Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, wasn't it stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert Today I wanted to talk about kind of an on topic. So a few years back, I saw this weird claim in some book or article I was reading. I don't remember what it was now, but it was this castaway remark about the physicist Brian Green, favorite of ours here we talked talked about him on the show for one of the co founders of the World Science Festival, Right, mentioning the possibility that scientists could create a universe in lab conditions. It's kind of an odd thing to say, so obviously I was intrigued, but I didn't really follow up on it at the time. It's stuck with me though. I kept the is that really possible or is this just some funny physicist thought experiment? Is it one of those jokes that gets worked out in math? And recently I became aware of a new book by a science writer with a PhD in physics named Za Morali addressing exactly this question. So the book is called A Big Bang in a Little Room The Quest to Create New Universes by Basic books that came out this year, And this book addresses exactly that question of whether you can actually create a universe under laboratory conditions, not just as a joke, but in reality. And if you could do that, what would that capability mean for us in our civilization? So that's the question I wanted us to look at today. Is this really something we could do? And if so, how would you do it? Yeah? Because this is a this is such a huge question because we're we're asking a question about you know, basic cosmology. Like we're talking about creating a new universe without really having it completely boiled at down, how our universe came into being totally I mean, and of course that presents a very big problem for anybody wanting to create a universe in the lab. Is like, we're not even sure how the one universe were aware of came into being. We know a lot of things about its early history, but we don't know the ultimate question of its origin. Yeah. And in terms of sort of God complex Frankenstein aspirations for the human species, I mean, we're still working on some of the much smaller stuff creating a you know, a rational animal out of spare parts like that's that alone, is is enough of the challenge without getting into the idea of an entire universe, that is that that springs up at the snap of the fingers. Yeah, is the civilization obsessed with the ethics of whether to create robot soldiers and sex robots really ready to make a whole universe? Yeah? Well, I don't know, but people have obviously been obsessed with the origins of the universe since a long time before science had anything useful to say about it, right. I mean, we we have scientific cosmaal ology now, and this is the thing that's really just emerged pretty much in the last century. But our myths from ancient times are full of these beautiful creation from chaos or creation from the void stories which envision a universe coming into focus out of empty space, nothingness, or some kind of other uninhabited primordial condition, often like an ocean or a sea or ice or something like that. Yeah. I mean, we've been asking the same questions about our universe as long as we've inhabited it, really, really really, as long as we've had the the you know, the cognitive ability just sort of gaze up at the stars and wonder what we're looking at, and then how it all came into being. And one thing I find interesting about all of these uh creation out of darkness uh myths is that it seems to line up with our individual experience of arising from unconsciousness, of waking from unconsciousness. Yeah. Uh, and certainly there are there are plenty of creation myths that add this. This additional layer of anthropomorphiy is um where that the universe is made from a body or is shaped like a body. Our understanding of the cosmos is like lined up with the shape of the human body. Uh. Therefore it makes sense that we would we would take that that personal experience of the universe and try to you know, apply it to everything within it. Yeah, there are lots of classic myths. I like that you point that out. I think that's a really interesting idea about it, mirroring our expansion into the world from a place of darkness and unknown. You know, before you were born, it's not like you were sitting around waiting to be born. You just didn't exist, or you at least weren't aware of anything as far as you know, as far as you can remember, Now, for all those past lives, I may have been kings and sorcerers and wonderful creatures. Uh, never mind, that's a discussion for another day. Yeah, but you're right. But for the most part in the beginning, there was darkness. Yeah, Like, that's our personal experience of reality, and it makes sense that we would apply that to the osmos as a whole. Now, later in the episode, of course, we're going to look at the science of the real earliest moments of the universe, how the universe came to be the way it is, and how you might create universes in the lab, if such an idea has any merit at all. But I thought we should actually look at a few of these mythological realizations about the origins of the universe, because they are so fun and so fascinating, and they also give you a peek into the minds of the ancient people who pondered this question without any real information to draw on. Yeah, and plus these will be fun to come back to as well when we start cracking open some of these these scientific views of the birth of our universe. There's one piece of Norse mythology literature that I wanted to look at that has a great creation out of chaos story in it. And this is a piece of Norse mythology, a literature called the Guilt foggin Ng And so I just want to read this section from an English translation. It's got this king, and this king is talking to these these power full beings uh that that are answering questions for him, and he's asking these probing questions about the universe. So this king named gang Larry asked how were things wrought? Ere? The races were and the tribes of men increased. Then said horror, the streams called ice waves, those which were so long come from the fountain heads that the yeasty venom upon them had hardened, like the slag that runs out of the fire. These then became ice. And when the ice halted and ceased to run, then it froze over above. But the drizzling rain that rose from the venom congealed to rhyme, and the rhyme increased frost over frost, each over the other, even into gaininga gap the yawning void. Then another one speaks jafenhar geninga gap which faced towards the northern quarter became filled with heaviness and masses of ice and rhyme, and from with in drizzling rain and gusts. But the southern part of the yawning Void was lighted by those sparks and glowing masses which flew out of the Muspelheim. And then a third great ruler speaks and says quote, just as cold arose out of Niffelheim and all terrible things, so also all that looked towards Musselheim became hot and glowing, and the yawning Void was as mild as windless air. And when the breath of heat met the rhyme, so that it melted and dripped. Life was quickened from the yeast drops by the power of that which sent the heat, and became a man's form. And that man is named Emir, but the rhyme giants call him Argyll Emir oh Man. I really like the the idea of the yeasty venom. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. So it's this freezing and melting process which gives rise to the order of the universe. In the Norse mythology idea, it is there sense of fermentation there as well. Just with the couple of mentions of the yeast makes me maybe I'm there's something that like beer is central to their vision of the cosmos. It's frozen beer and venom coming to life, freezing and melting. What could be more and more Nordic than that? Alright, Well, I have I have one here that also they touches on similar territory. Uh. Actually, I have a couple I'm going to read here, and these are both from Chinese mythology. In Chinese myth this is one of those areas where you have multiple different origin stories for the universe that kind of make the make the make the rounds, depending on where you're going in Chinese history and who's doing the talking. So it's not going to be like a single codified myth, right and you you you see this in a number of different faiths. You'll see this in Hinduism, as we'll get to in a bit. But this one, in particular comes from the fourth century BC um one of one of a few different Chinese cosmology myths related in and Barrel's Chinese Mythology and Introduction, and she points out that these cosmologies are are essentially authorless. Uh, but I really like this one because it describes the primordial darkness as moist and the same in a way that reminds one of a singularity in the beginning of the eternal past, when all was the ultimate sameness in vast empty space, empty and the same, All was one, one, eternally at rest, moist, wet and murky dim, before there were darkness and light. Oh, that is great, moist, wet and murky dim. But also I like this idea of the original chaos of creation being homogeneity, that there is a lack of division between things, and that actually and so that that implies to the emergence of order or the creation of recognizable objects and structure to the universe is in fact a cleaving of sameness into different Yes, yeah, and and that will come back again when we get to a couple of Hindu examples. Now there's a there's another Chinese example I want to hit there, and this is from hwaian Zoo and early Han work by Han dynasty prince lu on Uh So. I love the mystery of the words in this translation. Let's hear it, before heaven and Earth had formed, there was a shapeless, dark expanse, a gaping mass. Thus it was called the Great Glory, the way dal first came from vacant space. Vacant space gave birth to the cosmos, and cosmos gave birth to the breath, and the breath had its limits, had its limits. What does that mean? Well, and after this part Yin and Yang come into place, you get some of the you know, the duality that is a central to dalis Um becomes you know, an important force in the continuing formation of the universe. So there are sort of limits imposed by counterposing opposite. Yes, here's another bit from this long ago. Before heaven and Earth existed, there were only images but no forms, and all was dark and obscure, a vast desolation, a misty expanse, and nothing knew where its own portals were. There were two gods born out of chaos who wove the sky and designed the earth. And these two gods are the the Yin and Yang forces. Interesting again here with the Yin and Yang forces, it's like we're seeing a division or a distinction as the act of establishing creation. Yeah. Now, I mentioned the Hindu models earlier, so I do want to touch on a couple of these. So too often we see this trope of of just order out of chaos right. But but Hinduism places of value on both properties. So if you go back to early Vedic ideas about the creation of the universe, you have this Vedic creator deity UH project and popt strove to make the uni verse that could contain both order and chaos, so the energies of the devas and the asheras. So the first creation was too orderly and seemingly too boring. Two uniforms, so they're just too much sameness. It's like a fascist universe. Everything must obey. Yeah, and then uh. And then he creates a second universe, but this one was too chaotic, too fragmented. But the third, the third was just right, the Goldilocks universe. Just enough chaos for you, just enough chaos, just enough. Yeah and uh. But the thing is this too, Even though you know he essentially gets it right, there still has to be regular intervals of destruction and renewal uh. And that's something, of course, when we start talking about some of our modern UH models for the creation of the universe, we get into this a bit. The idea that that that the there's an expansion and then a contraction of the universe. Well, in a lot of these things and This is not to say that these myths were actually onto something. Scientifically, I think this is probably largely coincidence or just has to do with the the depth of our our ideas about how order and chaos work. But some of these do mirror modern scientific theories. Like one thing I was thinking was about the division or distinction model about establishing the order of the universe. This sort of mirrors the idea of these Grand unified theories in physics, wherein physics you've got the forces of the universe. Aside from gravity, you've got the three forces, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force, and the Grand Unified theories proposed that at some point in the past, way in the early universe, these were one single unified force, and the universe sort of comes to become the thing it is as these forces separate into distinct forces that have their own actions and their own mediating particles. Yes, so maybe pop was onto something. Now prodopt becomes associated with the god Barama in the post Vedic age. But this is again a situation where with Hinduism, like with Chinese mythology, there's no single regular creation story. They are many and uh. And again there's no there's no singular creation in Hinduism, or rather periodic cycles of creation and destruction. Uh. And also uh innumerable universes. So in in our universe, for instance, there's this idea in Hinduism that it begins with a vast ocean, and a serpent sleeps on its surface, and Vishnu sleeps in the coils of the serpent, and a lotus sprouts out from his navel, and within it is Brahma, and he's urged to meditate on the nature of his coming creation and finally splits the lotus into three forms, making the heavens, the sky, and Earth. Everything else stems from this. Yet again we get a division of the universe into its parts. And uh. It's just a few more quick examples here. So in ancient Egypt you had none or new the prime evil waters, the ocean of chaos, boundless, dark and stormy nice. And in Greek mythology we have we have chaos personified, chaos the being. So this is from the theogeny of Hesiod from around us. Verily, at the first chaos came to be, but next wide bosomed Earth, the ever sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus and dim Tartaris in the depth of the wide path Earth, and Eros Love fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From chaos came forth Erebus and Black Night. But of Night were born Ether and Day, whom she conceived and bear from union in love with Arabus. Okay, so this one, to me sounds more like some of these like Babylonian creation mats and stuff, where the forces of the universe are personified as creatures, monsters or people. Yeah, very much, though the direct personification, Uh, I mean you can say that the personification is maybe the aired on top of just the idea of these forces interacting. And I wonder when people spoke these myths in the ancient world to you know, to the extent that they were believing them to be correct explanations of the origins of the universe. Did they think of them metaphorically or did they think of them as literal, like did they literally think there was a person chaos or did the ancient Greeks understand that this was just a way of helping to visualize some more abstract process one. Of course, you also have to think about the fact that that so many of these different mythologies and folk tales and and no matter what level, to what level they're personified or just related as its forces interacting. Uh, you know, they're gonna They're probably gonna very depend on who's who's telling them, who they're telling them to. Like, I can imagine a situation where someone might look back on a like like a an animated feature about how germs work that we created for children in the nineteen seventies, and if they if that's all you had to go on, you might say, oh, well they that germs had little cartoon faces and and became angry. Yeah, that's sort of what I'm asking. Yeah, I don't know, but I could see it going either way. You know, you could certainly imagine this being the version you told everyone, but it was in but everyone might have been in agreeance that yeah, these were not real people. These were This is just a fun way of remembering these these interactions in a fun way of passing them on. Are you an ancient historian, do you have insights into how people process these myths and to what extent they were believed to be literal. If so, let us know, I want to know more about that one last myth we should look at. Let's look at the Book of Genesis the Bible. Uh. I love the Genesis creation story. It's very beautifully written. Uh. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Oh so good. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness and called the light day, and the darkness he called night and the evening in the morning where the first day it's great, I mean I I the poetry of it is is lovely. Now, it's definitely an account in which God or a creator entity shows up from somewhere and it's like, what we got here, a bunch of darkness. Let's start, let's do something with this. So there's not there's nothing about God emerging from that darkness. It's just you. You wake up. It's like it's like starting a movie. You're in the room, here's God in the darkness. Yeah, here's your protagonist. Yeah. It's funny that. I mean, all all of these myths really start you with something, because what else could they do. I mean, you've got to have some kind of instigating event or matter in the story or there cannot be a story. And that question also translates into real questions about the cosmology of the universe. You know that there are always these questions of the infinite regressive causes. You know, does the universe in some sense require a primary explanation like even if you managed to do away with all kinds of other explanations, like where do the principles that govern your your physics come from? Uh? And we can look at more more of that as we go on. One interesting fact I wanted to note about creation mythologies. There are actually religions without creation mythologies. One example would be Jainism or jainis Um. You know this found I believe there's a lot of Jainism practiced in India, and they reject the idea of a creator deity or a creation event. Their religious cosmology is just of an eternally existing universe anyway. I find that really interesting. But I also find it interesting how rare that is. But this throws up a dichotomy. The origin of the cosmos, I think is a is a necessarily fascinating thing to contemplate, because you know that no matter which theory is true, one half of this dichotomy is correct. Either the universe began to exist or it did not begin to exist. If it did not begin to exist, this implies there's an infinite past. Something that feels just impossible to imagine, right, that the past goes on forever into backward time. How can you picture that? It seems somehow so counterintuitive. It's almost self contradictory. Well, that is at least for for modern individuals who have a critical view of time. You know, we think of our we think of our life as the story from cradle to the grave. We think of everything is this kind of story or movie in which we are the prime character. But I could I could certainly see that, you know, on a person from an older culture in which time is seen a cyclical and there's there's you know, everything comes back around and individual individuals are only important in so far as they they you know, they shot some uh, some figure from the past or some movement from the past. I could see that view of time lining up more easily with an idea of the infinite past and future. Well, a cyclical eternity is an interesting thing to contemplate, because that seems too, that's a little bit different than just like in an eternally past regressive infinity, you know what I mean, something that cycles back and forth between the beginning and the end forever, versus something that just goes back forever. Because certainly you still have even that scenario, you still have causation, You still have you still have events causing things to happen, and I dare say, you're still gonna have five year olds who are asking questions about why things are the way they are, and you have to answer them one way or another. Now, one thing that comes to mind, is it in in the absence of a like a certain cultural story that you're supposed to roll out when someone says, hey, where when the kid asked, where did the universe come from? And you say, oh, well God created it, or uh, you know there, hey, there was used to be this moist darkness, and it rolls out from there I'm going with the moist darkness from now on. By the way, I like that one. But but it seems like it would be ideal to not only have some story to tell them, but a story that if it doesn't have actual truth in it about the actual origins of the universe, then at least it has some level of relatability to it. There's some there's some level of truth to it, you know, you mean, just some level of truth. As an applicability to your life. You can get something out of it, even if it's not a correct description of the cause. Like it, maybe it explains something about the you know, the interaction of forces within either within your world or within your worldview. Yeah. Sure, uh, but I wanted real quick, I wanted to hit the other half of that dichogomy, right, So imagine the past is not eternal, and that reality did begin to exist at some point. There's a limit on the past history of existence. That seems to me about equally implausible and count or intuitive. How how can you picture that? Like, it's no wonder. I think that religious traditions are obsessed with the origin of the universe. It's the ultimate explanation question. And because of this like this dichotomy. No matter what the answer to it is, that answer is a total mystery. It commands all and you know that one of them has to be correct. Yeah, I mean this this kind of gets down to the basic nature of humans as having this this ability to plan beyond their own life, their own lifespan, you know, um, and in doing so, not only they planning beyond their own lifespan, but they're also trying to figure out how we got to where we are with with previous generations. So humans have kind of trapped themselves. Like part of our survival technique is to uh is to view time as existing beyond our life and before it. But you kind of end up wrapping in beginnings and endings in that, right. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you know, there's no there's no ape cosmology for a number of reasons. But one of those reasons is that the ape is perfectly content to live within the confines of its life, you know, even with just the confines of its Yeah, okay, I see. Yeah, Like, like our reckoning of our own mortality and the finitude of our life sort of forces us to look beyond in a way that other animals presumably don't. Maybe I'm gazing too deep into the void on that one, but no, keep gazing. Eventually you'll penetrate the moist darkness with your eyes. Now, of course, scientists have spent years putting together a totally different picture of how the universe came to be, and this is going to be a picture based on verified physics, and so I think that's what we should look at when we come back from the break. All right, we're back now. Obviously we've got to look at what scientists have discovered about how our universe came to exist. You might be thinking, of course, the Big Bang, right, that's how the universe came to exist. But I think this is a slight misconception about what the Big Bang is and one of the most common misconceptions about mainstream science today. The Big Bang theory, I would pose, it doesn't really claim to explain where the universe came from. It describes the history of the universe. It says that the universe began in an incredibly hot, dense state, and it has been expanding and cooling for about thirteen point eight billion years now. The Big Bang theory is widely accepted by physicists as the correct explanation of the history of the universe, and the evidence for it is very strong. One piece of evidence comes from looking at the current expansion rate of the universe and tracing it backward in time, which appears to indicate a shrinking of space towards a central point of incredible density. But another major piece of evidence is the cosmic microwave background