Speaker 1: I want you to try a little thought experiment with
me right now, wherever you are.
Speaker 2: Oh, I love these.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I want you to imagine that you have
a remote control in your hand, and this remote it
controls time itself.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm picturing it right.
Speaker 1: So you press the rewind button. Imagine just watching the
world around you unspooling backward. You watch buildings unbuild, you know,
you watch cities shrink back into forests, stuff flying through
history and reverse exactly, and you keep rewinding. You're flying
past the ice ages, past the dinosaurs, past the very
formation of the Earth itself as it breaks apart, into
the swirling cloud of hot dust around a really.
Speaker 2: Young sun, going way back.
Speaker 1: Now, well, we're keeping going. You're rewinding past the birth
of the first stars, past the cosmic dark ages, right
back to the exact millisecond of the Big.
Speaker 2: Bang, that moment of just infinite heat and density, right
the absolute, universally accepted beginning of everything.
Speaker 1: You pause it right there, and then what happens if
you hit rewind one more time?
Speaker 2: Ooh, that is the ultimate question, right.
Speaker 1: What exists in the negative space before reality even started?
Speaker 2: I mean, when you hit that button, you are stepping
completely off the edge of the map.
Speaker 1: You really are.
Speaker 2: You're moving way past the boundaries of general relativity as
we comfortably understand it, and you're stepping into a void
that human brains are frankly not wired to comprehend. The
math just starts screaming at you.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads. Today, we are taking a deep
dive into the source material to answer the ultimate impossible question.
It's going to be weird, so weird. We are taking
an incredibly dense, groundbreaking stack of theoretical physics, models, astrophysical proposals,
and mathematical papers, and we're going to explore that negative space.
Speaker 2: What actually existed before the universe itself exactly.
Speaker 1: We aren't just looking at the Big Bang today. Okay,
let's unpack this. We are going into ten distinct, scientifically
rigorous and honestly terrifying theories about what preceded our existence.
Speaker 2: And we're going to break down the heavy physics. Sure,
but we're also going to explore the mechanics behind these theories.
Speaker 1: The nuts and bolts of the void.
Speaker 2: Right, we need to understand how the mathematics even allow
for these concepts to exist in the first place. And
why they fundamentally challenge everything you thought you knew about
time and human significance.
Speaker 1: Because when you mess with the origins of reality, you
kind of mess with our place inside it.
Speaker 2: Right, I absolutely do. It changes everything.
Speaker 1: Just laying the groundwork here before we jump in, we
are impartially reporting on the theoretical physics and the cosmological
mathematics directly from our sources, tricly the science, strictly the science,
no sides, no political stuff, no philosophical endorsements from us.
We're giving you the pure science, and it is entirely
up to you, the listener, to draw your own conclusions.
Speaker 2: And trust me, the science alone is more than enough
to handle today.
Speaker 1: It really is. So let's start with the most intuitive
way our human minds can handle the idea of before,
right cause and effect Exactly. We naturally assume that every
single event has a preceding cause. So the easiest way
to imagine the before is just as an infinite chain
of physical reality.
Speaker 2: Just one thing leading to another forever right.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to the physicist Andre Lynn at Stanford.
He proposed something in nineteen eighty three called eternal inflation.
Speaker 2: Ah Yes, a classic And.
Speaker 1: The way I've always visualized this one is by imagining
a giant pot of boiling water.
Speaker 2: That's a really good analogy.
Speaker 1: So our entire observable cosmos, with its billions of galaxies
and everything we know, is just a single tiny bubble
that nucleated in this eternal boil, Just.
Speaker 2: One little bubble in a massive pot.
Speaker 1: Right, So the Big Bang wasn't the beginning at all.
It was just our local pocket popping into existence. Here's
where it gets really interesting, though. There is no first bubble.
The pot has just been boiling forever.
Speaker 2: The boiling water analogy gets you about halfway there, i'd say,
but it breaks down when you realize the water in
this case is actually a scaler field trapped in what
physicists call a false vacuum state.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're gonna have to untack false vacuum for me.
Speaker 2: Sure, So, in standard inflation theory, we know the early
universe expanded exponentially for a fraction of a second.
Speaker 1: Right it blew up super fast.
Speaker 2: Right Wind looked at the mathematics of that underlying inflating
field and realized it doesn't just turn off everywhere.
Speaker 1: All at once, like it doesn't just stop expanding uniformally.
Speaker 2: Exactly because of quantum fluctuations. There are regions of this
field that remain in that high energy false vacuum state,
and they just keep expanding eternally.
Speaker 1: So the background is always stretching.
Speaker 2: Always, and as it expands, tiny patches undergo quantum tunneling.
They sort of decay into a true vacuum, which is
a much lower energy state.
Speaker 1: Wait, decay, like it rots, not rock.
Speaker 2: Just settling into a more stable state. When that happens,
the energy of the field is dumped right into that
specific pocket, creating the matter and radiation of a brand
new universe.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so our Big Bang was just one of
those local decay events.
Speaker 2: Precisely, just a little localized energy dump in an ever
expanding field.
Speaker 1: But how does a scaler field infleet eternally? I mean,
if it's constantly dumping energy into creating entire universes complete
with you know, hundreds of billions of galaxies, doesn't it
eventually run out of fuel?
Speaker 2: You would think, So, yeah.
Speaker 1: How do you get infinite bubbles out of a finite
pot of water?
