Universes

In The Beginning, this was a work of fiction.  However, it might still be about as real as normal reality, anyway.  Who's to say?

Toward The End, it's non-fiction, in the nature of a journal entry.

If, without any experience of a universe, I were to think one up, it might be this:

That's because my imagination is limited, at least for imagining a universe from scratch.

A typical universe would probably have things in it.  What sort of things do I think of?  Boxes, or squares.  It looks like kind of a boring universe.

Over time, I might think up other ideas for universes.  The following are some:

In the above case, I instead of everything being square boxes, which are 4-sided polygons, I thought of polygons with different numbers of sides.  In typical limited fashion, I the universe inventor was still only thinking of regular polygons.

In Universe Version 3, I got more daring.  In this case, one of the regular polygons is a different size!  I don't know what it took to think up that idea.  Also, notice how I cleverly put polygons of different types in unpredictable places in the sequence.  This should make things more interesting, says my imagination the universe inventor.

Over time, I keep churning them out.  When I get to version 9, I realize that thus far all my universes had been shown as two-dimensional drawings.  But universes wouldn't have to be two-dimensional.  Some universes might be one-dimensional or many-dimensional.  Version 9 appears as a 3-dimensional universe.  Notice how I have made a grid.  Universes 5, 6, and 8 (not shown here) were grid-like.  Version 9 is a 3-dimensional grid.  It appears as lots of 3-dimensional cubes stacked neatly together,  Notice how some of the cubes are different:  they are colored in.

Pretty early on, I the author had an agenda here.  My conception of universes is similar to an idea I heard about in a computer programming class in the early 1980s.  That idea was called "Conway's Life" and it was a two-dimensional grid with two kinds of cells:  the cells that had something in them, and the cells that were empty.  Those are the two kinds of cells.  There's actually an additional dimension to Conway's Life (that dimension is time).  Things got surprisingly interesting in Conway's Life.

Here's a rough approximation to what Conway's Life looks like:

This is a 3-dimensional universe.  It is a series of two-dimensional grids, and the third dimension is time.  In my drawing, notice how the grids are numbered 1, 2, 3, ....  Those numbers represent the passage of time.  This "time" is in discrete intervals.  Grid number 1 has some configuration of filled cells among empty cells.  Then, an interval of time passes, and the configuration in the grid has changed.  It is always "the same grid", but changes occur in it with the passage of time.  So, the grid at time 1 has a configuration in it, the grid at time 2 has a different configuration in it, the grid at time 3 has yet a different configuration in it, and so on.  What Conway did was to make up some rules which determine how that configuration shall change from one time to the next time.  You can see the rules, and much more, at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life (or, if that link doesn't work, just look up "Conway's Game Of Life" on wikipedia.org).

Conway's Life may give you some ideas.


My Interpretation Of All That:

So, in case anyone was wondering what I was really thinking, I was thinking several things, as follows.

One thing I am thinking is that a very simple universe could evolve into a very complex one.  I've had some rudimentary version of this idea for many years, maybe since I was in my twenties.  (When I first started thinking about something similar, I was trying to find some most basic thing to think about, or some most basic belief that I had.)  Conway's Life seems to illustrate the same idea, that a very simple universe could evolve into a very complex one.

Also I am thinking that if there are miracles of creation, they might be very simple miracles.  In particular, rather than a god creating all the animals, fully developed all in a single day, there could instead be a god creating some much simpler thing (such as a single dust mote in an otherwise empty universe) which could then be left alone to evolve into a more complex universe such as the one we live in.

Ever wonder where God came from?  Perhaps nobody knows, but I have a theory about it.  In brief, the universe evolved from whatever is the simplest, most likely to occur thing, and eventually one of the things that evolved in the universe was God.

Most of this needn't concern us in any practical way.  We will continue to live and die, behave well or ill, and be happy or sad, similarly as always.

I really cannot know much, rationally, about God.  I only mentioned God because so much has been said about the creation of the universe involving God, so naturally I took that as a point of reference.  There may or may not be any God involved in the creation of the universe we live in.  Personally I do believe there's a god but not one who meddles with nature.  Or if he does, he's modest and circumspect about it so that you probably wouldn't even notice he was there.

Back on the topic of universes, I am just guessing, of course, but if the theory's good, then the guesses may have an appealing charm to them, stemming from some internal consistency of thought which, somehow, produces a symmetrical or beautiful result.

I think there are many universes, or have been many universes, and some of them fizzled out, while others, perhaps relatively few others, evolved into something interesting.  Conway could have invented any set of rules.  The rules could be arbitrary, and the starting conditions could be random, but sometimes they just happen to hit it off well and evolve into something interesting.  Our universe is like that.  That's what I think.

-jrl, 2015/08/02