Why the Universe Exists
by
Zeb Glittering
Published August 27, 2005 by Glittering
(c) Copyright 2005. Author's moral rights asserted. This work
may be quoted in whole or in part (and in any language) without
any requirement to obtain permission.



WHY THE UNIVERSE EXISTS


'How the Universe Exists' is being discovered right now by
physicists, scientists, engineers, and mathematicians all around
the world. By their hard work, we are discovering the truly
useful information that allows us to craft the environment for
our benefit. (Advance won't destroy the world, but our innate
selfishness might.) 'Why the Universe Exists' is a more
philosophical problem. That it has remained intractable has
caused many to give up asking, perhaps having convinced
themselves that such a problem can never be solved. Others have
contented themselves with religious answers. A few of us have
not given up our hope of finding some answer. It is those few I
wish to address. I have found the answer.



THE SIMPLE REVELATION


I was considering one of the interpretations of quantum physics
in which each quantum event causes the Universe to split so that
you end up with a huge number of parallel universes, some rather
similar, others very different from each other. It occurred to
me that perhaps even the physical constants could be different
(because of differences in how these parallel universes had
evolved). Naively it even occurred to me hazily that the value
of mathematical constants such as pi might be different as well.
Then I stumbled across this equation:

(pi^2) /6 = 1/1^2 + 1/2^2 + 1/3^2 + 1/4^2 + 1/5^2 + ... + 1/n^2
(obtained by Euler).

Pi couldn't have just any value because in any parallel
universe, the above equation would always be true because it
doesn't depend on anything in that universe. So hypothetically
all the parallel universes might be different in possibly
bizarre ways, but pi would always be pi. It seemed that pi was
an inevitable and indestructible truth which depended on nothing
for its truth or its existence. It would be true even if there
was no Universe around in which for it to be true.

And then I had the revelation. If the only thing that without
exception was common to all the parallel universes was pi (and
other inevitable, indestructible truths like it) then pi and the
other such truths ultimately _are_ the Universe.



BUT HOW CAN IT REALLY BE SO?


In some way we don't yet understand, pi and other inevitable,
indestructible truths are responsible for every phenomenon in
the Universe. What are these truths?

Whatever they are, taken as a whole they must produce no
contradiction. And because they produce no contradiction, they
are true - which is probably the same as saying they exist. They
exist! When we distinguish something as physical, we're just
pointing out that thing's _local_ existence.

In formal mathematical systems, certain statements are assumed
to be self-evidently true and are given the name 'axioms'. In
the Universe, all truth must produce no contradiction; it must
be a consistent whole. Rather than axioms, there are kernels of
truth in the interconnected body of truth that is the Universe.
These kernels of truth, such as pi, appear recurrently in the
phenomena of the Universe, phenomena which all derive from these
inescapable truths.

I must emphasize the importance of non-contradiction, or
self-consistency. If a body of knowledge produces a
contradiction, somewhere in that body is a misconceived idea,
something false. That which produces no contradiction exists. We
can conceive of the impossible, of things that must lead
inevitably to contradiction, but we can conceive of anything!
The construction of our brains allows us to do as much. It is
not impossible to conceive of the impossible, but the impossible
cannot exist in the sense the Universe exists. Only _concepts_
of impossible things can exist, not the impossible things
themselves. A proportion of the population has difficulty with
that idea - at least their behaviour in certain regards suggests
as much.

To drive home the point of non-contradiction, it has been
discovered that Superstring Theory when made self-consistent
yields Einstein's Theory of Gravity. Let me repeat; given
Superstring Theory, from considerations of self-consistency
alone, Einstein's Gravity becomes inevitable! That which
produces no contradiction must exist.

