R.E. Slater - Process Panpsychism: "Is the Universe Conscious?"

Is the universe "conscious"

Process Panpsychism

by R.E. Slater

We are deeply connected to the cosmos

So I'm not sure where Klee Irwin is going in his 6 part Emergence Theory Overview series below having not reviewed it in the detail it requires, but I would like to state for the record that at Relevancy22 we discuss Process Philosophy and Theology on a regular basis. You need look no farther than Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism to discover that the cosmos in God is described by Process Thought as:

• (cosmo)panrelational - highly relational,

• (cosmo)panexperiential - from whole to parts and parts to whole the cosmos experiences itself through and through, and

• (cosmo)panpsychic - referring to a cosmos which "feels" the entirety of its depth and "being".

1 - Process Thought states that the universe is alive in some sense even as we, ourselves, feel alive to the universe. This is why Whitehead saw the cosmos as a living "organism" that "feels it's existence," by which he was referring to i) all the quantum physical forces and energies and ii) all biologically "living" plants and creatures.

2 - Moreover, our feeling or identity of "aliveness" is NOT unique to ourselves as participants in God's creation but is a result of being deeply connected with the earth, universe, or cosmos (however you wish to term it).

Humanity is not unique to (or separate from) it's environment but is birthed from its environment and shares deeply in its cosmic structures.

That is, panpsychic concepts such as human consciousness is not unique to itself in the human species but is shared with the rest of the cosmos. Which is to say, because the cosmos has some kind of panpsychism within it, the human species does too, as do all things around us.

More simply, we are who we are because of the type of cosmic creation we have evolved from. Rather than looking at humanity as being distinctly unique from its environment we need to see ourselves as deeply connected to the world about us.

Process Resources

The process philosopher, Matt Segall, from CIIS, has lately taken up Whitehead cum John Cobb et al's earlier positions of panpsychism to flesh those viewpoints out a bit more within an extended process context. If you wish to contextualize this area a bit more simply go to the Index section in the topic list to the right and look under "Index - Process Thought with Matt Segall" or "Index to Process Philosophy and Theology" or even "Index - Process Theologian John Cobb."

Process Flow and Rhythm

In short, Process Thought is how one may describe the world and find the process flow and rhythm of life everywhere. From the physical and social sciences, to anthropology and evolution, to literature and economics, and integrally with the all other non-process based philosophies, cosmic process is everywhere.

As example, let's picture the proverbial elephant where blinded philosophers and psychologists are feeling the elephant's tail, trunk, ears, feet, body and making conjectures about the world at large. Essentially, they are seeing the bits and pieces of a process world through their own unique perspectives, which makes process philosophy and theology an integral theory circumscribing all other parts of the sciences, humanities, and so on.

I mention this because here in this post there are two posts which are describing the universe as conscious or as a holographic projection of some kind (Klee Irwin's Quantum Gravity theory). Not unlike other philosophers and scientists of their day they are describing what Whitehead has described in his theory of cosmology as a Process-based Cosmos. These are not new thoughts so much as part of very old discussions.

A Process World attested to in Many Forms

The area of Process Thought would also include religion itself, such as Christianity and Islam, but perhaps more poignantly rests within the Asian cultures of India, China, and the Orient re Buddhism etc. That is, process inhabits all of humanity, from its religious, social, industrial, and recreational life.

For instance, in the area of Christianity there are a number of Process theologians who are reworking process thought into how one thinks about God; how one might read the bible in a legendary and historical, phenomenological, and redactive way; how social justice, personal and church worship, and life constructs might be made more pronounced when speaking to the human religious identity through the multi-hued process perspectives of love, sharing, burden bearing, service, or wellbeing and caretake of the soul.

If process is real it should be found everywhere, and especially in the living out of one's life in a healthily connected way with this earth and all those around us. 

