Devoid § 5

The 'hardest' part

We tend to think that everything needs to be conserved. According to most, that is a must for us to exist. It’s a must for existence. And we do our best to keep everything as conserved as possible. 

That is why our first tries on the road to understand reality were governed by laws that have to obey conservation. It’s human nature to do our best to make sure that whatever explanation we come up with for reality, also makes (our) existence possible.

Most (if not all) scientific laws are scale dependent

These laws were considered universal until we realized they are scale dependent. That is why the use of the word law in science is very uncommon these days. They can’t be called laws at every scale. 

For example, the ‘law’ relating to gravity works at very large scale. Electromagnetism is closely related to gravity, but while gravity is easily observed at large scales, it is harder to do so for electromagnetism. And the hypothetical graviton is probably energy from the moment space came into existence. If the graviton exists, we will see it as a particle of an amount of energy we currently can’t create. This is why we can’t observe it as a particle yet. But this particle may actually be filling the universe.

The conservation laws and information paradox only appear at our level of reality

Our urge to need to conserve stuff also eventually led to the so-called information paradox. 

Although this is solvable, the idea that information can’t be lost is in the end another law that existence doesn’t really need. There are many interactions going on below a scale we can imagine from which existence emerges, and what exists is constantly being regenerated from there.

From our point of view, it never appears this way until we examine reality very closely. As energy interacts and gets confined multiple times, new interactions emerge. These cause new forms of confinement and new interactions multiple times until we get to our level of reality from which we derive what we currently know.

That is why the conservation laws and the information paradox appear the way they are.

The true nature of energy

At the level of energy the whole quantum information paradox evaporates, but it can still be, and will be, solved at the level of matter, which is a very condensed form of energy.

However, that’s not the way energy works at the fundamental level. There, energy exists devoid of space and time as we know it. This can sound strange to us, as space and time seem a necessity for existence. But energy doesn’t have that limitation at the fundamental level. It’s just energy.

It can’t stay in its pure form and keeps interacting with itself constantly, instantly causing confined energy, space and time. Confined energy has many levels and, mostly without realizing it, these have received a lot of naming schemes throughout humanity's history. The thing is we have always felt something is there, even in places there seems to be nothing.

Ultimately, everything is confined energy, whatever we name it. 

What’s the matter before there’s matter?

The following will seem paradoxical, as at our level of confinement, we always need to add energy for anything to happen. When trying to figure this out from what we observe, down to the level of energy, we can’t add enough energy to get to the most early forms of confinement.

But energy itself is abundant, ubiquitous, and devoid of space and time before self interaction.

It is at the first interaction that energy confinement, space, and time emerge. The first level of confinement is kind of like splitting energy into two entangled regions.

This is the starting point of what later becomes matter and antimatter.

Splitting during energy interactions causes most symmetry

Up until now it is all still mostly energy interactions causing more and more confined entangled regions. All of these regions are very symmetrical. And although the interactions and forms of confinement become more and more complex, the splitting confined entangled regions keep on looking as mirror images of each other. If you want to see this in action, you would have to figure out how to probe what is happening beyond the Planck scale and beyond the electromagnetic region of the universe that is visible to us. Unfortunately, our current technology doesn’t have that capability yet (2020). 

This is the underlying mechanism that led to symmetry and Noether’s theorem.

About invisible energy

As fundamental energy is still interacting everywhere, the regions between confined energy keep on causing more space and time to emerge and more confined energy (more on that later) to emerge. As mentioned earlier, this in turn causes exponentially more fundamental energy interactions and even more space and time to emerge. From our perspective, it looks like some form of energy is pushing things apart in regions where there seems to be nothing. 

This is where the underlying mechanism of most of what we call dark energy comes from.

About invisible matter

The confined energy is also still interacting with other energy including itself, other confined energy and the underlying fundamental energy where everything originated from. All of this energy becomes more and more confined constantly at many levels until you get to very confined forms of energy like what we call matter. But long before we get to that level of confined energy, there are levels that don’t emit any electromagnetic radiation. We do notice it’s there, but we can’t detect it directly with our current sensory equipment. 

This is where the underlying mechanism of most of what we call dark matter comes from.

_{(More on why better names for ‘dark energy’ and ‘dark matter’ will be ‘invisible energy’ and ‘invisible matter’ is coming up in chapter seven.)}

Math and statistics apply

The more confinement of energy there is forming in many levels, the more complicated the interactions become and the more phenomena emerge. 

When stuff is this statistical, confined, massive in numbers and moves through space, we can easily put numbers to it, measure it and do calculations on it.

This is why the universe appears to be governed by mathematical physics and seems highly statistical.

And because it was the same energy that interacted causing everything to eventually emerge, all the mathematical formulas we come up with for explaining all kinds of seemingly different natural phenomena will point more and more to the same direction. The more we realize how to combine the formulas, the more accurate the descriptions of how it all works become. 

This is why some scientists expect there to be a theory of everything. 

_{(A better understanding of emergence is needed to get there.)}

However…

There is a pitfall most theories fall into. You see, the enormous amounts of data involved with natural phenomena make it possible to use mathematical trickery and still get highly accurate results. The problem with this is that what actually happens goes over our heads and leads to many possible explanations for how this all works.

That is the underlying mechanism that led to highly accurate theories that accurately predict most natural phenomena, but can’t explain (yet) why they happen as they do. 

It’s not an actual multiverse

There will only be part of why this is mentioned here, as it is a very long story.

When there was the new understanding of quantum mechanics, people realized there was a lot going on and there were multiple possible outcomes at the same time. The quantum world is a world where anything that can happen actually happens. It all just happens so fast that we don’t consider that to be part of actual reality, as at the macro scale we always see only one outcome. The weird thing is that all outcomes are everywhere until there is an interaction (often called a measurement). This has been experimentally proven many times. Misunderstanding how many levels of confinement lead to many levels of entanglement led some people to incorrect conclusions. This caused some to theorize that the many other outcomes must have gone to other worlds or universes. It’s more like they are hidden below the Planck scale within the universe, because “There's plenty of room at the bottom” as a scientist once said.

Then there is the idea that the universe is finely tuned, and combined with the earlier mentioned ‘anything that can happen will happen’ from the quantum world, we get to many worlds with different possible outcomes. 

Ultimately, it’s all one universe, even though there is a lot of it we don’t have access to.

That is some of the contexts where the ideas of the multiverse arose from. 

About the age of the universe

The more we can observe, the more we can predict about the age of the universe. The current estimate is very accurate for the part of the universe we have access to, and that is huge.

It is not correct to suspect that the part we have access to actually is the entire universe. And it’s also not correct to suspect that the current estimated age is for the entire universe. What we are most familiar with is the electromagnetic part of the universe that can reach us. And most of it can’t reach us, as it recedes from us faster and faster due to the expansion of space.

The universe is way older and much larger than any current prediction (besides the ones mentioning infinity as an estimate).

Infinitely big? Maybe, maybe not.

The fact is that the universe beyond the boundary we have access to keeps on receding from us faster than the speed limit of the universe due to the expansion of space. At the same time, the bubble we have access to is shrinking due to that same expansion. But stating that the regions we don’t have access to are other universes doesn’t seem like the correct approach.

And why the several multiverse theories aren’t the correct approach can be deduced by realizing where most of these ideas arose from.

But in reality, it’s probably the amount of energy and its interactions that equals (or approaches) infinity. From our point of view, energy can exist beyond space and time. That sounds a lot like zero (energy) equals infinity (energy interaction or confinement).

_{We could state that there is a universe to explore below the Planck scale, but it’s all still in the same universe we are all part of.}