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Infinite loop that is our universe



I’ve always been fascinated by the cosmos and the endless shroud of mystery surrounding it. Every time I thought about my life and how infinitesimally small it is compared to the world we live in, I felt this sense of divine euphoria take over me. Growing up I asked the usual questions, what’s the meaning of life, how did the universe begin, why did it begin in the first place, where is it headed, can you travel back in time or forward in time, etc. The list is endless and most of it inspired by Star Trek, Star Wars and my personal favorite Back to the Future. There is very little we know about our universe considering its enormity. Some answers I discovered as I aged through my lifetime like the big bang, the singularity that started it, the beginning of time but others are still far away from my consciousness.

What started as an almost obsessive thinking about the meaning of life led me to formulate some theories of my own. These are of course, heavily inspired by the movie interstellar and the science of Kip Thorne, the leading astrophysicist from Caltech who formulated the equations for the movie. The leading scientists who study the cosmos have concluded that our universe is most probably one of the many universes that are created and destroyed. According to them it’s an endless cycle. The big bang occurs, the universe comes into existence and then eventually gets swallowed by a black hole and becomes a singularity which starts the process again.

Ever since I read the statement about this endless universe cycle, it struck a chord somewhere in my subconscious. Have I not read something like this long ago, after some tribulations, the answer came to me. It was an article about Hindu Mythology. There are three gods in Hindu mythology who rule over all. Brahma the god of creation, Vishnu the supreme god or protector and Shiva the god of destruction.  According to Hindu mythology, the universe is cyclically created and destroyed in 8.64 billion years which according to the mythology is one day in Brahma's life span. Brahma creates the world and at the end of the day, Shiva destroys it and then the process repeats itself.

As I began to process this information, a wave of excitement hit me. I could see this theory forming ahead of me and maybe finally I had some answers of my own. Time is experienced differently at places with super high gravity than in relative places like earth. So in the movie Interstellar, the protagonist who's on a distant planet close to a black hole spends an hour on the planet while on earth seven years have passed. We know this is possible and our scientific principles predict this effect with details. Could it be something similar for god? Does he exist in an nth plane where the time that he experiences in one day is close to 8.64 billion years? What is this nth plane that I stuck in the middle of the sentence? Glad you asked. So we know that there could be multiple dimensions to our universe or multiverse. We as human beings can currently look and feel three dimensions. A tesseract which is a fancy word for hypercube is a 4-D object.  It’s a cube which has four dimensions but we can’t visualize it well because we can only see three dimensions at a time. String theory predicts as many as 11 dimensions to our universe. Some might be infinitesimally small while some expand across our universe.

I’m going to reference Interstellar again here. Towards the end of the movie, the protagonist of the movie Cooper falls into the Black Hole Gargantua and realizes that somehow he has entered into this space where he can see time as a dimension. His memories, his life span are all laid out in front of him. Skipping to the end of the movie, he concludes that human beings advanced to a higher form of civilization where they moved or could experience these other dimensions and it was these humans from the future who somehow helped him to transmit information back to the past to save humanity. It’s a complicated process but I’ll try to explain it as we go along here.

Imagine this is the first cycle of the universe. At a certain point of time, a civilization occurs and eventually it reaches a Utopian era of science. The science is so advanced that these people can move into or feel other dimensions. In this age, three people from this civilization descend into the nth plane. The nth plane extends across the universe and maybe beyond it. Let’s assume that these three people are Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. We hear throughout all religions that god is omnipotent. Because the nth dimensions extends across the universe, it would make these three people exists everywhere at the same time. It’s difficult to visualize this since we are used to dealing with three dimensional objects but it’s theoretically possible. In a 2-D world where space bends in on itself you would look like the 2-D image of yourself. You would still exist but your space wouldn't be the same. The concept is similar for an nth dimension plane. I can’t fathom what it would look like though and believe me I've tried.

After these three people descended into the nth plane, since time exists for them different to how it does for us, they can move back and forth into it. So they decided to go to the beginning of time and create a singularity which eventually turns into the big bang and starts the universe. For us time is a linear quantity i.e. t=1 sec, t=2 sec, t=3 sec and so on but in the nth plane, time t=1 and t=n all exist in parallel. I’ve a strong inclination to say all exist at the same time but time in the nth dimension is not what it is in our dimension so I’ll try and refrain from saying that. In the movie interstellar, Cooper realizes that the signals he witnessed on earth were the same ones that he sent back from the future. We are used to cause and effect but this is causation without effect. I’m going to shift into the field of computers here for a second to emphasize my point. In computer science, there is a programming language called C. To turn a C code into an executable that you can click on and something shows up on screen, it requires a software called the compiler. The compiler of C is written in C itself. Herein lies the paradox. How can you compile the first C program if you need to create the compiler using C itself? This process is called bootstrapping. The singularity that started the big bang came into accord because of the end of the universe it started in the first place, aka the universe bootstrapped itself.

Okay so I finally had some answers. I know god exists in the nth dimension, he’s omnipotent and how the universe came into being. What struck me next was why does god indulge in this cycle? What’s he getting out of this entire process of creation and destruction? This question kept me preoccupied for days and then as before it struck me unexpectedly. The answer being so simple “energy”. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed. God indulges in this cycle because the energy from destruction has to be transformed into construction and the process has to repeat itself.

I’m going to round up my hypothesis with another piece of the puzzle. I kept thinking about how Cooper in interstellar from the future made contact with his daughter in the past. He couldn’t move big objects and with considerable strength was able to move the second hand of a wrist watch. We keep hearing almost universally that god works in mysterious ways. Could this be the reason? Maybe the only way for him to contact us from the nth dimension is through influences and smaller things that combined together lead us to believe in his existence and his workings.

It’s disappointing in a way that in my lifetime science would not have progressed enough to give us all the answers we need. The future seems like an exciting place where we would have discovered interstellar travel, time travel, hyper speeds and the meaning of life but as of now, I am going to content myself by my own theory. I don’t consider myself a religious person but I do believe in one true god. He appears to everyone in a way that we perceive him and hence differently to everyone. Different cultures, religions and people perceive him in the way they want to. If I take the word of Stephen Hawking, god isn’t required for the universe but to imagine life without it would mean that life has no meaning and it’s just random probabilities and nothing more. That is a depressing thought so I’ll stick to my theory for now and maybe one day I can convince Stephen Hawking otherwise.

1 comment:

  1. The first passage when I read, I thought , "hey! that is so similar to what I used to think when I was a kid. This guy looks like my alter ego!!" But I found a few dissimilaries, specially in terms of theories about God. I was 14 I guess, when I kinda started having doubts about God's existence. To me , God is just an idea, a mere explanation to things we could not explain yet to our egotistic mind. Just like in past days we had "surya devata" and "chandra Devata" just because we hadn't explored those planets/stars/satellites(Though some people still believe and fear them :-|). It is just a way to content our curiousity as well as to keep us positive in our hard times.
    Anyway, I think I should stop here or my comment section will be larger than your post. ;)
    By the way it was a nice read! :)

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