Process is Felt by Many

As a process-based Christian, where I personally wish to stop short epistemically is moving too far into the mystical ideas of New Ageism, Astrology, and the eastern cults which I'll generally describe as Eastern New Ageism. And though I've written past articles giving a nod towards the astral "feeling" of the universe I wish to stop short of using the astral beliefs, or, of entering into the mystical spaces, which may run tangentially in other highly subjectivized directions beyond where process theology might naturally go. More simply, I wish to acknowledge these areas without going too far down the yellow brick world of subjectivized mysticism.

Our identity is found meaningfully

connected to creation about us.

Conclusion

To summarize then, we live in a process creation where there will be those among us who may be more attuned to it than the common man or woman. Who say they "feel" the world in its process flow and energy as if they were human tuning forks grasping to reach into the infinite arrays of cosmic energy flows which touches them in some meaningful way to the "cosmic All", to God, to mankind, or to themselves. It is this very normal, inherently built-in feeling of connectedness to everyone and everything which bears within its organic structures this "beiningness" of presence and relationality which process philosophy and theology is presenting to the colder worlds of our denied irreligious experience.

Our identity is found meaningfully connected to "the creational whole" of life. It is how our God is, and it is that Image of God which we feel or sense all around us.

Process flow is what makes our universe special when we hike down a trail in a sun splashed woods, or ski down a snowy mountainside, canoe across a blue-green lake, hunt or fish or camp, or simply walk the concrete city streets feeling alive to the flow of life flowing everywhere around us.

We sense creation's flow. We feel it. It is how we might describe the process flow of life that hints to the poetry which lives within us as we breathe in-and-out those esoteric feelings of spiritual community every moment of our mortality.

Namaste,

R.E. Slater

November 18, 2021

* * * * * * *

Tetrahedrons representing the quasicrystalline spin network (QSN), the fundamental  sub-
structure of spacetime, according to emergence theory. | Credit: Quantum Gravity Institute

New hypothesis argues the universe simulates itself into existence

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/new-hypothesis-argues-the-universe-simulates-itself-into-existence/#Echobox=1635255704

by Paul Ratner

A physics paper proposes neither you

nor the world around you are real.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A new hypothesis says the universe self-simulates itself in a "strange loop".

• A paper from the Quantum Gravity Research institute proposes there is an underlying panconsciousness.

• The work looks to unify insight from quantum mechanics with a non-materialistic perspective.

How real are you? What if everything you are, everything you know, all the people in your life as well as all the events were not physically there but just a very elaborate simulation? Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper “Are you living in a computer simulation?,” where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know. Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in “reality” is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

The physical universe is a “strange loop” says the new paper titled “The Self-Simulation Hypothesis Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” from the team at the Quantum Gravity Research, a Los Angeles-based theoretical physics institute founded by the scientist and entrepreneur Klee Irwin. They take Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, which maintains that all of reality is an extremely detailed computer program, and ask, rather than relying on advanced lifeforms to create the amazing technology necessary to compose everything within our world, isn’t it more efficient to propose that the universe itself is a “mental self-simulation”? They tie this idea to quantum mechanics, seeing the universe as one of many possible quantum gravity models.

One important aspect that differentiates this view relates to the fact that Bostrom’s original hypothesis is materialistic, seeing the universe as inherently physical. To Bostrom, we could simply be part of an ancestor simulation, engineered by posthumans. Even the process of evolution itself could just be a mechanism by which the future beings are testing countless processes, purposefully moving humans through levels of biological and technological growth. In this way they also generate the supposed information or history of our world. Ultimately, we wouldn’t know the difference.

But where does the physical reality that would generate the simulations comes from, wonder the researchers? Their hypothesis takes a non-materialistic approach, saying that everything is information expressed as thought. As such, the universe “self-actualizes” itself into existence, relying on underlying algorithms and a rule they call “the principle of efficient language.”

What Is Reality? [Official Film]

Mar 4, 2017

Quantum Gravity Research

What if the very fabric of space and time isn't made of one-dimensional strings or energy as we think of it, but instead was simply a code or a language made from a geometric projection?

Quantum Gravity Research is a Los Angeles based team of mathematicians and physicists working on developing a theoretical framework for a first-principles unified quantum gravity theory they call emergence theory. Still in the early stage of development, emergence theory attempts to unify, through mathematical and scientific rigor, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and consciousness.

