The Universe And It's Origin: my personal attempts to understand it

"Give me a derivation of a UTM from nothingness, and I don't need your physics to understand the origin of Universe..."

[2015-03-28]: An idea, and a more serious followup discussion on Everything-List.

Since 2.7 years old, immediately after the death of my grandfather, and the birth of my brother 11 days later, I created my dream of my life. The dream was "to understand the Universe", thinking that understanding it would let me know all answers, including the answer to question how to escape from the death.

Lying in my little bed that evening, I nearly cried because of the intensity of my sense of curiosity. I wanted to know everything. Unexpectedly I saw visions which appeared violet, white, blue and yellow (similar to this). I felt like having seen a glimpse of the Truth about the the Universe.

Later in my life I was mainly interested in astronomy, familiarized myself with great distances, timescales, densities, temperatures, energies and gravitational singularities in space, which helped me to accept the ideas of the Big Bang model and become a fan of it, because the model was (and is) supported by the most comprehensive and accurate explanations from current scientific evidence and observation.

The Big Bang model explains a great deal of structural aspects of the universe about 10^-12 seconds after the Big Bang, but it seems because of inability to accelerate particles indefinitely, this approach is limited by our technological advancement.

In spite of the limitations, I still wanted to get a picture of the earliest moments of the universe, and I was not satisfied with the uncertainties. I wanted the precise picture. I continued to ponder many years by myself.

When I had the Internet in 2001, I found that several websites including www.the-origin.org by Rogger Ellman suggested that "Nothingness" must be the best candidate for the initial state of the Universe as it doesn't require any additional explanation. Anything else requires explanation of its own existence. So I took the idea, and tried to develop upon it. I recognized that the essential thing to explore is the change from "Nothing" to "Something", and since changes are subject of mathematical analysis, I became interested in mathematics in order to explore the concept of change. However, after trying to estimate the changes resulting from the assumption of "Nothingness", I had little results.

Later in 2004 I found Stephen Wolfram's book "A New Kind of Science", about simple rules (called cellular automata) that sometimes yield complex patterns when repeatedly applied. It was exactly what I was looking for - something that could explain a complex pattern with a simple rule. For example, a seashell species Conus textile is said to have a pattern resembling the Rule 30 cellular automaton. This demonstrates how a simple rule can model a complex natural pattern. The fact that some rules are equivalent to universal turing machines (can in theory calculate anything that any computer can) looked sufficient for me to believe in Konrad Zuse's hypothesis that the entire Universe is being computed on a computer.

Consequently, in 2006 I had an idea to search for simple rules that explain the CMBR pattern. However, I was told that the CMBR pattern observed was very nearly homogeneous, to such an extent that up until recently it was not possible to measure the fraction that is not homogeneous via the COBE. I was also told that CMB dates from a time when the Universe was already quite old and large in the context of its smallest structures, and that any patterns we can see in the CMB are going to involve very large-scale variations, and thus it is unlikely to tell us much about the underlying simple rule.

It temporarily discouraged me from the idea, but in 2007 I found a Stephen Anastasi, claiming to be working on a non-axiomatic [set] theory uniting the mathematics, physics and philosophy; and explaining his ideas bottom-up from Cartesian argument in his weblog. Similarity to my initial thoughts had encouraged me to persist thinking about it, and became the source of my interest in mathematics (mainly mathematical logics and axiomatic set theory, which can be considered to be one of the possible kinds of deterministic rules (simple programs) from which definite conclusion can be drawn).

In addition, I have found a short article by Dr. Ulvi Yurtsever (JPL's Quantum Computing Technologies group) stating that it follows from the existence of entangled quantum states for spatially separated composite systems, and the fact that the Universe is large and expanding, that assuming the possibility of faster-than-light communication, it is reasonable to believe that the observed Universe could have evolved from simple initial conditions with simple, deterministic rules.

So, I became encouraged once again: if the rule that governs the Universe is rather simple, then we might simply disocover it, perhaps by comparing the essential features of simple-rule generated computational data with the features of the observable universe.

For example, some of the features of the Universe are already summarized and formulated as physical laws, others might be less documented. One feature that looks interesting to me is that our Universe objects appears to be three-dimensional in macroscopic scale, and it's interesting to consider what data patterns could give rise to impression of three spatial dimensions. Although this question is partly answered, I am not sure weather it is used as an essential feature of the space to classify data generated by simple rules.

Taking data generated by simple rules and searching for traits equivalent to the physical laws of our Universe could potentially result in the discovery of a rule that precisely models our Universe (i.e., allows us to simulate our own Universe, provides the precise pictures of its birth).

Another way that this question could be answered, I think is the following possibility:

If we would take a rule that is equivalent to universal turing machine, and then discovered how this rule could have undoubtedly formed out of the assumption of nothingness, then we would have a good reason to believe that it is the generating rule of the Universe.

The discovery of such a transition I would call the greatest discovery ever, because that would allow us to precisely simulate the beginning of Universe, and be certain about it.

Mindey, 2009-12-01

[2015-03-28]: An idea, and a more serious followup discussion on Everything-List.

[2020-04-14]: Stephen Wolfram discovers and introduces (www.wolframphysics.org) a generalization of the simple rules, that look like hypergraph grammars, that look like the right direction to think about and explore computational universes.