The Nature of Existence
The Nature of Existence
12/ 4/05
I began formulating this essay in 1995---ten years ago. I wrote my first draft sometime in the last half of the 1990’s. My computer says 1999 was the year of the earliest draft that I retain digitally, but I have changed computers at least 2 times since 1995. My memory is that I began spawning my ideas on this subject in 1995 and set them in writing in the 1996 time frame. I have been quite concerned about “going public” on this subject (and for that matter on others), since I have no credentials to make me either publishable or immune from the disenfranchisement that would no doubt result if I could even get a magazine to print an essay such as this or some others that I probably will decide to release. But now blogging has made it possible for me to publish. This effectively allows me to record for posterity my ideas and conjectures whether anyone likes it or not. Blogs time and date entries, so as long as some event does not wipe out the server, there will always be independent evidence of what I wrote and when I wrote it. At least, I hope that it works that way. Furthermore, my thoughts are available for anyone to stumble across or not. If my writings do get noticed and it comes to anything, that is all right with me. If they do not get noticed, then at least my writings are on record. That, too, is good enough for me.
For years I have been trying to reason out how the “universe” as we perceive it came about. I have been watching as science has come up with additional information as to what happened billions of years ago that started the events that have led up to the existence of humans.
You probably are familiar with the sequence of the classic description: maybe 14 billion or so years ago, there was this tremendous explosion of presumably a huge collection of energy that had come together over an indeterminate period of time. A critical mass was attained after which things just couldn't stay together, and so it all blew apart. This would be imperfectly analogous to a super-super-super-super-nova or perhaps a huge black hole that could no longer be contained. Since then, the universe has supposedly been expanding. Measurements of this are confounded by having to take into account that the earth rotates around the sun and our solar system rotates around our galaxy and goodness knows what our galaxy rotates around. So far, however, the general consensus is that everything is expanding outwardly from a central point.
After the big bang, whatever existed at the time then interacted in various ways to form more complex structures---from the larger atoms all the way to planets, comets, and stars. When planets formed, at least one of them cooled down and had the position and proper mix of elements to allow life to start, because life is one possible configuration of matter. From amino acids and nucleic acids came simple life forms which, due to the need to adapt in order to use the environment in the most favorable ways, evolved over countless generations into more and more complex and elaborate life forms. Finally, higher intelligence became a part of the deal, and that included humans. Humans appear to have the privilege of being the most versatile of all intelligent life forms. This has led to 20th and then 21st century humans, with our airplanes and computers and tragic flaws.
In the late 20th century, I had aged enough to begin to consolidate my long-standing thoughts on big-picture subjects. In 1986, I also became the father of a drop-dead gorgeous baby girl.
My daughter had just turned ten years old when we were going to a park in my car that only just fit two people among the unfiled paperwork, miscellaneous un-dealt-with items, and bags of crushed aluminum cans (I collect them to help fund my favorite local environmental charity and because it is the right thing to do, anyway). The air conditioner was on, and my daughter was curious as to how we could have air conditioning in the first place. Good question. I had to answer it for her, of course. I talked with her about compressing gas until it would lose its heat via a radiator. And expanding the gas again would make it a lot cooler. A fan distributes air cooled by the expanded gas. We could stay cool in the summer that way. But my daughter also wanted to know where heat came from. And what is heat, anyway? Well, heat is energy. O.K., so cool is the absence of energy, right? Maybe? So what is energy? I could not really put the answer to that one into words, although I had an intuitive idea as to what energy is.
My daughter and I got back home from feeding the ducks, and she eventually went to bed. But I did not stop mulling over in my mind about energy. This eventually led me to think about the big bang and why all that mass of stuff would come together in the first place, especially if now everything seems to be traveling away from us. An expanding-contracting universe would mean that eventually everything would have to stop and start to go back together again, as if some sort of centralized gravitational force would finally overcome everything enough to make outward expansion stop and reverse. But that did not make sense to me, because if such a force did exist, its peak was right before the big bang, and the explosion should have diminished the gravitational force considerably to the point where it could not be restored enough ever to pull anything together again. Or maybe space is curved such that things travel away but eventually come around the bends to meet again. But then I had to think about the implications that if this were so, there would have to be an outer boundary to the universe. If that were true, then what would be outside this rim? Besides, an outer boundary does not imply infinity for that which resulted from our big bang, but it does imply there is something more beyond what is ours. More universes? Maybe so, but why would there be other collections of matter elsewhere? Why would there not be matter in between these universes? There would have to be centralized gravitational forces in all universes to cause them to be cohesive entities that expand and contract, but such a thing already conceptually did not make sense to me, as I have already explained. And then I had to go on and think about what preceded the matter that was there after the big bang.