This film is presented in layperson terms and explains basics tenets of emergence theory, quantum mechanics and digital physics in ways that are meant to be communicative and fun. However, if you'd like to read any of the scientific and more technical papers, please visit our website.

What Is Reality? [Official Film]

Under this proposal, the entire simulation of everything in existence is just one “grand thought.” How would the simulation itself be originated? It was always there, say the researchers, explaining the concept of “timeless emergentism.” According to this idea, time isn’t there at all. Instead, the all-encompassing thought that is our reality offers a nested semblance of a hierarchical order, full of “sub-thoughts” that reach all the way down the rabbit hole towards the base mathematics and fundamental particles. This is also where the rule of efficient language comes in, suggesting that humans themselves are such “emergent sub-thoughts” and they experience and find meaning in the world through other sub-thoughts (called “code-steps or actions”) in the most economical fashion.

In correspondence with Big Think, physicist David Chester elaborated: “While many scientists presume materialism to be true, we believe that quantum mechanics may provide hints that our reality is a mental construct. Recent advances in quantum gravity, such as seeing spacetime emergent via a hologram, also is a hint that spacetime is not fundamental. This is also compatible with ancient Hermetic and Indian philosophy. In a sense, the mental construct of reality creates spacetime to efficiently understand itself by creating a network of subconscious entities that can interact and explore the totality of possibilities.”

The scientists link their hypothesis to panpsychism, which sees everything as thought or consciousness. The authors think that their “panpsychic self-simulation model” can even explain the origin of an overarching panconsciousness at the foundational level of the simulations, which “self-actualizes itself in a strange loop via self-simulation.” This panconsciousness also has free will and its various nested levels essentially have the ability to select what code to actualize, while making syntax choices. The goal of this consciousness? To generate meaning or information.

If all of this is hard to grasp, the authors offer another interesting idea that may link your everyday experience to these philosophical considerations. Think of your dreams as your own personal self-simulations, postulates the team. While they are rather primitive (by super-intelligent future AI standards), dreams tend to provide better resolution than current computer modeling and are a great example of the evolution of the human mind. As the scientists write, “What is most remarkable is the ultra-high-fidelity resolution of these mind-based simulations and the accuracy of the physics therein.” They point especially to lucid dreams, where the dreamer is aware of being in a dream, as instances of very accurate simulations created by your mind that may be impossible to distinguish from any other reality. To that end, now that you’re sitting here reading this article, how do you really know you’re not in a dream? The experience seems very high in resolution but so do some dreams. It’s not too much of a reach to imagine that an extremely powerful computer that we may be able to make in not-too-distant future could duplicate this level of detail.

The team also proposes that in the coming years we will be able to create designer consciousnesses for ourselves as advancements in gene editing could allow us to make our own mind-simulations much more powerful. We may also see minds emerging that do not require matter at all.

While some of these ideas are certainly controversial in the mainstream science circles, Klee and his team respond that “We must critically think about consciousness and certain aspects of philosophy that are uncomfortable subjects to some scientists.”

Want to know more? You can read the full paper online in the journal Entropy.

Klee Irwin - Emergence Theory Overview - Part 1 of 6

Apr 6, 2020

Quantum Gravity Research

Klee Irwin discusses the origin story of how Quantum Gravity Research was started and reviews the latest overview of how the self-simulation based physics of emergence theory is shaping up in its latest evolution at the top of 2020. https://quantumgravityresearch.org/

We now know the big bang theory is (probably) not how the universe began

We now know the big bang theory is

(probably) not how the universe began

https://www.freethink.com/science/big-bang-theory

by Ethan Siegel

October 30, 2021

The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago,

but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.

Where did all this come from? In every direction we care to observe, we find stars, galaxies, clouds of gas and dust, tenuous plasmas, and radiation spanning the gamut of wavelengths: from radio to infrared to visible light to gamma rays. No matter where or how we look at the universe, it’s full of matter and energy absolutely everywhere and at all times. And yet, it’s only natural to assume that it all came from somewhere. If you want to know the answer to the biggest question of all — the question of our cosmic origins — you have to pose the question to the universe itself, and listen to what it tells you.

