Comprehending the origins of the universe is a matter of unhinging human fallacies in thinking.
Three fallacies: materality, existence, and time (cause/effect).
There is no such thing as matter, nothing exists, and the forward procession of events is just an illusion.
My theory on the origin of the universe is that it is one enumeration of an infinitely possible abstract enumerations of mathematical expressions.
The key to understanding the origin of the universe is in answering this question, "at some point something must have come from nothing"
Of course, if we abandon time, then this sentence doesn't make any sense. However, the important bit of understanding is that there must be something that is a priori. There has to be. There has to be something that is because it is, and not because of something else. Atoms are the way they are because of electrons, protons, and neutrons. And those are the way they are because of quarks and the like.
Although, it is possible that things are a certain way because of themselves; a self-referencing reality. Like quarks and planck lengths are that way because a butter fly flaps its wings. But that doesn't settle right. Why is it this self-referencing reality the way it is?
At some point something must have come from nothing. There has to be objects in the universe that are just there because they are there.
The only thing I know of to exist without precedence is the abstract. 1+1=2 exists and is true without needing something creating it. Actually, all abstract ideas are existenceless, materialess, and timeless, they can be pure a priori or the result of a priori initial instructions. (They are also, possibly, dimensionless?)
In this case, the universe could just be an abstract Turing Machine and we are abstract states that have the abstract capacity for observation and reception as illustrated by further abstract states.
Cf: My Fight Club metaphor for the Turiginity of the Universe; Digital Philosophy; The Metaphysics Research Lab.
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Scientists have announced hints that the Universe is actually relatively small -- something like 70 billion light years across -- with a hall-of-mirrors illusion tricking us into thinking that space stretches on forever.
The thinking is based on observations by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which measures temperature ripples in the cosmic microwave background.
Our Universe seems like an endlessly repeating set of dodecahedrons (12 identical pentagons) and space wraps back on itself, says mathematician Jeffrey Weeks. If you exit through one pentagon, you re-enter the same region through the opposite face and you keep meeting the same galaxies over and over again. (link by way of Kurzweil)
WTF... I guess I have long since conceded that the math of our perception, is truly inadequate for understanding all the nuances of our space.
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Which mathematical structure is isomorphic to our Universe?
My physics friends over at UCSD sent me this article... will read up with it after I'm done working on these linear systems I have for tomorrow's meeting...
What if the universe consists of two parallel 3 dimensional planes one of matter and one of the empty black space, and that the matter that we see now is just the existence of holes in the black space with stuff from the matter-space bleeding through those holes
Lynd e-mailed me the other day in response to my complaint that "Why hasn't anybody solved Zeno's Paradox." This is an exerpt of what he had to say...
Lynds' solution to the Achilles and the tortoise paradox, submitted to Philosophy of Science, helped explain the work. A tortoise challenges Achilles, the swift Greek warrior, to a race, gets a 10m head start, and says Achilles can never pass him. When Achilles has run 10m, the tortoise has moved a further metre. When Achilles has covered that metre, the tortoise has moved 10cm...and so on. It is impossible for Achilles to pass him. The paradox is that in reality, Achilles would easily do so. A similar paradox, called the Dichotomy, stipulates that you can never reach your goal, as in order to get there, you must firstly travel half of the distance. But once you've done that, you must still traverse half the remaining distance, and half again, and so on. What's more, you can't even get started, as to travel a certain distance, you must firstly travel half of that distance, and so on.
According to both ancient and present day physics, objects in motion have determined relative positions. Indeed, the physics of motion from Zeno to Newton and through to today take this assumption as given. Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived. "There's no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it's the outcome of brain function and consciousness."
Rather than the historical mathematical proof provided in the 19th century of summing an infinite series of numbers to provide a finite whole, or in the case of another paradox called the Arrow, usually thought to be solved through functional mathematics and Weierstrass' "at-at" theory, Lynds' solution to all of the paradoxes lay in the realisation of the absence of an instant in time underlying a bodies motion and that its position was constantly changing over time and never determined. He comments, "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."
I bet all of the universe can be reduced down to, like, 10 basic patterns. One of them is the constant drive toward nodification and in response, the drive toward mass collectivization. Some good examples:
- Concentration of solar dust into balls which then create gravity wells that spawn rings of other floating nodes, solar systems.
- Individual's desire for concentration of political power into themselves and the resulting hydra of democracy, media, capitalism.
- Desire to bring in knowledge tends to result in a desire to share that knowledge.
The Omega Point and Life in the Universe "How long can life survive in the universe? Can it evolve forever, or will the third law of Thermodynamics lead to universal heat death? Apparently there might be some ways around this fate, if intelligent life is sufficiently clever and tenacious."
Interesting stuff by people who have thought of the biggest picture of them all, surviving the death of the universe. I believe more in Tipler's scenario since I'm more intimate with our ever accelerationg order and time infinitely slowing down. Maybe there's a Planck Constant for time, i.e. there's an atomic unit of time. I'm unfamiliar with Dyson's scenario. As for Linde's scenario, I don't believe in baby universes. I think that travelling to other universes or creating new "universes" defeats the term universe. The universe is all possibly accessible existence. It is either open or closed. I will have to read more. Don't stress too much about this though, worry about your girlfriend and dayjob.
There's always the question, "At one point, something must have come from nothing" and I have the similar concern that the singularity--the one at the big-bang, not the one in 2020--must have a source. I was thinking that maybe the only thing that can come from nothing is mathematics, abstract tautologies or ideas. These are the only things that occupy no physical space. Like what if there was a book that contained the story of the entire world and or a conceptual computer program that provided the inital conditions and rules for the big bang, and through cellular automata, if executed, would produce us. Would these things have to be executed in order for them to exist?