How to create a universe in a lab
For as long as people have been around, we have been wondering how it all began, and moreover who started it all? Ancient creation myths…
For as long as people have been around, we have been wondering how it all began, and moreover who started it all? Ancient creation myths tend to be alike in that they presume that there had to have been something always there or something which appeared out of, well, nothing. For the Greeks, Gaia sprang out of Chaos (the void), but where did Chaos come from?
In Norse mythology, the world was created out of the dead body of the ice giant Ymir who formed from fire of Muspelheim melting the ice of Niflheim.
Polynesian myths talk about the Sky father, Wakea, making the world.
In every creation myth, there is something that must be always there.
Later philosophers, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas, formalized the idea into the cosmological argument for the existence of God. One version due to Leibniz goes like this:
Every contingent fact has an explanation.
There is a contingent fact that includes all other contingent facts.
Therefore, there is an explanation of this fact.
This explanation must involve a necessary being.
This necessary being is God.
Now, other mythologies argue that the necessary being is Chaos, Muspelheim and Niflheim, Wakea, etc. The God of the Bible is not implied in this argument. Rather, it supports the idea of a necessary being or thing.
Noted atheist Bertrand Russell who subscribed to a naturalist philosophy argued that this necessary being was the laws of nature or energy, which, as far as he knew was always conserved, even though we know it is not in Einstein’s general relativity.
Leibniz’s version is different from medieval versions in that it does not take time into account at all. There is no cause and effect implied. We understand now that, in light of quantum physics and relativity, that causation is a weak platform on which to stand philosophically. Rather, it only deals with contingency, a philosophical concept that something contingent depends on something outside itself for its existence.
Everything in the universe, of course, depends on the universe for its existence, among other things, but what about the universe itself?
If you define the universe as everything, then it is impossible for anything to be outside it. But, another way to describe the universe is a region that is separated from another by a topological boundary like a horizon, a boundary that stops information crossing from one region to another in at least one direction. Hence, if you have two regions separated from one another like this:
You can say you have multiple universes even though they are connected to one another.
In the diagram above, the universe and parallel universe are completely isolated from one another in both directions, but it is possible for it to be in only one direction, allowing one universe to “create” another.
If you have multiple universes like this, you have a multiverse.
If this universe is contingent, then we must ask how it came to be, what is it contingent on?
One recent philosophical thought experiment is that the universe is a simulation and that it is, in fact, contingent on some advanced computers sitting in a “real” universe somewhere. As a thought experiment, the simulation hypothesis is powerful, but, as an ontological statement about reality, it is very weak. The argument, due to Nick Bostrom, makes use of some dubious probabilistic assumptions to arrive at its conclusions and there is absolutely no evidence for it.
An alternative is that intelligent beings may have created the universe the old fashioned way, by creating a false vacuum in their own universe which then allowed ours to form. Unlike a digital simulation, this universe would be indistinguishable from a real universe because it is one.
Scientists, notably the well-known cosmologist and proponent of inflationary theory, Alan Guth, have looked at the possibility of creating our own mini universe in the lab via quantum tunneling. If such a thing is physically possible, then it is entirely reasonable to suggest that our universe was created in an alien lab.
So, what does an alien universe creation lab look like?
On the face of it, as the authors of a 1990 paper admit, it seems absurd to try to create a universe inside another one. The universe we inhabit has about 10 to the power 32 solar masses of material. How could anyone get all that mass together to create a new universe?
The answer is inflationary cosmology, which gives us a way to create universes from only about 10 kilograms of material.
While 10 kg is not a lot of material, the density requirement is substantial at about 10 to the power 76 grams per cubic centimeter. (Equivalent to 100 trillion Giga-electronvolts packed into a region 10 to the power -24 centimeters, smaller than any known subatomic particle.) By comparison, the densest matter ever created on Earth, a quark-gluon plasma, made by smashing lead nuclei into one another in the Large Hadron Collider is only about 4 times 10 to the power 16 grams per cubic centimeter.
Nevertheless, imagine an advanced race has learned how to produce such densities. A new universe can be created out of a spherically symmetric bubble of false vacuum. This is a state where its vacuum has an energy higher than the true vacuum. In other words, energy permeates the bubble such that the lowest possible energy is higher than the Great Nothing of true vacuum.
