Let there be light(s)

Part 4: The multiverse one

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the multiverse rankles because if realities exist in which everything that I could ever imagine happening has happened, does happen or will, the value of my current life is degraded. Scarcity laws apply. If everything becomes, who cares? It’s the definition of low stakes. On the other hand I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that it is exactly the manifold unendingness of iterative variation that makes a precise life infinitesimally rare and surpassingly valuable, dare I say sacred. Scarcity laws apply. If every you happens, but this you is singular and singularly exposed to a unique version of events, how amazing is that? It’s like finding out you live in a universe wider and more populace than anyone had ever imagined and yet you are literally in possession of the only of something. They make baseball cards like this now: one-offs, to ensure value. I once told A. that I happened to be privy to the fact that in every other reality in which I was married, it was to Alicia Keys. She didn’t take this as the audacious romantic gesture I’d intended. She didn’t find it romantic at all. This encapsulates the valuation conundrum with which the multiverse presents us.

The short version of its history is, once enough time had seeped in among the footers and i-beams of the Copenhagen interpretation, once a critical mass of the founding fathers had merged with the infinite and their hit-men softened into late-stage Luca Brasian semiretirement, Science got to re-examining some of the old critiques. The flaw in Von Neumann’s original and canonical defense of Copenhagen was at last disseminated. The heretical work of David Bohm finally saw the light of day. He’d pled the fifth during a HUAC session chaired by Nixon, been blacklisted and exported himself to Brazil. His approach bypassed the party line of complementarity vis a vis pilot waves—think of the little waves that peel off to port and starboard in advance of the bow of a ship, quantum versions of which abolish much of the officially impenetrable mystery of the Schrödinger equation. His take had been more or less lynched at its debutante party by the old guard (Oppenheimer shivved his former student) and languished in obscurity for decades. Princeton alum Hugh Everett’s 1956 Whoopee cushion of a doctoral thesis, which had been nursemaided by John Wheeler, also enjoyed a second act. Wheeler was a grand nabob and get-along guy who thought his student had something on the ball, but in order to placate the Danish brahmins he’d persuaded Everett into letting a lot of the air out of the Whoopee cushion. As it had once been Schrödinger’s intention to pants the nascent field of quantum mechanics in front of everyone who mattered with his patently silly cat experiment, it was Everett’s intention to pants the Copenhagen interpretation by taking the cat experiment seriously. If it bothered everyone so much that a thicket of probabilities collapses arbitrarily to one outcome at the instant of measurement, let’s just say they don’t collapse, let’s say every single probability is realized in a parallel reality. Thus Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds hypothesis. Naturally he was laughed out of the building. Fine, Wheeler said. Fuck academia. I’m going to get rich writing nuclear war algorithms for the Pentagon.

The symbol for Schrödinger’s wavefunction equation is the Greek letter psi, pronounced like the last two letters of “maps.” Psi is indicated as a possible root form of the letter x.

Many Worlds was above all a brave response to the Schrödinger equation. I first read about it in Robert Anton Wilson books in the 90s. I didn’t care for the notion, except in a dreamy science-fictional way, that encountering an option, any option, triggered the instantaneous creation of forking universes, universes spawned multiply from each branching instant. It felt overmuch, exhausting. And where did all the stuff come from? And where would it all be? This kind of thinking required a special tolerance for metaphysical expanse. Everett’s attitude was: Deal with it; this is what the Schrödinger equation implies. If you don’t like it you can see your way back to Copenhagen. Which everyone did. But the old guard got old and the new guys, kicking cans how they do, picked one up now and then to see if it still had any juice in it. And the seasons turned and the long hygge winter of complementarity retreated, incapable of withstanding the melting heat of a much deferred and recklessly zany spring. (A tactical retreat, I should clarify: the Copenhagen interpretation is still taught to budding physicists globally, a plurality of whom still claim to buy it, though no two of them seem to agree precisely on what it means.)

