Scientific American’s Winter 2015 Special Edition,
entitled “Physics at the Limits,” is a collection of articles by physicists and
physics journalists describing the current status of efforts to solve the
deepest mysteries of the universe. Some of these problems have been worked on
for decades and are no closer to being solved. Ideas that looked promising and
inspired hope years ago haven’t panned
out. I found the overall tone of the issue somewhat downbeat. Nobody is
predicting that success is just around the corner.
Two articles caught my eye. “The Black Hole at the Beginning of Time,” by
Nieysh Afshordi, Robert B. Mann, and
Razieh Pourhasan, suggests that our (3+1)-dimensional universe is the
event horizon of a black hole in a
(4+1)-dimensional universe. They argue that their model helps us understand the
densities of ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy, and eliminates the
need for inflation. However, they admit that it doesn’t explain how it all
began, since the origin of the higher-dimensional universe is a mystery.
The second article, “What Is Real?,” by Meinard
Kuhlmann, asserts that looking at the world as made up of particles and fields
leads to conceptual difficulties, and that the world may actually consist of
bundles of properties, such as color and shape.
These two articles are related, because the
questions of how it all began and what is real can’t be answered independently.
The physics and the metaphysics are inextricably linked. Physicists know
nothing about metaphysics, are scared to death to get anywhere near it, and as
a result, can’t make significant progress. One of my objectives for this blog
is to get physicists to take metaphysics seriously.
As I explained here, here, and here, it all began with a single
thought, which we call existence or consciousness. Yes, they’re the same. Existence cannot “not exist.” For a thought
to exist, something has to think it. There isn’t anything else in the
beginning, so existence must think itself. Which just means it’s conscious.
Now, this is the hardest point to get across to physicists—or anyone else.
“Existence exists” sounds like some new-age silliness, Yet it’s actually the
key to everything. Once you “get” that existence exists, it’s not very
difficult to understand this universe.
The existence that exists in itself is a
logical concept. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t experience time. But logical
concepts imply other logical concepts, and by existing in itself, existence
implies the existence of everything that’s possible. That’s the universe.
Fundamentally, it’s a logical universe that’s atemporal but has a logical
structure. Starting with existence, concepts imply other concepts in stages.
But there’s also a temporal universe among the things that are possible. You
just have to look at the logical concepts as spacetime points and the logical
stages as time, and you have a temporal, physical universe that matches the one
we live in. I’ve explained all of this elsewhere in this blog.
Seen as a temporal process, the structure of
logical concepts looks like an explosion of spacetime. Yes, it’s the big bang.
But because it’s basicslly atemporal , the question of how it began is
meaningless. The four-dimensional black hole of the first article I mentioned
doesn’t exist anyway. As for the
properties proposed by the second article, they’re just logical concepts, and
they do exist, but to understand the universe you can’t look only at
properties, so I think that to put all your efforts behind that idea will just
lead to more frustration.
Physicists are trying to think outside the box.
Unfortunately, they can’t find the door.