Today, the universe as we see it is expanding, rarifying (getting less dense), and cooling. Although it’s tempting to simply extrapolate forward in time, when things will be even larger, less dense, and cooler, the laws of physics allow us to extrapolate backward just as easily. Long ago, the universe was smaller, denser, and hotter. How far back can we take this extrapolation? Mathematically, it’s tempting to go as far as possible: all the way back to infinitesimal sizes and infinite densities and temperatures, or what we know as a singularity. This idea, of a singular beginning to space, time, and the universe, was long known as the Big Bang.

But physically, when we looked closely enough, we found that the universe told a different story. Here’s how we know the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore.

Theoretical roots of big bang

Like most stories in science, the origin of the Big Bang has its roots in both theoretical and experimental/observational realms. On the theory side, Einstein put forth his general theory of relativity in 1915: a novel theory of gravity that sought to overthrow Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Although Einstein’s theory was far more intricate and complicated, it wasn’t long before the first exact solutions were found.

1 - In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild found the solution for a pointlike mass, which describes a nonrotating black hole.

2 - In 1917, Willem de Sitter found the solution for an empty universe with a cosmological constant, which describes an exponentially expanding universe.

3 - From 1916 to 1921, the Reissner-Nordström solution, found independently by four researchers, described the spacetime for a charged, spherically symmetric mass.

4 - In 1921, Edward Kasner found a solution that described a matter-and-radiation-free universe that’s anisotropic: different in different directions.

5 - In 1922, Alexander Friedmann discovered the solution for an isotropic (same in all directions) and homogeneous (same at all locations) universe, where any and all types of energy, including matter and radiation, were present.

That last one was very compelling for two reasons. One is that it appeared to describe our universe on the largest scales, where things appear similar, on average, everywhere and in all directions. And two, if you solved the governing equations for this solution — the Friedmann equations — you’d find that the universe it describes cannot be static, but must either expand or contract.

This idea, of a singular beginning to space, time, and the universe, was long known as the Big Bang. But physically, when we looked closely enough, we found that the universe told a different story.

This latter fact was recognized by many, including Einstein, but it wasn’t taken particularly seriously until the observational evidence began to support it. In the 1910s, astronomer Vesto Slipher started observing certain nebulae, which some argued might be galaxies outside of our Milky Way, and found that they were moving fast: far faster than any other objects within our galaxy. Moreover, the majority of them were moving away from us, with fainter, smaller nebulae generally appearing to move faster.

Then, in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble began measuring individual stars in these nebulae and eventually determined the distances to them. Not only were they much farther away than anything else in the galaxy, but the ones at the greater distances were moving away faster than the closer ones.

The universe was expanding.

An illustration of our cosmic history, from the Big Bang until the present, within the context of the expanding universe. The first Friedmann equation describes all of these epochs, from inflation to the Big Bang to the present and far into the future, perfectly accurately, even today. (Credit: NASA/WMAP science team)

Cornerstones of the big bang theory

Georges Lemaître was the first, in 1927, to recognize this. Upon discovering the expansion, he extrapolated backward, theorizing — as any competent mathematician might — that you could go as far back as you wanted: to what he called the primeval atom. In the beginning, he realized, the universe was a hot, dense, and rapidly expanding collection of matter and radiation, and everything around us emerged from this primordial state.

This idea was later developed by others to make a set of additional predictions:

1 - The universe, as we see it today, is more evolved than it was in the past. The farther back we look in space, the farther back we’re also looking in time. So, the objects we see back then should be younger, less gravitationally clumpy, less massive, with fewer heavy elements, and with less-evolved structure. There should even be a point beyond which no stars or galaxies were present.

2 - At some point, the radiation was so hot that neutral atoms couldn’t stably form, because radiation would reliably kick any electrons off of the nuclei they were attempting to bind to, and so there should be a leftover — now cold and sparse — bath of cosmic radiation from this time.