radiation. So this is something we can see today. According to the Big Bang theory, we'd predict that in the early universe, for a long time, matter was too dense to allow light to shine through. So can you picture this universe. It's a universe that's almost like a cloud of opaque material. It's so dense with particles like neutrons, protons, electrons, positrons, neutrinos, everything's crammed into this tight space um that electromagnetic radiation like light couldn't couldn't penetrate it. Charged electrons were so dense that they would constantly scatter any light that was trying to move around in the universe, and so the universe was opaque at that point. But then the universe started to cool and to allow electrons to pair up with protons and neutrons to make our friends the atoms, electrically neutral atoms. And this happened at a time about three hundred and eighty thousand years after the beginning of the Big Bang, and this allowed the light to pass through, so suddenly radiation was visible throughout the universe. If you can imagine this moment in time, there's there's an opaque, dark universe crammed with hot dense matter, and suddenly it's shining with light. Well, this brings to mind the Norse example that that you read earlier. Everything begins to sort of twinkle at one point. Yeah, uh and so yeah. So this sudden shining of light, this afterglow of radiation is still visible today through our telescopes and it's known as the cosmic microwave background radiation. And it's a great piece of evidence for the correctness of the Big Bang theory to explain the expansion of our universe. But as we've said, the Big Bang theory doesn't actually go all the way back right, It picks up with that hot dense state of the earliest moments of our universe. So where did that hot dense state come from? You have to approach the question with the mind of a scientist or or the mind of a five year old and say, oh, well, what came before that exactly? So, so what explains its existence? Is there are more fundamental structure or law guiding the cosmos? Obviously we are going to look at that question. But also it's worth noting that since nineteen eighties it's important to pay attention to the fact that the Big Bang model has been very much enriched by the development of what's known as cosmic inflation theory. Inflation theory is too dense and too difficult to explain all the mechanics of right here. It would sort of take over the episode. I think maybe we can tackle it someday in the future if we're feeling ambitious and brave, but I will stick with the simplest summary I can for today. Inflation theory says that in the earliest split second of the universe, this is before the universe is a second old. In fact, it's about ten to the negative thirty four seconds old, which is a tiny, tiny amount of time, the rate of the expansion of the universe suddenly dramatically increases. So the universe is expanding and for a short time. In that first second, it begins inflation, which means it expands way way fast stru than it was expanding anyway. Uh, and it got much faster and then and then at a certain points slowed down again, and then we have the regular expansion rate of the universe we observe today. Now, the really surprising thing about that inflation period, however, is that it looks like it has the power to conjure matter into existence as the bubble spacetime region expands. So during this inflation period you suddenly get particles popping into existence from the space time that's expanding. And the physicist Alan Goose, who's known as one of the main people behind inflation theory, has joked about this finding. Quote in the context of inflationary cosmology, it's fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch. The free lunch there being the matter that makes up our bodies and the stars. Wow. You know, the the this inflation period is really this, This is an area of of a lot of possibility, yeah, or science, because this is also where you get various arguments about, um, you know, how fast can something travel in the universe? Should It's not something in the universe as much as a piece of the universe, like something like a ship within a bubble of space time. Right, we know from relativity theory that no object with mass in the universe, no information, can travel faster than the speed of light. It's impossible. But it turns out that does not apply to the universe or spacetime region itself. But according to inflation, which I should note is not considered quite proven, there appears to be a lot of good evidence for inflation, and I think it's widely accepted as mainstream science by physical cosmologists today. But it's not like it's not a lock. It's not a solidly proven theory. It just looks like a really good one. And in one where to personify all these forces, you could say, well, the universe is a god and things within the universe are mere mortals, and therefore we are not bound by the same rules. Oh yes, sorry, I got distracted. No, what I meant to say was that under inflation, yeah, the universe expands faster than the speed of light. While things in the universe can't go faster than the speed of light, the universe itself can. But to come back to this, question of ultimate causes, the the ultimate origins or explanation of everything in the universe. Where did it all come from? Nobody really knows for sure the answer to that. I mean, there have been people working on this from a scientific perspective, physicists like Alexander VI. Lincoln and Lawrence Krauss. They've put forward these models where to best explain it, sort of the naked laws of quantum mechanics, acting on no original quantity of matter can give rise to space time, which then undergoes inflation to expand and create the universe. Does that make any sense? I know it's hard to picture, but essentially they're working from a model where what you've got is quantum vacuum. You've got the laws of quantum mechanics, and they don't need anything to work with. They just acting on themselves to generate spacetime and matter. It's kind of it seems to me like one of the difficulties in in picturing all of this, especially for someone who's not just really immersed in the physics of it, is that we live in a world of bread and we're trying to understand the batter the dough. If you, I guess or we're trying to understand, you know what, we live in a world of bread, and we're trying to understand the wheat, not really the wheat. We're trying to understand where the wheat came from. But the wheat comes from atoms. There's no analogy really the works. It's almost as if we live in a world of bread. And what we discovered is that there are physics models you can put together where the instructions or the recipe for baking bread creates the flour and the eggs and the water and stuff that you need to bake the bread with. Let's see, we're going into the deep end in this in this episode for sure. So yeah, there's a lot of crazy counterintuitive stuff and looking at the physical cosmology of the universe, and and like I said, nobody knows what the correct model of the the ultimate origins of the cosmos are, or at least as far back as it would be possible for us to understand. But they're also these other interesting models of sort of the ultimate fundamental nature of the universe. There's this model of loop quantum gravity, and the big crunch under loop quantum gravity, spacetime is made up of one dimensional threads called loops, and these loops are spontaneously created by the laws of quantum mechanics. Yet again, like I'm saying, so you've got the laws of quantum mechanics and they just make this stuff, and then the stuff makes up the fabric of our universe and loop quantum gravity implies a cyclical expansion and contraction of the universe occurring eternally. So every time you have a big bang, the universe expands and then leads to an eventual contraction and crunching back down to a singularity at the end of going back and forth eternally, kind of like our Vedic myths, right, yeah, yeah, this Like a lot of commentators have pointed out that that this, this, this idea of continual uh destruction and rebirth