Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn (2 page)

My dad's Haverford College yearbook photo
,
1970
Peter Gorski

I wondered if he was asking me about nothing because he suspected I was entertaining some kind of nihilistic streak. I was a contemplative but restless kid, the kind that parents describe as “hard to handle.” In truth I think I was just bored and not cut out for the suburbs. An aspiring writer with a learner's permit, I had read Jack Kerouac and I was itching to hit the road. To make matters worse, I
had discovered philosophy. When you're fifteen, boredom plus suburbia plus existentialism equals trouble. I couldn't imagine Sisyphus happy, and frankly, I didn't bother to try. Kurt Cobain had offed himself and I didn't believe in math. I had read somewhere that between the numbers 1 and 2 there were an infinite number of numbers, and I just kept thinking, how do you ever get to 2? My mother, a math teacher, would valiantly attempt to tutor me in geometry, but I'd refuse on principle. “Sure, I'll find that area,” I'd say, “just as soon as you explain to me how you get to 2.” She'd throw up her hands in defeat and storm off, leaving me to fail the class as a conscientious objector. It was Zeno's angst, in retrospect, but no one told me that then.

“How would I define nothing? I guess I'd define it as the absence of something. The absence of everything. Why?”

“I've been thinking about it for years,” he said, “this question of how you can get something from nothing. It just seemed so impossible, but I figured we must be thinking about nothing the wrong way. And then the other day I was at the mechanic waiting for my car to be fixed and it just hit me! I finally understood it.”

“You understood nothing?”

He nodded excitedly. “I thought, what if you had a state that was infinite, unbounded, and perfectly the same everywhere?”

I shrugged. “I'm guessing it would be nothing?”

“Right! Think about it—a ‘thing' is defined by its boundaries. By what differentiates it from something else. That's why when you draw something, it's enough to draw its outline. Its edges. The edges define the ‘thing.' But if you have a completely homogeneous state with no edges, and it's infinite so there's nothing else to differentiate it from … it would contain no ‘things.' It would be nothing!”

I spooned some more rice onto my plate. “Okay …”

My father continued, his excitement mounting. “Usually people think that to get to nothing, you have to remove everything. But if nothing is defined as an infinite, unbounded homogeneous state, you don't have to remove anything to get to it—you just have to put everything into a specific configuration. Think about it this way. You take a blender to the world—you blend up every object, every chair and table and fortune cookie in this place, you blend it all until everything is just
atoms and then you keep blending the atoms until any remaining structure is gone, until everything in the universe looks exactly the same, and this completely undifferentiated stuff is spread out infinitely without bound. Everything will have disappeared into sameness. Everything becomes nothing. But in some sense it's still everything, because everything you started with is still in there. Nothing is just everything in a different configuration.”

“Okay, that's pretty cool,” I said. “Something and nothing aren't really opposites, they're just different patterns of the same thing.”

“Exactly!” My father beamed. “And if that's true, then it seems much more plausible that you can get something from nothing. Because, in a way, the something is always there. It's like if you build a sandcastle at the beach and then knock it down—where does the castle go? The castle's ‘thingness' was defined by its form, by the boundaries that differentiated it from the rest of the beach. When you knock it down, the castle disappears back into the homogeneity of the beach. The castle and the beach, the something and the nothing, are just two different patterns.”

The idea was beginning to click. In my existentialist musings I had thought a bit about nothing—not the transcendent, oneness brand of nothing that my father was drawn to but the Heideggerian variety, laced with indifference and dread. A nothing that was an absence, not only of stuff but of meaning, a vast and impenetrable darkness, like the void I'd find behind my eyelids at night. It was a concept that easily gave way to vertigo, a word that was a paradox by its mere existence. By its name it was a thing, yet it was no thing, and somehow it was the very thing that defined the world. Inasmuch as anything existed, it existed in opposition to nothing, but nothing was a noun doomed to self-destruct, an idea that came complete with its own negation, poised as the limit not only of reality but of knowledge and of language.
Heidegger said that the question “what is nothing?” was the most fundamental of all philosophical questions, and yet
“no one,” wrote Henning Genz, “has ever given us an answer to what exactly defines nothing, other than by characterizing it simply by negatives.” Only that's exactly what my father was trying to do. To define nothing not in terms of what it isn't, but in terms of what it is. A state of infinite, unbounded homogeneity.

“I like it,” I told him.

He smiled.

And then this happened.

My father looked at me—his fifteen-year-old daughter—and in all seriousness asked, “Do you think that could explain how the universe began?”

I opened my mouth to speak, then paused, mouth open, searching for the right words, any words, to convey my mounting concern for his sanity. Had he gotten into the pot I had hidden under my mattress? “You're asking me how the universe began?”

“Well, before the universe there was nothing. So to get a universe, nothing has to become something. For years I've been thinking they must be two different states of the same underlying thing—the same underlying reality—otherwise there'd be no way to transform one into the other. But how could nothing be a state of anything? Only now I realize that it's a state of infinite, unbounded homogeneity. If you start from that, the problem of the origin of the universe becomes thinkable, at least. Tractable, maybe.”

I had been on board when I thought we were playing a philosophical game of semantic Jenga, but now he was bringing the universe into it?

“Isn't this, like,
physics
?” I asked.

He nodded.