3 - At some extremely early time it would have been so hot that even atomic nuclei would be blasted apart, implying there was an early, pre-stellar phase where nuclear fusion would have occurred: Big Bang nucleosynthesis. From that, we expect there to have been at least a population of light elements and their isotopes spread throughout the universe before any stars formed.

In conjunction with the expanding universe, these four points would become the cornerstone of the Big Bang.

A dangerous game

The growth and evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe, of individual galaxies, and of the stellar populations found within those galaxies all validates the Big Bang’s predictions.

The discovery of a bath of radiation just ~3 K above absolute zero was the key evidence that validated the Big Bang and eliminated many of its most popular alternatives. And the discovery and measurement of the light elements and their ratios — including hydrogen, deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7 — revealed not only which type of nuclear fusion occurred prior to the formation of stars, but also the total amount of normal matter that exists in the universe.

But extrapolating beyond the limits of your measurable evidence is a dangerous, albeit tempting, game to play.

Extrapolating back to as far as your evidence can take you is a tremendous success for science. The physics that took place during the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang imprinted itself onto the universe, enabling us to test our models, theories, and understanding of the universe from that time. The earliest observable imprint, in fact, is the cosmic neutrino background, whose effects show up in both the cosmic microwave background (the Big Bang’s leftover radiation) and the universe’s large-scale structure. This neutrino background comes to us, remarkably, from just ~1 second into the hot Big Bang.

But extrapolating beyond the limits of your measurable evidence is a dangerous, albeit tempting, game to play. After all, if we can trace the hot Big Bang back some 13.8 billion years, all the way to when the universe was less than 1 second old, what’s the harm in going all the way back just one additional second: to the singularity predicted to exist when the universe was 0 seconds old?

The answer, surprisingly, is that there’s a tremendous amount of harm. The reason this is problematic is because beginning at a singularity — at arbitrarily high temperatures, arbitrarily high densities, and arbitrarily small volumes — will have consequences for our universe that aren’t necessarily supported by observations.

For example, if the universe began from a singularity, then it must have sprung into existence with exactly the right balance of “stuff” in it — matter and energy combined — to precisely balance the expansion rate. If there were just a tiny bit more matter, the initially expanding universe would have already recollapsed by now. And if there were a tiny bit less, things would have expanded so quickly that the universe would be much larger than it is today.

The reason this is problematic is because beginning at a singularity — at arbitrarily high temperatures, arbitrarily high densities, and arbitrarily small volumes — will have consequences for our universe that aren’t necessarily supported by observations.

And yet, instead, what we’re observing is that the universe’s initial expansion rate and the total amount of matter and energy within it balance as perfectly as we can measure.

Why?

If the Big Bang began from a singularity, we have no explanation; we simply have to assert “the universe was born this way,” or, as physicists ignorant of Lady Gaga call it, “initial conditions.”

Similarly, a universe that reached arbitrarily high temperatures would be expected to possess leftover high-energy relics, like magnetic monopoles, but we don’t observe any. The universe would also be expected to be different temperatures in regions that are causally disconnected from one another — i.e., are in opposite directions in space at our observational limits — and yet the universe is observed to have equal temperatures everywhere to 99.99%+ precision.

Cosmic inflation

We’re always free to appeal to initial conditions as the explanation for anything, and say, “well, the universe was born this way, and that’s that.” But we’re always far more interested, as scientists, if we can come up with an explanation for the properties we observe.

That’s precisely what cosmic inflation gives us, plus more. Inflation says, sure, extrapolate the hot Big Bang back to a very early, very hot, very dense, very uniform state, but stop yourself before you go all the way back to a singularity. If you want the universe to have the expansion rate and the total amount of matter and energy in it balance, you’ll need some way to set it up in that fashion. The same applies for a universe with the same temperatures everywhere. On a slightly different note, if you want to avoid high-energy relics, you need some way to both get rid of any preexisting ones, and then avoid creating new ones by forbidding your universe from getting too hot once again.

