The Underlying Rules of Fundamental Physics — A cosmic telegram billions of years in transit.
By Maria Anna van Driel, www.nexttruth.com
Even the universe itself is one of the great unexplained wonders of human history, we now know that our universe is an unprecedentedly, vast dynamic cauldron of activity and home to one hundred billion galaxies all racing away within a boiling ocean of space-time.
But how did it all came about? And, is there an undiscovered complex system containing simple rules, underneath ‘space’ that is providing the existence for all the raw matter in the universe and on our planet?
The origin of the universe is the origin of everything. Multiple scientific theories and creation myths from around the world have tried to explain its mysterious genesis. However, the most widely accepted explanation is the Big Bang theory what states that the universe began as a hot and infinitely dense point. Only a few millimeters wide, it was similar to a supercharged black hole.
About 13.7 billion years ago this tiny singularity violently exploded. And it is from this explosion, this bang, that all matter, energy, space, and time were created.
That is a wonderful insight, but it leaves something out that peers deeper into the darker reaches of the origin of our universe. Something that is showing us that there is a possibility that, way beyond the Earth, the Milky Way and other distant galaxies, our universe is not as fundamental as we tend to think it is, but is instead part of an underlying complex system containing simple rules.
“If we based everything on the traditional methodology of mathematics, we would in effect only be able to explore what we somehow already understood. But in running computer experiments we are in effect sampling the raw computational universe of possibilities, without being limited by our existing understanding.” Prof. Stephen Wolfram explains in his article ‘Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics…and It’s Beautiful’.
Now the idea of a fundamental system laying underneath ordinary space and time is a strange one. I mean, most of us were raised to believe that the word “universe” means everything. But barring such an anomalous upbringing, it is strange to imagine other realms separate from ours, most with fundamentally different features, that would rightly be called universes of their own.
It is indeed one of the greatest adventures of the human mind to find out where we came from, where we are and, where are we drifting towards. But, to understand this whimsical place and how it created all the raw material we see here on earth, we need to take an incredible journey and travel back to the moment our universe was born. We need to go back to the very beginning, to a time when there was nothing…no stars, no planets, no space…just a time before there was time. But what is time?
“In effect it is much as we experience it: the inexorable process of things happening and leading to other things. But in our models it is something much more precise: it is the progressive application of rules, that continually modify the abstract structure that defines the contents of the universe.” Prof. Wolfram explains.
“But in the early 1980s, when I started studying the computational universe of simple programs, I made what was for me a very surprising and important discovery: that even when the underlying rules for a system are extremely simple, the behavior of the system as a whole can be essentially arbitrarily rich and complex.
And this got me thinking: Could the universe work this way? Could it in fact be that underneath all of this richness and complexity we see in physics there are just simple rules? I soon realized that if that was going to be the case, we’d in effect have to go underneath space and time and basically everything we know. Our rules would have to operate at some lower level, and all of physics would just have to emerge.”
A string or a path?
The string theory is an approach to realize Einstein’s dream of a unified theory of physics, a single overarching framework that would be able to describe all the forces at work in the universe. And the central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. It says that if you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you will find molecules and then you will find atoms and subatomic particles.
Think of a bucket filled with water. As you tip it over and let the water run out of the bucket it seems that the water is acting like this continuous fluid, yet, underneath this continuous, there are all these little molecules bouncing around. And this might be the same kind of behavior we might see one day, happening underneath known ‘space’.
This theory also says that if you could probe smaller, much smaller than we can with existing technology, you would find something else inside these particles — a little tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string. And just like the strings on a violin, they can vibrate in different patterns producing different musical notes.
These little fundamental strings, when they vibrate in different patterns, they produce different kinds of particles like electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, and would, in this line of thought, be united into a single framework, as they would all arise from these vibrating strings. It is a compelling picture, a kind of cosmic symphony, where all the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the music that these little, tiny strings can play.
But there is something missing in this elegant unification. Years of research have shown that the math of string theory does not quite work. It has internal inconsistencies, unless we allow for something wholly unfamiliar — the simple rules of a complex structure that might be cause for all the ‘stuff‘ you see around you.
Can we, with some caution, consider these underlying structures and the connections, or path’s, between the elements within these structures, Prof. Wolfram is speaking of, as the spooky action at a distance? Does it exist in a hyper speed (state) while we are experiencing the remnants from it?
“Certainly the theory of relativity points in this direction, Prof. Wolfram says, but if there’s been one wrong turn in the history of physics in the past century, I think it is the assumption that space and time are the same kind of thing. And in our models they are not — even though, as we will see, relativity comes out just fine. But to get to the point where we can understand the elegant bigger picture we need to go through some detailed things.”
To keep things tolerably simple, I’m not talking directly about rules that operate on hypergraphs. Instead I’m talking about rules that operate on strings of characters. (To clarify: these are not the strings of string theory — although in a bizarre twist of “pun-becomes-science” I suspect that the continuum limit of the operations I discuss on character strings is actually related to string theory in the modern physics sense.)
It does make one wonder indeed. Could these connections, or path’s, between the elements Prof. Wolfram is showing in his hyper-graphs be real time while the swirling movements in those cosmic area’s we have become to understand as ‘space’, is the origin of the ‘time-flow’ we are experiencing — interacting with?
If so, a mind dazzling question in this might be, “Are we truly experiencing time or, are we experiencing our brain rearranging the randomness, disorder and chaoticness of the underlying rules of the fundamental theory of physics into a, for us, coherent cosmic language?
Perhaps we should not sweep the idea that there a realistic possibility that we are, and everything we see in both the universe and on our planet, is existing because of an extremely slowed down behavior of the time found on these path’s where particles/elements are exchanged the (primordial) binary information they posses, under the carpet this quickly.