“I'm not even taking physics. I opted out of physics and took meteorology with the other underachievers. And I can't even tell you how a hurricane begins because I slept through the class.”

He motioned to the waitress for the check. “Well, I think we should figure it out.”

We should figure it out.
It wasn't the kind of thing a parent says to a child. It was the kind of thing a person says to another person. I was intrigued. The whole thing sounded crazy, but crazy was infinitely better than boring. Besides, if there was one thing I knew, it was that my father was brilliant. Everyone knew my father was brilliant. He played it down with his sweet exterior and goofy sense of humor. You'd be forgiven for not seeing his brilliance right away, since he was always making wrong turns, zoning out midsentence, or, according to family legend, forgetting his pants. But just past that polite, absentminded demeanor was a bold, creative, insightful mind, and people who spoke to him for even a few minutes
walked away knowing they had encountered something extraordinary. If you had to choose one guy to lead you off a cliff with his crazy idea, my father was that guy. For the first time in what felt like years, I smiled.

“Okay. How?”

He shrugged. “We'll do a little research.”

So we began to read. If there was a book about physics or cosmology, our noses were in it. We read about the big bang, inflation, relativity, quantum theory, galaxy formation, particle physics, thermodynamics, extra dimensions, black holes, the microwave background. We discussed the ideas late into the night until my mother yelled at us to go to bed. Each piece of knowledge gained brought with it a hundred new questions, and reading became an endless scavenger hunt. We pored over enormous stacks of books in a feverish attempt to learn what was known about how the universe began, how something came from nothing. It became our own secret world.

Soon we needed to dedicate an entire room of the house just to physics books. Luckily, we had a spare—a small bedroom I had burned down in a freak accident involving a trick birthday candle. We cleaned out the ashes, painted the walls, and built shelves. The books multiplied at an exponential rate, climbing the walls up to the ceiling and eventually blanketing the floor.

My father had me convinced that the nothing before the universe was a state of infinite, unbounded homogeneity, a featureless, uniform sameness that stretched on and on for eternity. Or at least until the universe was born. Which of course begged the million-dollar question: Why would the nothing ever change? How could something defined by relentless sameness ever become different? Why would anything, like a universe, ever happen at all?

It was an infuriating dilemma. On one hand, by suggesting that something and nothing were just different configurations of the same thing, an answer to the question of how you get something from nothing seemed possible. On the other, the perfect uniformity of the homogeneous state seemed to rule out the possibility of change altogether.

The more we discussed it, the more annoyed I became at having to
repeat the phrase “infinite, unbounded homogeneous state.” I tried referring to it simply as “nothing,” but the grammatical ambiguity inevitably led us into a kind of philosopher's rendition of “Who's on First.” “Seriously,” I told my father. “If I have to say ‘homogeneous state' one more time, I'm going to kill myself with a physics book.”

“We'll come up with a shorthand,” my father said. “How about just ‘H-state'?”

I considered it for a moment. “H-state. I can live with that.”

To figure out why the H-state would ever change, we needed to know why cosmologists believed the big bang happened. Exactly what kind of physical process could get a whole universe to suddenly burst into existence from nothing?

In the growing piles of books we found intriguing suggestions, but no answers. The problem was that cosmology didn't start with nothing. It started with everything—with an expanding universe full of matter and radiation—and worked backward, running the clock 14 billion years in reverse and watching as the universe contracted, galaxies crowding closer together until the entire observable universe occupied a single point, the origin whence something relatively big presumably went bang, an infinitely hot, infinitely dense, infinitely twisted cosmic seed. A singularity.

It was tempting to think of a singularity as small, but, as my father and I quickly learned, that's a rookie mistake. It only seems small because you picture it as a point in space, as if you're looking at it from the outside. But the singularity has no outside. It's not a point in space because it
is
space. It's the universe, it's everything. We're
in
the point. Besides, a point isn't small—it's sizeless. I had learned that in geometry class, in spite of my protests. You can just as well think of a point as infinitely big.
The big bang happened everywhere
, I scribbled in my notebook.
Even in the suburbs.

Watching cosmic evolution play out in reverse, you see everything turn into nothing at the singularity. The answer to why the H-state would change was hidden there. It was hidden well. The whole expanding universe was described by the equations of general relativity,
Einstein's theory of space and time and gravity, but the singularity was the one place where the equations couldn't go. If general relativity provides a map of the universe, the singularity is the uncharted spot that the cartographers aren't sure how to draw.
Here be dragons.

Quantum dragons, most likely. The singularity suggested that general relativity would eventually give way to a more fundamental theory, but physicists already knew that. Einstein's theory wasn't compatible with quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the behavior of matter at extremely small scales. In their day-to-day lives physicists could ignore the problem by keeping the two theories separate, using general relativity to describe how big things such as planets and galaxies distort spacetime and using quantum mechanics to describe the strange dice game subatomic particles play. But at the end of the day, the separation can't hold up. Spacetime and matter talk to each other all the time. As Wheeler put it, “Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move.” As helpful as it may have been to pretend otherwise, the two theories described one and the same universe. Something had to give.

The singularity on the cosmic map wasn't a thing but a message: spacetime, at least as Einstein dreamed it, can't be reality's bottom layer. Something lies beneath it, something more fundamental from which spacetime as we know it emerges, something that will be revealed only by a theory that unites general relativity with quantum mechanics: a theory of quantum gravity.