Like a lot of people, I’ve always wondered about how the universe was created, and where it came from. Was it created by a God? Was it created by an accidental quirk or fate? Was it created by evolution?
Well awhile back an answer hit me that has stuck with me, and the more I consider it the more sense it makes to me. So, I thought I would put my thoughts down in bits and share them with you in my ground-breaking series of diatribes (inspirational seminars and prayer meetings coming soon).
So who created the universe, and how did they do it? Was it just a physical process, happening by itself, or was a God involved?
Actually, it’s neither.
Ok, brace yourself, because this is hard to wrap your head around.
The universe was not created. There was never a time when it didn’t exist, because without the universe there is no time. There is no “outside the universe” because space only exists within the universe. There was no space or time before the universe was created, because spacetime requires the universe to exist.
There was no creation event of the universe, because time requires the universe to exist. That’s a hard thing to imagine, because space and time are so essential to our experience of reality. We find it very hard to imagine not having a “before the universe”, and not having an “outside the universe”, so we look for some answer to “where” it all “came from”. We want it so bad we’re even willing to believe far-fetched fairy tales about magical beings, because we don’t have evidence for anything else and we really feel like we need some sort of explanation.
So the universe wasn’t created by God, and it wasn’t created by some physical process, and it didn’t create itself – it wasn’t created at all.
Not so long ago, someone proposed that photons did not exist in a single place, but rather as a probability of places. Many scientists and others rejected that idea, because it was so foreign to our experience of reality. I think that the idea that the universe wasn’t created is like that, so I expect a lot of people to reject it. Hopefully some will come to accept it, but other than stroking my ego it doesn’t really matter if they do or not. The more I think about this, the more it makes sense.
We have absolutely no reason to believe that either space or time exist except as part of the universe. Some physicists have speculated about a multiverse – a sort of spawning ground of many universes – but there is no evidence very little theory to support the idea. Perhaps as little as the giant turtle theory. To have a multiverse requires space and time to exist independently of the universe, but we have no reason to believe that they might.
The idea that there is no place “outside the universe” is perhaps more familiar. I remember learning about it in freshman physics. There is no “edge” of the universe, no boundary between inside and outside, because space only exists in the universe. The same is true of time. There is no before and after the universe, because time is a function of the existence of the universe.
Without a before and after, there is no creation, there is no change, and there is no causation. The universe was not created.
I’m not going to proclaim my faith in any religion, although I do have one. I’m not going to insist that an intelligent God created the Universe, although I do believe in God.
Instead, I’m going to focus on things we actually know enough about to reasonably believe that we can prove them – with facts, theory, and observation. I know that this means that my explanation is a scientific one (or at least a pseudo-scientific one, you be the judge) and that means that many people who would prefer a faith-based explanation will reject it. So be it. Anything I can say won’t have any impact on anyone determined enough to reject it, so I see no point in trying. If however you’re interested in something different, read on.
In order to start considering the origins of the universe, you should first have a few difficult concepts in mind. In particular, the idea of spacetime.
Spacetime is one of the main ingredients of the universe, along with matter and energy. It was probably the biggest concept in Einstein’s General Relativity, and we now have a lot of data to prove its existence, and a strong body of theory that explains how it works. That doesn’t mean that we know everything about it – far from it – but we know a lot.
I keep calling it “spacetime” like it’s one thing, not space plus time. That’s because it is one thing, not two. Space and time are the four dimensions that make up spacetime – 3 dimensions in space (length, width, height) and one dimension of time.
Spacetime is what we experience as reality. Without it, there would be no “here” and “there”, there would be no “past” and “future” or “now”, and there would be no causation. That last one is important. One thing could not be caused by something else, since that would require time – a before the thing was caused, and an after it was caused. Without spacetime, there would be no change. In many senses time can be described as change. And without space, there would be no there there, so there would be no experience, no reality.
Spacetime is affected by gravity, and spacetime is an aspect of the universe. We have a lot of data, observations, and theory about spacetime as a part of the universe in much the same way that matter and energy are parts of the universe. Spacetime is an inseperable part of what the universe is – without spacetime there is no universe, and without the universe there is no spacetime. Anyone can propose a universe without spacetime as a theoretical exercise in the same way that anyone can propose a giant turtle that holds the Earth on it’s back. Interesting theory, but absolutely no reason to believe it’s possible.