Speaker 2: Well, this is where the physics of inflation becomes incredibly counterintuitive.
The inflating false vacuum has a property called negative pressure.
Speaker 1: Negative pressure that sounds made up.
Speaker 2: I know it sounds wild, but in general relativity, pressure
actually contributes to gravity. Positive pressure pulls things together, but
negative pressure creates this repulsive gravitational effect.
Speaker 1: So it pushes space apart instead of pulling it together.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it actively drives the rapid expansion of space. And
here's the real trick of it. As the space expands,
the energy density of the false vacuum remains exactly constant.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, ye, so you have more physical space,
but with the exact same energy density per cubic centimeter.
Speaker 2: You got it. The total energy the inflating field is
actually growing exponentially as it expands. It literally creates its
own fuel.
Speaker 1: That violates everything my brain understands about conservation.
Speaker 2: It's totally nonintuitive. It will never run out. And because
the rate of expansion is vastly faster than the rate
to which these bubble universes nucleate, the space between the
bubbles grows faster than the bubbles can ever collide.
Speaker 1: So the pod has literally been boiling forever and the
bubbles are flying apart so fast they never touch.
Speaker 2: Right we exist in the middle of a chain that
has no first link.
Speaker 1: That is deeply unsettling. If you ask what came before
our universe, the answer is just the underlying scaler field
churning out other universes infinitely backward in time foreverever. There
is no origin story, There is no underlying explanation for
why the boiling pot exists in the first place. It
just is.
Speaker 2: It really forces you to completely abandon the concept of
a singular genesis. But what if the chain isn't a
side by side arrangement of isolated bubbles?
Speaker 1: Okay, what's the alternative?
Speaker 2: What if the B four is a single, relentlessly recycling timeline. Oh,
like a loop exactly. Paul Steinhardt at Princeton and Neil
Trurock at Cambridge propose the cy click model in two
thousand and one, and it shifts the perspective entirely.
Speaker 1: I remember reading about this one and the sources right.
Speaker 2: So instead of a field smawning bubbles, they looked at
string theory, specifically m theory, to suggest our universe is
trapped in an infinite look of destruction and rebirth.
Speaker 1: Right, this is where things get super violent. The cyclic
model suggests the universe expands, cools, contracts, and then basically
triggers a new big bang that resets the entire board.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a complete cosmic reset.
Speaker 1: But it's not just a single balloon inflating and deflating. Right.
They draw on the concept of brains or membranes.
Speaker 2: Yes, the higher dimensional brains.
Speaker 1: The idea is that our entire observable universe, literally everything
you see and experience, exists on a three dimensional surface
a brain embedded in a higher dimensional space called the bulk.
Speaker 2: It's a great way to visualize extra dimensions.
Speaker 1: I picture our universe is a single sheet of paper
floating in a large empty room, and there is a
parallel universe, another sheet of paper floating right alongside.
Speaker 2: Ours, right, a parallel brain.
Speaker 1: And periodically these two brains are drawn together by a
really weak attractive force across that extra dimension, and they
just collide.
Speaker 2: The mechanics of that collision are absolutely fascinating. It's known
in the physics as the ekporotic phase.
Speaker 1: Ekparotic sounds intense very.
Speaker 2: When those two brains smash together, the massive kinetic energy
of the collision is converted directly into the fiery plasma
of a new Big Bang.
Speaker 1: So the crash is the Big Bang exactly.
Speaker 2: The brains bounce apart, our universe expands, it eventually cools
over trillions of years, the attractive force takes over again,
and they are pulled back for another collision.
Speaker 1: It's just two giant cosmic symbols constantly crashing together.
Speaker 2: Yes, But the crucial part of Steinhardt and Trock's math
is how it handles the enterp.
Speaker 1: Problem right, the messiness factor exactly.
Speaker 2: Normally, if a universe cycles like that, disorder builds up.
Each subsequent universe should be messier, and if you rewind time,
the cycle should get smaller and shorter until you hit
an absolute.
Speaker 1: Beginning, because you can't have an infinite past. If entropy
is constantly accumulating, eventually the battery just dies.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, precisely. But in the cyclic model, during the
expansion phase, the universe grows so massively that the entropy,
the disorder, the scattered matter, the black holes, it all
gets diluted to practically zero.
Speaker 1: It stretches it out so much that the mess is negligible.
Speaker 2: Right by the time the brains collide again, they are
completely flat, cold, and empty. The collision doesn't just recycle
the energy. The sheer geometric stretching of the brains literally
wipes the slate clean.
Speaker 1: Okay. I have to push back on the idea of
a completely clean slate, though. If two entire universes, two
vast brains are clapping together to create a bit bang,
surely something survives the crash, right, you'd hope. So, I mean,
if the previous cycle had its own planets, its own physics,
maybe its own gravitational waves. Does absolutely no whisper of
that make it through to our cycle.
Speaker 2: I hate to break it to you, but the boundary
conditions of the ex prioritic collision are mathematically ruthless.
Speaker 1: Ruthless.
Speaker 2: How when the brains collide, the distance between them drops
to absolute zero, But the spatial dimensions of the brains
themselves do not shrink to zero.
Speaker 1: Okay, So they stay flat sheets.
Speaker 2: Right, and that avoids the singularity of the standard Big bang. However,
the physical structure within the brain is completely utterly eradicated, erased.