I like to boil things down to their basics. So as my thought processes continued, I asked: if matter is here, is it true that it always has been here? If that is so, then the universe has existed always with a finite amount of matter that continues to change in its form over billions of years. But if that is so, then how do you explain how it came about? If it has always been in existence, that means it did not come from anything or anywhere. But that is inconsistent. After all, animals and plants are made of molecules, which come from atoms, which come from protons, neutrons, and electrons, which come from even smaller subatomic particles. These bits of matter may also have breakdown products, and so where did these even smaller pieces come from? What is the "bottom line" stuff? And how did it come about? To say that it has always been there is not enough, because that does not explain its origin based upon something more fundamental. So what is the ultimate fundamental thing whose origin does not have to be explained?
If you are deeply religious, you might tell me that basic matter came about because God made it happen. But if God did this, what was there before he did us the favor? Only God? Well, if that is so, how did God come about existing? Has he always been there? But to answer that question affirmatively is not enough for me--again--because it still does not explain to me the condition that exists to allow something in addition to just nothing to be out there, infinite or not. This question can be explained simply by saying that God is infinite and does not need a predecessor and is different from the physical universe and has to be accepted on faith. And this is fine for all of those that yearn for something more than just earthly existence: in all likelihood, the spiritual and the physical are like comparing apples to Cadillacs. Because the spiritual does not have to be physical, it does not have to obey the rules of the physical. The two can simply exist in parallel. On the other hand, since the spiritual arena is accepted by faith without proof in the scientific sense, it is more vulnerable to being relegated to the category of imagination. Certainly it is arguable that the physical universe operates just fine independent of spirituality.
So to continue with analysis within the realm of scientific inquiry, out of the above I went on to conclude that particulate matter is simply one of the manifestations of energy. Energy is a nebulous entity that implies the ability to do work. It appears that energy can differentiate into any number of possible forms, depending on the level of energy available and other factors which probably come about because of resonances, which I shall address elsewhere. Thus, I came to the conclusion that energy is the primary stuff of physical existence. If energy implies the capacity to do work, then energy would have to have been "charged up", at least at the beginning of its existence, relative to a lower state of energy. The ultimate state of low energy would be no energy at all. Therefore, if matter is a form of energy, then energy in the form of particles would possess the capacity to do work relative to ground zero, a reference point represented by no particles (and no energy) at all. Note that near absolute zero, matter still contains a huge amount of energy, which implies that absolute zero addresses only thermal energy and not everything that comprises particles so as to make them have substance.
I believe that scientists already have concluded that the basal state of energy of the universe is zero. This fits with what I am proposing here.
So, one night when I was at work late, and I was sitting at a table in a small room doing some writing at 2:00 in the morning, I started thinking about these things again. All of a sudden I had insight that finally made sense of it all.
The only thing that I could be comfortable with that could be infinite without my having to ask where it came from is: nothing!
That is correct---nothing. Zero energy, zero matter. Absolutely, totally empty space. Of course! That is the only "thing" that could go on and on forever without an implicit question attached to it as to where it came from. Emptiness---containing nothing, redundantly expressed---can truly go on and on infinitely without boundaries.