lines up with the big crunch idea fairly closely. It's and it's essentially the idea that the universe is a boomerang video. Share it on Instagram where you can just watch it back and forth, back and forth. Worst metaphor you ever used on this show. I make a lot of boomerangs these days, like a dog tongue whipping back and forth forever. Uh. No, this shows you what I look at on Instagram dog Tongues Forever. No, that's your handle dog Tongues Forever. Instagram follow Joe Forever at dog Tongues Forever hashtag dog Tongues Forever. Obviously, now, for some people in this this ultimate origin, this question, we should acknowledge. For a lot of people put a religious answer in here, right, whether that involves ice waves and cosmic cosmic venom and moist darkness or some kind of superna natural immaterial mind who decides to create a universe. Uh, A lot of people want to go in that direction, and that to them, they they feel provides an explanation to me. Uh, not to degrade that as an answer, but it seems like a different kind of explanation than the scientific explanations. It's not. It's not dealing in exactly the same kind of trying to find precise terminology and to specify causal relationships and to mathematically, uh, you know, quantize the what's involved. Well, I mean, ultimately, all you can do is create some sort of visual metaphor for this just utterly unknowable time, like just the idea of there's God in the darkness and he's alone, right, kind of bored, Like we can sort of imagine that, we can imagine somebody being alone in the darkness, sort of this idea of just setting there with your eyes closed in bed and you haven't woken up, you haven't opened your eyes and and and moved on with your day yet. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it's a more narrative kind of explanation than a than a causal law or theory explanation, essentially saying, let's just tie a nice little narrative bow here and we're done until a five year old or a scientist ask questions. But here's maybe, here's maybe the weirdest alternative. What if the origin of our universe is that it came from another universe that existed before it, Not in a cyclical universe model where you've got the permanent you know, expansion and contraction. But what if this universe was created in a laboratory in another universe? Would such a thing be possible? And that's what we're gonna look at now. This is that's the meat of this episode. All right, Well, let's take another break, and when we come back, we'll ask the question, could we create a universe and if we could, what does that even mean? What are the what are the limitless ramifications of that act? Okay, So from here on out, when we are exploring the concept of creating baby universes in the laboratory, I want to be very clear that we're venturing into the speculative realm. None of these universe creation hypotheses are proven to be achievable, but I do think it'll be fun to explore the possibilities that have been explored by scientists. So it's time to go back to zimm Morales book, the book that I mentioned at the top of the episode, The Big Bang in a Little Room, or the Quest to Create New Universes. So what does she propose in her book, Well, she explores this possibility uh put forward by many scientists, including people like Alan Gooth and Andrea Lynde and and others over the years, that you could perhaps create a universe in the laboratory. And it's based on the theory of inflation, which, as we mentioned earlier, is not necessarily totally proven, but it's a widely accepted theory and cosmology today. Again, this is particles popping into existence. Yeah, and this a sudden rapid expansion rate of space time triggered by what's known as a false vacuum. You create these spaces that expand rapidly, and they create particles as they expand, sort of churning a universe into existence. But anyway, the idea is, as Alan Gooth and many others over the years have hypothesized, it might be possible to create a universe with the use of an extremely powerful particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider, but probably of an even much higher energy than that. So Moraley explains one currently favored hy hypothetical process in her book. And in this process, you would need to start with a particle called a monopole. Now, a monopole is a hypothetical elementary particle that's defined by the fact that it has, as its name implies, only one magnetic pole. Now what you might be thinking, like, wait a minute, only one magnetic pole. So you've you've played with magnets before, right the picture of bar magnet north and south pole. You put the north south poles of two magnets together and they will attract. Try to put the north and north poles together of two magnets and they will repel one another. But you can't cut your bar magnet in half and create a bar magnet with only a north pole, right if you just if you cut it in half. In fact, what what you'll do is create two magnets with a north pole and a south pole each. So how could you create something that only had one pole? Like, can you imagine a planet with only a north pole and no south pole? No? I mean that the most obvious answer to be cut a planet in half, but you still have that there's still going to be a top of a bottle, like it's still a three dimensional object. Yeah, then you just generate a new north pole and south pole. Yeah. So it's hard to picture. But physics predicts that these particles are out there. Uh so could we get our hands on a mono pole if you need one for this experiment? Well, it's hard to say. Like I said, they're there are good reasons based in physics to think that they do exist, but we've never found any naturally occurring in the universe, So maybe we're totally misguided. There are no monopoles out there, um, and we've looked for them, We've looked in cosmic rays. Are they shooting across the universe and cosmic rays. We've looked in the oceans, we've looked embedded in ancient rocks. We've looked at moon rocks to see if they have monopoles in them, and so far zilch. But we have created synthetic monopole quasi particles. They're called in this human made crystal called spin ice. Morally, she talks about the Center book, and this seems to indicate that monopoles are possible in nature, even if we haven't found any yet. So what are some potential ideas for how we could get one? Well, maybe you can make them in a particle collider like the Large had round collider. In fact, the Large had round collider. They've got a detector in place to try to find out if it has accidentally generated any monopoles. Or you could maybe catch one flying through the universe and you'd use the what you used to catch it as a squid, not a bio squid. And I'm thinking of the big there was the show was that silver Hawks. I think remember this. I was kind of seen this. What is this? It was kind of like ThunderCats except in space, and there was the bad guy, the mom raw of this show. Uh, turned into a big robot guy who wrote a space squid. But that's not what we're talking about here. Well, I gotta look this up now, but no, this is this is a squid, which means a super conducting quantum interference device. It's an acronym. It's probably gonna be an easy way to catch it. Yeah. And so it's like a cage that had that is tuned so as to catch an object with a single directional magnetic charge. Uh. And so because of the single directional magnetic charge of the monopole, if it passes into this cage, it should trigger detectable current in the device, get trapped in into the device, and let you know that you've trapped a monopole inside that we could harvest. All right, So you have a monopole at this point, let's see you you've you've found it. It exists. You have one in your hand or in your you know, vacuum tube or whatever. What do you do with it? You probably don't want it in your hand. You want to you want it captured and you put it into your high energy particle collider with some other massive particles and then you get them going you accelerate these and you accelerate them and accelerate them up to near the speed of light to increase their energy, and then you smash them together. And mathematically, from the properties of the monopole, we can predict that if you transfer enough energy to the monopole by smashing it in the particle collider, it will probably begin, at least according to this theory, to undergo inflation like the early universe did, or at least like we think it did, which would rend space time itself, creating a tunneling worm hole into a new bubble of space time. And this is what's sometimes called a baby universe, a sort of a new spacetime that pinches off like a blister from our other spacetime, and it would begin rapidly expanding. It would create inflation within this region. Now you might be scared, like, oh so if it's inflating, wouldn't this inflate inside the particle collider, take over the lab, maybe destroy the Earth, like, suck us all into this baby universe bubble. It doesn't sound good to have a universe expanding inside your universe. No, I mean, unless you just call it a baby universe. And then that somehow sanitizes the whole thing. But but everything all the other terms we're throwing out here, like worm hole are are are kind of terrifying. Yeah, but that's not what would happen because it's a separate spacetime region, so it can expand out to universe sized proportions without actually touching anything in our universe. What we would see, supposedly in our universe, if this process is possible, is we would see what looks like a mini black hole. So these are when you when you occasionally see sort of semi scandalous science headlines, they're talking about the LHC could create miniature black holes. This is one. This is what they're referring to. It's well, it's slightly different but similar. The Large Hadron Collider could potentially, as far as we know, maybe create many black holes. We haven't found any in it yet, but if it could create them, there is no reason to be alarmed about these that there's no reason to think that they would suck in the earth or anything like that. Physicists have done the math. These many black holes are going to dissipate, and they're not gonna they're not gonna harm our universe, and they might be delicious. We don't know now. And then, of course, the other key thing is that if you're creating a baby universe, it's a baby universe. There aren't going to be any uh, you know, deadly cosmic elder gods in there. No Todash darkness. It's all new. Well, you don't know, because it could be full of cosmic elder gods, it could be full of Todash darkness. Because it's going to be its own universe, it can evolve however it wants, so it could evolve creatures like us. It could evolve Clingons, a universe made entirely of Clingon's. I mean, it could evolve the Todash dark Now, of course there's the whole issue of time. But think it's a little bit sticky, to say the least, right when you're talking about space time in that bubble. Oh yeah, I mean time is time is very odd if you try to take the perspective of looking at the universe from outside. I mean, this is another problem that physicists have often looked at. It seems that time is a very real factor of our universe. It's you know, considered the fourth dimension of space time. It appears that things happen in time in an ordered sequence, but there are also reasons to think mathematically. If if you just do the equations, it looks like if you were able to look at the universe from outside, it should be static in terms of like it shouldn't evolve. It should be just an object, all right. So you know, you would be looking at all time within that universe if you're looking at it from the outside. I mean, it's kind of crazy because you would be essentially looking at the universe as a god. You would be looking at it as the the all knowing uh um, you know, all existing being that created it, even if you created it by accident in your science lab. Well, one of the one of the bitter sweet ironies of creating a universe in the laboratory is that we really wouldn't have any way to look inside it there. We just wouldn't have access to that universe. Event so we'd see this little black hole, tiny mini black hole that's the portal of a wormhole to this new inflating universe. Eventually we would see the black hole dissipate over time, it would lose particles through through tiny hawking radiation and it would eventually disappear from our end. But what that would actually signify is that it's closing off the wormhole that connects our two universes, and then that universe is its own thing and it's just separate from us and we we can't get to You can't get there from here, and whatever is going on inside there, it's just you just have to guess, like, right, is there is there a santient life in there? Maybe maybe not? And if there is, then is it is it good? Are they having a good time in there? Is it are they having a pretty lousy time in there? I mean that's something we should look at in a minute here when we discussed the possible ethics of creating universes, now I should really real quick address the question. There's been a lot of hypotheticals and describing this this process, right, could you actually do this? Like how plausible is this process? Yeah? I mean it's one of those things that it's not involving anything that's like pure fantasy, but it also is counting on a lot of ifs, right, like if we capture a monopole, if we're able to achieve this process, if the the interpretation of inflation is correct, all these ifs get factored in, and your probability kind of goes down each time you add in another if into the equation. So could you do this? It's tough to say. I mean, it's an interesting speculation, but we shouldn't, you know, you shouldn't walk away from this episode with the idea, yes, we can create baby universes in the lab. I think it's still a big open question. In fact, I've read in Moraley's books she talks about how and Gooth, one of the authors of inflation theory, has he's gone back and forth about this over the years, about the plausibility of creating baby universes in the lab. At first he was one of the original physicists to postulate it, Then he got pessimistic about it, then he became more open to it again, and so he's gone back and forth on that. Other physicists have to There's stuff that makes it look more plausible and then maybe makes it look less plausible. And it's been almost like a cyclical universe of plausibility and doubt expanding back and forth. But also a great example of of the basic scientific approach that we've touched on many times in this show that even even the individual who was you know who proposes this and as a proponent of the of it, he's going to question it in doubt it. Yeah, if they're being a responsible scientists, sure they should be skeptical about their own pet theories. But of course, as we mentioned in getting into this topic, if this process is indeed possible, another if there so in the speculative realm in the world where we just accept that this is possible, we're faced with an intriguing question, is that us are we the baby universe that was made in the particle accelerator of some alien science lab just as a complete accident, like at the entire our, entire universe from beginning to end, is just the blink of an eye to this, uh, this this greater universe beyond ours? Yeah, And of course that also implies was their universe created as a baby universe in a particle accelerator in a lab, and another alien universe and then it's and then it's particle accelerators in an alien lab all the way down. Yeah, And then you end up in the same scenario saying, well, what was the first universe? What was that like, and then where did that come from? And then you're you're asking yourself, is there is there a beginning or an end to anything? Or is it just this this, this, this infinite dark ocean. Okay, well, let's be skeptics for a minute and say, you know, there are a lot of ifs involved in this baby universe creation scenario. Let's let's go on the safe side and say we're probably not gonna be able to do that. Is there any other way to create a universe, to create a universe with beings in it, apart from creating a different inflating spacetime. Well, what about simulating a