It might turn out that the only satisfactory way to understand
why there is such a thing as gravity is to say it is because the
self-consistency of all truth demands it. This may be the case
for the least understandable aspects of quantum physics as well.
Actually (in my opinion) a great deal can be understood by
realizing that, to maintain self-consistency, the Universe must
have scale, and that uncertainty and the speed of light as
maximum follow logically from that truth - and closely tied to
this, infinity can have no real existence.

(Yes, infinity is a _useful_ concept, but it is prone to
producing contradictions - it can exist as a concept, but
anything can exist as a concept; that is not the same thing as
the thing itself existing. Space can neither be infinitely large
nor infinitely small - unless infinity can occur very
specifically in ways that produce no contradiction, but I don't
like the sound of that. It should be obvious that I am taking
guesses. I hope that this doesn't detract from the essence of
what I am trying to communicate. It would be illogical to expect
that I had all the answers, and ridiculous to dismiss what I
have to say because I don't have them.)

Something infinitely large cannot be said to have a measurable
scale, so the speed of light will have a maximum. In fact if
light had infinite speed, it couldn't propagate - it would
already be everywhere! At the other end of the scale, if
something cannot be infinitely small, then at the limit of
smallness, things inevitably look uncertain when appraised with
the (imaginary) concept of an infinitely divisible measure while
only having to hand some measure that is so small that it has
already become an indivisible one. Isn't this just _obvious_?
And it might proceed from the simple idea that the Universe must
have scale because infinity leads to contradictions. (The reason
I suspect infinity leads to contradictions is because it crops
up in so many paradoxes. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be
possible to carefully and artificially apply it as a concept. I
can conceive of chopping my member up into infinite parts,
though I can't actually do it.)

We have always thought of mathematical truths as abstract and
mysterious. Why did it never occur to us that they were real,
the kernels of our ultimate reality?



HOW CAN SOMETHING SO ABSTRACT
BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING REAL?


How can such apparently abstract truths be responsible for
something real, like time? 'And not only time,' I might hear you
add, 'for time seems to us inseparable from the reality of our
conscious experience. There is no way these ideas you present
can explain that, so what you are trying to say cannot be true.'

Wrong!

Time is an abstract concept. Yes, time appears real, but is time
what you think it is? If all change in the Universe ceased, how
much time would elapse? How would you know? Time only works as a
concept while, somewhere, something is changing. In fact there
is great evidence that our concept of time is misconceived
because it is capable of producing contradictions.

From considerations of our concept of time, there seems no
obvious reason why it should not be possible to travel backwards
in time, but to do so creates paradoxes (being able to kill your
parents before you were born, for one example; violations of
conservation of energy, for another) that cannot be resolved in
other than ad hoc ways.

So just supposing our concept of time is currently flawed, what
is this thing we believe we know so well? (I'm trying to show
how something abstract might produce something real like time,
and therefore like conscious existence. If I can do that, you
can begin to see what how all this could be true.) Let us
suppose that it is changes, and some sort of order to those
changes, that we experience. What is change in the most abstract
sense? Could we show that abstract change is an inevitable truth
by mathematical argument? If we can assert the inevitable truth
of change and of order, time could be necessitated by the fact
that it derives somehow from these two unavoidable truths.

If we consider the prospect of travelling backwards in time, in
terms of the changes and the order from which time derives, we
can easily see the whole notion of time travel quickly becomes
absurd: we would have to undo all the changes in the Universe
except for those to ourselves, and then redo them again to
travel forward.

Can we understand why time seems so inescapably real to us? Yes.
Conscious experience, produced in our brains, does not occur in
a single change; many changes have to occur to produce any
sensation. Therefore our experience is spread-out over many
changes. It is from many changes that our concept of time
derives. In any instant of our consciousness, many things will
happen; many changes will occur. It is impossible for us not to
perceive a notion of time.

But changes _take_ time: I'm absolutely certain this objection
must be buzzing around in your heads. All our everyday
experience tells us that this is true, but fundamentally (and
outside of our everyday experience) things occur uncertainly.
That means that, at the finest level, we cannot be sure which of
two changes takes place first. At some point, some change will
occur for which its order with respect to another will be
apparent. The uncertainty of the order of changes _makes_ time.

