The Reality Thief (Deplosion Book 1)

by Paul Anlee

  “Since then, we’ve looked at millions of galaxies using far more powerful telescopes like the orbital Hubble, the James Web, the Wukong 3, and they all confirm what Professor Hubble saw over a hundred years ago. When you rewind the motion of the fleeing galaxies, you can project that all matter must have at one time occupied the same point in space from which it expanded outward.

  “These calculations and observations put an end to the idea of a static universe. For a while, some people believed that perhaps the universe was oscillating through periods of expansion and contraction, eternally being re-created. But our best calculations today suggest this universe is going to go on expanding forever. There’s not enough matter for gravity to pull it all back together. There’s no contraction in our future, and there probably wasn’t in our past, either.

  "But not everyone has been satisfied to leave it at that. There’s a simple problem with the idea of a Big Bang: where did everything come from? If there was nothing here before that, what was it that exploded? What caused the explosion?

  “Our best cosmological answer is still: nothing. However, the physicist’s definition of nothing is quite different from the philosophical idea of nothing. And precisely defining ‘nothing’ in a way that satisfies everyone turns out to be exceedingly difficult, more difficult than one might imagine. Both sides agree that something can’t come from absolutely nothing. So how do you get around the problem that there is, obviously, something?

  “Let’s look at the philosophical theologians’ perspective. Christian ideas about creation, along with those of many other religions, assert the existence of some deity, God, if you will, who is outside of time and space, who has always existed, and who created the universe from absolutely nothing.

  Darian changed the slide from the image of thousands of distant galaxies to a picture of the famous Michelangelo paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, showing the Christian God in the act of Creation.

  “Let’s think about that for a minute. Theologians say, ‘God is not made of anything.’ In other words, God is outside the universe of matter and energy, outside of space and time. Still, He is powerful enough to make something from nothing. But is this really nothing, even a philosophical nothing?

  “As I see it, there are two possibilities that fit with this traditional religious model of creation. Either the universe was created as part of God, or there was something in existence, or potentially in existence, apart from God, before He supposedly created the universe from it.

  “If the universe came from a part of God, and the universe is made from ‘something,’ then it seems logical to conclude that God is made, at least in part, of ‘something’ as well, especially if the universe is still a part of God. On the other hand, if God created the universe apart from Himself, then whatever He made it from was either ‘something’ or had the potential to become ‘something’.

  “Some theologians speak of an ‘empty room,’ separate from God, with absolutely nothing in it. But an empty room is a location, a space separate from God. So, that’s still something, isn’t it? Either everything was God at the beginning, or there was something, maybe only an empty space, that wasn’t God. In the end, the Creationist idea of an omnipotent God creating the something of the universe from absolutely nothing fails logically.

  * * *

  DARIAN CASUALLY SCANNED THE AUDIENCE and monitored the progress of the background facial recognition check. The data both piqued his interest and accounted for some of his unease.

  The lattice revealed statistics about a number of attendees that fell well outside the norm for a casual presentation like this. Among the usual mix of students and professors, there was a high proportion of people with no discernible links, neither present nor past, to any of the universities in the city. It was common to have unaffiliated members of the public dropping by these Philosophers' Cafés but usually no more than a dozen or so at any particular event. Today's turnout was remarkable. Or perhaps it wasn’t, considering the protest that had greeted him outside.

  The lattice also revealed a disproportionate number of individuals, across the university and non-university attendees alike, who maintained strong ties with fundamental Christian religious groups. The Yeshua’s True Guard Church was especially well represented. Of those individuals, a suspiciously high number had recently flown in on tourist visas from the New Confederacy, many of whom he recognized as agitators from the unruly crowd outside the building.

  Are they in town for some big event and just dropped by? Why would so many show up to hear me talk about physics?

  Darian expanded the parameters of the background search, and applied it to his own internal recording of the audience. The program identified a network of subtle glances between identified Church members, focusing on two specific members garnering an inordinate amount of attention.

  The first individual whom people were watching came as no surprise. As the prominent leader of the True Guard Church, Reverend Alan LaMontagne was easily recognized, a celebrity of sorts. Those who recognized him were likely to be at least mildly curious, if not hyper-attuned to, his reactions to the talk.

  The second person drawing unusual attention was more of a puzzle. He was not a well-known celebrity, and he raised no other alerts in the lattice. By all accounts, he wasn't in any way noteworthy, not until the system factored in facial micro-expressions. With that, his hatred of Darian jumped out like a gargoyle sculpture in a Japanese Zen garden. Compared to the rest of the audience, his face expressed an inordinately high number and level of distasteful expressions.

  The individual was otherwise a picture of blandness: middle-aged, Caucasian, male, neither too pale nor overly tanned, short-cropped blondish hair, neatly but not fanatically groomed. He was casually dressed in khaki pants and a beige, all-cotton hiking vest.

  His face exuded uncompromising, steely determination. He had barely moved a muscle during the entire first half of the talk; it was his face alone that set off numerous alerts within Darian’s lattice. The system had tracked all sorts of facial micro-shifts as the man’s gaze intensified. It registered his brow gathering into tense little creases, his eyes locking onto the young scientist without distraction, and the jaw clenching and unclenching.

  Darian instinctively picked up on the murderous intent in the man's stare; he didn't need his lattice to interpret that. What it couldn't tell him, was the connection between this man and the members of the YTG Church who kept glancing his way. According to official records, the man didn’t even belong to the group, yet their glances indicated that many recognized him. What could I have done or said to attract such open hostility? I haven't even touched on the controversial part yet.

  Darian sighed; there was nothing he could do about it at this point, anyway. And judging by the audience composition, things were only going to get worse. He waded in.

  * * *

  “SO, WE’VE ARRIVED AT ONE CONCLUSION. The argument that a Creator God existed before the universe is not substantially better than the Greek static model of the universe. The Greek model doesn’t fit our observations, and the Creationist model simply moves the static, eternal part into an adjacent universe containing an intelligent, willful being. It does not say how this universe containing a purposeful, omnipotent God came about. Nor does it explain how or why a potential universe, a space adjacent but separate from the universe of God—an empty room from which or where He created everything—could exist. It is illogical.

  “What does physics have to say about all this? What kind of natural ‘nothing’ could have existed before the Big Bang, according to physics?”

  The next slide was a pure black image. "In quantum mechanics, nothing is generally interpreted as space devoid of stuff, without matter or energy. The nothing of physics is not the same as the nothing of philosophy or religion, so physicists call it something different, a quantum vacuum. A quantum vacuum is empty of matter and energy, it contains no things. But it’s not completely empty; it's full o
f virtual particles, of perturbations in the quantum fields.

  “Aha, you say, that's still something! Well, yes, and no. Virtual particles are called ‘virtual’ because they’re not real. In quantum mechanics, they're as close to nothing as physicists can imagine. Virtual particles pop into and out of existence all the time.

  "I know this sounds completely ridiculous and unreal to many of you. You're thinking, he might as well say unicorn as virtual particle. It would make about as much sense. An imaginary thing for an imaginary thing, right? Let’s see what would that sound like.

  “Unicorns come in balanced pairs: unicorns and anti-unicorns. One of the unicorn types can travel some distance for a very short time before recombining with an anti-unicorn of the same type. When they combine they are both annihilated. This happens over such a short time and distance that unicorns can’t be observed. Nevertheless, unicorns have real effects that can be observed.

  "Sounds silly, I agree. Except they're not the same. Unlike unicorns, virtual particles are more than just an idea. How do we know that?

  “We use virtual particles to explain such things as quantum tunneling. That's a well-documented phenomenon where an electron can disappear from one side of an insulator and instantly reappear on the other side, in spite of the barrier. All of our modern electronics containing quantum dot, field effect transistors depend on this tunneling effect.

  "Ordinary static electricity is a virtual particle phenomenon. It’s a field composed of the virtual particles emitted by moving electrons inside a charged material.

  “Virtual particles also allow us to calculate the exact wavelengths of light emitted by heating pure elements with astounding accuracy; within one part in a billion, or 0.0000001 percent. So we accept the virtual particle theory because it allows us to make the most accurate calculations in all of science.

  "Now, many of you may have heard of the two kinds of real particles, fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles such as quarks, electrons, or neutrinos. Bosons carry forces between the fermions. Bosons include photons, gluons, Higgs bosons, and so on. We can calculate how these real particles and the virtual particles are related.

  “Everyone’s heard of Einstein’s famous E=mc2, right? Energy equals mass times speed of light squared? An atomic explosion converts mass into energy. Most people don’t realize that Einstein’s equation works in the other direction, too. When you put enough energy in one place, the energy gets converted into mass.”

  He displayed an image of the familiar mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion. That was shortly replaced by a strange-looking image full of weird blobs, representing the interactions between virtual particles and quarks inside a proton.

  “The binding energy that ties virtual particles together inside a real particle makes up the majority of the mass of that real particle. Indeed, about seventy-percent of the mass of a proton comes from the energy created by the virtual particles bound together inside of it.

  “Another way to think of real particles is as complete standing waves in the quantum field. What does that mean?

  “Well, think of each real particle as a string that loops back on itself. The looped string represents a wave in the quantum field. If a wave is of the correct frequency, relative to the size of the loop, when it reaches the end of the loop, it starts all over again, creating what we call a standing wave in that loop. Kind of like when an audience at a football game performs a wave that goes all the way around the stadium, and starts over again. Real particles, standing waves in a loop, are stable.

  "Virtual particles, on the other hand, are just incomplete sections of a complete standing wave. They're highly unstable and transient; they don’t last long enough for us to even observe.

