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

1. Quantum Cosmology Theoretic Unity

Nadis, Steve. Making Multiverses. Astronomy. October, 2005. From a special cosmology issue, the latest vistas of inflation, strings, constants, and so on, amidst a proliferation of bubbling universes.

Nadis, Steve. Nadis, Steve. Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang. Quanta. May 31, 2024. By studying the geometry of model space-times, researchers offer alternative views of the universe’s first moments. A science writer profiles Ghazal Geshnizjani, Perimeter Institute, Jerome Quintin, University of Waterloo, and Eric Ling, University of Copenhagen as they collaborate on the latest studies of how the entire universe might have come into being. Their prime paper is On the initial singularity and extendibility of flat quasi-de Sitter spacetimes by GG, et al in the Journal of High Energy Physics (Vol. 182, 2023). See also Anisotropic examples of inflation-generating initial conditions for the big bang at arXiv:2403.02471 and Fingerprints of a Non-Inflationary Universe from Massive Fields at arXiv:2405.11016 for other entries by team members. Our plaNatural philoSophia interest then wonders about an ecosmic spacescene whence billions of years later an optimum bioglobe attains a sapiensphere progeny able to accomplish an aware, retrospective description. What kind of reality seems made and meant to achieve its post-recognition maybe so as to select and affirm itself? What manner of genetic-like informed knowledge might accumulate along with this capricious ascent?

A Taxonomy of Singularities The central issue confronting Geshnizjani, Ling and Quintin is whether there is a point prior to inflation at which the laws of gravity break down in a singularity. The simplest example of a mathematical singularity is what happens to the function 1/x as x approaches zero. The function takes a number x as an input, and outputs another number. As x gets smaller and smaller, 1/x gets larger and larger, approaching infinity. If x is zero, the function is no longer well defined: It can’t be relied upon as a description of reality. (SN)

A singularity hints at the fact that general relativity can’t be a complete description of the basic rules of physics. Efforts to form such a description, which would require reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics, are ongoing. In order to make sense of the universe at the highest energy levels, he said, “we first need to understand classical physics as well as we can.” (SN)

Nath, Pran. Particle physics and cosmology intertwined.. arXiv:2402.04170. While the widest substantial pairing that entitles this unit came together in the 1980s, and online for us in 2004, here in 2024 we post a latest version by a Northeastern University physicist to convey how their overall definitive unification has held up. See also A Search for Classical Subsystems in Quantum Worlds by Arsalan, Adil, et al at arXiv:2403.10895 for another example.

While the standard model describes data at the electroweak scale without inclusion of gravity, beyond the standard model physics is increasingly intertwined with gravitational phenomena and cosmology. Thus gravity mediated breaking of supersymmetry in supergravity models lead to particle masses, which are gravitational in origin, observable at TeV scales and testable at the LHC, and supergravity also provides a candidate for dark matter. The above implies that particle physics and cosmology are intrinsically intertwined in the resolution of essentially all of the cosmological phenomena. (Abstract)

Nobbenhuis, Stefan. Categorizing Different Approaches to the Cosmological Constant Problem. Foundations of Physics. 36/5, 2006. A lengthy paper from Gerard ‘t Hooft’s Institute for Theoretical Physics at Utrecht University which we cite as an example of deep angst at the conceptual foundations of the materialist paradigm. This “constant” is widely noted as a cosmic fudge factor.

In this paper we categorized the different approaches to the cosmological constant problem. The many different ways in which it can be phrased often blurs the road to a possible solution. So far we can only conclude that in fact none of the approaches described above is a real outstanding candidate for a solution of the “old cosmological constant problem. Most effort nowadays is in finding a physical mechanism that drives the Universe’s acceleration, but as we have seen these approaches, be it by modifying general relativity in the far infrared, or by studying higher dimensional braneworlds, generally do not convincingly attack the old and most basic problem.