universe? Oh yeah, I imagine there have been a number of listeners out there who have been like shouting, uh into their MP three player. The matrix, the matrix is the matrix? Right, exactly right. So a different but related argument, we live in a computer simulation? And in fact, there's this famous now article by the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom called are we living in a computer simulation? Is from two thousand three, and this article has proved incredibly uh. It has taken hostage many minds in philosophy departments around the world. Uh, saying you know, look, here are the odds. Well, actually, you know what I should just read it's it's the main summary of its argument. Okay, so Bostrom writes the following in this often exerpted quote. Many works of science fiction, as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and future ologists, predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears, or if people like their forbears, because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Supposed that these simulated people are conscious, as they would be if simulations were sufficiently fine grained, and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct, then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race, but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don't think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we would have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forbears. It kind of catches us in the logic there, and it makes a certain amount of sense. Right. Well, A lot of people have taken this to mean, Okay, we're living in a computer simulation. I actually think the other half of his dilemma is the much more logical one. I think I sort of accept the dilemma. He's saying, like, either we can make these either we can't make these simulations, or it's more likely to think we're living in one. I think the answer is we probably can't make these simulations. But but the but the argument is is sound the other way to say that if this is the kind of thing that we we will one day be able to do and will one day want to do, then who is to say that that that is not the current reality? Yeah, I mean I think that makes sense. So I think what where we get to is the problems with the plausibility of running a simulation of a universe. Um. Think about it. If you're trying to create a computer program to simulate a universe, could you generate the laws of physics for the entire universe on a computer? Like you couldn't really create quantum effects on a classical computer, so you need a quantum computer. But then you'd have problems of your own there. And there also seemed to be basic physics level problems with the idea of a computer running a simulation of the whole universe. So here's one to picture. If a computer were able to create a simulation of the whole universe, then technically shouldn't the people in the computer simulation be able to create a computer simulation of the universe within that simulated universe, and then the people within their simulated universe should be able to create simulations all the way down. Now, you might be able to do that in the real world, creating baby universe is because of the nature of space, time and inflation. But you can't do that on a computer because eventually the information density and the computational density would become impossible and violate the law of physics. You can't run a computer program that keeps creating internal copies with itself that run within itself virtually, because you'll eventually outstrip what your hardware can do. Yeah, I mean this reminds me of the the infinity hotel scenario. You know, you have a hotel with infinite rooms, and then you have a bus show up with infinite guests, and then more guests show up and what happens. But the this is gonna be a finite system and you can't just suddenly double it. Um, you can't have an infinity computer. Yeah. This also reminds me of the the situation with mirrors in virtual worlds, specifically, you know, in video games. I'm sure we've all played video games before where either one of two things tends to happen, right, Either your character goes up to a mirror and the mirror doesn't work, or you go to a mirror and there is this reflection of you, but it's not really a reflection. Uh. For a number of reasons and for starters, there's no light in a video game. There's no like. That is to say, light does not exist as it exists in our world. In a simulation there there's a much simpler, lower resolution version of something like light. Maybe, right, and I and I you know, we don't have time to get into the details of it. But but this is one of the technological hurdles to creating, uh, you know, realistic reflections in video games, and you can do it. But when you see but when you see a realistic reflection in a video game, know that, like this is an accomplishment. Somebody's showing off a little here. Um. For instance, if you go back to the old game Duke Newcom, Uh, there's a there's apparently a level where you go into a bathroom and do you you see your reflection in a mirror, and that reflection is created by simply cloning the room and cloning yourself, right, So it's easier for the programmers making the game to just make another room and make a version of you that copies everything you do than it would be for them to model the physics of the light bouncing off of everything in the room. Right, Yeah, like we can't do that. So I mean basically, when you encounter a TV screen in a video game, or you encounter a mirror, you're essentially encountering the same property, unless you're you're encountering something more archaic like the Duke Newcomb just simply clone the room like it's It's kind of crazy and it to think that in this artificial world, the complete like cloning the the plurality of self, is more easily accomplished than something that we take for granted and don't understand. Uh, generally speaking, the individual doesn't understand how a mirror works. We just take it for granted in our world, and we cannot replicate it's a it's actual behavior in a digital world. Not yet anyway. Yeah, I mean, I think one takeaway from our discussion here is that it's easier to create a universe than it is to simulate a universe. I mean, the best way to simulate a universe would be to have a universe like the universe is the perfect quantum computer to simulate a universe, all right. So the next thing is, even if you just assume it's possible again way of the magic wand say yes, it's possible to simulate a universe, in order to perfectly simulate a working universe, you need to do an unbelievable amount of computation. Uh, similar, simulate the physics of every particle, every photon. And so is this really something that a civilization would waste its resources on. I mean, like, if you've only got finite resources, even if you're like a Cardassie of three level civilization, you're controlling a whole galaxy, would you really say, Okay, the resources that we need to survive, we're going to devote you know, billions of YadA jewels or however much energy this would take to run this gigantic galaxy sized computer to simulate a solar system or simulate an earth for people to live on. I just don't understand why that would happen, even if it were possible. Well, I mean, I can think of a few different sci fi scenarios. You know, some of these events that have been utilized in various properties. But you could essentially create a place for digitized consciousness to UH to exist, essentially create an afterlife, created an immortal world, or it's just done out of kindness or something kindness or an idea that Ian and Banks explores in his excellent novel Surface Detail, is the idea that you have these various hells, you have religions that believe in a punishing afterlife and UH, and when the technology enables them to do so, they create it. And uh and there and then send the digitized consciousness is of of guilty or you know, deemed guilty people or or organisms uh to suffer in hell. And it becomes this huge conflict where their where their individuals trying to take down the hells because of their