Inflation accomplishes this by postulating a period, prior to the hot Big Bang, where the universe was dominated by a large cosmological constant (or something that behaves similarly): the same solution found by de Sitter way back in 1917. This phase stretches the universe flat, gives it the same properties everywhere, gets rid of any pre-existing high-energy relics, and prevents us from generating new ones by capping the maximum temperature reached after inflation ends and the hot Big Bang ensues. Furthermore, by assuming there were quantum fluctuations generated and stretched across the universe during inflation, it makes new predictions for what types of imperfections the universe would begin with.

Since it was hypothesized back in the 1980s, inflation has been tested in a variety of ways against the alternative: a universe that began from a singularity. When we stack up the scorecard, we find the following:

1 - Inflation reproduces all of the successes of the hot Big Bang; there’s nothing that the hot Big Bang accounts for that inflation can’t also account for.

2 - Inflation offers successful explanations for the puzzles that we simply have to say “initial conditions” for in the hot Big Bang.

3 - Of the predictions where inflation and a hot Big Bang without inflation differ, four of them have been tested to sufficient precision to discriminate between the two. On those four fronts, inflation is 4-for-4, while the hot Big Bang is 0-for-4.

But things get really interesting if we look back at our idea of “the beginning.” Whereas a universe with matter and/or radiation — what we get with the hot Big Bang — can always be extrapolated back to a singularity, an inflationary universe cannot. Due to its exponential nature, even if you run the clock back an infinite amount of time, space will only approach infinitesimal sizes and infinite temperatures and densities; it will never reach it. This means, rather than inevitably leading to a singularity, inflation absolutely cannot get you to one by itself. The idea that “the universe began from a singularity, and that’s what the Big Bang was,” needed to be jettisoned the moment we recognized that an inflationary phase preceded the hot, dense, and matter-and-radiation-filled one we inhabit today.

The idea that “the universe began from a singularity, and that’s what the Big Bang was,” needed to be jettisoned the moment we recognized that an inflationary phase preceded the hot, dense, and matter-and-radiation-filled one we inhabit today.

This new picture gives us three important pieces of information about the beginning of the universe that run counter to the traditional story that most of us learned. First, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, and small singularity — and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since — is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.

Second, observations have well established the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang: cosmic inflation. Before the hot Big Bang, the early universe underwent a phase of exponential growth, where any preexisting components to the universe were literally “inflated away.” When inflation ended, the universe reheated to a high, but not arbitrarily high, temperature, giving us the hot, dense, and expanding universe that grew into what we inhabit today.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how — or even whether — the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other nonsingular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity. Until the day comes where we discover how to extract more information from the universe than presently seems possible, we have no choice but to face our ignorance. The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.

This article was originally published on our sister site, Big Think. Read the original article here.

What if the universe had no beginning?

What if the universe had no beginning?

https://www.livescience.com/universe-had-no-beginning-time

by Paul Sutter

October 11, 2021

In the beginning, there was … well, maybe there was no beginning. Perhaps our universe has always existed — and a new theory of quantum gravity reveals how that could work.

"Reality has so many things that most people would associate with sci-fi or even fantasy," said Bruno Bento, a physicist who studies the nature of time at the University of Liverpool in the U.K.

In his work, he employed a new theory of quantum gravity, called causal set theory, in which space and time are broken down into discrete chunks of space-time. At some level, there's a fundamental unit of space-time, according to this theory. 

Bento and his collaborators used this causal-set approach to explore the beginning of the universe. They found that it's possible that the universe had no beginning — that it has always existed into the infinite past and only recently evolved into what we call the Big Bang.

A quantum of gravity

Quantum gravity is perhaps the most frustrating problem facing modern physics. We have two extraordinarily effective theories of the universe: quantum physics and general relativity. Quantum physics has produced a successful description of three of the four fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force) down to microscopic scales. General relativity, on the other hand, is the most powerful and complete description of gravity ever devised.