But then, if nothing is the universe's basal state, where did matter come from? Then it became apparent to me that “nothing” or “zero” has duplicity. I also will discuss this further in a different essay. Zero can be nothing, or it can be the sum of the pair of two numbers equal in magnitude, except one is positive and one is negative. Then zero could actually have the potential to revert from time to time to its summation components (and in the final analysis still remain zero). This implies that there might be a slight instability in the state of zero at any one point in time and at any one place, that can allow this separation to occur. How often this instability would amount to anything and whether it occurs in a lot of places would be difficult to tell and would probably have to be determined from a different vantage point and time frame, as I shall elaborate on farther down in this essay. Certainly it does not occur often from the standpoint of the time frame of a human life. Thus, maybe it is a property of "nothingness" to "separate itself" from time to time---rarely but with a definable statistical frequency---into two separate masses of energy of enormous potential that would be equal and opposite to one another, so that when put back together again, they would cancel one another out. I am basically referring to energy and anti-energy. The phenomenon of formation of these two separate masses of energy would, however, result in their explosive separation mostly in opposite directions, so that they would not have the chance to cancel one another out.
It followed directly, therefore, that it then made sense why and how the "big bang" came about. I would guess that the formation of two separate, huge masses of energy that fly away from one another rapidly would resemble an explosion. The energy thus released subsequently could differentiate out into all the possible forms of particles and waves, including molecules and life. It is just that the two separate masses of energy would be "anti" one another and if put together again would result in nothing again. In fact, eventually that would probably happen after many billions of years when enough dissipation had occurred. The energy in these separate masses would eventually meet up with their opposites (spawned from not the same but other big bangs) and disappear quietly into the original nothingness again. In an infinite macrocosm, what would keep this process from wildcatting out of control is an interesting speculation in itself. There must be an achievable balance between the frequency of occurrence and the rate of dissipation and neutralization that keeps everything in check. This also could imply that the mechanism of appearance depends on the rate of disappearance for its frequency. These two phenomena must be locked in resonance together.
The above may seem difficult to picture for those of us that are down here in the trenches with only the perspective of "worker ants". But say that you could live one hundred trillion years, and you also could travel far away and be able to see a large area of the vastness that is space, and suppose that you could speed things up so that each billion years was like only fifteen minutes or so from your perspective. In this scenario, looking into the vastness of space you would see over here the sudden violent formation of two separate masses of what would seem like light (assuming you could see its spectrum) that would then differentiate into defined entities such as galaxies, stars, and planets, and then in a while you would see about the same thing’s happening over there, etc. Over the course of a trillion years, from the perspective of your position, you might see ten or twelve of these separation phenomena. Each one would be in a unique state of development and eventual dispersion. And each one would have the ability to differentiate into all the different particles and waves that are possible any time that there is energy. That is to say, there is a forward bias that facilitates certain stable energy states, depending on the level of energy that is present at the time. This forward bias also favors entropy.
This hypothesis explains a great deal. The basal state of everything is nothing, and this nothing is infinite without having to be explained otherwise. The big bang came when equally opposite energy fields were formed and separated violently. Cyclical formation, expansion, and dissipation occurs. The sum of it all is zero.
I am unsure that this hypothesis is consistent with what physicists already have observed. They have produced something known as “anti-matter” in the laboratory. You would think that this means we already have a scientific basis for believing that a zero-sum universe can be possible. But from what I understand, the “anti-matter” that has been formed releases tremendous energy when it interacts with “matter” in experimental conditions. To me, this means that the physicists have found something that should have another name. The true result of the combination of energy and antienergy should involve no release of energy at all. Neutralization is an appropriate term for this process, whose resultant summation should be zero.
I am also very uncertain that this phenomenon of zero’s splitting into energy and anti-energy can be demonstrated in laboratory circumstances, for I suspect that a “critical mass” (to make a play on words) is necessary for its occurrence. Also, the probability that it will happen at any one place and at any one time is extremely small. It is likely to remain unknown what the nature of any hypothetical instability associated with the basal state of zero really is. Finally, we certainly should never be able to see the “anti-universe” associated with our big bang, for photons from our metaphorical mirror image would never reach us: they are outside of our “fishbowl”, they are traveling away from us, and even if they did come toward us, they should be neutralized by our own photons into oblivion.
I am not a physicist, and so I have to be content with sitting back for a long time to find out if the establishment comes up with a similar hypothesis and concludes that it is correct. In the meanwhile, as more scientific discoveries come about, it should be interesting and fun seeing how well they fit with what I have proposed above.
And as for the spiritual side: who knows? Maybe there are spirits and anti-spirits….
