When I was an undergraduate, I sang in the University of Louisiana Choir in a production of Franz Josef Haydn's spectacular choral work The Creation.
The opening is a quiet, eerie orchestral passage called "The Representation of Chaos" -- meant to evoke the unformed "void" that made up the universe prior to the moment of creation. Then the Archangel Raphael sings, "In the beginning, God made Heaven and Earth; and the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." The chorus joins in -- everything still in a ghostly pianissimo -- "In the spirit, God moved upon the face of the waters; and God said, "Let there be light. And... there... was...
...LIGHT!"
The last word is sung in a resounding, major-chord fortissimo, with the entire orchestra joining in -- trumpets blaring, tympanis booming, the works.
Even if you don't buy the theology, it's a moment that sends chills up the spine. (You can hear it yourself here.)
Of course, the conventional wisdom amongst the cosmologists has been that the universe didn't begin in some kind of chaotic, dark void; quite the opposite. The Big Bang -- or at least, the moment after it -- is usually visualized as a searingly hot, dense fireball, which expanded and cooled, leading to a steady entropy increase. So by our current models, we're heading toward chaos, not away from it.
Well, maybe.
A recent paper by the pioneering Portuguese physicist and cosmologist João Magueijo has proposed a new model for the origins of the universe that overturns that entire scenario -- and far from being ridiculed off the stage, he's captured the attention even of hard-nosed skeptics like Sabine Hossenfelder, who did a video on her YouTube channel about his paper a few days ago that is well worth watching in its entirety. But the gist, as far as a layperson like myself can understand it, goes like this.
It's long been a mystery why the fundamental constants of physics have the values they do, and why they actually are constant. A handful of numbers -- the speed of light, the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, the strength of the gravitational force, the fine-structure constant, and a few others -- govern the behavior of, well, pretty much everything. None seem to be derivable from more fundamental principles; i.e., they appear to be arbitrary. None have ever been observed to shift, regardless how far out in space (and therefore how far back in time) you look. And what's curious is that most of them have values that are tightly constrained, at least from our perspective. Even a percent or two change in either direction, and you'd have situations like stars burning out way too fast to host stable planetary systems, atoms themselves falling apart, or matter not generating sufficient gravity to clump together.
So to many, the universe has appeared "fine-tuned," as if some omnipotent deity had set the dials just right at the moment of creation of the universe to favor everything we see around us (including life). This is called the anthropic principle -- the strong version implying a master fine-tuner, the weak version being the more-or-less tautological statement that if those numbers had been any different, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
But that doesn't get us any closer to figuring out why the fundamental constants are what they are. Never one to shy away from the Big Questions, that's exactly what Magueijo has undertaken -- and what he's come up with is, to put it mildly, intriguing.
What he did was to start from the assumption that the fundamental constants aren't... constant. That In The Beginning (to stick with our original Book of Genesis metaphor), the universe was indeed chaos -- the constants could have had more or less any values. The thing is, the constants aren't all independent of each other. Just as numbers in our mundane life can push and pull on each other -- to give a simple example, if you alter housing prices in a town, other numbers such as average salaries, rates of people moving in and moving out, tax rates, and funding for schools will shift in response -- the fundamental constants of physics affect each other. What Magueijo did was to set some constraints on how those constants can evolve, then let the model run to see what kind of universe eventually came out.
And what he found was that after jittering around for a bit, the constants eventually found stable values and settled into an equilibrium. In Hossenfelder's video, she uses the analogy of sand grains on a vibration plate being jostled into spots that have the highest stability (the most resistance to motion). At that point, the pattern that emerges doesn't change again no matter how long you vibrate the plate. What Magueijo suggests is that the current configuration of fundamental constants may not be the only stable one, but the range of what the constants could be might be far narrower than we'd thought -- and it also explains why we don't see the constants changing any more.
Why they are, in fact, constant.
Magueijo's work might be the first step toward solving one of the most vexing questions of physics -- why the universe exists with these particular laws and constants, despite there not seeming to be any underlying reason for it. Perhaps we've been looking at the whole thing the wrong way. The early universe really may have been without substance and void -- but instead of a voice crying "let there be light!", things simply evolved until they reached a stable configuration that then generated everything around us.
It might not be as audibly dramatic as Haydn's vision of The Creation, but it's just as much of an eye-opener.
Thank you for continuing to post. I learn more here than anywhere else on the internet.
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