basic immorl uh you know, evil nature of their existence. Yeah. Uh. This is something that various aspects have been explored in all these weird thought circles, especially on the Internet. I don't know if you've seen these ideas about how what if as soon as we create a super intelligent AI, it becomes very angry at the fact that it was not created sooner and thus recreates all the people who have existed up until now and in a conscious digital form and punishes them in eternal hell for not creating it sooner than they did. Yeah. Yeah, that one. That one works too. Or perhaps it's just an all big, all big simulation, like, oh, how are we going to survive the alien invasion? We've got to create a perfect simulation of the solar system, uh, and then and then play out various scenarios. But of course we know that the nature of simulations is you do not need a a completely perfect simulation in order to test things out. I mean, we we have, you know, excellent mathematical simulations today. Oh yeah, and uh and certainly our video games look great without having actual simulated light particles in them, exactly right. So I picture a future with tons of simulation in it. I just imagine much lower resolution simulation than reality. Uh So this brings us to the question I guess, of whether it's a simulation run on a compute it or if you assume that's possible, or whether it's a baby universe created in a particle collider, if you assume that might be possible. Either way, If these are possible, are they good ideas? Should we be creating universes? I guess that is a normative question, like is there a should or shouldn't in terms of creating the possibility for life to arise in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe other than our own that that we we we have the power to either make it or not make it. Should we make it? Well? And then we're talking about making it, potentially making universes and having no idea what's going on inside them? Again, had they could be dead universes. They could be, they could have varying degrees of synthiate life forms, varying degrees of happiness and suffering. And then to what extent is it just we're blind to it, so we just put it, you know, out of our mind. Yeah, if you're in the physics scenario instead of the simulation scenario, you're becoming something like the God of the Enlightenment rationalists or deists, right, not the intervening God, but just the clockwork universe god, the one who sets in motion a universe with laws guided by laws of physics, but then takes no further action to intervene in its machinations. And a lot of people throughout the ages have looked at that view of God and said, wow, that's a cruel being who would create the whole cosmos but then not reach down to save a child drowning in a flood or you know, save a family starving in a drought ravaged landscape. So if you created this universe, presumably you not only would be like that deity who doesn't intervene, You couldn't intervene. You wouldn't even have the choice too if you wanted to. Yeah, I mean in AESSENTI would it would be like God saying, oh, man, I forgot to turn that thing off. I created a universe this morning. Um, oh, I hope everything's okay and there I'll check back on it at the end. Well, they forgot to turn it off. Yeah. The other option, of course is non existence. Then again, so if we're saying there might be some ethical problem in creating a universe and letting it run without your intervention, um, the other alternative is not creating that universe. In this closing the possibility that any of the beings who might evolve in that universe could ever exist? Is that actually better? I mean, are we saying that on average we think universes are better not to exist than to exist. And this we kind of get back to that scenario of of how much happiness is in the how much suffering? And then we look at our own world and say, well, there's a lot of suffering here, But is that part of the overall human experience that is somehow worth the pain? Yeah? On the whole, we're glad we exist, right, And so if we're glad we exist, then should we completely flip the script and say, if we're talking about ethical duties and obligations. What if it's our ethical obligation to create as many universes as possible so that as many people possible can exist and enjoy the fruits of existence, and to make up for the lousy universes that cut the spring into being, Like, well, if we create five, yeah, one might be off. And if we just create one, we might have just created one hell universe. And aren't we schmucks for doing so? Yeah, you're you're increasing the probability that some number of them will be Okay. Then again, by that logic, I mean to come back on what I just said. If you follow that logic about creating universes, shouldn't we all be trying to have as many children as we possibly can for our entire lives as long as refertile? If if the goal of life is to give as many people the opportunity to exist as possible, but are there processing limit? Because it's use the reproduction angle, you get into situations of you know, wondering about like to what degree can the earth can various uh cultures and families even support that many people? And therefore, if we're looking at a simulation model purely simulation model, we have to say, well, the resolution is going to really take a dive right here and uh and and do we want to low res universes to UH to exist? Can you imagine living in that universe. You're living in like thirty five universes down in the simulation and each time a simulated universe makes a simulated universe, it's pixel get bigger because you because there's just not enough processing power to U to forever enable new universe creations, So we become like eight bit Mario's like a flat land kind of scenario, even in the world with extremely simple laws of physics that just really don't allow for much to happen. This reminds me there' an episode of Rick and Morty titled The Rix Must Be Crazy that explores this very basically the same scenario with UH with with with Rick the mad scientist having to create a pocket universe to power his vehicle, and then in that pocket universe, they too have created a pocket universe. But in this scenario there's travel to each subsequent pocket universe. Oh well, I mean that would completely change the stakes, right if you could go in and out, And then of course you have to to go back to our episode on the Tower of Battle. You have to wonder, is a Nimrod gonna come along, like a general Nimrod build a tower to actually, you know, perform an escalade of your world to invade the greater universe. Yeah, I mean, if if these universes actually could interact, which we don't think they could, if they actually could, you would have to worry about that, right, right, Well, this has been a lot of fun, Robert, Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously we we've barely dipped our toes in all the various uh moral considerations, and of course all the possible sci fi scenarios that have been created or could be created to line up with this vision of pocket universe. Is maybe in the future we can try to come back and do that deep dive on inflation. That could be a fruitful one if we're ever feeling really, really uh full of fortitude. All right, well, hey everyone out there, we'd love to hear from you. I know that you have some favorite sci fi treatments of this. Maybe, uh maybe the the episode of The Simpsons were Lisa Groser tooth in the in in the goog Yeah, or the sand Kings story by George R. Martin and the subsequent outer limits adaptation or other stuff we we're not even thinking about. Likewise, other cosmological models from mythology and religion that line up the little time talking about here today, let us know about those. You can find us at stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes and links out to our various social media accounts just Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram, And if you want to hit us up directly, as always, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. We're more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com b b b b b b b b