How Our Universe Came To Be

"How Our Universe Came To Be" (with warmup feature "Guessing With Precision")

Was:  "Guessing With Precision, And Other Odd Bits Of Impropriety"

(Episode X of "Writing More Than I Know")


   Some people like to guess with precision.  I'm one of them.
For example, when I set the microwave timer I intuitively think:
One-and-a-half minutes?  That feels too short.  1:45?  Okay.  And
then as I'm setting the timer, I feel 1:45 is too much, and I
adjust downward to 1:42.  Not that I really know the ideal time;
it's just an intuitive guess influenced by the size of the chunk of potato that
I'm cooking or just some feeling I have.  Or, as an other example, if you ask
me how long it will take to do something, I might say:  4 minutes.
Most people will give a conventional round number like 5 minutes
or "a minute" or instead opt for a vagary like "soon" or "a few
minutes".  But I will sometimes say 4 or 12 or 7 minutes depending on
the event being estimated.

   Estimating with precision is sometimes mathematically improper,
if I recall the lesson correctly.  If you say, "10.57" it's supposed
to imply that you know the number to the nearest hundredth.  If
you don't, you should instead say "10.5" or "10" according to the level
of exactness you actually know.  This is not true for all math*, but
is for some of it.

( * In Statistics a confidence interval such as "8.39 - 0.23 < x < 8.39 + 0.23",
while it is accurately derived, at least _looks_ kind of like guessing with
unwarranted precision.  But in Statistics such a precise interval is properly
presented and with good manners.)

   All that is to illustrate that I shall say a thing, such as the above 1.42,
and I may sound as though I know what I'm talking about, but I don't necessarily
know that much.

   It is a warmup for what I really want to write about today, which is
cosmology in the sense of how the universe came to be what it is.  I write
about that every once in a while.  So far nobody indicates belief nor
admits having noticed that I wrote such a thing; so today I stand ready
to maintain a perfect record of inconsequentiality.  But really it matters
to me, anyway, in my mind.

   Cosmology is a subject I cannot discuss with cosmologists.  I know this
because I attended a few lunchtime fun cosmology lessons and the math
rapidly got beyond me, or at least seemed unpalatable, every time the
group leader explained a universe.

   I am undeterred in myuniverse because here I can say whatever I want.

   It's actually my"multi"verse, though, rather than my"uni"verse.

   And it's not quite "my"multiverse because I sometimes borrow an idea
from somebody else.

   So it is "a" multiverse:  amultiverse.

   So here's my theory about how our universe came to be what it is:

   There was either a total nothingness, or there was something.  The multiverse
splits at each such turning point.  Now we have two universes:  the one in which
there was a total nothingness, and the other in which there was something.

   I pursue the possibilities of the one in which there was something:

   The something either remains intact, or eventually breaks apart.  Thus the multiverse splits again.

(Breaking apart is easy to imagine; in our world here, things degrade and occasionally fall apart.)

   So far we have described three universes, within this multiverse.

   In the universe which had something in it which broke apart, the parts continued to break apart randomly.  In this scenario, there either is or isn't a physical "law" or "tendency" which governs what the parts do.  For simplicity I'll skip over a step or two and call this the law of gravity:  objects attract each other.  Also for simplicity I'll assume a law of inertia, and also assume that somehow the parts are in motion relative to each other.  Now, after the multiverse has split many times, at all these junctures where a universe could be one way or another, we come to one of these many universes:  the one in which there is a law of gravity and a law of inertia and the parts are in motion.

   Some people say that such a universe is remarkable, or surprising.  However, I don't think so.  There are an infinite number of universes and the one in which we find ourselves is one which has such motion, inertia, and gravity.  Furthermore, the universe in which we _find_ ourselves is, _of course_, a universe which allows beings such as ourselves to evolve.

   Now imagine those objects moving around, governed by both inertia and gravity.  Some of them will accrete together, forming larger objects.  This takes place over time ("time").  Thus, part of the time, there will exist a large object such as the planet Earth.  Very plausibly (given laws of inertia and gravity) it will orbit around a yet larger object such as our Sun.  And, among all such planets and Suns, that is, among all the trillions of them in our universe, there _could_ be at least one on which by some random process of collisions among atoms life began and evolved into us.  Voila.  Perhaps every quadrillion universes or so, such a thing will happen.  It is not particularly remarkable, then.  It would be more remarkable if in several quadrillion different kinds of universe, absolutely _none_ of them could generate such life.  That would be such a pure, sterile, statistically _strange_ multiverse as to boggle the imagination and it would tempt us to suppose that only a God could have miraculously made such a purely sterile multiverse.

   That's my theory, but other people have probably already thought of the same ideas so I say it is "a theory", not necessarily just "my" theory.  But it's the theory I feel comfortable with.  And it seems to me that I thought it up myself.  I did borrow the idea of "multiverse" from other sources.

   There is also a God, or gods, but in most of my universes they are polite gods and don't conflict with nature.

-jrl 2019/Nov/12