Was the Big Bang Merely a Phantom Event?

Let us imagine a trial in which a man is accused of murder. Suppose there is a crucial witness for the prosecution who says she saw the defendant kill the murdered person. Suppose her testimony goes like this.

District attorney: So tell us what you observed in front of the defendant's house.

Witness: I'll never forget it. I saw a man take out a big knife and plunge it into the murdered woman's chest.

District attorney: And was that man someone in this court room?

Witness: Yes, it was the defendant. I saw him plunge the knife into her chest three times.

District attorney: And how did you happen to be at the defendant's house?

Witness: Well, I was sitting comfortably in my house, when I decided to teleport myself to outside the defendant's house. So I closed my eyes, said “Abracadabra,” and then poof, there I was in front of the defendant's house.

The final detail given here by the defendant is what we may call a narrative disqualifier. A narrative disqualifier is some part of a narrative that is so unbelievable or so seemingly fake that it causes you to throw out the entire story. In this case, no jury would accept the testimony that the witness had seen the murder. They would discard or disqualify her entire story.

Let's imagine another case of a narrative disqualifier, one that we might see in a film. Imagine you are watching a film that purports to be a true documentary about a trip to a strange jungle where creatures like Bigfoot were seen. You watch the film, and it seems very realistic. This film is real and truthful, you tell yourself. But near the end of the film you notice something that reveals the type of film you are watching. The film shows some people that are supposed to be in front of a beautiful vista, looking down from a high hill. You look closely and notice that the scene in back of the characters is fake. The characters are standing in front of some wooden screen on which the scenery was painted!

You have now found a narrative disqualifier. So you disqualify or discard the whole film. Even if all the rest of the film seems very realistic, you now believe the whole thing is fake.

So now you get the idea of a narrative disqualifier. But it is interesting to ask: within the cosmic chronology told by modern science, is there a narrative disqualifier? Is there some part of the story so unbelievable that it should cause us to question or discard the whole narrative?

Below is the modern story of the past of mankind, life, and the universe as told by modern science:

Long before men built cities, they lived in primitive tribes, often living in caves. A few million years before that, there were less intelligent primates walking about. About 50 million years earlier, the planet was dominated by dinosaurs. The major groups of animals first appeared during the Cambrian Era about 550 million years ago. About one or two billion years earlier, the first primitive life appeared from some lucky combinations of chemicals. Millions of years earlier, our planet formed. Billions of years before our planet formed, our galaxy formed. Going back further and further in time, to before the time our galaxy formed, we find the universe was very hot and dense. The farther you go back in time, the hotter things were, and the denser things were. Tracing things back to the very first instant, we see the entire universe popping into existence in a state of infinite density, in the event we call the Big Bang.

Is there anything in this story we might call a narrative disqualifier? If you study the complexity of even the most primitive life and the genetic code, you may be entitled to think that the formation of life from some lucky combination of chemicals is a narrative disqualifier. But there's something in this story that seems like much more of a narrative disqualifier. It's the very end of the story, the Big Bang (or what would be the very start of the story, if the story were told in chronological order). The entire universe popping into existence in a state of infinite density? Perhaps we should regard this as being the “mother of all narrative disqualifiers.”

According to the theory of gravitation, gravitational attraction is proportional to density. The gravitational attraction of a universe an instant after the Big Bang should have been nearly infinite, and should have caused the universe to collapse back into itself instantly, instantly turning the Big Bang into a Big Crunch. Cosmologists know of no known force that could have counteracted this gravitation, and they are purely speculating when they describe a force counteracting this gravity. For example, they may speculate about some “inflaton field,” but there is no evidence for such a field.

Back in the nineteenth century, astronomers tended to believe in an eternal universe. Imagine if someone had proposed the Big Bang theory back around 1850. He would have been almost uniformly denounced as a crackpot selling ridiculous hogwash.

Given the apparent impossibility of the universe popping into existence and expanding from a state of infinite density, perhaps we should regard the Big Bang as a narrative disqualifier. Perhaps the Big Bang disqualifies the whole modern account of the universe's history prior to man's existence. It may be argued that for such an account to be credible, it must have a credible beginning; and that the Big Bang event is not a credible beginning for a universe.

But what alternatives would there be if we made such a disqualification? One alternative would be to construct an alternative physical theory for the past of the universe. That might involve innovative thinking, and an innovative interpretation of red shifts and the cosmic background radiation (the two pillars of evidence for the Big Bang).

Another alternative is to think outside of the box, and to break out of the whole “first there was matter and then there was Mind” type of thinking. Here is one scenario. Let us imagine that there are only minds, and that matter exists only as something that is perceived by minds. Let us imagine that there is what we may call a Mind Source that is the source of minds such as ours.

If such a thing were true, it might be appropriate to distinguish between two types of events: events observed by minds, and events that were not observed by minds. We might call the latter type of events “phantom events,” and assign them a lesser degree of reality. Similarly, we might call years in which no minds could observe anything as “phantom years.”

This would take us into an innovative way of thinking. Scientists have traditionally regarded all years as having the same degree of reality. Just as a poet once proclaimed “a rose is a rose is a rose,” scientists have tended to think like this:

A year is a year is a year.

A century is a century is a century.

An event is an event is an event.

But maybe we shouldn't think in such a simple and monolithic way. If the universe consists only of minds, then years that were never observed by minds should perhaps be regarded as having a kind of shadowy, phantom existence. We might call such years phantom years. The whole first billion years of the universe's history could be regarded as mere phantom years. The Big Bang could be regarded as a mere phantom event.

If this idea seems outrageous, consider how scientists think about particles. You might think it's just common sense to think: a particle is a particle is a particle. But according to modern physicists, that isn't quite right. Physicists distinguish between two types of particles: real particles, and what are called virtual particles. Virtual particles have a kind of ghostly, phantom existence, lacking the same reality as permanent particles. If we can distinguish between real particles and these virtual, phantom particles, why shouldn't we distinguish between real events and phantom events, which might also be called virtual events?

Based on the very strange results of the double-slit experiments, some scientists have speculated on quantum mechanical grounds that events don't become real until they are observed (at which time, supposedly, the wave-function collapses). If that's true, what happens to the Big Bang? It becomes a mere phantom event.

There is another reason for regarding the Big Bang as a kind of phantom event. The reason is a kind of “dirty little secret” of cosmology. It is the fact that the Big Bang is eternally unobservable. There is no chance that we will ever develop technology that allows us to look back to the Big Bang, or anything within 380,000 years of its occurrence.

The physical reason has to do with what is called the recombination era. Scientists say that in the first 380,000 years of the universe's history, matter and energy were so densely packed that all photons of light coming from the early universe were hopelessly scattered. Imagine you are looking through some crazy telescope that is 50 meters long and has 1000 different lenses at different points in the telescope tube. Each of the 1000 lenses causes the light to scatter in a different way. Of course, such a telescope will not allow you to see anything. Just as such an arrangement would act as an impenetrable optical barrier, the first 380,000 years of the universe's history acts as an impenetrable optical barrier. Each light photon from the Big Bang must have been scattered many times every second, as those particles interacted with other matter and energy particles in the dense early universe.

The cosmic background radiation cited as evidence for the Big Bang does not actually date from the Big Bang, but from a time 380,000 years after it. That radiation only tells us about the state of the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

The visual below illustrates the idea. We can only look back in our telescopes to the edge of the orange area. Trying to look back to the Big Bang is like trying to look through a thick layer of clouds to see the moon, but a million times worse. 

 We can only look back to 380,000 years after the Big Bang

If we can consider the light from the Big Bang as a quantity of information, then the first 380,000 years of the universe's history served to shuffle that information billions of times. We can no more recover that information than you could recover the original state of a deck of cards after the deck had been shuffled a billion times.

So we can never look back to the Big Bang. No technology will ever overcome this physical obstacle. Since the Big Bang is eternally unobservable, there are empirical grounds for regarding it as no more than a kind of phantom event, lacking the substantiality of events that we can presently observe or can at least hope to one day observe.

Should we then refer to “the ghostly beginning of all things” when discussing cosmology?

Does the Future Splash on the Present?

On the morning of August 24, 2014 around 2:00 AM EST I was woken up by a vivid dream. The dream seemed like the simplest dream I had ever had. It consisted simply of an image of a small metallic trash basket moving a few inches on the floor, without anything else being nearby.

I thought about the dream and at first thought that it might be a dream about some ghostly force moving the small trash basket. But then I thought of a simpler idea. Perhaps the dream was about an earthquake tremor. If there were a sufficiently powerful earthquake, that might cause a small trash basket to move around on the floor by itself.

Having previously suggested in a blog post that people describe unusual dreams by sending out a Twitter tweet, I decided I would do just that – as soon as I woke up in the morning. I imagined myself sending out a Twitter tweet in the morning, a tweet about a possible earthquake premonition. That would be proof of my premonition if an earthquake soon occurred, because you can't change the time stamp on Twitter tweets.

After I woke up in the morning and went to my computer, I discovered there was no longer any point in sending out such a Twitter tweet. The earthquake had already occurred. It happened about four hours after my dream, at about 6:20 AM EST (3:20 AM PST). It was the worst earthquake in the San Francisco area in 25 years. I hope all those who got injured will recover fully.

This year I have recorded some 17 dreams I have had that match either events that occurred shortly thereafter, or events that occurred (unknown to me) within the previous few days. The most dramatic case is fully described here. It's a dream I had of a meteor fall that had an uncanny resemblance to something that happened within a week. On June 30, 2014 I had another meteor dream that matched reality well. I dreamed that a meteor made a bright colored flash of light in the sky, and that an observer saw the meteor wearing sunglasses, thinking: I'm sure glad I wore these sunglasses, because that was so bright. That night while I was sleeping a British observatory reported the brightest meteor flash it had ever seen, which witnesses said produced a bright green light (it was a type called a bolide meteor).

On April 10 I had a dream about a senior White House official resigning. The resignation of a senior White House official (Sebelius) was announced later that day. On April 16 I had a dream of a power outage at a stadium. There was such an outage on the previous night (unknown to me), and a week later there were two such outages in different places. On April 25 I had a dream of astronauts on the moon carrying radiation shields (stone umbrellas, to be exact). Later in the day a scientific study was released saying that future lunar astronauts will need much better radiation shields.

On June 12 of this year I had a dream of a non-elderly adult woman completely underwater in a bathtub. The next day there was a news story of exactly such an event (a drowning), an event that only occurs about once a month to non-elderly adult women in the US. On June 13 I had a dream of someone stabbing a robber who entered that person's house. Within 24 hours (before or after) there were two such events in different places.

On July 16 I had a terrible dream of a child falling to his death from about the tenth or fifteenth floor of an apartment building. A day earlier (unknown to me) a 16-year-old described as Turkey's youngest novelist had fallen to his death from the tenth floor of an apartment building. On June 30 I had a dream about homeless people living in a hotel or motel. I learned later that day that there had been a local protest a few days earlier about a nearby motel being converted into a homeless shelter. Then there was the dream discussed here.

What I find is that for every case in which one of my dreams seems to match well something that soon happens (which may be an example of precognition), there are roughly an equal number of cases where one of my dreams seem to match well something that happened one day or a few days previously (but which I had no knowledge of). The latter examples may be cases of what is called retrocognition, which means an anomalous knowledge about something that happened in the past.

It is very hard to mathematically compute the odds of such things occurring randomly. These cases could all be due to mere coincidence. But let us at least speculate: what type of theory of time might allow for both anomalous precognition (knowledge of a future event) and anomalous retrocognition (knowledge of some past event that you never learned about through normal means)?

I can think of a crude sketch of such a theory. Let us imagine time as being like a stream of water. We can imagine ourselves as fish swimming in that stream, or we can imagine ourselves as people walking along the side of the stream. Now let us imagine events as being like rocks or pebbles that fall into the stream. We can imagine that each event causes a little splash or ripple. We can imagine that the bigger and more important the event, the bigger the splash or ripple it produces.

Such a theory might help to explain both precognition and retrocognition. Just as the splash of a rock in a stream travels in all directions, we can imagine that some type of paranormal or psychic “event splash” travels both forward and backward in time. When someone has a dream of something about to happen, it might be caused by a “backsplash” of a future event. When someone has a dream about something that recently happened (something he never learned about normally), that might be caused by a “foresplash” of the event.

I have no idea whether such a theory is valid. But I have at least learned one thing. I must discard my previous policy of waiting until the morning to send out a Twitter tweet when I have a vivid dream of something that might soon be verified. From now on when I have such a dream in the middle of the night, I am going to immediately wake up, turn on my computer, and send out a time-stamped Twitter tweet describing the dream, as soon as my dream is finished. Hopefully if I follow this policy I will one day have a nice juicy case where I can prove I dreamed about something a few hours before it happened. 

Not Even Half Baked: The Premature Project Known as Quantum Gravity

Two of the biggest theories of modern science are quantum mechanics (which deals with the subatomic world) and general relativity (a theory of gravity that works on a large scale, dealing with large massive objects). For decades, scientists have had the hope of uniting the two into a single theory. Einstein spent the last years of his life working on such a project, but came up empty-handed.

In the past few decades, some physicists have continued to work on theories that attempt to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity. Such theories are called quantum gravity theories. One class of these theories is called loop quantum gravity.

One occasionally sees news stories based on the predictions of loop quantum gravity. An example is this recent one, suggesting that black holes eventually become white holes that gush out matter.