Nothing survives, no civilization, no memory, no physical trace can
survive the energy conversion of that impact. Wow, every single
atom in your body right now might be forged from
the kinetic energy of a collision that obliterated a previous cosmos,
but no information carries over. The slate is wiped so
thoroughly that the past is permanently seen off from the present.
Speaker 1: That is incredibly bleak. That implies everything humanity ever builds
or achieves is ultimately destined for total erasure. When those
symbols crash again, we.
Speaker 2: Are just temporary arrangements of recycled energy, just.
Speaker 1: Recycled brain crash energy.
Speaker 2: Wild But let's say we don't want to rely on
hidden extra dimensions and colliding sheets of paper in a
bulkroom to explain the cycle.
Speaker 1: Sure, let's look closer to home.
Speaker 2: What if the universe resets from within? This leads us
straight into the physics of the Big Bounce, which was
proposed by Martin Bojowald in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1: Right, Bojolot approached the problem using a framework called loop
quantum gravity. Loop quantum gravity. Okay, break that down for us.
Speaker 2: General relativity has a fatal flaw. If you rewind the
Big Bang using standard relativity, all the matter and energy
in the universe compresses into a point of infinite density.
Speaker 1: The singularity.
Speaker 2: Exactly the singularity. The equations literally spit out infinities, which
is a mathematical way of nature telling us, hey, your
theory is broken. Here.
Speaker 1: The math just gives up, it does.
Speaker 2: Loop quantum gravity attempts to fix this by applying quantum
mechanics to the very fabric of space itself. It suggests
that space is not a smooth, continuous background like we
usually picture.
Speaker 1: It's not a seamless canvas.
Speaker 2: Right if you zoom all the way in to the
plank length, which is roughly ten to the negative thirty
five meters, unimaginably small space.
Speaker 1: Is quantized, meaning it's made of little chunks.
Speaker 2: Yes, it is made of discrete finite loops woven into
what are called spin networks.
Speaker 1: So I try to picture space not as a smooth
silk sheet, but like a microscopic chain mail. The chain
mail analogy is perfect for this, right, So, when the
previous universe collapsed inward under its own gravity, it got
smaller and denser. But because space is like chain mail,
it can't be compressed infinitely exactly. Those tiny quantum loops
eventually experience stress and strain. They push back against the crush.
Speaker 2: To be mathematically precise about it, In loop quantum gravity,
the operator for volume has a discrete spectrum. You literally
physically cannot have a volume smaller than a fundamental quantity
of space.
Speaker 1: It's the absolute pixel size of the universe.
Speaker 2: Right, So, when the matter of a collapsing universe tries
to pack into a volume smaller than the physical geometry allows,
the quantum state of the geometry becomes highly repulsive.
Speaker 1: It fights back hard.
Speaker 2: At maximum compression, the plank density gravity actually flips. It
goes from being an attractive force to an intensely repulsive one.
The collapse is violently halted.
Speaker 1: It rebounds like hitting a solid concrete floor and bouncing.
Speaker 2: Back up exactly like a bounce.
Speaker 1: Which means there never was a singularity. The infinity is vanished.
There was just a big bounce. Every single star you
see at night is just the rebound of a universe
that collapsed in on itself.
Speaker 2: And this completely removes the necessity for a creation event.
Speaker 1: Right. There's no beginning from nothing.
Speaker 2: The origin of our expanding universe is simply the death
throes of a collapsing one. We are the continuation of
a localized process governed by quantum geometry.
Speaker 1: That feels a little more comforting than the brain collisions, honestly,
But so far, the infinite bubbles, the colliding brains, the
bouncing chain mail, they all treat the past universe as
a disconnected or erased event.
Speaker 2: A fresh start each time.
Speaker 1: Right, But what if the previous universe wasn't just a predecessor.
What if it was apparent and it actually left behind
a genetic lineage.
Speaker 2: Now we're getting into the really mind bending stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. Lee S. Mollin at the Perimeter Institute proposed
cosmological natural selection in nineteen ninety two, and it forces
us to look at the before as an actual evolutionary process.
Speaker 2: Smollen noted something that is bothered physicists for decades. The
fundamental constants of our universe, like the mass of the electron,
the strength of the strong nuclear force, the cosmological constant.
They all seem exquisitely fine tuned.
Speaker 1: Like they were dialed in perfectly.
Speaker 2: Right. If you change them even slightly, stars don't form,
carbon isn't created, and the entire universe just falls apart.
Speaker 1: And usually anthropi centrism suggests this is so we can exist,
like the universe is tuned for human life exactly.
Speaker 2: But Smolen hypothesized a biological mechanism. Instead, he proposed that
inside every single black hole, the singularity actually bounces, creating
a new baby universe on the other side of the
event horizon.
Speaker 1: Wait, inside every black.
Speaker 2: Hole, every single one.
Speaker 1: And the crucial part here is that the physical laws
aren't perfectly copied to the baby universe. Right, there's a.
Speaker 2: Mutation, exactly, a tiny mutation.
Speaker 1: The bounce mechanics inside the black hole slightly alter the
fine structure constant or the gravitational constant for the new
baby cosmos. It's literal Darwinian evolution, but on a cosmic scale,
the universes.
Speaker 2: Are competing to produce the most offspring.
Speaker 1: Universe is competing to make black holes. That is wild.
Speaker 2: Think about the selection pressure here. In biology, organisms compete
for limited resources, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, food space mates.
Speaker 2: But in Smolln's multiverse, space isn't limited. So the only
metric of evolutionary success is pure reproductive volume.
Speaker 1: Whoever makes the most babies wins.
Speaker 2: Right. If a universe has physical constants that make it
really bad at forming stars and black holes, it basically
dies out without leaving many offspring.
Speaker 1: It's an evolutionary dead end.
Speaker 2: But if a universe has constants that naturally lead to
massive stars, supernovas, and an abundance of black holes. It
will spawn billions of baby universes.
Speaker 1: And those babies will inherit those favorable black hole making traits.
Speaker 2: Yes, they mutate slightly and perhaps become even better at
making black holes. Over countless generations, the multiverse becomes completely
dominated by universes mathematically optimized for gravitational collapse.
Speaker 1: Which completely utterly reframes our entire existence.
Speaker 2: It really does.
Speaker 1: I mean, we look at our universe and think it
was perfectly designed for human life, but under cosmological natural selection,
humanity is a complete accident.
Speaker 2: We are not the goal.
Speaker 1: We are a byproduct. The universe was fine tuned over
billions of ancestral generations to manufacture black holes. The fact
that the specific mystry required to make black holes also
happens to allow for carbon based life and human consciousness.
It's just a.
Speaker 2: Fluke, a total statistical anomaly.
Speaker 1: We are literally the mold growing on the side of
a cosmic factory.
Speaker 2: It is deeply humbling, isn't it. It strips away the
illusion of our centrality in the cosmos. Yeah, the universe
before ours was our literal parent. It gives birth to
our reality through a black hole, but it had absolutely
no intention of creating life.
Speaker 1: We are the exhaust fumes of an evolutionary machine that
is man. That is rough on the ego it is.
Speaker 2: But if Smolin gives us a lineage, Roger Penrose gives
us literal ghosts.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, theory number six.
Speaker 2: In twenty ten, Penrose proposed conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC
for short.
Speaker 1: And I really struggled with this one in the sources
because Penroe suggests that the ultimate freezing heat death of
a universe is mathematically identical to the fiery explosive birth
of a new one.
Speaker 2: It's a massive paradox on the surface.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how does the infinite freeze end equate to the
dense hot beginning? That makes no logical sense to me.
Speaker 2: I know, it's tough. It relies on something called conformal geometry.
You have to trace the universe to its absolute furthest
limit to understand it.
Speaker 1: Okay, take me to the end of time.
Speaker 2: So trillions of years from now, all the stars will
burn out, the galaxies will go dark. Eventually, even the
supermassive black holes will evaporate via Hawking radiation, total darkness.
Right in the deepest darkest future, all massive particles will
eventually decay. The only things left of the cosmos will
be massless particles, primarily photons.
Speaker 1: Just an endless, incredibly diluted soup of light.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Now here's the trick. Because they are massless, photons
travel at the speed of light, and relativity tells us
that at the speed of light, time essentially stops.
Speaker 1: Right time dilation. A photon emitted from a dying star
and traveling for ten billion years doesn't experience a single
second passing exactly.
Speaker 2: So, if the entire universe is filled only with particles
that do not experience time, the cosmic clock simply stops ticking.
Speaker 1: Time ceases to exist.
Speaker 2: And if time loses its meaning, spatial scale also loses
its meaning because we define distance using timelike light years.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, if there's no time, you can't measure distance.
Speaker 2: Right. In the mathematics of general relativity, the metric tensor,
which is the tool we use to measure distance in time,
can be scaled by what's called a conformal factor.
Speaker 1: Okay, stick with me here.
Speaker 2: When you remove mass from the universe, the geometry loses
its conformal factor. It effectively forgets how big it is.
Speaker 1: It forgets its own size.
Speaker 2: Yes, an infinitely large, cold, dead universe without time or
scale becomes mathematically indistinguishable from the infinitely hot, dense microscoptic
singularity of new Big Bang.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, I know, but space is still expanding
in that dead universe. How does infinitely large become infinitely
dense just because it forgot its size?
Speaker 2: Because without mass to act as a reference point, words
like large and dense are meaningless concepts. The conformal rescaling
allows the infinite future boundary of the old universe to
perfectly match the initial singularity boundary of the new one.
Speaker 1: It just snaps together.
Speaker 2: The boundary matching is perfectly seamless. The death of the
old cosmos is geometrically the exact same event as the
birth of the next.
Speaker 1: That is beautiful but also terrifying. But the part that
really shook me in the reading is Penrose's claim about.
Speaker 2: Hawking points ah the thermal scars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because he argues, the previous universe didn't just quietly
fade into our Big Bang, It left actual scars on
the foundation of our reality.
Speaker 2: Yes he did. In twenty eighteen, Penrose's team analyzed the
cosmic microwave background, which is the residual heat map of
the Big Bang that we can still see.
Speaker 1: Today, the static from the dawn of time.
Speaker 2: Right, They look for anomalous concentrated circular rings of thermal
variation in that heat map. According to CCC math, when
supermassive black holes in the previous universe finally evaporated, they
released these massive bursts of Hawking radiation.
Speaker 1: A huge pop of energy right at the end of
the previous universe.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And because of the conformal boundary matching we just
talked about, the entire history of that evaporation gets squashed
down into a single intense point of energy that punches
straight through the boundary into our newly born universe. Wow,
it creates an expanding ring of heat in the primordial
plasma of our cosmos.
