Big/Fundamental Questions

May 2024

They’re the kinds of questions that tap into something deep in our psyche. An innate curiosity about what things are, why they are, how they came to be, and where we fit in.

When we want to ask important questions in an organised way, we typically do this by pooling people together in one place. When the questions we’re working on are mostly in the form of ideas and knowledge, we often call this organisation a think tank, an institute, or a research centre. I think that such an organisation should be created to focus on the big/fundamental unanswered questions about the universe. Let’s call it an Institute for the Study of Fundamental Questions.

What kinds of questions would it work on, and who would fund it?

An institute that focuses on big/fundamental questions about the universe would be unlikely to discover things that deliver financial value, at least on anything approaching a typical investment timeframe. But the insights and ideas that emerge from it might change our fundamental understanding of things. So the funders would be people who’d be willing (or seeking) investment returns of a non-financial nature. They would definitely be people who are interested in the big questions, and they would probably be interested in philosophies like long-termism. Likely candidates include philanthropists, foundations, wealthy individuals of a certain disposition, and perhaps for-profit businesses with a values-based investment strategy.

What questions would an institute like this work on? Beyond the questions being ones that are big/fundamental, there would need to be some sort of criteria for identifying the specific questions to focus on, and then prioritising them. This would form the research programme. I won’t speculate as to what exactly this programme should include. But it makes at least some sense to start at the beginning: the Big Bang.

This is probably the most recognised scientific theory about how the universe came to be. But just as Newtonian physics works well at the level that humans typically operate even while it can’t explain phenomena at the quantum level, so the Big Bang theory explains a lot of what we observe in the universe while leaving some big questions unresolved.¹ Specifically, if the Big Bang theory is correct then this seems to raise two questions that would qualify as big/fundamental. First is the foundation question: what caused the Big Bang? Second is the boundaries question: what’s outside the universe?

Regarding the foundations question, it seems at least one of the following conclusions should be true if the Big Bang is correct:

(1a) It’s possible for something to arise from nothing. In other words, non-existence can give birth to existence; an effect can occur without a prior cause. Such notions run contradictory to our basic assumptions about cause and effect — namely, the assumption that something can’t arise from nothing. It’s intrinsically difficult to imagine the complete absence of existence, and it’s equally (if not more) difficult to imagine how anything could ‘happen’ within this absence to create existence. Even the words in that sentence feel clumsy.

(1b) The universe has always existed. Clearly, something exists right now. And if it isn’t possible for this something to have been created from nothing, then perhaps this something always existed. In this case, perhaps what we call the Big Bang was one of many cosmic expansion events (the ‘Bang’ part) that followed a cosmic contraction event. (Incidentally, this would mean that we couldn’t say whether the particular bang that we talk about was genuinely big in comparison to all the others. Perhaps it was just a normal sized bang.)

The question then arises of what caused the first expansion event that birthed the original universe. One conclusion here is that the first expansion event arose from nothingness, which takes us back to (1a). Another conclusion is that there was no first expansion event and no original universe, because the universe has always existed and follows some sort of infinite expansion-contraction cycle. If this is true, there was no start to the universe. Maybe there’ll be no end, either.

Moving to the boundaries question, it seems at least one of the following conclusions should be true if the Big Bang is correct:

(2a) The universe is expanding into nothingness. In other words there is nothing beyond the edge of the universe. However, this begs the question of would happen to an object that was able to reach the edge of the universe, match the universe’s expansion speed, and then accelerate. With the object effectively moving beyond the boundary of the universe, where would it exist and what would happen to it? As a thought experiment, it seems irrelevant whether we believe an object could be capable of achieving the speeds necessary to do this. The point is that if the universe is expanding into nothingness, we should be able to use a hypothetical object like this to help explain what might happen beyond the universe’s boundary.

(2b) The universe is expanding into somethingness. If the universe is not expanding into nothingness, it must be expanding into somethingness. Where there is not nothing, there is something. This implies two further conclusions. The first is that the boundary of the universe is indeed the boundary of the universe, so there’s something else outside this boundary that’s different to what we call the universe. This outside thing would be an entirely different kind of thing, something that’s completely unknown to us and will probably remain unknowable to all sentiment beings within the universe (unless they create the type of object mentioned above). If this is true, what’s beyond this other thing’s boundary? And beyond that one’s? And so on.

The second conclusion is that what’s outside the boundary of the universe isn’t a fundamentally different kind of thing to what’s within the boundary of the universe. If so, the boundary of the universe that we currently think about might not be the boundary of the universe at all, and the real boundary is actually further away. However, if this is true then we’ve merely updated the boundary of the universe overall, and the question remains of what’s beyond it. This appears to either take us full circle to the start of (2b) and keep us there in an infinite loop, or else point us back to (2a).

(2c) Our understanding of boundaries is wrong. If neither (2a) nor (2b) are correct, then the universe is not expanding into nothingness — and yet, because it’s also not expanding into somethingness, it’s still the case that there’s nothing outside the universe. This is a paradox. It’s hard to conceptualise this scenario unless we’re missing something fundamental about the nature of boundaries — and of existence itself, for that matter.

Two things to mention in closing. First, the logic underpinning these questions appears to remain valid even if we live in a multiverse. In fact, you could probably just replace each mention of ‘universe’ above with ‘multiverse’ and leave the rest as it is. Second, this entire essay is one meandering thought experiment, or perhaps a set of them. It’s all inconclusive, and that’s the point. These are the kinds of issues that an Institute for the Study of Fundamental Questions could work on.

Notes

[1] I’m not an expert in these fields. But from what I’ve read, this broadly seems to be what a lot of experts think.