I’ve been reading up on the current state of cosmology and what’s known about the origins of the universe. The “Standard Model” is based on the “big bang”, i.e. the sudden separation of nothingness within an extremely tiny quanta into huge offsetting gobs of positive energy (light, heat, magnetism, etc.) and negative energy (gravity). It also requires “inflation”, the sudden injection of “bubbles” of height, width, depth and time into that hot little quanta, rapidly inflating it like a balloon and allowing the eventual condensation of matter into stars and galaxies. Over the past 12 to 14 billion years, that little bubble expanded into the known universe, with all of its billions and billions of light-years of empty space and billions and billions of galaxies and stars and dust and planets that froze out of that primordial energy, along with various other forms of leftover energy that still bounce around through the void. The Standard Model still hasn’t reached its verdict on the ultimate fate of the Universe, but given the recent observations about the continuing acceleration of the Universe’s expansion (caused by a heretofore unknown “dark energy” that counters the attraction between galaxies caused by gravity), it isn’t terribly optimistic about a future “big crunch” where everything comes back together and perhaps bounces out into a new “big bang”. Many non-scientists regret this, as a cyclical universe that continually expands and contracts like a beating heart just seems so much more poetic that a “heat death” universe where everything is just going to scatter and fall apart and go cold and dark.

Interestingly enough, there is now a competing theory of the universe, called cyclic / quintessence theory. These people are taking the recently discovered acceleration factor and turning it on its head. They believe that accelleration is caused by an energy field they call “quintessence”. As energy goes, quintessence isn’t so “dark” after all, because in the future it will change so as to reverse the expansion and cause a “big crunch”, thus bringing back the beating heart universe. The world of cosmology seems to be taking this paradigm seriously. Some cosmologists say it’s a lot of bunk, while others think it has potential. I don’t know if Steven Hawking has weighed in on the issue yet, but the ultimate arbiter will be experimental observations from satellites and antennas and observatories. The theory that best explains what is observed out in the heavens, e.g. fluctuations in the cosmic background noise, patterns in red-shifts of stars and galaxies, x-ray signals from black holes, and wavy images caused by gravity effects, will be the winner. Oh, also, the theory has to explain everything else known to physicists about atoms and particles and energy. And that’s where the problems come in. The Standard Model has certain things that it can’t comfortably explain (like the rapid spinning of galaxies relative to the known amount of matter in the universe), or implies certain things that just don’t seem to happen (such as magnets that have only one pole, or significant amounts of anti-matter). The cyclic theory supposedly also has its weak spots. It’s like trying to find the perfect pair of pants; with one pair, maybe the length is OK, but the back is too tight, while another pair is fine on length and seat but the waist pinches. Fortunately, pants aren’t cosmic theories. If we all waited for nearly perfect pairs of pants, most of us would still be in togas. Cosmologists, however, want to get it all right.

I really wish that I had the brainpower to get in on these doings. Cosmology seems to engage just about every aspect of physics known to humanity, from quantum mechanics to the laws of thermodynamics and entropy to fluid mechanics to geometry and topography to relativity to particle physics — all swallowed with extremely abstract and complex doses of mathematics. To be a cosmologist these days, it seems that you have to know just about everything there is to know about physics, and account for it in your ramblings about where the universe came from, what it is doing, and where it’s going. You don’t look at pretty images in the night sky through telescopes very often (or at images coming from NASA satellites); you do heavy math and crunch numbers on computers, then write extremely dense technical papers and defend them at conferences and before cranky academic committees. Decades ago, in engineering school, I studied some of the basic math and physics that undergirds this world, but I’ve long since forgotten most of it.

So, anything that I say here about current cosmological theories is pretty much worthless; I couldn’t even call it “2 cents worth”. But that never stopped me before. So here goes. Right now, I’m still betting on the standard big-bang / inflation view, and not taking quintessence too seriously. I admire the cyclical / quintessence view, as it represents a breath of fresh air, the kind of thinking that comes along every now and then in science causing a great leap forward. But in order to accept the cyclic / quintessence view, you have to start thinking in additional dimensions. This was probably inspired by superstring theory, the current attempt at an elegant “theory of everything” that unifies the view of all known elementary particles and forces (including gravity). Superstring theory has a lot going for it, but it requires the acceptance of multiple hyper-dimensions. Some forms of it require up to 11 dimensions. The cyclic theory people need only one or two extra dimensions, but that’s a whole lot more than what we experience in our daily lives (at least while we’re sober).

The thought of extra dimensions certainly does stir the popular imagination (although the string theory people try to deflate that by saying that the extra dimensions are somehow bound or wrapped up and aren’t really available to be manipulated). Years and years ago I read the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott, which is quite a significant little book. On the social level, it makes you aware of the effect of prejudices and closed mindedness. But on the geometric level, it helps your mind to picture what dimensions are, and what extra dimensions might mean. Flatland describes a 2-dimensional world (which is called Flatland, of all things; actually, it has 2 space dimensions plus time, as things happen in it). When Flatland encounters the 3 dimensional world that we live in, very strange things seem to happen to the living creatures who inhabit Flatland. They start seeing things in their world disappear, then reappear somewhere else. For example, imagine that a circle on the Flatland plain was lifted into our 3-dimensional world, taken up from the infinitely thin world like a plastic circle from a child’s Colorforms sheet, then set back down on it at a different point. And hey, what if you put your finger into Flatland? The Flatlanders would see an oval shape appear, then get bigger as you put your finger further through it, then get smaller and disappear when you pull your finger back. To them, it would be magic — a miracle, beyond the laws of their universe! You would be a god to them.

So, if there are extra dimensions beyond our three (actually, there are four: three space dimensions plus time), can a 3-D object disappear then reappear somewhere else? Or get bigger and smaller as some extra-dimensional being outside of our world toys with our space? And what about time? If there is a trans-time dimension, can something zoom into the past or future? Or can you replace your body of today with your body of ten years ago? And what would all of this do to the basic principle of conservation of energy and mass in physics? What if something could just get pulled out of our universe via a hyper-dimension? Doesn’t that mean that mass and energy in fact are not conserved (although they may still be, in a hyper-dimensional sense)? An uninformed layman like myself might wonder at times whether those weird quantum sub-atomic events where particles act like fuzzy probability distributions use an extra dimension to confound us (maybe they just bounce around through some extra spatial dimension, or split themselves up in time somehow to be in two or three places at once). And hey, the big bang does seem in some ways like the creation of a closed-off “timespace” universe from a hyper-dimensional “mother universe” (just like we can arguably create a 2-dimensional living Flatland from our 3-D space, on a computer screen; in Flatland, the Flatlanders talked of a 1-dimensional land, called “LineLand” I think). The cyclic theory people really do fire up the imagination with their talk of 3-dimensional “membranes” drifting around like nets in a hyper-dimensional sea, occasionally colliding and thus causing a frictional spark of sorts that triggers off the gravity/energy-mass split of the big bang (i.e., the big bang event).

Well, I know that this is mostly pseudo-scientific babble on my part. But it’s fun to do sometimes. Hey, Gene Rodenberry and his successor Star Trek writers did it and still do it! But at bottom, I’m sticking with the standard “bang-inflation” model and four dimensions. Too bad if the Universe we know is heading for an unpoetic physical death. So am I, and so are all of us. The only hope for us is that there is in fact some sort of spiritual reality, which would at the very least need to be extra-dimensional, transcending space, time and entropy. But mixing our thinking on spirituality and science is really not such a good mix, like ammonia and bleach, or drinking and driving. For now, it’s probably best to generally keep them all in their own little corners of space and time (sorry, Ken Wilber). Maybe someday we will be ready for a very much bigger picture. For now, I think that it is best to assume that science, including the science of the cosmos, is just looking at a tiny portion of overall “reality”. Hawking and his successors will NOT know the mind of God when they finally have a cosmic theory with seemingly perfect fit. Unlocking one door will simply lead to another room of mystery. Throughout the history of civilization, the trend has been that every generation finds that that their picture of the known and imagined universe is bigger and more complex than what their predecessors had, sometimes by several orders of magnitude. (Notwithstanding those ancient Hindu sages, with their bizarre descriptions of fantastic numbers and eons of time that allegedly represent but a grain of sand in the ultimate reality — maybe they were on to something). Why, other then ego, should we think that our current concepts are the end of the road?

So, my hunch is that there is some sort of hyperdimensionality that relates to God. But for now, that’s not relevant to science. As to space and time hyperdimensions, my hunch is that our physics is not yet ready for the jump from the Standard Model to hyperdimensionality. As with the gasoline engine in automobiles, I don’t think that height / width / length / time is going to be outmoded anytime soon, even though research on alternatives must continue. We shall see.