(Fundamental) changes don't _take_ time. They _make_ time.

The above idea is unfamiliar, and we won't experience it in
everyday life, but it is perhaps the one that _doesn't_ lead to
contradictions - and if so, it has to be the one that exists,
the truth.

What else? Well either things are changing, or they are not.
With our new concept of time derived from changes and order, if
no changes occur, no time elapses. The notion of what happened
before changes began to happen, and for how long, I hope now you
will see was misconceived; it has become defunct.

Is infinity forbidden a real existence, or have I made a mistake
in that? If infinity cannot exist, then there must have been a
first change or changes (or else there will have been a infinite
amount of changes since) - 'changes' because which of the
changes occurred first might be uncertain. By careful abstract
reasoning, we might be able to discover what the first change
(or changes) must have been. The self-consistency of all truth
would demand it to be true.

I can feel you clinging to that old concept of time as
fundamental and irreducible (I know I am). But you see how our
everyday, flawed concept of time leads us into trouble. We might
deduce that the first change or changes occurred 20 billion
years ago. We might ask, 'Why not earlier, and what happened
before?' The answer is, 'If nothing was changing, there was no
before.' (I heard a fuse blow.) The answer is that the 'time'
that you thought you knew and understood was a flawed concept.
It was flawed because you didn't understand from where it
derived. And the question you had ('What happened before the
beginning of the Universe?') was nonsensical for reasons you
didn't suspect.

An analogy or two here might help: When I first saw a camera, it
was clear to me that somehow something in the camera looked out
of the little glass window in the front, and that there must be
a clever mechanism inside that could draw what it saw - though
this seemed incredible, it didn't seem that it could be
otherwise; how else could it work? If I had insisted on knowing
which part of the camera drew the picture, could I have obtained
an answer I would have found satisfactory? Of course not - light
entered through the little window and exposed the film; there
was no clever mechanism drawing pictures.

When I first got hold of a computer, I typed in a program from
the manual. I wondered how the computer could read what I had
typed on the screen, understand what it meant, and then do what
it was supposed to. I knew it couldn't read what was on the
screen because there was no wire connecting it to the screen
that would give it that information, but it seemed - very
convincingly to me - that that was what it was doing. Even if it
could read what I had written there, how could it know what it
meant? The problem was very mysterious.

The important point is that if I had insisted on having an
answer given in the terms in which I had asked the question, all
I could have received were unacceptable contradictions. For
example, 'How does the computer read the screen? It doesn't
_read_ the screen. How does the computer know what the program
means? It doesn't _know_ what the program means.' And I would
complain, 'But it must do, or it couldn't work.' And I would be
wrong.

(The computer is a carefully crafted mechanism. The
interpretation that its behaviour has meaning comes from
ourselves, and we designed the computer specifically so that it
would behave in a way that would allow us to do so. The details
of how we managed that fantastic feat are a bit lengthy to go
into here.)

Can you really be sure that time is what it always seemed to you
that it must be? The answer is no, unwelcome though it may be.
Until you understand something, you can never be sure it will
turn out to be as you supposed. And I know you didn't understand
time. Oh, no you didn't. Where did it go? Where did it come
from? Why couldn't you see it or collect it? Why hadn't you met
anyone from the future? All rather _mysterious_ wasn't it.

But time derives from something we can fathom (it's only right
for me to add here, '...so a strong intuition tells me,' because
I'm not claiming to possess the proofs).

We don't have the details yet of how truths that we have
formerly considered abstract and somehow separate from reality
(and other truths that we have yet to discover) are responsible
for every phenomenon in the Universe, in fact _are_ the
Universe, but I hope you are beginning to comprehend how it
could be so. With further reflection, perhaps you will see that
it might be that it must be so.