But whenever you hear the phrase “quantum gravity” you should also think to yourself: not even half-baked. Or perhaps it might be better to think: not even tenth-baked. This is because it is perhaps centuries too early to be advancing a theory that tries to unite quantum mechanics and gravitation. One reason is that there are too many mysteries involved in gravitation and quantum mechanics. Uniting quantum gravity and gravitation might have to wait until we solve such mysteries.

The following might be a logical plan:

1. We solve the basic mystery of what causes gravitation, something we don't understand. We know that gravitation is proportional to density of matter, but as it is easy to imagine a universe with no gravitation, we don't really understand why gravitation exists.
2. We solve the mystery of why gravity is a trillion trillion trillion times weaker than all of the three other fundamental forces of the universe.
3. We solve the basic problem of the nature of the collapse of the wave function, something which is still furiously debated by quantum mechanics theorists.
4. We solve the incredibly perplexing problem of quantum entanglement, and how this spooky mysterious “action at a distance” can be occurring.
5. We solve the mysterious “observer effect” in quantum mechanics, the bizarre fact that matter can behave very differently depending only on the way we observe matter.
6. We clarify the mysterious “double slit” experiment, which suggests that both electrons and energy photons can switch back and forth between wave behavior and particle behavior.
7. Then, after gaining a vastly clearer understanding of both quantum mechanics and gravitation, we attempt to create a single theory uniting both of them.

But some of our physicists have jumped straight to item 7 in this list before understanding the first six. This seems to make no sense. How can you unite quantum mechanics and gravitation into a single theory, when there are so many unsolved mysteries involved in both of them?

Quantum gravity is a nice little niche for some physicists. If you are a quantum gravity theorist, you can spend your year working on some theory that no one will expect to work, piling on one far-out speculation after another. If anyone complains about a lack of verification or predictions, you can say: come on, this is quantum gravity, what do you expect? I'm reminded of that Broadway song with the lyric: nice work if you can get it.

Quantum gravity theorists are good at speculations, but are not very good at justifying their work. One quantum gravity theorist admits that there is no evidence for quantum gravity, but she tries to justify her funding by saying this:

The irony is that quantum gravity phenomenology is as safe an investment as it gets in science. We know the theory must exist. We know that the only way it can be scientific is to make contact to observation. Quantum gravity phenomenology will become reality as surely as volcanic ash will drift over Central Europe again.

This is very unpersuasive reasoning. We are not sure that any workable theory of quantum gravity will ever be discovered, and it is very unclear whether such a workable theory will be developed anytime in the next 500 years. Far from “as safe an investment as it gets in science,” investing in quantum gravity theoretical research seems no more safe than betting on a horse race or buying a lottery ticket. A safe investment, on the other hand, is one that has a high likelihood of giving you a good return within the next decade (such as a mutual fund with a 50% mix of stocks and bonds).

Perhaps the main type of quantum gravity theory is what is called loop quantum gravity theory. Such a theory is based on the idea that time is quantized. You can get kind of an idea of quantized time by imagining that each second is a stack of time-slices, and that there are a limited number of these time-slices in each second.

I think this idea is misguided. The idea of quantized time reinforces the assumption of a strict segregation between this instant and the next instant. But rather than thinking in such a way, we should perhaps be moving in the opposite direction. Although it may shock our expectations, experiments on precognition suggest that there may well rarely be some kind of partial intermingling or information exchange between the future and the present. The same thing is suggested by many human experiences very well described in the book The Science of Premonitions by Larry Dossey MD. A particularly striking example is given on page 41 of the book. On May 2, 1812 an Englishman named John Williams had a dream of the assassination of the British prime minister Spencer Perceval. Williams had the dream three times on the same night, and the dream included very specific details. Nine days later Perceval was assassinated. As Dossey puts it, “The details of the assassination were identical to those of the dream, including the colors of the clothing, the buttons on the assassin's jacket, and the location of the bloodstain on Perceval's white waistcoast.” (See here for another author's discussion of this incident.)

It is hard enough to explain such experiments and experiences with our normal assumptions about time, and it seems even harder to explain them under some assumption of quantized time. If physicists wish to create some exotic new theory of time, they would do better to create one that can help explain experiments on precognition and human experiences of premonitions that came true. Rather than imagining a rigid “one-way street” leading between the past and the future, such a theory might allow for the possibility of a limited degree of mingling or communication between the past and the future, possibly in both directions. Such a theory might describe a separation between the past and the future that is more fuzzy and blurred than we normally imagine.

But such a theory may be a long way off. For the present, I simply suggest: when you hear that something is suggested by quantum gravity, remember that quantum gravity may be centuries away from being ready for prime time.