III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

1. Quantum Cosmology Theoretic Unity

Giudice, Gian. A Zeptospace Odyssey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. A CERN physicist evokes the Large Hadron Collider as the ultimate microscope now able to peer into this “zeptometre” zone of a billionth of a billionth of a millimeter. Its supposed mission is to find some missing, crucial clue in a material haystack that would connect to and explain the multiverse. Or maybe the last hurrah of a left brain male hunt as it disappears into this black hole of a machine, oblivious to a radically developmental universe to human genesis. Or as Brian Josephson tries to say due to creative, self-organizing forces that will not be found in the LHC.

Gnedin, Nickolay. Digitizing the Universe. Nature. 435/572, 2005. A report on a detailed article in the same issue (Springel, Volker, et al. Simulations of the Formation, Evolution and Clustering of Galaxies and Quasars.) on the work of an international collaboration known as the Virgo Consortium. This group uses novel, sophisticated computational astrophysics including simulations of dark matter (invisible material that is the main source of gravity) to achieve the most realistic model to date of our dynamically evolving cosmos.

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Norton, 1999. An elegant exposition of frontier physics and especially multi-dimensional string theory as it strives to unify the quantum and relativity domains.

Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos. New York: Knopf, 2004. In a sequel to his 1999 bestseller The Elegant Universe, the Columbia University physicist and impresario provides another accessible entry to the celestial, temporal and quantum realms of a multidimensional reality. Of especial interest is an explanation of the Holographic Universe theory, whereby our extant 3D world may be a projection from information on a 2D surface. The hologram scenario is most apropos because each minute section contains a refraction of the whole image.

Greene, Brian. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New York: Knopf, 2011. The Columbia University physicist surely does communicate such far outer reaches and dimensions of theoretical imaginations with verve and veracity. Quilted, Inflationary, Brane, Cyclic, Landscape, Quantum, Holographic, Simulated, and Ultimate Multiverse options are clearly explained, amidst their wonderment. But, but, as per the quote, in this so declared final Copernican displacement, as if physics disappearing into its own, self-made black hole, all human hopes, sensibilities and reprieves of a meaningful destiny are to be abandoned.

Rather, what’s gratifying about being human, what’s exciting about being part of the scientific enterprise, is our ability to use analytical thought to bridge vast distances, journeying to outer and inner space, if some of the ideas we’ll encounter in this book prove correct, perhaps even beyond our universe. For me, it is the depth of our understanding, acquired from our lonely vantage point in the inky black stillness of a cold and forbidding cosmos, that reverberates across the expanse of reality and marks our arrival. (8)

Guth, Alan. The Inflationary Universe. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. A sudden expansion of the cosmic singularity in its first seconds is proposed by the MIT cosmologist to resolve mathematical and observational disagreements, which has now become the generally accepted model.

Guth, Alan and David Kaiser. Inflationary Cosmology: Exploring the Universe from the Smallest to the Largest Scales. Science. 307/884, 2005. A thorough survey of the latest theories and observations in this regard prepared for the International Year of Physics.

Habib, Salman, et al. HACC: Extreme Scaling and Performance across Diverse Architectures. Communications of the ACM. 60/1, 2017. A 13 member team from Argonne, Los Alamos, and Berkeley Lawrence National Laboratories describe frontier computational capacities by which our worldwide sapience can achieve a cosmic self-quantification of infinite celestial environs.

Supercomputing is evolving toward hybrid and accelerator-based architectures with millions of cores. The Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) framework exploits this diverse landscape at the largest scales of problem size, obtaining high scalability and sustained performance. Developed to satisfy the science requirements of cosmological surveys, HACC melds particle and grid methods using a novel algorithmic structure that flexibly maps across architectures, including CPU/GPU, multi/many-core, and Blue Gene systems. In this Research Highlight, we demonstrate the success of HACC on two very different machines, the CPU/GPU system Titan and the BG/Q systems Sequoia and Mira, attaining very high levels of scalable performance. (Abstract)

Hartle, James. Arrows of Time and Initial and Final Conditions in the Quantum Mechanics of Closed Systems Like the Universe. arXiv:2002.07093. We choose this recent entry by the UC Santa Barbara physicist to recognize his decadal flow of papers about the so mathematical matters of melding quantum depths with cosmic breadth. The third abstract is from a 1990 Jerusalem Winter School and well catches this human unification of depth and breadth. See also, for example, The Impact of Cosmology on Quantum Mechanics (1901.03933) and The Quantum Mechanics of Cosmology (1805.12246), abstracts below, for his oriented agenda.

