Gods are Superfluous to the Creation of Universes

by David Sims

OUR UNIVERSE is one of many. Indeed, there’s probably an infinity of universes, each of which (or most of which) are completely isolated from all of the others.

I can’t prove that that’s so. But it seems, to me, to be the explanation that is most likely, arising naturally from what is known from science: from cosmology, from particle physics, from relativity, from quantum mechanics.

The multiverse idea isn’t testable, so it doesn’t have the status of theory. It is, rather, a speculation suggested by what else is testable and has been tested. The multiverse is consistent with, though not proved by, experimental evidence.

First, though, let’s see how far we can go with pure logic.

A tautology is a statement like “A is A” or “A thing is itself.” Tautologies are always true, and they are almost always trivial, conveying no relationship between facts other than identity.

Almost always trivial, I said. There is one exception only. The exceptional tautology is “Existence exists.” Usually, when you say that “A is A,” you don’t mean that there are no such things as Bs or Cs. But when you say “Existence exists,” you do mean that there’s nothing else.

Why does existence exist? The reason is there can be no alternative.

There never was any chance that nothing could be.

Now, having gotten this far with pure logic alone, we find that pure logic can take us no farther. We’ve reasoned that existence must exist, but we can’t decide from logical principles what the fundamental nature of existence might be. We can’t reason out what existence is like generally speaking: how it is when it has no reason to be any way at all.

For those answers, you must turn to empiricism, or science.

And what science has discovered is that vacuum is a thing, and not an emptiness. The thing that vacuum is a ground state of energy to which every other energy state can be related. As vacuum is a thing, rather than nothing, it is everywhere subject to the uncertainty principle. No part of vacuum can be perfectly stable, sure of its own content of energy over a stretch of time such that the product of the energy and the time is less than Planck’s constant divided by 2π.

ΔE Δt < ħ = 1.0545718e-34 J sec

We live on a scale of size where the smallest things we can see are about 10 micrometers, or 1% of a millimeter. Likewise, our eyes resolve time intervals no smaller than about 5% of a second. We can and do build instruments that can resolve space and time more finely than our bare senses can.

And observing nature with those instruments were what led to modern physics, and the speculations that stem from it, in the first place.

There is no need for God in the mechanics of universe genesis that I believe to be correct.

As vacuum is uncertain in every place regarding its own state, fluctuations of energy come and go, subject to the uncertainty principle’s limits. We can’t see these fluctuations for the same reason that you can’t see the roughness of a sheet of sandpaper from a distance of a mile, and for the same reason that an LED bulb seems to emit a steady beam of light, even though it is actually switching on and off faster than your eye can follow.

The energy fluctuations that occur as a natural property of vacuum contain amounts of energy that are distributed according to the Planck distribution.

B(ν,T) = (2hν³/c²) {exp[hν/(kT) − 1]}⁻¹

Most vacuum fluctuations are too weak to do much of anything. However, they can affect the behavior of matter in a small way. If you hang two conductive plates very near each other, the gap between them will set a limit on how long the wavelength of a fluctuation can be there. Why? Because conductive plates don’t support electrical potentials. This will screen out the longer wavelength (lower energy) vacuum fluctuations. Meanwhile, the vacuum fluctuations on the outsides of the plates retain the full spectrum, with nothing screened out. The pressure of vacuum on the outside faces of the plates is greater than the pressure of vacuum between the plates, and so the plates move together, into contact, simply because the differential pressure of vacuum energy produces a force on the plates. This is called the Casimir Effect.

The more energetic a vacuum fluctuation is, the rarer it is. The less often it happens within a given volume of vacuum. These weak fluctuations that don’t do much are, by far, the most common sort. But rare does not mean none.

A small percentage of vacuum fluctuations are energetic enough to trigger the formation of ‘virtual particles,’ which generally occur in conjugate pairs of matter and antimatter. For example: an electron and a positron. These virtual particles are simply the matter version of the energy fluctuations that occur naturally in vacuum. And just as the energy winks out within the time limit set by the uncertainty principle, so it is likewise with these virtual particles. They appear out of nothing. They disappear back into nothing. Very quickly.

However, there’s always a dynamic equilibrium of virtual particle pairs throughout vacuum. They have effects on ordinary matter particles. One of those effects is broadening the apparent size of charged particles, so that they seem bigger than they really are. It happens because the virtual positron is attracted toward a normal electron, while its virtual electron partner is repelled by the normal electron. On the average, the virtual positrons are closer to the nearest normal electron than the virtual electron is, and this makes the net electric charge (to an observer at a distance) seem to be spread out more than it otherwise would be.

The smallest possible radius for any object to have is the Planck length, which is equal to

√(ħG/c³) = 1.616199e-35 meters

There’s also a Planck mass, which is equal to

√(ħc/G) = 2.17651e-8 kilograms

The Planck mass is equivalent (by Einstein’s equation) to the Planck energy, which is

√(ħc⁵/G) = 1.95608672e9 Joules

That much energy is a very great deal of energy for a vacuum fluctuation to have. According to the Planck distribution, it must therefore be very, very rare, and extremely small fraction of all vacuum fluctuations.

But, again, rare does not mean none.

When a vacuum fluctuation containing more than the Planck energy does happen, it appears as a black hole. That’s because the Planck length is the Schwarzschild gravitational radius for the Planck mass, the distance at which the escape speed is the speed of light.

Unlike ordinary black holes, which are created by identifiable causes (such as the collapse of a star’s core), these virtual black holes can’t emit any Hawking radiation. If they did, they’d violate the conservation of energy. But they must obey the time limitation set by the uncertainty principle.

So what they do is detach from the universe in which they first appeared. It’s as if the universe in which a virtual black hole spawned were the parent, and the virtual black hole itself were the offspring.

Universes, it seems, can reproduce. The mechanism isn’t efficient, but on the other hand it doesn’t need to be.

Once detached, the energy of which the virtual black hole is made has no outside to which it can relate. All relations are those of identity, and this brings its singular state into conflict with the uncertainty principle. It is therefore unstable and must decay, just as a radioactive atomic nucleus does, into other things.

When a radioactive atomic nucleus decays, the products are other atomic nuclei, protons, neutrons, neutrinos, and gamma rays.

When an isolated virtual black hole decays, the product is a universe of some kind, with internal force relations of some kind. I don’t know of any reason why our universe has the only kind of nature that it is possible for a universe to have, and I suspect that there are other possibilities that are logically consistent.

We see the universe we do, with the laws it has, because we evolved inside it, and thus there is a selection bias in play.

Again, notice that in all of this there is no need for gods to create the universe. The apparent need for gods arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of vacuum, from wrong assumptions about what vacuum is. These are simply primitive concepts originating in classical thinking which contain errors that mankind has yet to generally identify.

Mankind has, in general, recognized the Earth is round, not flat. But it hasn’t yet put together a true picture of what existence is by default. Maybe it’s always this way, with the truth having to wait for stubbornly intransigent old-way-of-thinking people to die off before a better understanding of reality can replace the inferior older model.

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