In the Beginning

I've been pondering the question of "where did we come from" recently. I'm not talking about humanity, obviously, but rather the more fundamental question of where the universe came from. The Big Bang theory doesn't actually answer that question - it provides a useful model for the very first few moments of the universe's existence, but it doesn't offer any answer to the question of why or how - i.e. it merely pushes the question back to "where did the Big Bang come from" (or perhaps more helpfully "what caused the Big Bang").

It's only as I write this entry that I realise what a ridiculous phrase "Big Bang" is. Wikipedia informs me the name was coined sarcastically by Fred Hoyle to describe the theory (in opposition to his own steady state model). Somehow I'm not surprised to discover it was originally a pejorative label...

I've seen various suggestions to answer that question - brane theory, etc. - but all only extend the causal regression, rather than tackling directly the question "why something, rather than nothing". I find that curiously many people seem to consider this question "scientifically [not tackleable]"; that point of view may be true but it certainly seems to be a pessimistic starting point.

We tend to believe 'ex nihilo nihil fit' (from nothing nothing is made), and this is certainly the other part of the paradox (the first part being the existence of the universe). I'm quite happy to agree with Ayn Rand that 'existence exists', and simple logic tells us that no thing can be extracted from the empty set (a common concept of 'nothing'). I began to wonder, however, why we should consider the type of nothing that pre-dates existence (which I will hereafter refer to for convenience as 'the pre-universe') as the same kind of nothing as the empty set.

Let's consider the fact that in quantum theory (which generally seems to be a better model of reality than our classical, intuitive predictions) the initial state of a value is commonly not zero, but rather 'undefined'; the value only becomes one or zero after some measurement or interaction. This leads me to the thinking (which I admit I cannot defend with any rigour, but hope you will humour me anyway) that perhaps the 'undefined' state is a much more natural place to begin than a 'zero' state as one typically imagines the pre-universe. In a rather abstract way, one could think of the pre-universe as an array of qubits, all of undefined value. As time has passed, those qubits have fallen into the defined values that describe our particular universe.

This might seem like a very vague and unhelpful place to begin a scientific enquiry - even a thought experiment - but consider that three thought-provoking points can already be drawn from the idea described:

1. If the pre-universe was all that existed (as it presumably must be, since the presence of anything else would push the question back to the origin of that other) it cannot exchange anything with any 'external' entity. If a metric exists for something that cannot be created or destroyed within the pre-universe, the total of that metric must remain constant. This sounds intriguingly like conservation of energy.
2. The concept that the original state of the universe was undefined, and that therefore it is becoming increasingly defined over time, offers an alternative to the many-worlds type interpretations of quantum events. Any given quantum event where a 'random choice' occurs may be a genuine choice; analogous to the irreversible collapse of a single qubit of the universe from an undefined state to a defined one.
3. String theory is frequently criticised because it describes not one universe, ours, but rather a vast range of universes. This seems less problematic if our universe fell out of an undefined state by random chance - a slightly different result for the final choices in that falling-out would be expected to lead to a similar universe, and hence one potentially also describable by the same or a very similar theory.

Perhaps one day I'll have the time to study enough maths and physics to explore this idea in more detail... if you have any such training, please do post your comments, I'd be very interested to hear them. (Of course comments are also welcome if you don't have any such training!)