In a quantum universe, arrows of time are described by the probabilities of appropriately coarse grained sets of histories of quantities like entropy that grow or decay. We show that the requirement of that these sets of histories decohere implies two things: (1) A time asymmetry between initial and final conditions that is a basis for arrows ot time. (2) How a final state of indifference that is represented by a final density matrix proportional to the unit density matrix is consistent with causality, and allows a finer-grained description of the model universe in terms of decoherent histories than any other final state. (Abstract, 2002.07093)

When quantum mechanics was developed in the '20s of the last century another revolution in physics was just starting. It began with the discovery that the universe is expanding. For a long time quantum mechanics and cosmology developed independently of one another. Yet the very discovery of the expansion would eventually draw the two subjects together because it implied the big bang where quantum mechanics was important for cosmology and for understanding our observations of the universe today. (Abstract, 1901.03933)

This posting is 92 pages of from the lectures by the author at the 7th Jerusalem Winter School 1990 on Quantum Cosmology and Baby Universes. The lectures covered quantum mechanics for closed systems like the universe, generalized quantum mechanics, time in quantum mechanics, the quantum mechanics spacetime, and practical quantum cosmology. (Abstract, 1805.12246).

Hartle, James. How Nature is Conformable to Herself: A View from Quantum Cosmology. arXiv:1909.08724. The UC Santa Barbara physicist and often collaborator with his advisor the late Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) comments on his 1996 article with the above title (Complexity 1/4) in which he, as did Newton from whom the phrase comes, avers a persistent innate recurrence in kind from universe to us. A metaphor is layers of onion skin – a natural genesis conforms to and reiterates the same “complex adaptive system” at each and every stage (see his 1994 The Quark and the Jaguar). Circa 2019, Hartle indeed cites a universality of emergent, mathematical simplicity, regularity and complexity from its quantum dynamics source. See George Johnson’s N. Y. Times obit (May 25) where he also notes Murray’s long advocacy of a sensible cosmos which opens to our comprehension.

In his essay "Nature Conformable to Herself" the late Murray Gell-Mann expands on an observation of Newton that theories of seemingly disparate phenomena in the universe often make use of similar ideas and similar mathematical structure. Newton summarized that by saying that nature was very consonant and conformable to herself. This essay uses a model of quantum cosmology to illustrate how, why, and when nature is conformable to herself. (Hartle Abstract)

All three principles – the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the utility of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality – are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics. (Gell-Mann, 1995, 12).

Hartle, James, et al. Accelerated Expansion from Negative Lambda. arXiv:1205.3807. Coauthors are Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog, posted on May 30, 2012. As reported by Amanda Gefter in New Scientist for June 30, noted above, a proposal by these veteran physicists to resolve piled up inconsistencies with older inflationary and string theories by way of a holographic theory solution.

Wave functions specifying a quantum state of the universe must satisfy the constraints of general relativity, in particular the Wheeler-DeWitt equation (WDWE).We show for a wide class of models with non-zero cosmological constant that solutions of the WDWE exhibit a universal semiclassical asymptotic structure for large spatial volumes. A consequence of this asymptotic structure is that a wave function in a gravitational theory with a negative cosmological constant can predict an ensemble of asymptotically classical histories which expand with a positive effective cosmological constant. This raises the possibility that even fundamental theories with a negative cosmological constant can be consistent with our low-energy observations of a classical, accelerating universe. We illustrate this general framework with the specific example of the no-boundary wave function in its holographic form. The implications of these results for model building in string cosmology are discussed. (Abstract)

Hattich, Frank. Quantum Processes: A Whiteheadian Interpretation of Quantum Field Theory. Munster: agenda Verlag, 2004. Wherein a physicist and philosopher methodically finds the mathematical formalism of QFT to imply that rather than particles and fields, fluid processes are the essence of reality. In Alfred North’s terms, these dynamics result in a self-creating, self-causing, and self-realizing universe.

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