Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

Searching for the Universal Patterns Another way to probe the ultimate nature of the universe is to look for patterns that arise in different kinds of phenomena, apparently unrelated phenomena. In 1951 Wigner suggested that statistical physics should adopt mathematical tools called "random matrices" to model phenomena like the energy spectrum of the uranium nucleus ("On the statistical distribution of the widths and spacings of nuclear resonance levels", 1951). The phenomenon that he observed is now known as "universality" and consists in a fine balance of randomness and regularity, at the border between chaos and order. It seems to be widespread in nature, almost a hallmark of all complex correlated systems (systems with strong interactions and correlations between the constituent particles). A spectrum looks like a bar code: a sequence of lines separated by blank spaces. The distribution of lines in the spectrum of complex correlated systems follows a mathematical formula called the "correlation function". Wigner realized that this distribution mirrors the spacing between the eigenvalues, or solutions, of a vast matrix filled with random numbers, a random matrix. And viceversa: any system that exhibits this property of universality turns out to be a complex and correlated system that can be modeled as a random matrix. It turns out that universality is closely related to the most famous distribution in number theory: the distribution of prime numbers, numbers that cannot be divided by other numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, etc). Another ubiquitous pattern that can be modeled with random matrices is "hyperuniformity", discovered by the Italian physicist Salvatore Torquato ("Local density fluctuations, hyperuniformity, and order metrics", 2003). Physicists have found that hyperuniformity is widespread in nature, from bird eyes to the large-scale structure of the universe. The End of the Universe By the end of the 20th century, there were at least five valid hypotheses on how the universe might end. The Heat Death was still the most likely, with the universe expanding forever, and dark energy (the “cosmological constant”) causing even an acceleration in the expansion, until only a dark, cold and empty universe will be left. The Big Crunch was the hypothesis that somehow at some point the universe would start contracting, reversing its expansion and resulting in a ghastly compression of matter and energy, with thermonuclear explosions everywhere. The cyclical universe model assumes an infinite cycles of Big Bangs and Big Crunches. The Big Rip assumed the existence of “phantom” dark energy: instead of a cosmological constant, it assumed that dark energy is not constant but will increase over time. This energy would eventually tear apart the universe. The Big Rip hypothesis depends on a quantity called “equation of state parameter”: if its value is -1, dark energy is constant; if it’s less than -1, then dark energy will increase and the Big Rip will be the ultimate consequence. In 2018 the Planck satellite measured a value very close to -1, but the jury is still out. In the worst case scenario, the Big Rip will happen in 188 billion years. Finally, the Vacuum Decay model assumes that the Higgs field (that permeates the universe) will change again and will fall from a false vacuum (where it is meta-stable now) to a true vacuum, where it will be truly stable but in a different form, and the universe as it is, created by the Higgs field, will unravel because the laws of physics will change too. We Actually don't Know what's out There The problem of course is that we have no way of knowing what's really out there "now". When we observe a galaxy, we are looking into the past: the speed of light is finite and therefore it takes time from the light of that galaxy to reach our eyes. In general, it takes thousands if not millions of years. What we see is what "was" there thousands or millions of years ago. We have no idea what truly exists today in the universe. It could well be that all the galaxies we see with our powerful telescopes have long died and disappeared. The closest galaxy is Andromeda, which is 2.5 million light-years away: what we see when we look at it is something that existed 2.5 million years ago. Even the dwarf galaxies are too far away to be sure that they still exist: the Canis Major Dwarf is 25,000 light-years away. Only in the year 27,000 we will be sure that the Canis Major Dwarf truly existed in the year 2000. Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters