The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?

Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5

There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” the text began. I winced. “Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories,” it continued, “comes afterward”; such questions, the text explained, were part of the game humanity played, but they deserved attention only after the one true issue had been settled. The book was The Myth of Sisyphus and was written by the Algerian-born philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus. After a moment, the iciness of his words melted under the light of comprehension. Yes, of course, I thought. You can ponder this or analyze that till the cows come home, but the real question is whether all your ponderings and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That’s what it all comes down to. Everything else is detail.

The world of the everyday suddenly seemed nothing but an inverted magic act, lulling its audience into believing in the usual, familiar conceptions of space and time, while the astonishing truth of quantum reality lay carefully guarded by nature's sleights of hand.

Quantum mechanics challenges this view by revealing, at least in certain circumstances, a capacity to transcend space; long-range quantum connections can bypass spatial separation. Two objects can be far apart in space, but as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it’s as if they’re a single entity.

Special relativity declares a similar law for all motion: the combined speed of any object’s motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light.

How, in looser language, does the part of the probability wave in Andromeda, and everywhere else, “know” to drop to zero simultaneously?19

The most extreme of those who hold this opinion would go as far as declaring that, indeed, when no one and no thing is “looking” at or interacting with the moon in any way, it is not there.

And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged, or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all.

thought of as it once was: intervening space,

the universe, according to quantum mechanics, participates in a game of chance.

Namely, each messenger particle is a string that’s executing a particular vibrational pattern. A photon is a string vibrating in one particular pattern, a W particle is a string vibrating in a different pattern, a gluon is a string vibrating in yet another pattern. And, of prime importance, what Schwarz and Scherk showed in 1974 is that there is a parti Table

After all, the reasoning goes, at the big bang everything emerged from one place since, we believe, all places we now think of as different were the same place way back in the beginning.