Quantic View of the UniverseThe subjects of physics and science have long interested me for the obvious reasons that they provide a solid basis on which to observe and understand what is going on around us. It did not hurt that I made substantial efforts in time to offset my limited raw intelligence, efforts which returned some societal wins. They also provide mental gymnastics to keep the brain fit and less old. It remains very exciting to learn new things and to speculate about the fundamental nature of our life and universe.
On the physics side, having a glimpse at proposed solutions to the unified theory remains a multi-decade interest. Also, putting a scientific basis to consciousness remains an ultimate challenge. We, humans, have been on top of the food chain for a few million years, and yet we are ridiculously too small in all aspects to find answers to these seemingly elementary and fundamental questions. I don’t understand much about these subjects, not for lack of having read about them. I just want to share my own perspective about them, with all likelihood of being incomplete and/or wrong most of the time. At least, I try to simplify their complexity in a manner that speaks to me, and hopefully to others.
How come gravity, still Einstein’s domain, has not yet proven to be quantic, like all three other forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic)? How can we fathom the beginning or end or cycles of the universe? The universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, each with a fair amount of surrounding planets, and we are about 8 billion humans in our exquisitely paradisiac planet, blessed with oxygen and water, while the universe is overwhelmingly made of hydrogen and helium. On top of that, the current version of the universe is 14 billion years old, a little more than our life expectancy or the few thousand years on which our ancestors have left some marks. OK, if we are too small, let’s try to think bigger, right? Let’s put ourselves in the universe’s shoes. What do we see? the same bunch of galaxies (forget about stars and planets: let’s assume that, at the scale of the universe, they are photon-like, insignificant, massless “particles” that appear and disappear, like light beams. Also, let’s think of billions of years as “moments”. So then, the universe may look more quantic: in a particular billion-years moment, the location of galaxies may well appear probabilistic (galaxy 28956 could be here or there, at random but with an observable probability). So, it is not inconceivable to re-gauge our scale of “things” more in tune with this “big” universe.
Looking at the Big Bang as a not so rare moment in the life of this entity , and not as the big, big, beginning of everything it seems to be for humans, may allow us to counteract the fundamental human-centric bias which compels us to consider that things are as we perceive them, as opposed to how they could really be, whatever that means. Does time exist in this mind-experiment? If time is defined as the sequence of states between one observation and another, and if prior to the big bang, the space was so empty at its core, without any possibility of interaction or evolution, then time would not seem to make any sense “at that time”, would it? Let’s leave the issue of time aside for a moment. How come there was very little and all of the sudden, the crash of all crashes. If we are tempted to use our intuition to imagine the causes of such singularity, one would think of a big crash, like all china dropping at once in the house. The previous order of the universe “tipping”, flipping” for some reasons, all things moving from periphery to center? “Moving” in itself is a dangerous word that implies that the same “things” are moving from point A to point B. It is most likely better to think in terms of “field” reversal, which transformed all there was at previous observation to a totally different state, much like the result of creation and annihilation operators familiar in quantum mechanics. Quid of energy conservation, entropy variation? Clearly, a huge bounce of entropy: as a gambler, I would place my chip on energy conservation from dark + black holed to our more graspable concept of “hot” energy.