  “We have recently shown that every known real sub-atomic particle can be modeled, not as a solid speck or ball, but as a boiling collection of randomly appearing and disappearing virtual particles that somehow manages to maintain a consistency of behavior in the aggregate, that is, in the collective whole.

  “How do these chaotic, erratically behaved virtual particles—these incomplete waveforms—become nice, stable standing waves? The short answer is, through resonance.

  “Two resonant—or compatible—waves on the same looped string reinforce each other. When they match the natural resonance of the string, they form a stable standing wave.

  “So, imagine we have a partial wave in a quantum field, and it meets up with another partial wave of the same frequency. The second wave ‘completes’ part of the first wave. And, if you put enough of these resonant partial waves together, you create a full standing-wave pattern. And, bingo! The virtual turns into the real. The sections that overlap are redundant and fall out of the resulting real particle as excess binding energy.

  “That makes reality, the universe as we know it, an emergent phenomenon of interacting virtual particles, things that don’t really exist in any directly-measurable way. Poetically speaking, one might say that the physical nothing of the quantum vacuum is filled with an infinite number of tiny bits of imagination, existing without dimension, for no time.

  “That sounds like a whole lot of unicorns, I mean, ‘nothing’ to me.”

  Very few laughed. Most stared back, stone-faced, uncomprehending, fidgety, and silent.

  “What, no laughs? C'mon, that was funny!”

  Wow, tough crowd—he thought, but it was more than that. There was a pervasive tension building out there. Something's up. He took a sip of water and returned to his lecture, uneasy.

  “An entire universe filled with nothing but virtual particles would be very chaotic, yet it would appear completely empty to us. Virtual particles of all kinds would spontaneously appear, briefly interact with each other and disappear.

  “Most of these interactions would be extremely short-lived because the incomplete waves of one particle would likely not resonate with the incomplete waves of incompatible, neighboring virtual particles.

  “Which brings us to the question that has motivated my research team: How could a universe full of these chaotic, poorly behaved virtual particles give birth to the well-behaved real universe we see today?

  “How can we conceive of a completely natural mechanism of real matter that evolves by a kind of natural selection from virtual matter, without the intervention or initiation of any intelligent creator? In other words, without God?

  “The problem of spontaneous creation of a universe from nothing is not really a problem of the creation of energy and matter. As we've established, what we used to think of as nothing, is actually full of stuff. The quantum vacuum, deeper than the deepest vacuum in outer space, is crowded with energetic virtual particles.

  "The problem is that, in the universe before the Big Bang, these virtual particles had not yet evolved a consistent set of stable, well-behaved interactions with each other. They existed; they just didn’t exist stably.

  “Our newest theory came from thinking about this problem. That led us to the next question, which led to the next, and so on. Questions like: How could these virtual particles that filled the great nothingness before the Big Bang achieve stable associations in an otherwise chaotic universe? How could virtual particle interactions propagate from one pair to another?

  “Our best theory is that an orderly universe would start to distill from this chaotic brew of virtual particles by the resonance I mentioned earlier. A very rare event would eventually place numerous virtual particles, each with sufficient overlapping oscillations to produce a standing wave in the quantum field. Such standing waves would be the first real particles and provide little islands of stability in an essentially chaotic universe.

  “The standing waves of these real particles would interact with the incomplete waves of nearby virtual particles. Our models show that after many, many interactions—too many to easily count—these interactions could eventually lead to larger stable domains in the otherwise chaotic universe. All of this would have taken place with ridiculously low probability.r />
  “But before the Big Bang and the causality that we know and love today, even ridiculously low probability events were essentially guaranteed to happen eventually.

  “These resonances formed the basis of the rules that determine how matter and energy interact, the laws of nature, if you will. The laws evolved from these interactions; they were not designed or imposed by an external force. The resonances, leading to the ways in which particles formed and interacted, arose by chance from infinite possibilities.

  “Now, the real universe that formed through this process, our universe, still shares the same space with infinitely many other possible virtual universes. However, these other possible virtual universes have been unable to form a stable set of interactions and become real.

  “This is different from the so-called multiverse theory, which states every universe that can exist, does. That's correct to a certain extent, but only our universe ever became real, that is to say, stable. All other possible universes remained virtual, never forming a stable relationship between enough of their member virtual particles to coalesce into reality. They're all still out there, those many other possibilities, interacting, appearing, and vanishing. Rather boggles the mind, doesn't it?

  Darian switched to a slide showing a traditional analog stopwatch with a ticking second hand. The image was overlaid with a large question mark.

  “I've got another brain twister for you. Consider the ridiculously high, practically infinite, number of interactions that would have to take place, along with the ridiculously low probability of just the right bits coming together precisely when, where, and how they needed to. Got that?

  “Now, given all of that, how long do you think it took for our universe to come together, to evolve naturally from chaos? Anyone want to venture a guess?"

  Darian looked around to see if there were any takers. The second hand moved on the overhead slide. He let them suffer for a few seconds before jumping back in.