FURTHER EXPOUNDING WILL HELP IT BECOME CLEAR


You cannot create something out of nothing. Wrong! Look at the
financial system; look at money. From nothing we can produce a
debit and a credit. From such splitting of nothingness can spawn
an entire financial world, expanding, and making its existence
felt in the real world. 'But money isn't really real,' you might
say; 'it's not quite the same as saying the whole Universe could
come from nothing.' Maybe not, but it seems like a fascinating
reflection possibly of some underlying truth. Money does have
some kind of existence, but perhaps only a conceptual one; and
try explaining civilization's behaviour without it. But hey, you
can't have an infinite amount of money, but the amount of money
can expand without limit - just like the Universe perhaps.

Each year, mathematicians produce 30,000 new proofs. The
mathematical world is expanding every day. From the axioms,
theorems result. Likewise from the indestructible truths, the
phenomena of the Universe result - that is to say the theorems
of the Universe result, the theorems of the indestructible
kernels of truth. Every day the Universe expands. It may expand
without limit or boundary, but that is _very_ different from
saying it is infinite.



ONWARDS AND UPWARDS


I have thought about this idea. I am probably wrong in serious
ways about all of the details I have suggested, but it's the
only credible (to me) answer that I have ever come across, and
having thought of it, it seems so obvious that it must be true
(but I've fallen fowl of that before). It is only a
philosophical answer, but it suggests that the deepest
understanding to be obtained about the Universe is going to be,
in essence, mathematical - something that the modern theories of
physics appear to be bearing out - and it provides a way to
understand why. It's an explanation that I can make sense of,
and it creates a goal for mathematicians. What are these
indestructible truths? It seems to me that they will be elicited
only by the heights of abstract reasoning, and an instinct for
the right track. (And everything can be verified by probing the
phenomena of the Universe; the ultimate kernels of truth must
have consequences at every level.)

Formal mathematical systems are conceptualizations of certain
aspects of the truth, the best we know them. They adopt a
certain set of axioms. This is a problem. It's not axioms, but
the conception of kernels of truth that we are after. All
kernels at once, everything together. If every conceivable axiom
taken together produces contradictions, then impossible though
it may seem, one or more of those axioms is subtly or totally
misconceived. The ultimate mathematical system should faithfully
reflect the indestructible truth that is the Universe, its
concepts having been refined until they can produce no
contradiction, while omitting nothing. (OK, I'm really sounding
like a crank now if I wasn't already, but this isn't about me.
If there is value in anything being said here, it pertains
regardless of the manner in which it is said or who says it.)

When contemplating why the Universe exists, in effect you can do
that exactly by contemplating why pi has precisely the value it
does. You can explore such a truth without limit. Something
false quickly leads to contradiction. And you can explore that
truth in as much depth as you care to, discovering in new ways
why it must have the value it does, in order not to cause
contradictions with everything else that must be true - and as
your understanding expands, the Universe will expand with you as
the repercussions of the truth create new phenomenon upon
phenomenon.

The Universe exists because the truths from which all the
Universe's amazing phenomena derive require nothing for their
truth - not even a Universe in which to be true. They are
indestructible and inescapable simply because as a whole they
contain no contradiction. In essence, some truths that we have
thought of as abstract are not so abstract after all because,
taken together with truths we have yet to discover, they have
very concrete consequences. That is why the Universe exists.

(If you haven't simply skipped to the end, and you still don't
see this, then you probably need to reflect - that is, do some
thinking of your own. After having done that, you will probably
see that, in essence, I haven't said very much. Good! The less
that has been said, the less chance it has to be wrong. The
greatest enlightenment will come as physicists, mathematicians,
(and philosophers) discover the kernels of inevitable truth - if
the remainder of us are prepared to work hard enough to
understand what they reveal, that is.)

