The idea of deciphering a so-called Theory of Everything has always been the dream of science. To know everything, as some have euphemistically suggested, would be to “know the mind of God.”

In the biological realm, the origin of life from nonliving chemicals and the subsequent radiation of living things into every nook and cranny or niche of the planet has been the compelling mystery. To solve the mystery, biologists look to natural selection as their Theory of Everything—the axiom that environment-mediated competition between various chemical and physical possibilities or structures results in adaptation and speciation. The ever-branching evolutionary tree of life, with each terminal leaf representing another species and each forking branch a common ancestor, is the icon of this theory of life’s history.

SIMPLIFYING THE EARLY UNIVERSE ...

For the physicist, a Theory of Everything would go deeper and wider; in seeking to explain the physical rules that guide the universe, we need a formula that would describe the microcosm of the subatomic world and at the same time would reach out to encompass the universe in total. In sum, the idea is to unify the laws that give rise to the four basic forces: the strong and weak nuclear forces (which hold atoms together), electromagnetism (which describes the behavior of charged particles such as electrons and protons) and, finally, gravity. The hope is that discovering the secret that would combine these laws would also explain why the universe developed to include ourselves.

“Physicists have struggled with the same problems for 10, 20, 30 years, and straightforward extensions of extensions of the existing ideas are unlikely to solve them,” says physicist Dejan Stojkovic. In a recent paper with colleague Jonas Mureika, he suggests that the current divide between general relativity and quantum mechanics may be bridged by imagining that the universe began in one dimension—a straight line—and expanded as additional spatial dimensions evolved.

Relativity theory, which is concerned with gravity, has done a good job of describing how mass and space interact on cosmic scales. Meanwhile, quantum field theory has described and unified the other three forces that control the atom. But getting the two theories together has been a frustration. One way to solve the riddle of a unifying theory is to dump the problem of gravity altogether, odd man out, so to speak. “What we’re proposing here is a shift in paradigm,” Stojkovic said in a State University of New York press release.

Because gravity does not exist without dimensions, a universe with fewer dimensions would not need to account for relativity; the researchers argue that this would eliminate the mathematical discrepancies between quantum and relativity theory. They also believe that future observational studies of deep space—viewing ever farther out in space is like going back in time—will be able to confirm or invalidate their hypothesis as the effects of what might be called “missing gravity” could be seen within the ancient light rays themselves.

The fewer-dimensions proposition might also serve to explain why the expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating and how particles behaved in the first fractions of time after the big bang. “We have to take into account the possibility that something is systematically wrong with our ideas,” says Stojkovic. “We need something radical and new, and this is something radical and new.”

Advancing even more radical ideas was physicist John Wheeler’s stock-in-trade. The originator of the concept of the black hole—a collapsed star so massive that its gravity well pulls in even passing light rays—Wheeler (1911–2008) is considered a maverick thinker, teacher and mentor.

At the heart of the universe, Wheeler postulated, was information; “it from bit” he called the feedback circuit of creation. “No working picture that can be offered today is so attractive as this,” he wrote: “the universe brought into being by acts of observer-participatorship; the observer-participator brought into being by the universe.” The upshot of his “self-excited circuit” of creation is indeed odd: our observation of the universe today changes it retroactively to create it in the first place. Stranger still, Wheeler designed experiments that actually showed this type of retroactive influence, the so-called delayed-choice experiment where the results at the end change the beginning.

“We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago,” Wheeler declared.

In another sort of branching tree, a growing number of cosmologists now view our universe as just one of an infinite number of possible universes: the multiverse. As Brian Greene writes in The Hidden Reality, “such simulated [parallel universe] worlds would forcefully realize Wheeler’s vision of information’s primacy. Generate circuits that carry the right information and you’ve generated parallel realities that are as real to their inhabitants as this one is to us.”

Excerpt from The Mind Of God by Dan Cloer

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