© 2005, srman07
12/ 4/05
I began formulating this essay in 1995---ten years ago. I wrote my first draft sometime in the last half of the 1990’s. My computer says 1999 was the year of the earliest draft that I retain digitally, but I have changed computers at least 2 times since 1995. My memory is that I began spawning my ideas on this subject in 1995 and set them in writing in the 1996 time frame. I have been quite concerned about “going public” on this subject (and for that matter on others), since I have no credentials to make me either publishable or immune from the disenfranchisement that would no doubt result if I could even get a magazine to print an essay such as this or some others that I probably will decide to release. But now blogging has made it possible for me to publish. This effectively allows me to record for posterity my ideas and conjectures whether anyone likes it or not. Blogs time and date entries, so as long as some event does not wipe out the server, there will always be independent evidence of what I wrote and when I wrote it. At least, I hope that it works that way. Furthermore, my thoughts are available for anyone to stumble across or not. If my writings do get noticed and it comes to anything, that is all right with me. If they do not get noticed, then at least my writings are on record. That, too, is good enough for me.
For years I have been trying to reason out how the “universe” as we perceive it came about. I have been watching as science has come up with additional information as to what happened billions of years ago that started the events that have led up to the existence of humans.
You probably are familiar with the sequence of the classic description: maybe 14 billion or so years ago, there was this tremendous explosion of presumably a huge collection of energy that had come together over an indeterminate period of time. A critical mass was attained after which things just couldn't stay together, and so it all blew apart. This would be imperfectly analogous to a super-super-super-super-nova or perhaps a huge black hole that could no longer be contained. Since then, the universe has supposedly been expanding. Measurements of this are confounded by having to take into account that the earth rotates around the sun and our solar system rotates around our galaxy and goodness knows what our galaxy rotates around. So far, however, the general consensus is that everything is expanding outwardly from a central point.
After the big bang, whatever existed at the time then interacted in various ways to form more complex structures---from the larger atoms all the way to planets, comets, and stars. When planets formed, at least one of them cooled down and had the position and proper mix of elements to allow life to start, because life is one possible configuration of matter. From amino acids and nucleic acids came simple life forms which, due to the need to adapt in order to use the environment in the most favorable ways, evolved over countless generations into more and more complex and elaborate life forms. Finally, higher intelligence became a part of the deal, and that included humans. Humans appear to have the privilege of being the most versatile of all intelligent life forms. This has led to 20th and then 21st century humans, with our airplanes and computers and tragic flaws.
In the late 20th century, I had aged enough to begin to consolidate my long-standing thoughts on big-picture subjects. In 1986, I also became the father of a drop-dead gorgeous baby girl.
My daughter had just turned ten years old when we were going to a park in my car that only just fit two people among the unfiled paperwork, miscellaneous un-dealt-with items, and bags of crushed aluminum cans (I collect them to help fund my favorite local environmental charity and because it is the right thing to do, anyway). The air conditioner was on, and my daughter was curious as to how we could have air conditioning in the first place. Good question. I had to answer it for her, of course. I talked with her about compressing gas until it would lose its heat via a radiator. And expanding the gas again would make it a lot cooler. A fan distributes air cooled by the expanded gas. We could stay cool in the summer that way. But my daughter also wanted to know where heat came from. And what is heat, anyway? Well, heat is energy. O.K., so cool is the absence of energy, right? Maybe? So what is energy? I could not really put the answer to that one into words, although I had an intuitive idea as to what energy is.
My daughter and I got back home from feeding the ducks, and she eventually went to bed. But I did not stop mulling over in my mind about energy. This eventually led me to think about the big bang and why all that mass of stuff would come together in the first place, especially if now everything seems to be traveling away from us. An expanding-contracting universe would mean that eventually everything would have to stop and start to go back together again, as if some sort of centralized gravitational force would finally overcome everything enough to make outward expansion stop and reverse. But that did not make sense to me, because if such a force did exist, its peak was right before the big bang, and the explosion should have diminished the gravitational force considerably to the point where it could not be restored enough ever to pull anything together again. Or maybe space is curved such that things travel away but eventually come around the bends to meet again. But then I had to think about the implications that if this were so, there would have to be an outer boundary to the universe. If that were true, then what would be outside this rim? Besides, an outer boundary does not imply infinity for that which resulted from our big bang, but it does imply there is something more beyond what is ours. More universes? Maybe so, but why would there be other collections of matter elsewhere? Why would there not be matter in between these universes? There would have to be centralized gravitational forces in all universes to cause them to be cohesive entities that expand and contract, but such a thing already conceptually did not make sense to me, as I have already explained. And then I had to go on and think about what preceded the matter that was there after the big bang.