Is an argument for the apparent evolutionary utility of our repetitious systems as simple and gross as the one shown gazillionly in nature documentaries, that the usurping inseminator must physically oust the residing? This needn’t I suppose be an entirely depressing thought. We don’t want flimsily reasoned philosophies eclipsing rigorous and useful ones just by virtue of being the darlings of new people. Nature reflects the reality of the fittest animals producing the most offspring and therefore generational influence because that’s how nature works. Or, to commit an anthropomorphic sin: That’s how nature wants it! Truly though there is something sinisterly appealing to the idea that things can’t be other than they are. I wonder if there isn’t a red thread connecting Leibniz’s best-of-all-possible-worlds back to the Stoics and over around to Darwin and the indifferent sift of genetic mutation over time to the sort of defeatist-tainted “It is what it is” attitude of so many people today. I wonder if they aren’t all cousins philosophically—though I suppose we’re all at least that; if you can read a common language in this dark colossal universe you must at the very least be philosophical cousins. The activist mentality rebels against that sedentary posture: We make our own beds, are agents of change, etc. But the sedent has such ludicrous resources to hand. To the sedent (and I admit that that is a fraught choice of nouns, but activists gonna activist) the activist is akin to the mouse with an erection floating on his back on a river toward a drawbridge, yelling: “Raise the bridge! Raise the bridge!” Only in the mouse’s mind is his potency a matter of any importance to the larger world. Stepping away from his perspective, each step a full remove: mouse to river to region to continent to world to solar system to galaxy etc.,—or with each step a zooming out in the scale of time, of the doings of biology between ice ages—the sedent is at any given spacetime coordinates lavishly justified in his lack of ambition. Even Candide tending to his garden might break to sip a pint with Leibniz in the pub called The Best of All Possible Worlds, looking at things this way.

A point all the physicists who’ve made careers of the multiverse are given to repeating is that it is not a theory in and of itself but a prediction that follows from a theory. The theory in question is called Inflation, or Cosmic Inflation. Some theories are born when an apple falls on your head and you wonder why it happened. Others are born when you already have a theory—for example—as to how and why orbits are what they are except one of them’s a bit wonky so you predict the existence of a variable that would make sense of things, which is maybe a planet heretofore unknown to humanity, and then they discover Neptune right where you said it would be and you’re retroactively—often posthumously—discovered to have been a genius. Cosmic inflation is one of the latter kind. We look around and things don’t quite add up but they would if such and such were the case. It makes sense of things. Relativity’s implications for the future were upsetting. It wasn’t clear at first why the attractional quality of gravity wouldn’t have, or wouldn’t eventually result in, a mass contraction, so Einstein introduced what he called the cosmological constant, a sort of hazy universal repellant presence that countered gravity and made everything conform to what were then the standard models of a static cosmos. When Edwin Hubble confirmed in 1929 that the universe was in fact expanding, an embarrassed Einstein retracted his constant, referring to it as his “biggest blunder.” But then when we figured out that the expansion was accelerating, the cosmological constant was retrieved from the dust bin and re-enlisted as dark energy, a to-this-day ill-explained but influential in a way that is impossible to overstate factor accounting for about 70% of all the stuff in the universe. Is dark energy an aspect of vacuum, is it a defect in spacetime, is it actually unnecessary, something we’ve invented to make our existing model (General Relativity) work when in fact it’s the model that needs tweaking? We don’t know.

I reach a point fairly often in these researches where my mind just wants to throw in the towel. There’s a character in there, not my favorite, perpetually standing on the other side of a window I can open if I ever want to hear him say, “So what?” Which is all he says. Sometimes tossing an f-bomb in there. “So fucking what?” It’s difficult to figure how much difference it makes “knowing” about cosmology or quantum physics. The aspect if any of my personality knowledge of this nature seems likeliest to accentuate is my sense of the absurd, which wasn’t underdeveloped to begin with, and which is a liability more often than not in a person attempting to live a responsible life, especially one on whom anyone else relies. The existence of the cosmological constant in no way intersects with my obligation to get my oil changed every three months or 5,000 miles. “I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light,” declares art historian Bernard Nightingale in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Were such questions to begin nosing into the terrain of my day-to-day it couldn’t conceivably be for the good. Which isn’t to say the exercise is exclusively the domain of nutjobs. Scientists support their families hammering away at these questions. The handful of earthlings who’ve been permitted to accumulate shamefully gargantuan fortunes might be able to do something about them. Philosophers are. I’m basically a retired barista with a hardworking wife and three kitty cats. I employ unretired baristas while efforting daily to defer rot, using my graduate degree in playwriting to keep the birds fed. And to be is to wonder. They say that mathematics is the oldest continuous human thought. Wondering at our place in it all must be our original mental pastime. I’ve arrived at this, the large end of the telescope, because talking about quantum mechanics and omitting the multiverse would be like talking about Texas omitting cowboy hats. Also because I suspect the discussion will ultimately add texture to this thing’s conclusion. But I’m only furthering in my indescribably tiny way an age-old human project.

Which is a project we should undertake with maximum humility, seeing as we’ve been wrong about it in every way forever. After Moses, Aristotle is maybe the first person we have on record stating the facts and they were all wrong. Ptolemy was wrong. All the popes were wrong for a very long time. Henry VIII I don’t know if he ever ventured a guess but if he had it would’ve been wrong. Every monarch was wrong for thousands of years, ditto their councilors. The Druids were wrong. Every indigenous tribe was wrong. They probably asked Martin Luther and he probably deferred to Genesis, but Genesis was wrong because Moses didn’t know what he was talking about. How could he? Most of Science for most of Science’s existence has been wrong. The most intelligent people on the planet used to think the planet was a dish at the bottom of a cosmos like an upturned vase. Then they thought it was a sphere within a sequence of nested crystal spheres along the surfaces of which the planets and stars and the sun rolled out their orbits. It was all—everything was—part of a tree. Or mischief ginned up by a coyote. I’m not trying to write a cultural anthropology paper here, I’m just doing a blink-survey of a field long on imagination but you’d have to say short on facts. Capital s Science deserves some latitude as it’s an enterprise founded on a method that is literally a reaction to our inexhaustible knack for error. If it has been wrong, and it has, you have to give it credit for never having claimed it was right to begin with; rather, it has always been an arrow, a direction, one track laid at a time endlessly on the trail of greater accuracy.

One time I was sitting outside somewhere enjoying all the animals when it occurred to me from one thought to the next that I had no idea how long any of them lived. Just on a very basic longevity scale. How long did birds live? Did it vary widely from species to species? How old was the average worm or doodlebug? Days? Minutes? How many of these guys just got here? Or was I surrounded by geriatrics? What was going on? I think I laughed. Out of sheer joy and hilarity at the scope of my ignorance. How enlightened could you be if you existed on the daily amid a profusion of fellow travelers about whom you knew so little? Whatever the opposite of the word oceanic is describes my knowledge of such things. We know that we see only a fraction of visible light and we know it’s a small slice of the whole spectrum. I think my revelation that day was equivalent to discovering that even in my visible spectra my intelligence was equally minimal again, a fraction of that fraction. Einstein said that his first intimation toward science happened when his father showed him a compass when he was four or five years old. When he realized that the needle would remain trained on north no matter what, a deep cold came over him. He lay shaking in bed around the thought. This is Einstein basically in kindergarten thrilling bodily to the evidence of unignorable forces hidden in daylight. This is a kid, I submit, constitutionally unable to take things for granted. Which must, I submit, rank among the few most valuable traits a penetrating thinker can possess.

One thing almost none of us ever think about is the fact that the global human population has about quadrupled in the last 100 years, an outcome that is wholly the product of Science and Capitalism and that has not so much represented a variation on a theme of growth as it has an instantaneous genre shift. Imagine you’re looking at a sparsely populated meadow grazed by a few sheep and you blink and it’s a teeming refugee camp, half the people staring at phones and a few extremely rich. If people lived longer than they do we’d talk about this more, I think. It’s the shuffling-off and, prior to that, the disregardment human senescence affords that enables the managing generations to go about their business among the madding crowd self-singing lullabies that it was ever thus. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity usurped Isaac Newton’s laws of motion entirely. Newton went from Man of the Hour for a quarter millennium to yesterday’s news with a few swipes of chalk on Einstein’s whiteboard. Still, his math and formulae were sufficient to launch into space a mission that would land on the moon in 1969. And that guy? Newton? He thought the Earth was 6,000 years old.

