Does the Universe Create Itself?

imagine going to a 19th century physicist and telling them that 21st century physics is plagued by enormous nigh-unsolvable philosophical questions - but that we're also unsatisfied because our theories break down "only" before 10-³² seconds after the beginning of the universe

This actually sounds like how I often run games of dnd. The players enter somewhere, a place I have yet to fully design. Then, as the players ask questions "is this room well lit?", "how far away is the next door", "can I climb this wall?", it forces me to choose the nature of the location. Only because the players asked did the room become how it is now! With that analogy, I now imagine the universe being asked by scientists "how does this work?" and the universe stuttering as it poorly explains a property, as the scientists fervently write notes.

This reads like a scientist living his own Lovecraftian horror story. Knowledge so unknowable that one begins to go insane from a sudden intuitive understanding that they can't put into words because the words don't exist. But the fright and despair in the eyes of the afflicted is so intense that you can only shudder at the thought of such a horrifying realization

The universe may or may not be creating itself, but what IS definitely happening is that the Universe is aware and trying to understand itself - by the sole fact that we humans are part of the universe. I just think that's amazing - that an entity that bursts forth from a amorphous plasma and evolves to learn about itself.

PHEW! Since the universe creates itself, it won’t leave me for some other universe on Tinder!

Matt: We have determined that our universe is created from answering questions. Matt shortly later: Please answer our 8 question survey. Matt next episode: Physicists have just discovered 256 new universes.

The mass of the entire universe in a black hole producing the size equal to our cosmological event horizon was such a cliffhanger. Please elaborate on this next time.

The thing about the 2 entangled particles which somehow communicate at a distance, even a distance of light-years, gives a good clue to the underlying nature of everything. The laws of symmetry: rotational, displacement in space and time etc all connected to conservation laws like conservation of angular momentum and momentum etc. Now the measured particle with spin “up” “causing” a distant entangled particle to have spin “down” happens because the law of conservation must be obeyed, even if things are light-years apart. So, it also tells us that the information about the up and down spins is more fundamental than distance. Therefore, we have evidence of an underlying informational universe more fundamental than our apparent physical universe. That much is clear.

As I watch more and more videos about quantum mechanics, I am further convinced of the idea that the wave function is the universe's way of implementing lazy loading for optimization. For clarity, lazy loading is the programming principle where resources or objects are not initialized until they are actually utilized.

as long as "observation" is defined as physical interaction i totally buy it.

When I was a much younger person, I had a magic mushroom-fueled epiphany that if one was to come to understand the true nature of all 'creation' (remain calm, I'm using that word generically), everything would cease to exist. I still believe it, 40 years later.

I think there is plenty of space in the field of physics for philosophers. Science currently only measures the physical aspect of the universe but there is clearly something more that we are missing and I think having philosopher physicists working on finding new ways to think of these problems is extremely helpful for the field as a whole to grow. We may not be able to measure consciousness now but maybe it will be these philosopher physicists who find some way to do so in the future!

The aspects of this sort of quantum observer effect that most interest me are when the interactions occur over vast distances. Ten billion years ago, some galaxy near the edge of our own observable universe emitted a photon into deep space. This photon didn't just go in one direction, but according to QM 'rippled' outwards like a wave, potentially interacting with countless octillions of other particles along the way. The ripple expanded outwards in many directions, through nebulae, planets, other stars, probably other telescopes belonging to aliens outside our observable universe and by chance it didn't interact with any of them, passing over all of them without a blip - until one day that wave - now 20-billion light-years wide - suddenly resolved as a discrete ping on the CCD of the Hubble Telescope. The photon who's position was indeterminate for over 10-billion years, possibly anywhere within our observable universe or well outside it, suddenly was THERE for just a moment, and likewise there may have been an instantaneous entangled quantum interaction with the electron responsible for emitting that photon so long ago - even though the galaxy from which it came is probably now far beyond our particle horizon. Equally interesting, as photons move at the speed of light and thus do not experience time, that interaction was - from its standpoint, if it could be said to have one - instantaneous.

When I started watching this channel I thought a career in fusion was a pipe dream. Now I've worked on a research device and will be working on SPARC. Plasma physics is a deep field but it's very interesting. Please do videos on it!

The concept of observation/interaction retroactively defining reality has always been really interesting to me, but not with quantum physics, instead, storytelling. Imagine this analogy: you're playing a video game, an RPG, and one of the characters asks what your player character's name is. You then get to choose your name, in that moment. But, within the story, that was always your character's name, for their whole life (presumably), and the only thing that happened there was that another person asked what it was. Furthermore, there may be countless other players out there with countless other playthroughs choosing different names, all equally retroactively true to their specific game, or, perhaps, universe, but equally none of their characters will have any way of knowing about yours.

Amanda Gefters book “Tresspassing in Einstein’s Lawn” covers this whole topic, and Wheeler’s contributions to it in a lot of depth. It’s an amazing and lovely book.

Being a big fan of both science and philosophy, these episodes make me so happy. I wish I could have learned more about this in high school. Then the intrinsic uncertainty of the Universe wouldn’t have felt so problematic, but rather the natural state of things.

I'd be interested in hearing your take on Penrose's idea that if the universe ends up decaying entirely into massless particles, then the notion of space collapses and you have a universe's worth of energy in a no-space, which would provide the initial conditions for a big bang. Sort of an oscillating universe theory, except without any collapse.

Thanks for your challenging and interesting dives into QM, GR, etc. I'm an astrophysicist by training and a systems engineer by occupation, and you have helped my understanding of a number of complex topics that I'd wondered about. Please keep up the good work.

I very much love the fact that our observation of reality meets ancient philosophy. In this video I was reminded to a nice buddhistic idea: The experienced object, the experiencer and the experience are the same. Please keep on making cool videos space time team!