Why we do not understand the Universe
Too many times I have heard florid scientists and eminent physicists regretfully assert that there are concepts that we absolutely cannot (completely) understand, such as singularities, black holes, Big Bang, inflation, quantum physics, and so on. I remember in particular a theoretical physicist who asserted that the word singularity was just a fancy way of defining something we have no idea what it is. Not to mention Albert Einstein, who was convinced that black holes could not exist, since Nature would never have allowed such a monstrosity in our universe (not least because such a "monstrosity" would have undermined the validity of his theory of general relativity).
But if certain realities appear abstruse, unimaginable, inconceivable, incomprehensible to us, you want also because of their nature, from our very fragile biological point of view, violent and catastrophic, in my opinion it is instead precisely the universe in which we live that is such, and not that from which it originated.
That inflation, which in the multiverse has been assumed to be eternal, I believe has for all intents and purposes unwound this universe in part, into 4 open dimensions and 7 remaining closed in on itself, thus making it chaotic, entropic, inhomogeneous, explosive, gravity kneaded, energetically active and thermally reactive. Whereas its initial state, which I imagine totally folded in on itself in a one-dimensional reality of vibrating energetic strings, must have been, and probably still is, located in that primeval matrix from which infinite universes originate; a topological status that is likely to be relaxed, structurally simple and energetically harmonious, until some random fluctuation, as unlikely as it can be in a reality which has eternity at its disposal to await its occurrence, has disrupted it, as it were, in its intimacy (or much more likely all this is actually just the norm of its fluctuating energetic state from which infinite bubbles of universes continually originate), deploying it as a tesseract in something that I think we might call surreal, absurd, grotesque, as an organism turned inside out can be or, less suggestively, as a chromosome unrolled from its supercoils in the distended helix of DNA.
Yet this four-dimensional monstrosity we call Reality, only because it belongs to us and we belong to it, unaware of what the real anomaly is. And in this unnatural reality we exist, originated and evolve, unaware that it probably should not subsist at all, as it is in a precarious and temporary state of equilibrium, just as a cloud of smoke emitted from a cigarette swirls uncertainly in the air causally, until it thins out, rarefies and finally disappears. And this unstable and temporally limited state, in the face of the eternity of the multiverse from which we originated, is determined by the very duration of the Universe, which had a beginning and in interminable eons will see its inevitable end, to evaporate and return and be what it was and forever will be. This conclusion, which nevertheless remains a hypothesis, certainly not a dogma of faith, may seem at first glance to be a kind of alternative religious version of the concept of god or pantheistic philosophy in a modern key, but it cannot be denied that there has been a highly energetic birth that will be followed by an inescapable thermal death, which will perhaps be repeated in infinite combinations of possible universes and realities, in a hypothetical cycle of energetic expansion and rarefaction and rebirth from its own ashes, if it is true that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed.
The universe in which we exist, then, would be nothing more than a different energy configuration in which reality manifests in this distorted anomaly that is four-dimensional space-time. But though partially unwound, the Void that sustains the whole retains its intimate structure that binds it to the other folded dimensions. Thus, the Void does not exist in the sense of nothingness, as it is instinctively understood, that is, of simple absence of matter/energy, just as in this finite universe the concepts of infinite and eternal cannot have meaning. The Void must have a structure of its own that connects all dimensions. The space that appears virtually empty to us, barely filled with hydrogen and dark matter, is actually what can be called a false vacuum. It is betrayed by the matter itself, which burdens three-dimensional space by curving it, just as an insect on the spider web by wiggling makes it shimmer in the sun, when before this was motionless and invisible, distorting and warping it along with time.
We can thus imagine the vacuum as a kind of mesh that simultaneously harnesses everything, while the so-called gravity that we three-dimensional beings feel as a force, not knowing how else to describe this effect, is nothing but the consequence of the curving of space under the presence, or weight, of mass, which tends to regroup by virtue of its natural status that it had before inflation; that is why gravity is only attractive: nothing more than the universe tending to return to its original state of stable energy minimum that it had before the Big Bang, which is not that of absolute vacuum at absolute zero as we mistakenly believe. There must necessarily be a basal energy level from which everything originates and to which everything tends.