This 6,000 number, you’ve probably heard it, it comes from one long genealogy in the book of Genesis. The thought was, if you assume competence in the genealogist (likely Moses again), right there is a map of history. You could think this because geology hadn’t been invented yet and neither had biology or chemistry in any real way. All we had was math, astronomy and witchcraft. In the room next to Newton Robert Hooke was studying tiny stuff through rudimentary microscopes and getting ideas while in another one someone was inventing the second-hand, but all that was speculative and unborn. Noted science fiction author William Gibson has often been quoted as saying “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” and this has always been the case, even at the arrow-point of the vanguard. One could invent calculus and hand centuries into the future the principles needed to traject a rocket to—much closer to Newton’s time—the orb his countryman Will Shakespeare knew as Diana and still know bupkis about anything and everything else.

So progress is choppy, uneven, scooting forward in big surprising chunks over here while stalling out for centuries at a throw over there. Much depends on what we decide to officially care about. In the last hundred years or so the human race concentrated a lot of time and money on telescopes and related technologies with the result that our understanding of many basic tenets of the visible cosmos deepened significantly. We rather rudely drilled the universe’s age down to 13.8 billions years. Honing in on galactic red shift presented us with some data fascinatingly disruptive to the standard model of a static universe. In fact we were expanding and at rates that accelerated the further away you looked. Stephen Hawking called the cosmic microwave background radiation perhaps the most important discovery ever—this being the vestigial warmth of the initial hydrogen plasma whose omnipresence eventually rolled out into everything we see when we look anywhere at all. It’s a cocoon of by definition the earliest history we’re capable of perceiving. Close long-term studies of the CMB yielded a buffet of perplexing and suggestive data pointing to much ado in the first instants of the universe. Much ado, as it were, about nothing. Suddenly it was possible to marry all sorts of information to all sorts of projection and reverse-projectioning models, and one notion beautiful in its simplicity was all it took to explain everything. Inflation. Reality began with a dot much smaller than an atom and infinitely dense. Very very rapidly it started expanding, exponentially and without losing density. The Inflaton (that’s what we’re calling the primal egg) can grow in size and weight simultaneously because matter is created from energy, and with every doubling a portion of the Inflaton’s energy was converted to matter.

Here’s the first annoying hurdle we’re going to come to. I’m just going to get it out of the way. The Inflaton is not our universe in miniature. It is Reality in miniature, and Reality encompasses many universes, including ours. Quantum mechanics, which historically has had such a rough go of aligning with classical physics, shines in the Inflaton. The curious and regular temperature variation we’ve charted in the CMB is explained by Schrödinger’s wavefunction operating in the opening instants of the infinitesimal cosmos. Ditto the peculiar flatness of space, ditto the stuttering cadence of our universe’s expansion. It isn’t possible for us to picture the pace of the Inflaton’s increase. Essentially inside the snap of your fingers it went from tinier than an electron to galactically roomy. We’re talking trillionths of billionths of a second. I don’t know about you but this is the kind of creation story I can really get behind. Nagging cavils about nothingness and expansion (i.e., what was it all growing into?) diminish when I am able to imagine that All Isness Everywhere Forever just basically appeared one moment, as if rather than a development it was a matter of—as Moses had it, to be fair—simply turning on the lights.

It is supposed that Reality is spherical. It is surmised that when it had reached in the vertiginous pace of its expanse roughly the size of a grapefruit, some of the inflationary material decayed a bit. If you imagine the inflation as a horse race churning up so much dirt that you can’t even see the participants, now you can see one because it has staggered off the pace and fallen off track. This is what in our local universe we have designated the Big Bang: not the beginning of everything, really, but the end of the beginning of everything. First Inflation, then inflationary decay, then Big Bang, so that our universe is in effect only a few microseconds younger than Reality.

The other really annoying thing we have to deal with here is that the Inflaton cannot escape eternal inflation. The math is pretty clear on this point. It continues inflating at a faster rate than it decays, meaning the web or tree of universes it spawns just keeps growing forever. This was an unexpected off-shoot of the theory but there you go, that’s how it works sometimes. You probe What Is for explanations and they refuse to stay in the neat silos you’ve prepared for them. They spill, explaining more and in different ways than you’d planned on. The worst part of eternal inflation is that it all depends on a Ponzi scheme involving a perpetual leveraging of energy borrowed on the margins of gravity. I don’t want to spend too much time on this. I’ve tried nailing it down, it’s pivotal, but I can’t seem to penetrate the mechanism. For what it’s worth I also get lost pretty much whenever Michael Lewis explains something to me about high finance. Suffice it to say that the people who do understand it do so often against their will. As Tegmark says, the dominant complaint he fields from colleagues regarding the multiverse has evolved from “It doesn’t make any sense to me and I hate it” to “I hate it.”