I like to boil things down to their basics. So as my thought processes continued, I asked: if matter is here, is it true that it always has been here? If that is so, then the universe has existed always with a finite amount of matter that continues to change in its form over billions of years. But if that is so, then how do you explain how it came about? If it has always been in existence, that means it did not come from anything or anywhere. But that is inconsistent. After all, animals and plants are made of molecules, which come from atoms, which come from protons, neutrons, and electrons, which come from even smaller subatomic particles. These bits of matter may also have breakdown products, and so where did these even smaller pieces come from? What is the "bottom line" stuff? And how did it come about? To say that it has always been there is not enough, because that does not explain its origin based upon something more fundamental. So what is the ultimate fundamental thing whose origin does not have to be explained?
If you are deeply religious, you might tell me that basic matter came about because God made it happen. But if God did this, what was there before he did us the favor? Only God? Well, if that is so, how did God come about existing? Has he always been there? But to answer that question affirmatively is not enough for me--again--because it still does not explain to me the condition that exists to allow something in addition to just nothing to be out there, infinite or not. This question can be explained simply by saying that God is infinite and does not need a predecessor and is different from the physical universe and has to be accepted on faith. And this is fine for all of those that yearn for something more than just earthly existence: in all likelihood, the spiritual and the physical are like comparing apples to Cadillacs. Because the spiritual does not have to be physical, it does not have to obey the rules of the physical. The two can simply exist in parallel. On the other hand, since the spiritual arena is accepted by faith without proof in the scientific sense, it is more vulnerable to being relegated to the category of imagination. Certainly it is arguable that the physical universe operates just fine independent of spirituality.
So to continue with analysis within the realm of scientific inquiry, out of the above I went on to conclude that particulate matter is simply one of the manifestations of energy. Energy is a nebulous entity that implies the ability to do work. It appears that energy can differentiate into any number of possible forms, depending on the level of energy available and other factors which probably come about because of resonances, which I shall address elsewhere. Thus, I came to the conclusion that energy is the primary stuff of physical existence. If energy implies the capacity to do work, then energy would have to have been "charged up", at least at the beginning of its existence, relative to a lower state of energy. The ultimate state of low energy would be no energy at all. Therefore, if matter is a form of energy, then energy in the form of particles would possess the capacity to do work relative to ground zero, a reference point represented by no particles (and no energy) at all. Note that near absolute zero, matter still contains a huge amount of energy, which implies that absolute zero addresses only thermal energy and not everything that comprises particles so as to make them have substance.
I believe that scientists already have concluded that the basal state of energy of the universe is zero. This fits with what I am proposing here.
So, one night when I was at work late, and I was sitting at a table in a small room doing some writing at 2:00 in the morning, I started thinking about these things again. All of a sudden I had insight that finally made sense of it all.
The only thing that I could be comfortable with that could be infinite without my having to ask where it came from is: nothing!
That is correct---nothing. Zero energy, zero matter. Absolutely, totally empty space. Of course! That is the only "thing" that could go on and on forever without an implicit question attached to it as to where it came from. Emptiness---containing nothing, redundantly expressed---can truly go on and on infinitely without boundaries.