The black holes then, in this seemingly three-dimensional context where folded inner space certainly does not cease to exist, are nothing more than the premature realization on a local scale of this primordial state in which the universe was and soon will be again, by virtue of the other concentration of mass that was able to enable their creation.
Therefore, we cannot but take note of this fundamental law of the Universe: all matter/energy tends to return to its original state of equilibrium, since our reality is nothing but a temporary unstable equilibrium, and by temporary I mean that it will last as long as the unfolded fabric of spacetime in this universe; other universes will probably, depending on the amount of energy involved at the time of inflation, have a different duration, which may be so small as to prevent its formation to much greater than we are given to surmise its fate.
If the universe really was static, as was believed in Einstein's time, before we realized that everything is expanding under the pull of so-called dark energy (which in my opinion is only a reflection of the ubiquitous echo of inflation, just as the background radiation in the microwaves is all that remains in evidence of the so-called Big Bang), retained only locally by the thickening of matter manifested in its 4 fundamental forces, all of which are destined to give way at different times, in anticipation of the final Big Rip, really then would tend to collapse in on itself, thus accomplishing the same result in perhaps shorter, if not immediate, times as soon as gravity had taken over opposing the repulsive effect of the Big Bang.
But the Big Bang was not an explosion as we like to imagine. In fact, in this totally erroneous view the Big Bang never happened, because inflation is something else entirely, which we cannot even imagine, deceived by the concept we have of a radiant explosion as that of a firework or anti-aircraft. If it had, the primordial universe certainly would not have had that homogeneous distribution as it appears to us thanks to the Hubble telescope, exceptions made for a few infinitesimal discontinuities, because the explosions we are used to create zones of heterogeneous chaos.
Since, on the other hand, there has been an inflation that took place at a speed far greater than that of light, even before the universe became transparent to the much slower electromagnetic radiation, this has forced it to take another path, perhaps only a little longer and less fascinating than a reverse Big Crunch, which will nevertheless lead it silently toward a desultory energy evaporation, until even the last proton in 1033 years will have decayed. It will therefore remain a soup of leptons and photons that, unable to sustain unfolded with their evanescent presence the four-dimensional space, will abandon it to float finally free of the grave of matter until it falls back on itself in an instantaneous reverse inflation, in that state it had before it all began, Alpha will therefore coincide with Omega, the circle will finally close and the anomaly of the half-folded space in which we living beings we have existed and disappeared now for interminable eons, it will cease to exist by vanishing forever and everything will return to its ordered, one- dimensional, fluctuating and eternal state of that sea of vibrating strings from whose random ripples all infinite possible universes originate and will forever originate.
As for black holes, especially the supermassive ones with masses equal to billions of suns that lie at the center of every galaxy-which I firmly believe we should study by devoting all our resources and intellectual faculties to them in order to understand the true reality of the Universe-the very fact that they can evaporate, nullifying with them all the information they contain and the entropy they have accumulated, as Stephen Hawking argues, is proof that all that mass that seems impossible to us can be concentrated all together in a single infinitely small point, is nothing but the local repurposing of that primeval state with all 11 dimensions of inner space folded in on themselves, where only such a high concentration of energy, mass or strings as we want to call the intimate structure of existence (and let us forget the concept of nonexistence or nothingness, because it makes no sense to deny being by opposing a fancy antithesis to it, we are not talking about electric charges or antiparticles, the Whole cannot have a duality by opposing Nothingness to it), makes this possible.
Returning, then, to the title of this reflection of mine poised between physics and metaphysics: why then can we not understand the universe? Well, I am more than convinced that all this may seem absurd and unintelligible to us because we are anomalous (not to say monstrous) beings deployed in only 3 spatial dimensions straddling a fourth temporal dimension. Let us reflect on this as much as we need to.