The connection between spacetime and change is important to wrap your head around. Without a before and after, things can’t change, since there is no difference between before and after the change happened.
Without change, there is no causation. You can’t cause a change when there is no change, and you can’t have change without spacetime.
We’re all fairly familiar with the universe, or at least we think we are. Most cosmologists and sciencey-type people accept the idea of the Big Bang as the beginning of the universe. The idea is that right after the creation of the universe, there was a big bang – meaning that the universe started both expanding and cooling, moving from a very hot dense state to the fairly spread out, comfortably warm state that we all know and love.
But linked to this is the idea that the universe was first created somehow. Some folks believe that the universe was created in a purely physical way, through some process that we currently don’t understand but hopefully will someday, kind of like how we don’t currently understand where the other sock disappears to. Other folks believe that there was some mysterious mumbo-jumbo involved that we will never understand because we’re incapable of understanding it, and they tend to think that some supernatural being was responsible for that, whom they tend to call “God” (or “Allah”, “Yahweh”, “Jehovah”, etc.) A third group of folks comes down squarely in the middle, believing that there was a supernatural being responsible, but that we might someday understand His ways and may already understand part of them. They point to various ideas in modern physics as evidence that “an intelligent being must have done this”, such as the delicate balance between the four forces – electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force, and the weak force.
I’m here to tell you that they’re all wrong.
Ok, I know that most of you will jump up with the arguments from whatever group you belong to and try to prove me wrong, or just discount whatever I have to say on the subject. Ok, fine, but hear me out first. And yes, there’s just a teensy little chance that I could be wrong too, but I think we can just dispense with that out of respect for my massive intellect, right?
Before I explain all of this, I should warn you – this will not feel right. It simply doesn’t quite fit with our everyday experience of the world, and the way we perceive reality. If you’re familiar with general relativity or quantum mechanics, you might remember how hard it was to wrap your head around it when you first learned about it. It’s so outside the way we experience the world that even people like Albert Einstein had problems with it. He said [I can't accept quantum mechanics because] “I like to think the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.” Neils Bohr said “Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.”
Well, this is like that. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
If you’ve ever gotten a microphone too close to a speaker while they’re both plugged into the same amplifier, then you know the sound of a feedback loop gone crazy. If you could hear the sound of the stock market today, that’s what it would sound like.
The stock market is a very important part of our economy, theoretically. It’s where most corporations raise most of their capital. When it works right, the stock market is supposed to accurately determine the value of current and future assets of public corporations, and express them in terms of present value. If it doesn’t work right, corporations and their owners no longer have that measure of the value of their decisions and activities – they might be creating value, or they might be losing value, it’s hard to say. Not that the stock market (or equity markets in general) were ever a perfect measure — largely because future value is always uncertain and people don’t always behave rationally — but it was better than nothing.
In my considered opinion, today the stock market is worse than nothing as a measure of corporate value. It not only doesn’t provide an accurate measure, it provides a measure that is complete devoid of value but is still used to measure things. Kind of like a scale where the dial is hooked up to a slot machine.
The reason that I think this is what has happened in high-frequency trading over the last few years. These are completely computer driven trades, where buy and sell decisions are made in milliseconds based on algorithms, mainly driven by other trading activity – trading driving trading, a pure feedback loop. Each algorithm trying to game the other algorithms – I design software for a living, and I can tell you that ain’t good. The stocks bought are usually only held for a few seconds, and then sold. There is no assessment of corporate value, future earnings, or anything real, and a great deal of money is made based purely on gaming the system.
High-frequency trading accounts for something like 73% of all trading volume. Think about that. Any investor trying to evaluate real value is wasting their time. Any investor looking at charts is wasting their time. Any investor trying to maintain a balanced stock portfolio is wasting their time. The price will be set in milliseconds, with no connection to reality.
http://www.pbs.org/nbr/site/research/learnmore/inside_high_frequency_trading_100524/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html?_r=3&ref=business
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1259-High-Frequency-Trading-Is-A-Scam.html