P.S. I am not proposing a faith. If I have made a mistake (if ?
- what a laugh), I won't be hurt by discovering it. If I was me
and somebody else knew this, I would want to hear it; I hope I'm
not mistaken in thinking that you did. And I hope that this way
of understanding 'Why the Universe Exists' will, inside some
bright minds, provoke insights that will speed up our advance
(because I want more spaceships, limitless clean energy, global
atmospheric control, a longer life, and to log into the
inter-galactic 'internet' - which if possibility allows, must
surely be operating already. Hey, we could planet form Mars and
move there, and then we could keep Earth as a giant nature
reserve).

( From http://whyuniverse.mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk )

Zeb Glittering wrote:

Why the Universe Exists
by
Zeb Glittering
Published August 27, 2005 by Glittering
(c) Copyright 2005. Author's moral rights asserted. This work
may be quoted in whole or in part (and in any language) without
any requirement to obtain permission.
[snip crap]

If the only thing that without
exception was common to all the parallel universes was pi (and
other inevitable, indestructible truths like it) then pi and the
other such truths ultimately _are_ the Universe.
[snip more crap]

"Az di bobe vot gehat beytsim volt zi geven mayn zeyde."
Do you have three grandfathers?

It might turn out that the only satisfactory way to understand
why there is such a thing as gravity is to say it is because the
self-consistency of all truth demands it.
[snip a huge midden of crap]

The Universe exists because the truths from which all the
Universe's amazing phenomena derive require nothing for their
truth - not even a Universe in which to be true. They are
indestructible and inescapable simply because as a whole they
contain no contradiction. In essence, some truths that we have
thought of as abstract are not so abstract after all because,
taken together with truths we have yet to discover, they have
very concrete consequences. That is why the Universe exists.
[snip rest of crap]

400 lines of crap arrive at the amazing conclusion, "reality is."

Define the universe; give three examples.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf

Zeb Glittering wrote:

The Universe exists because the truths from which all the
Universe's amazing phenomena derive require nothing for their
truth - not even a Universe in which to be true. They are
indestructible and inescapable simply because as a whole they
contain no contradiction. In essence, some truths that we have
thought of as abstract are not so abstract after all because,
taken together with truths we have yet to discover, they have
very concrete consequences. That is why the Universe exists.

That stuff does bad to you man...

Mike

In article ,
(Zeb Glittering) wrote:
In article , says...

400 lines of crap arrive at the amazing conclusion, "reality is."


You missed the point.

No, he didn't.

..The point was to suggest how an 'abstract' truth can
create reality, rather than just being considered as something separate and
mysterious, or as only a concept in a mathematician's head.

If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. You need
to learn how to make something from scratch. Six months
laboring on a farm (not watching, but doing the work)
would teach you most of what you need to know.




That point is impossible to grasp if you don't make a sincere attempt to
understand it. Instead of dismissing my feeble attempts to explain as crap,
you could make an effort to try to understand what I was getting at.

It's up to you. I'm not a crackpot, and I'm not on drugs, and I haven't got a
hidden agenda. Neither am I an idiot.

I wonder why I bother, though. Maybe people just aren't prepared to entertain
anything that's more than 1% away from what they 'think' they know already.


Define the universe; give three examples.


By 'Universe', I meant everything - things, concepts of things, concepts of
impossible things, kernels of truth, everything. By 'universe', I meant one
of the supposed parallel universes. I can't give you three examples, but good
luck looking for them.

If you can't give three examples, then you aren't matching your
hypothesis to reality. This is what science does. It's called
experiment that is reproducible.

/BAH

In article , says...

400 lines of crap arrive at the amazing conclusion, "reality is."


You missed the point. The point was to suggest how an 'abstract' truth can
create reality, rather than just being considered as something separate and
mysterious, or as only a concept in a mathematician's head.

That point is impossible to grasp if you don't make a sincere attempt to
understand it. Instead of dismissing my feeble attempts to explain as crap,
you could make an effort to try to understand what I was getting at.

