chock full of the necessary building blocks, but temperature seems to be the limiting factor. In most places, our Universe is simply too hot or too cold for these carbon-based building blocks to do their job. They are either not jiggling around fast enough for chemical reactions to occur in a timely manner, or they are jiggling around too fast to stay stuck together long enough. The temperature range of our Universe goes from a low of 3 0K for the CBR – Cosmic Background Radiation - up to several billion 0K for the core of an O class star about to supernova, with most matter near the extremes. However, carbon-based life can only exist in a narrow range of about 200 0K near the freezing and boiling points of water on Earth, and there are very few places in our Universe where that is the case. The fact that we live in a Universe that is on one hand capable of sustaining intelligent beings, but on the other hand is quite hostile to them at the same time might help to explain Fermi’s Paradox, first proposed by Enrico Fermi over lunch one day in 1950, which asks the question:
Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?
This leads one to conclude that Intelligence in our Universe is indeed possible, but probably quite rare due to all of the complicated twists and turns required for it to arise.
Mathematics Does Not Require a Stage Either
The above model lacks one thing to make it a purely mathematical abstraction. It requires a stage of spacetime to play itself out upon. Such models are called background-dependent because they require a pre-existing background or stage upon which all of the action occurs. Nearly all of the current theories of physics are background-dependent theories that unfold upon a stage of pre-existing spacetime. For example, the Standard Model of particle physics and string theory both assume that there is a stage of pre-existing spacetime upon which they act to produce what we observe in our Universe. Loop quantum gravity does not have such a stage and is therefore background-independent. In loop quantum gravity, spacetime is quantized into a network of nodes called a spin network. The minimum distance between nodes is about one Planck length of about 10-35 meters. Loop quantum gravity is a background-independent theory because the spin network can be an emergent property of the Universe that evolves with time.
Figure 6 - In loop quantum gravity space is quantized into a collection of nodes that are very much like the nodes that constitute the Software Universe. In both cases, the distance between things is the number of hops between nodes.
In Sean Carroll's Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime (2019), he describes a very interesting new research program to investigate quantum gravity from a new perspective. Instead of trying to quantize Einstein's general theory of relativity, this new research program tries to derive the general theory of relativity from the fundamentals of quantum mechanics by portraying spacetime as an emergent phenomenon that naturally arises from the wavefunction of the Universe. Recall that emergent phenomena are things like the temperature and pressure of a gas. The temperature and pressure of a gas are not fundamental phenomena. They are really just the macroscopic effects of gas molecules bouncing around in a container and that bouncing around is actually governed by the rules of quantum mechanics. If successful, this research program would produce another background-independent model of the Multiverse in which the stage of spacetime would simply emerge as another abstraction from the pure mathematics of quantum mechanics. For a brief introduction to quantum mechanics from an IT perspective see Quantum Software, Quantum Computing and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, The Foundations of Quantum Computing and Quantum Computing and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
Where Is This All Heading After We Are All Gone?
The sad truth is that none of us know for sure, but in Why Do Carbon-Based Intelligences Always Seem to Snuff Themselves Out? and Do Not Fear the Software Singularity, I pointed out that carbon-based Intelligences only arise after several billion years of theft and murder have selected for a successful form of carbon-based Intelligence to take the world stage. Consequently, the fatal flaw of all carbon-based Intelligences seems to be that apparently, they can never turn the theft and murder off in time to avoid self-destruction. This all stems from the fact that carbon-based Intelligences are composed of various forms of self-replicating information trying to survive no matter the cost and, therefore, must be truly selfish in nature. For more on that see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information.
But it has to be more than that because carbon-based life has been using theft and murder for about 4.0 billion years to self-replicate and it is still thriving today. Surprisingly, I think that it might all go downhill when carbon-based life first learns how to count whole numbers! Learning how to count whole numbers is our very first introduction to mathematics as children. As children, we all learn that our Universe seemingly has discrete things in it that can be counted. Now to truly appreciate that concept you would need some advanced thinking in quantum mechanics, but despite that, as children, we all do seem to learn about the concept of counting whole numbers. It is claimed that other species can also count whole numbers, but remember, they are also forms of carbon-based self-replicating information too. Once people learned how to count whole numbers, all sorts of technologies were bound to follow. Granted, you probably can mount a flint point on a wooden shaft without counting numbers, but knowing how many spears it takes to bring down a woolly mammoth before it kills you first does come in handy on a hunt.
Once people could count things, civilization was sure to follow too. Civilization is currently based on the division of labor and figuring out who gets what from the output of civilization. And as we all know, that's when most of our troubles all began. Once you are able to count things, you might discover that some people have more things than you do, and you might mistakenly think that having more things would make you happier. That's what most people spend most of their time fighting about. But the key point is that once you have the division of labor and a rudimentary mathematics, science and technology are sure to follow. It seems that advanced technology is what does carbon-based Intelligences in because they just cannot turn off the theft and murder that brought them into existence, and all of that comes from just learning how to count whole numbers!
There is a popular Bronze Age mythology that portrays something like learning how to count whole numbers as the eating of fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Well, human history has taught us that you can certainly do a lot of good and evil with counting numbers! In Why Do Carbon-Based Intelligences Always Seem to Snuff Themselves Out? and Can We Make the Transition From the Anthropocene to the Machineocene?, I explained that we are all living in one of those very rare moments in time when a carbon-based Intelligence is on the cusp of developing a machine-based Intelligence that can then go on to explore our galaxy. This has never successfully happened before in the 10 billion-year history of our galaxy. My hope is that this time we make it by putting mathematics, science and technology to good use. But none of us will ever know for sure.
Figure 7 – My hope can best be summed up by the motto found beneath the bronze Alma Mater statue at the University of Illinois in Urbana.
To thy happy children
of the future
those of the past
send greetings
Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
