Some notes on cosmology
There is no good reason to suppose the Universe is of finite age. Even if the Big Bang model is correct (and there are good reasons to think it is not), there is no reason to suppose that this epoch is not just one of a limitless number of prior epochs.
It is more pleasant to suppose that the Universe is of infinite age because then the question “how old is the Universe?” is dispensed with entirely - it has no age, it is ageless. And assigning an age to the Universe does not resolve the problem of origins in any case because, if we supposed that the Universe is a particular age, the question immediately arises: why this age rather than that age?
Exactly the same may be said in regard to the extents of the Universe.
In regards to what is, that is, what exists, we must separate between two senses: the first sense is that of subjective awareness of existence, that is, conscious experience of the world. The second sense is more ambitious and is the common fascination of philosophy: what really, really is. That is, what sorts of assertions may be made about the Universe which will never in the course of future human thought and study of the Universe be found to be in error or requiring amendment or appendage?
In the absolutist sense of “existence”, there is an implicit search for the Absolute, the omniscient awareness of the case-in-fact from the smallest to the greatest. This is intimately connected to the desire to find the characteristica universalis - that language which is so natural, so divine, so necessarily the case that to utter a subject in the language is to close all further discussion of the matter. From this perfect language, the ambitious philosophers have hoped to construct the final justification by which man may dictate to man, ex cathedra. “Thus the Universe Hath Said. Thus Thou Shalt Do.”
The humbler, common sense of existence is less ugly and martial - it is oriented toward the practical investigation of what exists insofar as it is useful to man’s ends.
When pondering the nature of the Universe, we are necessarily limited to metaphor when speaking of anything that lies outside of our immediate ability to sense. And even our senses are a mechanism that presents a metaphorical picture of the world to the mind. The common conviction of the objectivity of waking sensation is far stronger than justified. This is easily illustrated with auditory, visual and cognitive illusions and foibles in the human mind.
When we speak of an “atom”, for example, we have no idea whether what we are speaking of is, in fact, a mathematically smooth shape of the variety that atomic physicsts like to draw or whether it is something more complicated which responds to stimuli in a manner that we cannot differentiate from the mathematically smooth shape which we attribute to it.
Turning now to metaphor, let us conceive of an amorphous medium of indefinite extent, analogous perhaps to a terrestrial gas or water or even a homogeneous solid. Let us suppose that this medium is “what exists”, that is, the root final substance out of which everything else is made. No investigation can be made into what this medium itself is composed of because it is the most basic thing - there is no answer to the questions “what is it made of?” “what are its properties?” and so on.
Since we have not stated the form of the medium, there is no reason why it should be organized in any particular way - just as there is no reason for the stones in a riverbed to be arranged in a pattern like a stone wall or a brick building and, therefore, they are never observed to be so arranged. However, if we displace something in the medium, it must create two effects - a deficit of the medium from where we displaced it and a surplus in the medium where we displaced it to.
The most universal tendency in physics is the tendency to equilibrium. Everywhere, we observe that equilibrium is the inexorable endpoint of all processes. If we apply the principle of equilibrium to our metaphorical medium, we see that the surplus and the deficit must result in motion… the deficit must be filled in and the surplus must be eased.
I will give the example of gas pressure to illustrate.
Let us conceive of a single gas particle enclosed in some volume. This particle exerts a pressure against the walls of the enclosing vessel. Physicists tell us that the properties of the gas are distributed everywhere against the enclosing vessel so that it is a mistake to think of the particle like a very small tennis ball that creates the illusion of pressure by banging very rapidly around the vessel walls. All we can rightly say is that the pressure is correlative with the particle’s presence in the enclosed volume and that if we open the box to observe the particle, we will find that it does have some definite location in space. How the particle exerts the pressurizing influence on the walls of the enclosing volume is not answered by modern science.
If we remove the enclosing walls of the volume and ponder the behavior of the particle, we must say that if it were still enclosed it would be exerting that much pressure on the enclosing vessel walls. We can say this for every size of container in which we can imagine trapping the particle. Since we have supposed that the Universe has no extents, this process continues ad nauseum.
Now, let us imagine not a single enclosing volume, but an infinite grid of enclosing volumes, extending in all directions. For the sake of illustration, we can take the enclosing volumes to be cubic in shape. Now, let each enclosing volume contain a single gas particle and, further, let each wall of an enclosing volume be so weak that any non-zero pressure will result in its immediate collapse.
Now, let us snatch a gas particle from one volume and remove it at infinite speed to another enclosing volume some distance away. What will ensue*? We will see a cascading, inward collapse of enclosing walls, spherically around the volume which is now void and, simultaneously, we will see an exploding, spherical collapse of enclosing walls around the volume which contains an excess gas particle. At the expanding, circular plane where these two spheres intersect, we should see the emergence of a flow that is more insistent than the rest of the expansion fronts of the implosion-sphere and the explosion-sphere, respectively, as the “over-pressure” front of the explosion sphere is that much more encouraged by the “under-pressure” front of the implosion.
If we assumed that all the effects of the collapses and gas expansions took place at infinite speed, the two spheres would expand exactly to meet at a single point - as soon as the volumes shared even a single enclosing volume in common, the pressure of the dual-sphere would instantly equilibrate to the standard pressure of 1 gas-particle per enclosing volume.
As we reduce the speed of evolution from infinite to some finite speed, the spheres will “overlap” to an extent - the slower the speed of evolution of gas pressure, the greater the overlap. Also consider that equilibrium would be reached soonest near the plane of intersection of the spheres, causing them to be “fat” at further distance from the plane of intersection. Note that we are explicitly ruling out any kind of wave mechanics within the gas itself as this would lead to an indefinite continuation of the implosion-explosion as the pressure would not be maintained at exactly 1.0 anywhere.
This metaphor, I believe, is applicable to all phenomena at every scale. The lines of force exerted by a positive and negative charge in proximity of one another, for example, conform very closely to the geometry I have just described.
Hence, I believe that the metaphor of an inscrutable medium, perturbed by excess and deficit is of significant use. This is no cheap claim about “what the Universe really is”. The Universe is whatever it is but its behavior at any scale can be usefully described by this metaphor. It is my view that every variety of wave mechanics is ultimately employing this powerful metaphor. What is crucial is to keep in mind that it is a metaphor.
Clayton -
*Note that I am reasoning as if the collapse of an enclosing wall requires the passage of time.
