In The Beginning

Before the universe … I almost said “was created”, but that would be jumping to a conclusion … before the universe existed, there was nothing. There was a void: no space, no time, no matter, no energy. Nothing. Nada. Zip. You may reasonably think that before the Big Bang, there was just empty space, and the Big Bang was an incredible explosion that took place at a point in this empty space. But that is not the case. Before the Big Bang, space did not exist. Hence the term void. The Big Bang was the event that created SpaceTime and all the matter and energy in it.

While the void was empty of space and time, and empty of matter and energy, it was not without its own properties.  We know this because something happened in it (or to it): the Big Bang happened. Before the Big Bang, the universe did not exist but the void existed. It was empty but it was something.  It was not Nothing. Even if it was only some kind of purely mathematical space, it existed and it had properties. Perhaps it was a thought generated by a non-material mind.  Perhaps the void was Potential.

From the instant of the Big Bang, something else seems to have come into existence. Something besides time and space and energy. That something was all the laws of physics, and all the laws of mathematics, and all the laws of geometry, Plank’s constant, the speed of light, quantum mechanics, and all the rest.

Where did these laws come from? Why should there even be any laws?  We think of these laws as governing the behavior and interactions of sub-atomic particles, or the way those particles interact with other kinds of energy. But perhaps the particles and the energies created by the Big Bang are what define and give rise to physical laws. (Certainly the characteristics of SpaceTime gave rise to the laws of Euclidian geometry. Humans can think of alternate (non-Euclidean) geometries that don’t exist in our universe but which are internally self-consistent. Perhaps those geometries exist elsewhere.) If the void had existed for eternity without spawning a universe, then why should our universe have suddenly popped into existence 13.7 billion years ago? Why did the Big Bang happen at that particular moment? Why did it happen at all?

The properties of the void made the Big Bang possible. Perhaps when the Big Bang occurred, a subset of the void’s properties crystallized out of an infinity of Potential and became our universe.

And now, theorists theorize that there may be many universes … perhaps an infinite number of them. This collection of universes is called the multiverse. The laws of physics may be different in each universe. In many universes, the laws of physics are such that matter could not form … or stars could not form … or life could not develop. In our universe, the laws of physics turned out perfectly for us. We live in the rare “Goldilocks Universe” where all the laws of physics are finely tuned for us to be here. That’s not a very satisfying explanation for why the universe is so finely tuned for matter to exist, for stars to form, for life to be possible. Instead of invoking deity, science invokes the multiverse. But if we can’t prove the multiverse exists, we might as well say it was magic.