Speaker 1: So let me get this straight. When astronomers map the
cosmic microwave background today, they might literally be looking at
the thermal fingerprints of a reality that died before ours
even began.
Speaker 2: That's the claim.
Speaker 1: Yes, we are looking at the ghosts of supermassive black
holes from a previous eternity. We're just passing scars down
the generational line.
Speaker 2: It is a profoundly haunting image. Now, to be fair
to the broader scientific community, many cosmologists argue these patterns
could just be statistical noise in the data. But the
mathematical framework Penrose built is undeniably rigorous.
Speaker 1: It's definitely compelling. But notice that in all these theories,
bouncing chain mail, black hole evolution, conformal geometry, we are
still assuming the before was made of something physical.
Speaker 2: Right, matter, gravity space?
Speaker 1: Exactly? What if the precursor to our universe wasn't a
physical place at all? What if we have to look
into genuine nothingness and.
Speaker 2: That transitions us perfectly To Edward Tryon's nineteen seventy three
paper on the quantum vacuum theory, Number eight, Tryon proposed
that the entire universe is a massive quantum fluctuation from
pure nothingness.
Speaker 1: Okay, look, I'm going to push back hard on this one.
Speaker 2: I figured you would.
Speaker 1: You cannot get something from nothing. It violates the first
law of thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. You
can't spawn a universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies
out of an empty void. The energy has to come
from somewhere, right, You.
Speaker 2: Would absolutely think so. It seems like basic common sense.
But the mathematics of general relativity provide a very specific
loophole via something called the Hamiltonian.
Speaker 1: Constraint, a physics loophole.
Speaker 2: Okay, explain, Try realize that to create the universe from nothing,
you don't actually violate the conservation of energy provided that
the net total energy of the universe is exactly zero.
Speaker 1: Wait, okay, Calling gravity negative energy feels like an accounting
trick cooked up to balance a checkbook that is fundamentally overdrawn.
How does a universe full of burning stars and kinetic
energy equal zero.
Speaker 2: It's not a trick, I promise. It is a fundamental
consequence of how gravitational potential works. The matter in radiation,
the mass of the stars, the heat you and me.
That all represents positive energy.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's the stuff, right.
Speaker 2: But gravity is an attractive force. To pull two massive
objects apart, you have to input energy into the system.
Speaker 1: Like lifting a rock off the ground takes work exactly.
Speaker 2: That means their gravitational binding energy is mathematically negative. If
you integrate the total positive mass energy of the observable
universe and add it to the total negative gravitational the
potential energy holding it all together. They precisely cancel each.
Speaker 1: Other out ages equals zero.
Speaker 2: The universe has exactly zero net energy.
Speaker 1: So because the universe technically costs nothing to make, quantum
mechanics allows it to just pop into existence precisely.
Speaker 2: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows for temporary violations of energy conservation
as long as they happen quickly. We see virtual particles
pop in and out of the vacuum constantly in lab experiments.
Speaker 1: Right quantum foam boiling.
Speaker 2: But because our entire universe has zero net energy, the
uncertainty principle says a fluctuation of zero energy can last
for an infinite amount of time.
Speaker 1: It doesn't need to instantly annihilate like those lab particles.
Speaker 2: Exactly a tiny patch of nothingness tunneled into a state
of exponential inflation, and our universe was born. It is
the ultimate cosmic free lunch.
Speaker 1: But if we are just a zero energy quantum fluctuation,
quantum mechanics is ruled by probability, not certainty.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see where you're going with us.
Speaker 1: If we borrowed our existence from the void. Doesn't that
mean the fluctuation could spontaneously reverse like, couldn't the universe
just decided to cancel itself out?
Speaker 2: Yes, that is the very real threat of vacuum decay.
Speaker 1: Vacuum decay, I hate the sound of that already.
Speaker 2: If our universe is a fluctuation, its stability is entirely probabilistic.
At any completely random moment, a new quantum tunneling event
could occur. A bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere
in space and expand outward at the speed of light.
Speaker 1: And what happens If that bubble hits us.
Speaker 2: It would instantly alter the fundamental forces of physics. It
would dissolve all atomic bonds. Reality wouldn't even explode, It
would just instantly cease to be.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't even see it coming because it moves at
light speed exactly.
Speaker 2: The universe would pay off at zero energy debt, and
the lights would go out everywhere with absolutely zero warning.
Speaker 1: One second we're here, and the next second the universe
corrects a math error and we vanish. It makes you
feel incredibly fragile. It's the ultimate sort of damicles well, wait,
if the vacuum is fundamentally unstable, what if the three
D space we're sitting in right now isn't even structurally real.
Speaker 2: H step into the illusion of space.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This brings us to Juan Maldasana's nineteen ninety seven
paper on the holographic principle, and this paper, if I recall,
is famously the most cited in the history of theoretical physics.
Speaker 2: It absolutely revolutionized the field.
Speaker 1: Maltasena took this fear of the void and pushed it
completely into the realm of pure data.
Speaker 2: Malvasena introduced what's known as the ad SCFT correspondence.
Speaker 1: Okay, acronym alert, yes sorry.
Speaker 2: He demonstrated mathematically that a specific type of three dimensional
space that contains gravity, called antidsitter space. The ADS part
is perfectly mathematically equivalent to a two dimensional boundary that
does not contain gravity, which is governed by conformal field theory.