Since even the sometimes very drastic modifications advocated in the proposals we discussed do not lead to a satisfactory answer, this seems to imply that the ultimate theory of quantum gravity might very well be based on very different grounds that imagined so far. The only way out could be the discovery of a symmetry that forbids a cosmological constant term to appear. (669)

Overbye, Dennis. All Signs Point to Higgs, But Scientific Certainty is a Waiting Game. New York Times. March 5,, 2013. An article in a special Science Tuesday edition “Chasing the Higgs,” written by Overbye, as a succinct entry to the Large Hadron Collider project to detect at extreme depths and energies this theoretically crucial particle and force field. A grand story of dedicated personalities who by fits and starts build, repair, operate, and fine tune huge machinery, instrumentation, computer support, along with wonderment what does it all mean? Yet, per the second quote, is it an experiment too far? Are physicists placing too much emphasis on this approach, because it is what they have and can do? Should we bet that such reductions are the window to reality, or might something wholly else be going on, that Colliders miss and exclude, say an immaterial mathematical code which serves a genesis procreation visible more by its emergent progeny?

In December 2011, shortly after CERN teams first declared that they had seen signs of the famous boson with a mass of 125 billion electron volts, Gian Giudice, a CERN theorist, and his colleagues ran the numbers and concluded that the universe was in a precarious condition and could be prone to collapse in the far, far future. (E6) The calculations also depend crucially on the mass of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, as well as the Higgs, neither of which have been weighed precisely enough yet to determine the fate of the universe. If the top quark were just a little lighter or the Higgs a little heavier, 130 billion electron volts, Dr. Giudice said, the vacuum would in fact be stable. (E6)

It’s a puzzle, he said, why the universe exists in such a critical state. In an e-mail, Dr. Giudice wrote, “Why do we happen to live at the edge of collapse?” He went on, “In my view, the message about near-criticality of the universe is the most important thing we have learned from the discovery of the Higgs boson so far.” Guido Tonelli of CERN and the University of Pisa, said, “If true, it is somehow magic.” We wouldn’t be having this discussion, he said, if there hadn’t been enough time already for this universe to produce galaxies, stars, planets and “human beings who are attempting to produce a vision of the world,” he said. “So, in some sense, we are here, because we have been lucky, because for this particular universe the lottery produced a certain set of numbers, which allow the universe to have an evolution, which is very long.” (E6)

Overbye, Dennis. Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our UniVerse. New York Times. October 10, 2022. Take gravity, add quantum mechanics, stir. What do you get? Just maybe, a holographic cosmos. A succinct review of attempts by quantum and astro physicists to appreciate that their fields have a deep commonality to an extent as being one and the same. A main player is Stanford’s Leonard Susskind (arxiv:1708.03040) along with many colleagues.

Overbye, Dennis. Laws of Nature: Source Unknown. New York Times. December 18, 2007. Tuesday’s great Science Times section is a clearing-house for the leading edges of cosmological speculation. But its almost totally male pursuit seems to flounder on its basic premises, as this article widely reviews. Agreement eludes on whether the universe has intrinsic, eternal laws, as Plato long ago avered, or, for example, be finally unpredictable re Anton Zeilinger, with malleable parameters per Paul Davies, or is, as Holger Bech Nielsen likens, a random machine. With such tossing around of multidimensional strings, contorted landscapes, and so on, one cannot avoid the notion of a “Ptolemaic physics” trying to shore up an ultimately untenable model of a cosmos that is essentially organic in kind.

Overbye, Dennis. Physicists’ Dreams and Worries in Era of the Big Collider. New York Times. January 26, 2010. A news item on a “Physics of the Universe Summit” held at Caltech to mostly access the state and future of particulate theories, now that the LHC was online, to a degree. But with open issues such as dark matter and energy, quantum gravity, along with many other quandaries and entanglements, it was hard for attendees to avoid a malaise that their physics paradigm was in bankruptcy, and in need of revolutionary revision. And on the facing page is a note: “Slime Mold Proves to be a Brainy Blob” by Japanese researchers about how these microbes form a viable network similar to the Toyko metro system (see A. Tero, et al). Such disparate phases are said to spring from common mathematical principles, but such real emergent phenomena which will not be found in atom smashers. (see Brian Josephson for an attempt to open a window)

Overduin, James and Paul Wesson. The Light/Dark Universe: Light from Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. Singapore: World Scientific, 2008. Astronomers from Stanford University and the University of Waterloo, Manitoba, provide the latest explanation as to why, if filled with stars and galaxies, space remains black when viewed. This is old chestnut is now seen to involve the age of the universe, its various wave length backgrounds, tendencies to clumpiness, along with elusive darknesses of matter and energy.