Our record of discoveries concerning Our Place In It All constitutes a kind of horror show of successive humiliations. The infinite multiverse strikes me as the ultimate yanking-out-the-rug-underfoot of the entire species. Not only is the visible universe not even remotely the sum of what’s out there (it’s a nook comprised of 14 billion years’ worth of light we can see), there are an infinite (and infinitely multiplying) number of universes, the vast majority of which abide by different so-called laws of nature. And once you open the door to infinity things get silly real quick. For example, since there are infinite universes, every single thing that can happen will happen an infinite number of times. Earlier I refrained from deploying the figure of speech that way lies madness because the point was to delve into the mess. Now I must deploy it because madness really does lie there. One of the foremost thinkers of all time on infinity, Georg Cantor, lost his mind thinking too hard about infinite sets and died of a heart attack in an insane asylum. I learned about this from a book about infinity by David Foster Wallace, who killed himself. I put that book down without finishing it, though in an infinitude of other universes I finished it and lost my marbles and ended badly.

Though Max Tegmark, the man I learned everything I know about cosmic inflation from, believes that at base Reality is a mathematical superstructure, and everything within it further articulations of mathyness, I enjoy pondering the heresy that numbers aren’t real. That, in actuality, only two of them really exist, one and zero, and since zero is a null property, really only one is the thing, an innumerable or countless aggregation of individual ones all over the place. I think it’s a fun way to see the world. Rather than beholding a field of poppies and describing it as a field or as thousands of poppies, you can see it as one poppy at a time, each one a one, each different at some (metaphorical) decimal place of its genetic identity. (Which is also what makes identical twins so extraordinary.) For whatever reason this notion satisfies something deep in me. That it isn’t possible to truly own the concepts of infinity or eternity inclines me to the suspicion—and maybe this is a Cave Man mentality I’m indulging—that they aren’t real, they aren’t honestly aspects of Reality.

Take Earth. It’s very old but it isn’t eternal. It didn’t exist 4 billion years ago, when our universe was already in cosmic fifth grade. Then it came into being and basically had right away everything it would ever have, a complete package of material wanting only in time. Add enough of that and it bursts into life. Recycling is real. Recycling is total. The equation for life on Earth requires no variable I for infinity or eternity E. It needs only spaciousness. In a few billion years our sun, which we used to call “the” sun and which Hermes Trismegistus called “God visible”, will die, and that will be that. Everything that was us, that we were, that the dinosaurs were, even the lifeless mass that for 250 million years preceded life and larded its caesuras, the continental plates, the dewless deserts, the world-straddling ocean, all of it will have suffered radical malnutrition and a change of clothes and drifted into other orbits. Recycling we can wrap our heads around, but infinity? Even paradoxes we can handle, which makes sense, since they seem to be real. Our minds contain everything that contains them, a delicious paradox wholly fathomable. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. No problem. If you can hold for a moment in your thoughts a picture of your childhood home and set your childhood self in it, you are containing that which contained you and the you it contained, which you still in a way physically contain, and you’re doing it all in a time cup that contains all your other time cups and that is subsequently contained within the finitely nesting time cups of your life to come. We can do this stuff with our eyes closed. But eternity? Infinity? I’m not sure I buy it.

Because infinities can be of unequal size (to wit, there are an infinite number of whole numbers and an infinite number of even numbers, the latter by definition half as big as the former), even though an infinitude of universes exist with you variously in them, a much larger infinitude of universes exist in which you never happened because the quantum mechanical ghost in the quantum mechanical machine initiated inflational decay in ways that coded slightly or exaggeratedly different principles of nature than the ones precisely found at our address—the ones that must exist exactly as they are in order for us to exist even a little. The multiverse is the ultimate addendum to Hamlet’s sick burn of Horatio: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The multiverse is Hamlet’s sidekick there, cracking its infinite knuckles.

But it’s giving that particular Dane the side-eye too.

Part 3: The Year One