But then, if nothing is the universe's basal state, where did matter come from? Then it became apparent to me that “nothing” or “zero” has duplicity. I also will discuss this further in a different essay. Zero can be nothing, or it can be the sum of the pair of two numbers equal in magnitude, except one is positive and one is negative. Then zero could actually have the potential to revert from time to time to its summation components (and in the final analysis still remain zero). This implies that there might be a slight instability in the state of zero at any one point in time and at any one place, that can allow this separation to occur. How often this instability would amount to anything and whether it occurs in a lot of places would be difficult to tell and would probably have to be determined from a different vantage point and time frame, as I shall elaborate on farther down in this essay. Certainly it does not occur often from the standpoint of the time frame of a human life. Thus, maybe it is a property of "nothingness" to "separate itself" from time to time---rarely but with a definable statistical frequency---into two separate masses of energy of enormous potential that would be equal and opposite to one another, so that when put back together again, they would cancel one another out. I am basically referring to energy and anti-energy. The phenomenon of formation of these two separate masses of energy would, however, result in their explosive separation mostly in opposite directions, so that they would not have the chance to cancel one another out.
It followed directly, therefore, that it then made sense why and how the "big bang" came about. I would guess that the formation of two separate, huge masses of energy that fly away from one another rapidly would resemble an explosion. The energy thus released subsequently could differentiate out into all the possible forms of particles and waves, including molecules and life. It is just that the two separate masses of energy would be "anti" one another and if put together again would result in nothing again. In fact, eventually that would probably happen after many billions of years when enough dissipation had occurred. The energy in these separate masses would eventually meet up with their opposites (spawned from not the same but other big bangs) and disappear quietly into the original nothingness again. In an infinite macrocosm, what would keep this process from wildcatting out of control is an interesting speculation in itself. There must be an achievable balance between the frequency of occurrence and the rate of dissipation and neutralization that keeps everything in check. This also could imply that the mechanism of appearance depends on the rate of disappearance for its frequency. These two phenomena must be locked in resonance together.
The above may seem difficult to picture for those of us that are down here in the trenches with only the perspective of "worker ants". But say that you could live one hundred trillion years, and you also could travel far away and be able to see a large area of the vastness that is space, and suppose that you could speed things up so that each billion years was like only fifteen minutes or so from your perspective. In this scenario, looking into the vastness of space you would see over here the sudden violent formation of two separate masses of what would seem like light (assuming you could see its spectrum) that would then differentiate into defined entities such as galaxies, stars, and planets, and then in a while you would see about the same thing’s happening over there, etc. Over the course of a trillion years, from the perspective of your position, you might see ten or twelve of these separation phenomena. Each one would be in a unique state of development and eventual dispersion. And each one would have the ability to differentiate into all the different particles and waves that are possible any time that there is energy. That is to say, there is a forward bias that facilitates certain stable energy states, depending on the level of energy that is present at the time. This forward bias also favors entropy.
This hypothesis explains a great deal. The basal state of everything is nothing, and this nothing is infinite without having to be explained otherwise. The big bang came when equally opposite energy fields were formed and separated violently. Cyclical formation, expansion, and dissipation occurs. The sum of it all is zero.
I am unsure that this hypothesis is consistent with what physicists already have observed. They have produced something known as “anti-matter” in the laboratory. You would think that this means we already have a scientific basis for believing that a zero-sum universe can be possible. But from what I understand, the “anti-matter” that has been formed releases tremendous energy when it interacts with “matter” in experimental conditions. To me, this means that the physicists have found something that should have another name. The true result of the combination of energy and antienergy should involve no release of energy at all. Neutralization is an appropriate term for this process, whose resultant summation should be zero.
I am also very uncertain that this phenomenon of zero’s splitting into energy and anti-energy can be demonstrated in laboratory circumstances, for I suspect that a “critical mass” (to make a play on words) is necessary for its occurrence. Also, the probability that it will happen at any one place and at any one time is extremely small. It is likely to remain unknown what the nature of any hypothetical instability associated with the basal state of zero really is. Finally, we certainly should never be able to see the “anti-universe” associated with our big bang, for photons from our metaphorical mirror image would never reach us: they are outside of our “fishbowl”, they are traveling away from us, and even if they did come toward us, they should be neutralized by our own photons into oblivion.
I am not a physicist, and so I have to be content with sitting back for a long time to find out if the establishment comes up with a similar hypothesis and concludes that it is correct. In the meanwhile, as more scientific discoveries come about, it should be interesting and fun seeing how well they fit with what I have proposed above.
And as for the spiritual side: who knows? Maybe there are spirits and anti-spirits….
© 2005, srman07
posted by srman07 at 7:07 PM
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