But for all its strengths, general relativity is incomplete. In at least two specific places in the universe, the math of general relativity simply breaks down, failing to produce reliable results: in the centers of black holes and at the beginning of the universe. These regions are called "singularities," which are spots in space-time where our current laws of physics crumble, and they are mathematical warning signs that the theory of general relativity is tripping over itself. Within both of these singularities, gravity becomes incredibly strong at very tiny length scales.

As such, to solve the mysteries of the singularities, physicists need a microscopic description of strong gravity, also called a quantum theory of gravity. There are lots of contenders out there, including string theory and loop quantum gravity.

And there's another approach that completely rewrites our understanding of space and time.

Causal set theory

In all current theories of physics, space and time are continuous. They form a smooth fabric that underlies all of reality. In such a continuous space-time, two points can be as close to each other in space as possible, and two events can occur as close in time to each other as possible.

"Reality has so many things that most people would associate with sci-fi or even fantasy." - Bruno Bento

But another approach, called causal set theory, reimagines space-time as a series of discrete chunks, or space-time "atoms." This theory would place strict limits on how close events can be in space and time, since they can't be any closer than the size of the "atom."

For instance, if you're looking at your screen reading this, everything seems smooth and continuous. But if you were to look at the same screen through a magnifying glass, you might see the pixels that divide up the space, and you'd find that it's impossible to bring two images on your screen closer than a single pixel.

This theory of physics excited Bento. "I was thrilled to find this theory, which not only tries to go as fundamental as possible — being an approach to quantum gravity and actually rethinking the notion of space-time itself — but which also gives a central role to time and what it physically means for time to pass, how physical your past really is and whether the future exists already or not," Bento told Live Science.

Space-time is made up of discrete chunks or space-time "atoms," similar to the pixels of a computer image. (Image credit: oxygen/Getty Images)

Beginning of time

Causal set theory has important implications for the nature of time. 

"A huge part of the causal set philosophy is that the passage of time is something physical, that it should not be attributed to some emergent sort of illusion or to something that happens inside our brains that makes us think time passes; this passing is, in itself, a manifestation of the physical theory," Bento said. "So, in causal set theory, a causal set will grow one 'atom' at a time and get bigger and bigger."

The causal set approach neatly removes the problem of the Big Bang singularity because, in the theory, singularities can't exist. It's impossible for matter to compress down to infinitely tiny points — they can get no smaller than the size of a space-time atom. 

So without a Big Bang singularity, what does the beginning of our universe look like? That's where Bento and his collaborator, Stav Zalel, a graduate student at Imperial College London, picked up the thread, exploring what causal set theory has to say about the initial moments of the universe. Their work appears in a paper published Sept. 24 to the preprint database arXiv. (The paper has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.) 

The paper examined "whether a beginning must exist in the causal set approach," Bento said. "In the original causal set formulation and dynamics, classically speaking, a causal set grows from nothing into the universe we see today. In our work instead, there would be no Big Bang as a beginning, as the causal set would be infinite to the past, and so there's always something before."

Their work implies that the universe may have had no beginning — that it has simply always existed. What we perceive as the Big Bang may have been just a particular moment in the evolution of this always-existing causal set, not a true beginning.

There's still a lot of work to be done, however. It's not clear yet if this no-beginning causal approach can allow for physical theories that we can work with to describe the complex evolution of the universe during the Big Bang.

"One can still ask whether this [causal set approach] can be interpreted in a 'reasonable' way, or what such dynamics physically means in a broader sense, but we showed that a framework is indeed possible," Bento said. "So at least mathematically, this can be done."

In other words, it's … a beginning.

Originally published on Live Science.

Paul Sutter, Astrophysicist

Paul M. Sutter is a research professor in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. He is also the host of several shows, such as "How the Universe Works" on Science Channel, "Space Out" on Discovery, and his hit "Ask a Spaceman" podcast. He is the author of two books, "Your Place in the Universe" and "How to Die in Space," as well as a regular contributor to Space.com, LiveScience, and more. Paul received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research fellowship in Trieste, Italy,