The CFT part.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this very carefully, because a three D
space with gravity equating to a flat two D surface
without gravity is well, it's.
Speaker 2: Mind bending, it's extremely unintuitous.
Speaker 1: The best analogy I can think of is a three
D movie. When you sit in the theater, you see
spaceships and depth. But the rich three D experience is
just a trick of light projected from a flat two
D reel of film.
Speaker 2: Right, The depth is an illusion.
Speaker 1: So the three D world isn't the fundamental reality the
flat film is. Is that what we're talking about here?
Speaker 2: The film projector analogy is a really good starting point,
but it breaks down when you realize the film in
this case is a massively tangled quantum state.
Speaker 1: Okay, explain that it.
Speaker 2: Has to do with the Peckenstein bound Physicists realized a
while ago that the maximum amount of information you can
cram into a region of spacelike inside a black hole
is proportional to the surfaced area of the event horizon,
not the three D volume inside.
Speaker 1: So a black hole's data limit is based on its skin,
not its guts.
Speaker 2: Exactly. All the information about the three D objects that
fell into the black hole is encoded permanently on its
two D surface. Melasine, it just took that concept and
applied it to the entire universe.
Speaker 1: But how does string theory math map onto a flat surface?
I mean, how does the feeling of gravity emerge from something.
Speaker 2: Flat through the magic of quantum entanglement. The particles and
the two D boundary are highly highly entangled. The complex
web a quantum entanglement on that flat surface actually generates
the geometric illusion of three D space and the force
of gravity in the interior.
Speaker 1: So gravity isn't real.
Speaker 2: Gravity isn't a fundamental force in this model. No, it
is an emergent property of information processing happening on the boundary.
Speaker 1: So if the holographic principle is correct, you and I
do not actually exist as physical entities in three dimensional space.
Speaker 2: Not fundamentally enough.
Speaker 1: We are incredibly complex patterns of data encoded on a
distant two dimensional surface. The depth of volume, the feeling
of me moving my hands right now, it's all an
illusion generated by a cosmic server.
Speaker 2: Rack, the quantum server rack.
Speaker 1: But yes, essentially, and this completely destroys our core question
for this deep dive, because if space is just an
illusion of data, then asking what came before the universe
is no longer a question about time.
Speaker 2: Exactly, in a holographic model, the before F four wasn't
a prior time or a physical place at all. It
was simply a different configuration of quantum information on that
two D boundary.
Speaker 1: It's just a different save file.
Speaker 2: Right. Our universe wasn't born in a temporal sense. The
boundary data just underwent a phase transition. The original reality
is a lower dimensional substrate that looks absolutely nothing like
the universe we perceive.
Speaker 1: That is just wow. But even in the holographic model,
we are still using words like prior configuration. We are
implicitly clinging to time.
Speaker 2: We can't help it, It's how our language works.
Speaker 1: We are still asking what happened before? So let's push
this into the actual dissolution of time itself.
Speaker 2: Three number two right.
Speaker 1: John Wheeler in nineteen sixty seven and Stephen Hawking in
nineteen eighty three completely dismantled the concept of before with
quantum gravity foam and the no boundary proposal.
Speaker 2: For this one, we have to zoom back down to
the plank length. Wheeler coined the term quantum foam.
Speaker 1: The churning chain mail from earlier.
Speaker 2: Similar but worse. At that extreme microscopic scale, the smooth
fabric of space and time entirely loses its structure. It
dissolves into a violently churning froth. Tiny wormholes open and
close instantly.
Speaker 1: Just microscopic chaos sotal chaos.
Speaker 2: Geometry itself becomes fundamentally uncertain. You literally can't tell up
from down or before from after.
Speaker 1: And at the Big Bang, all the matter and energy
in the universe was compressed down into a space so
unimaginably tiny that the entire cosmos was dominated by this
quantum foam.
Speaker 2: Right, and in that primordial quantum foam, the absolute rule
of time completely breaks down. Stephen Hawking and James Hartle
used quantum mechanics to model this.
Speaker 1: Origin state the Hartle Hawking state.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and to make the math work. Hawking utilized a
technique called a Wick rotation. He substituted normal time, represented
by the letter T, with imaginary time it by multiplying
it by the square root of negative one. Wait, wait, stop,
I know imaginary numbers.
Speaker 1: Imaginary time. You're telling me Stephen Hawking just multiplied time
by the square root of negative one and solve the universe.
That sounds like a mathematical parlor trick. Oh, the equation
doesn't work. Let me just use an imaginary number.
Speaker 2: I know it sounds like a trick, but the Wick
rotation actually has profound geometrical consequences in physics. When you
replace real time with imaginary time and the metric equations
of relativity, the fundamental distinction between time and space vanishes.
Speaker 1: They become the same thing.
Speaker 2: The metric signature changes from Lorenzian to Euclidean. Time literally
transforms into a fourth spatial dimension.
Speaker 1: Okay, so time becomes space. Hawking use the North Pole
analogy for this, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's the best way to explain it.
Speaker 1: If you walk north on the Earth, you eventually hit
the North Pole. But once you are standing exactly on
the pole, every direction is south. The concept of north
simply ceases to exist.
Speaker 2: That is the absolute essence of the Hartle Hawking state.
The universe doesn't have a boundary in time, just like
the Earth doesn't have an edge you can fall.