It's up to you. I'm not a crackpot, and I'm not on drugs, and I haven't got a
hidden agenda. Neither am I an idiot.

I wonder why I bother, though. Maybe people just aren't prepared to entertain
anything that's more than 1% away from what they 'think' they know already.


Define the universe; give three examples.


By 'Universe', I meant everything - things, concepts of things, concepts of
impossible things, kernels of truth, everything. By 'universe', I meant one
of the supposed parallel universes. I can't give you three examples, but good
luck looking for them.

In article ,
says...

If you can't give three examples, then you aren't matching your
hypothesis to reality. This is what science does. It's called
experiment that is reproducible.


Right at the beginning, I indicated that I was giving a philosophical answer
to a philosophical question. At the end, I said why I thought it may be of
use. I admitted that I wasn't saying very much, but that's very different from
saying nothing at all.

Of course I haven't matched my hypnothesis to reality. Wasn't it clear that I
was communicating a hunch for which I feel a strong conviction? It doesn't
necessary follow that I have the skills of education to go about testing that
hypothesis. It doesn't necessarily mean that the idea is worthless.

The one who will give the proper answer will be greatest scientist ever
lived. And yet, the answer must exist.

Henry Haapalainen


"Zeb Glittering" kirjoitti viestissä
...
In article ,

says...

If you can't give three examples, then you aren't matching your
hypothesis to reality. This is what science does. It's called
experiment that is reproducible.


Right at the beginning, I indicated that I was giving a philosophical
answer
to a philosophical question. At the end, I said why I thought it may be of
use. I admitted that I wasn't saying very much, but that's very different
from
saying nothing at all.

Of course I haven't matched my hypnothesis to reality. Wasn't it clear
that I
was communicating a hunch for which I feel a strong conviction? It doesn't
necessary follow that I have the skills of education to go about testing
that
hypothesis. It doesn't necessarily mean that the idea is worthless.

Henry Haapalainen wrote:

The one who will give the proper answer will be greatest scientist ever
lived. And yet, the answer must exist.

There are provably unsolvable problems. Why can't there be unanswered
and unswerable questions?

Bob Kolker

In article ,
(Zeb Glittering) wrote:
In article ,

says...

If you can't give three examples, then you aren't matching your
hypothesis to reality. This is what science does. It's called
experiment that is reproducible.


Right at the beginning, I indicated that I was giving a philosophical answer
to a philosophical question.

So you did do the first step of the Scientific Method and sorted
out that it couldn't be studied using this flavor of thinking.

..At the end, I said why I thought it may be of
use. I admitted that I wasn't saying very much, but that's very different
from
saying nothing at all.

Here is where you goofed. You continued on and insisted that
other people should be able to examine the notion even after
you rejected it as a viable subject to study using the
Scientific Method. Do you see the problem with this?

Of course I haven't matched my hypnothesis to reality. Wasn't it clear that I
was communicating a hunch for which I feel a strong conviction?

You are allowing your strong conviction govern your conclusions.
This is not science; it is religion. The first step of the
Scientific Method is to sort out what can be tested. If it
can't be tested objectively, it isn't science.

..It doesn't
necessary follow that I have the skills of education to go about testing that
hypothesis.

You learn how to think analytically. This removes the tendency of
wishful thinking. Its purpose is to sort out what can be studied
using the Scientific Method and what cannot be studied using
that flavor of thinking.

.. It doesn't necessarily mean that the idea is worthless.

It is not productive _within the context of a scientific study_.
It may be productive in another area.

Imaging stuff is lots of fun. Sorting out what is useful
within a particular discipline is more fun. Making the
1 idea out of 10,000+ work is the best fun.

/BAH

Zeb Glittering wrote:

Why the Universe Exists
by
Zeb Glittering


Is there any proof that it exists at all ?
Could everything be just a dream as in a matrix ?

Rene