The Universe appears to consist of roughly three parts vacuum-like dark energy and one part pressureless cold dark matter, with a sprinkling of how dark matter (neutrinos) that is almost certainly much less important that cold dark matter. Baryons – the stuff of which we are made – turn out to be mere trace elements in comparison. This marks a fundamental shift in cosmological thinking: our composition is special, even if our location in space is not. (197) At present it simply seems that we have stumbled onto the cosmic stage at an unusual moment. (197) More universally, the development of physics is akin to the activity of a fisherman, in the sense that we only recover from the sea of knowledge those “discoveries” which are larger than the mesh-size of our mental net. (201)

Palanque-Delabrouile, nathalie. Future directions in cosmology. . . In an article to appear
in the "Challenging the standard cosmological model" issue of Philosophical Transactions A, the Physics director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provides surveys the latest frontiers of our Earthuman universal explorations and instrumental quantifications.

Cosmology is entering an exciting time when a wealth of experiments are collecting data about the nature of dark matter, is dark energy a constant or varying field, the masses of the neutrinos, and more. This contribution provides an overview of upcoming projects and the science opportunities they will allow. In particular, we comment the DESI year-1 BAO constraints and some recent results and new questions in the perspective of the forthcoming observational program.

Palmer, Tim. Lorenz, Gödel and Penrose: New Perspectives on Geometry and Determinism in Fundamental Physics. Contemporary Physics. Online April, 2014. The text of the 9th Dennis Sciama Memorial Lecture by the Oxford University Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics. The paper continues Palmer’s project, search here and arXiv, to explain with novel theoretical credence a 21st century cosmic development by way of invariant nonlinear complex systems: "the universe as a dynamical system." With 20th century relativity and quantum theories in place, these new perceptions of nature’s universal iteration presage a revolutionary self-emergent cosmos. Palmer took his doctorate with Sciama at Oxford in the 1970s so is well versed to do so. In regard, Dennis Sciama was scientist-in-resident in 1979 at near by Mount Holyoke College where he ran a premier lecture series with speakers from Max Delbruck to Virginia Trimble. Some decades later this endeavor to engage and comprehend an inherently self-creating genesis universe continues forth.

Meteorologist Ed Lorenz, pioneer of chaos theory, is well known for his demonstration of `the butterfly effect'. More fundamentally, however, Lorenz's research established a profound link between space-time calculus and state-space fractal geometry. Amazingly, properties of Lorenz's fractal invariant set can be shown to relate space-time calculus to deep areas of mathematics associated with Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and G\"{o}del's Incompleteness Theorem. Motivated by this, it is proposed that our theories of fundamental physics should also be framed in terms of state-space geometry rather than the traditional space-time calculus. To develop these ideas more concretely, it is supposed that the universe U is itself a deterministic dynamical system evolving on a fractal invariant set I_U in its state space. (Abstract)

The Universe as a Dynamical System. There is nothing especially new about considering the universe as a gravitationally closed relativistic dynamical system. But what is the evidence that the universe can be considered a dynamical system evolving on a fractal invariant set? If p denotes the state of the universe at some time and if the universe is evolving on a compact fractal invariant set IU in state space, then after a finite period of time the state of the universe should return to a state arbitrarily close to p. In other words, the universe must be quasi-cyclic. In recent years the notion of a cyclic universe is re-gaining popularity and bothstring theory and loop quantum gravity support cyclic cosmological models. Whilst a strictly cyclic universe is periodic, implying that its trajectory in state space is a closed loop, there is no reason from these models strict periodicity. Viewed in this way, the notion of the universe evolving on a fractal invariant set implies a rather novel perspective on the multiverse, a concept so prevalent in modern cosmology. That is to say, the ‘parallel universes’ in the neighbourhood of p do not represent ‘other worlds’ but rather represent states of our own world at future aeons. (13)

Peacock, John. Cosmological Physics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. A large textbook presents the realms of relativity theory, quantum fields, galaxy formation, and an embryonic, developing cosmos.

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