Speaker 1: Off, so there's no cliff to drop off of. At
the beginning.
Speaker 2: Right as you rewind toward the Big Bang, you don't
hit a wall of creation. You hit a temporal pole
where the dimension of time curves into a spatial dimension.
Speaker 1: It just rounds up.
Speaker 2: There's no moment of creation from nothing, because there is
literally no first moment. The concept of before the Big
Bang is as mathematically incoherent as asking what is north
of the North Pole. It's just an invalid query.
Speaker 1: And this is where the physics gets deeply, profoundly upsetting
to human psychology.
Speaker 2: You know, oh totally.
Speaker 1: We evolved on the African savannah to understand causes and effects.
The grass rustles, that's the cause a predator jumps out,
that's the effect.
Speaker 2: It's hardwired into our survival exactly.
Speaker 1: Our entire survival and cognitive structure rely on understanding before
and after. The disturbing realization here is that human cognition
is constitutionally incapable of understanding the origin of reality.
Speaker 2: We just don't have the hardware for it.
Speaker 1: Our brains are simply the wrong shape to process a
universe where causes and effects dissolve into spatial geometry. We
desperately want to story with a beginning, and the universe
just flat out refuses to give us one.
Speaker 2: We are trying to use temporal reasoning in a domain
where that tool fundamentally does not apply. But if you
think losing the concept of before is hard, wait until
we get to theory.
Speaker 1: Number three Max tech Mark at MIT in two thousand
and seven, the mathematical universe.
Speaker 2: This one removes the concept of time passing entirely.
Speaker 1: Right, tech Mark takes us straight into extreme platonism. Most
physicists use math to describe the universe, right like we
use equations to map how gravity works or how planets orbit.
Speaker 2: Math is the language we use to describe reality.
Speaker 1: But teg Mark flip the script entirely, and so the
universe isn't just described by mathematics. It is mathematics exactly.
Speaker 2: Tech Mark argues for what he calls a level four
V multiverse, where every single mathematically consistent structure that can
possibly exist actually does exist physically.
Speaker 1: So if the math works, the universe exists.
Speaker 2: Yes, our universe, with its quarks, biological life, expanding galaxies
is simply one highly complex mathematic structure among infinitely many.
And because it is purely a mathematical object, it doesn't
need a creator, doesn't need to be simulated by a computer,
and it certainly doesn't need a beginning.
Speaker 1: I have to interject here because I am a human being.
I experience entropy, I make choices. Every day.
Speaker 2: You feel like you have free will.
Speaker 1: I remember the past and I don't know the future.
How can my lived dynamic messy unpredictable experience of life
just be a static math equation. It feels too real
to be math.
Speaker 2: Because that dynamic experience is an illusion generated from within
the math. In tech Mark's block universe, you are not
a dynamic entity moving through a flowing river of time.
Speaker 1: I'm not.
Speaker 2: No, you are a highly complex, completely static pattern embedded
inside an eternal mathematical object. Think of a DVD.
Speaker 1: Okay, a DVD.
Speaker 2: The movie on the DVD contains a story with a beginning, middle,
and end. The characters inside the movie experience time passing.
They make choices, they suffer, But the DVD itself is
just a single static piece of plastic.
Speaker 1: It's all just data etched on a disk.
Speaker 2: It doesn't experience time. It just exists.
Speaker 1: So my consciousness, every moment of suffering, every joy, my birth,
my eventual death, it all exists simultaneously right now as
an eternal mathematical fact.
Speaker 2: Yes, all of it. The experience of time passing is
just an internal property of your specific pattern within that
overarching structure that is heavy. Nothing preceded the universe because
the universe doesn't exist in time. It is a mathematical
landscape frozen in eternity. You are never created, and you
will never end. You simply are, in the exact same
way that the number seven simply is.
Speaker 1: The number seven doesn't need a cause. It's just a
mathematical truth exactly.
Speaker 2: It always was and always will be.
Speaker 1: It completely strips away all the dynamism of life. We
are just fossils trapped in a mathematical block.
Speaker 2: The very complex block.
Speaker 1: But yes, but if we are just math, what if
the math is just a random roll of the dice.
This brings us to our final source, the concept I
find the absolute most existentially.
Speaker 2: Terrifying of the bun oh Boltzman.
Speaker 1: Boltzmann genesis, tracing all the way back to the physicist
Ludwig Boltzmann in the late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: To really grasp the horror of Boltzmann's theory, we have
to look at statistical mechanics in phase space.
Speaker 1: Okay, take us there.
Speaker 2: The second law of thermodynamics tells us that closed systems
always moved toward maximum entropy, which means thermal equilibrium, a
state of complete and utter disorder, like a hot.
Speaker 1: Cup of coffee cooling down to room temperature.
Speaker 2: Perfect example. The problem is our universe started in a
state of impossibly low entropy.
Speaker 1: It was incredibly ordered at the Big Bang, right.
Speaker 2: Roger Penrose actually calculated the probability of the Big Bang's
initial low entropy state occurring purely by.
Speaker 1: Chance, and what were the odds?
Speaker 2: The number is one in ten to the power of
ten to the one twenty three.
Speaker 1: That is, I can't even conceptualize that.
Speaker 2: Nobody can. It's a number so staggeringly huge that if
you put a zero on every single subatomic particle in
the observable universe, you would run out of particles long
before the whole number.
Speaker 1: So it's effectively impossible for our universe to just happen by.
Speaker 2: Chance, exactly unless.
Speaker 1: Unless you have infinite time there it is. Boltzman proposed
that the before was just an eternal, infinite void of
maximum entropy, a completely dead, featureless expanse of thermal noise
stretching forever, and.
Speaker 2: The mathematics of statistical mechanics, specifically the point kerret recurrence theorem,
dictate that in an infinite system, random thermal fluctuations are
absolutely guaranteed to eventually visit every possible state, no matter
how ridiculously unlikely.
Speaker 1: If you roll the dice infinitely eventually you get every combination.
Speaker 2: Right, if you wait long enough. In a dead, infinite universe,
a random fluctuation of particles will eventually align perfectly to
create a localized, highly ordered, low entropy patch like our
Big Bang.
Speaker 1: Like our Big Bang, so our entire Cosmos, the Milky Way,
the Earth, all of human history. It might just be
a random statistical accident that popped out of eternal thermal noise.
Speaker 2: Yes, because infinity has no beginning, that insanely rare fluctuation
was actually an absolute mathematical certainty. Yeah, if you wait forever,
the impossible becomes guaranteed.
Speaker 1: That's chilling. But the terror of Boltzmann genesis isn't just
that we are a statistical accident in a void, right.
It's the horrifying logic of probability that inevitably follows.
Speaker 2: That thought the Boltzman brain.
Speaker 1: The Boltzman brain, statistical mechanics dictates that smaller, simpler fluctuations
are exponentially more probable than massively complex ones.
Speaker 2: Bugyous.
Speaker 1: It takes infinitely less luck to spontaneously assemble a rock
out of random thermal noise than it takes to assemble
a whole, functioning planet.
Speaker 2: That is the core logic. Yes, oh, it is infinitely
more probable for a random fluctuation to create a single
solar system than a whole galaxy, And extending that exact logic,
it is infinitely more probable for a random fluctuation in
the void to temporarily assemble just a single conscious human
brain loading out there in the dark, complete with false
preloaded memories of a thirteen point eight billion year cosmic history,
than it is for the actual full universe to physically exist.
Speaker 1: Let that sink in for a second. According to the
pure mathematics of statistical probability, it is far far more
likely that you, yes, you listening to this deep dive
right now, are just a solitary brain that spontaneously materialized
out of the chaos a fraction of a second agoin
a terrifying thought. Your memories of your childhood, the sensation
of the chair you're sitting in, your memory of the
start of this very conversation, they are all just chemical
illusions forged by a freak alignment of atoms in an
endless void.
Speaker 2: The Earth doesn't exist, I don't exist.
Speaker 1: You are totally alone in the dark, and we are
just the smallest possible dream that the void could have
right before your brain dissolves back into the thermal noise.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate nightmare of probability. It tells us
there is no grand architecture, no physical reality outside of
a momentary hallucination generated by statistical inevitability in an infinite
featureless chaos. Wow.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's pull ourselves out of that boyd for a
second before we all have an existential crisis.
Speaker 2: Probably a good idea.
Speaker 1: We've gone from the chaote eternal inflation of false vacuums
to the ruthless epiotic collisions of higher dimensional brains. We've
explored the repulsive gravity of loop quantum gravity and the
biological evolution of universes breeding black holes.
Speaker 2: You've covered a lot of ground.
Speaker 1: We've seen the conformal scars of Hawking points, the thread
of instant vacuum decay, and the illusion of three D
space generated by a holographic two D boundary. We've watched
time dissolve completely into spatial geometry at the Plank scale
and realized we might be nothing more than static math
or a hallucinating brain in a dead universe.
Speaker 2: These theories aggressively dismantle our intuitive understanding of existence. They
challenge the very bedrock of what we consider to be real.
Speaker 1: But I want to leave you with one final thought,
something we haven't actually touched on yet today, that builds
right out of that Boltzmann brain nightmare.
Speaker 2: Oh, the quantum immortality angle.
Speaker 1: Exactly if the void is capable of producing a momentary
brain with false memories, what happens when it produces a
mind that realizes it's an illusion. If infinity guarantees every
possible fluctuation, then it guarantees an infinite number of identical
Boltzmann brains. Having this exact thought at this exact moment,
infinite copies of you, which introduces the concept of quantum immortality.
Even if your current physical iteration dissolves into thermal noise
a microsecond from now, there is another exact copy of
your neural state fluctuating into existence somewhere else in the
infinite void, continuing the thought seamlessly.
Speaker 2: It just picks up right where you left off.
Speaker 1: Your consciousness might be jumping across an infinite expanse of
dead space, sustained purely by the fact that out of infinity,
there's always one brain that survives long enough to finish
the sentence, you might be immortal solely because the math
demands it.
Speaker 2: That is somehow both terrifying and incredibly comforting.
Speaker 1: Right, So, I have a H's direct question for you
to ponder as you go about your day. Out of
all the theories we unpacked, from eternal inflation and colliding
brains to holographic projections and immortal statistical fluctuations, which model
of the before do you actually believe governs our reality.
Speaker 2: I'd love to know what people think.
Speaker 1: Drop a comment below and let us know your stance.
Thank you for joining us on this reality bending edition
of Thrilling Threads. The math is brutal, the timeline is
an illusion, so keep your curiosity infinite.