This bubble will experience inflation for a time and then settle into the same kind of expansion that our own universe experiences. The bubble is separated from the true vacuum by a thin layer. Inside the bubble is a de Sitter space, a space that is thought to resemble our own universe, with positive curvature even in the absence of matter or energy. On the other side of the layer is a true vacuum with what is called a Schwarzschild geometry, the geometry that resembles that of a black hole but also that of any spherically symmetric body like the Earth or Sun. In our case, the Schwarzschild geometry has a mass that is equivalent to the energy of the bubble according to Einstein’s famous relation: E equals m c squared. Above a certain critical mass, the bubble grows without bound.
Once our alien scientists get their new universe started and expanding, you might ask if the new universe explodes into theirs, destroying them and anything else in its path like some mad science experiment gone wrong. This is not so, however, thanks to the Riemannian geometry of Einstein’s general relativity. To the aliens, the universe would exist behind the event horizon of the Schwarzschild geometry, effectively shielded from them as if it were inside a black hole. Our universe would expand without any contact with theirs.
If it sounds awfully similar to what I wrote about in my popular article
The Big Bang may be a black hole inside another universe
We may be living in a daughter universe inside of black hole from a mother universe.medium.com
It is because the math is very similar, except that there is, in this formulation, no actual singularity, only an extremely dense region of matter with an event horizon around it.
The authors of the paper determine that a lab created universe must avoid any singularity. They run into trouble, however, using only classical general relativity. They cannot create the necessary false vacuum bubble without a singularity. This is a consequence of the Penrose theorem. Thanks to this theorem, Penrose was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020 for his contribution to the theory that black holes and their singularities are robust predictions of general relativity.
The problem comes down to mass bounds. Below a certain mass, a baby universe will expand briefly and collapse in on itself. Above that baby universe will expand, then collapse, and then expand again and continue expanding like our universe. Then above that the baby universe will expand continuously.
The problem is that, to avoid a singularity, the baby universe has to have a mass that is so small that it would just collapse in on itself, end of story.
All these are predictions of classical general relativity which means there is no avoiding them.
This means we have to turn to quantum theory. A phenomenon called quantum tunneling allows for certain violations of classical physics, including general relativity, using principles of uncertainty, which enable, for example, particles to travel through impassable barriers.
Quantum tunneling does not only apply to physical barriers like walls. It also applies to any kind of trajectory. For example, a particle in a stable orbit around the Sun could, through no external influence, tunnel into an unstable trajectory, escaping the star. In classical physics, there is effectively a wall between escape velocity and orbital velocity, but a particle can tunnel through that barrier.
This principle applies not only to the trajectories of particles but entire universes. A universe with a mass that should lead to immediate collapse into nothing, therefore, can theoretically tunnel to a trajectory where it bounces and expands again without any additional mass or energy that might lead to a singularity.
Quantum theory is only required to explain the tunneling aspect, after which classical physics takes over, meaning that our universe, should it have been created as an inflationary false vacuum bubble in an alien particle accelerator or equivalent, would not bear any hints that it resulted from quantum effects.
Another result of inflationary theory is that the small initial mass of the baby universe would expand enormously effectively converting “nothing” into matter and energy by the expansion, faster than light of false vacuum. Since false vacuum states are metastable, i.e., they are like water that remains liquid below freezing or above boiling point, they do not last.
One theory is that the false vacuum decays into true vacuum by bubble nucleation, where quantum effects restore the vacuum. By analogy, if you place a smooth mug full of water in the microwave and heat it to above boiling, it may remain liquid without any bubbles to indicate it is above boiling. This is a metastable state that results from the smoothness of its environment preventing the nucleation of bubbles. A tea bag or even a puff of air disturbs it, it suddenly springs to life with bubbles, and the water boils, returning to a stable state.
Likewise with the universe, it may have formed a false vacuum which inflated, causing all the matter and energy we see to be created from nothing. Then quantum effects, acting like the tea bag, caused bubbles of true vacuum to appear, halting inflation and restoring thermodynamics.
Unlike my earlier articles on this idea happening naturally, in this case, no singularity is needed. There is no black hole. Rather, there is simply a very dense region of mass which initiates a quantum tunneling effect to create our universe.
To our alien creators, it is not clear if they would know whether they had successfully created a universe or not. They would likely have to make a very large number of bubbles in order for one to tunnel into a true universe because the probability is incredibly small. These tiny bubbles, smaller than a subatomic particle, would expand and follow their typical classical trajectories. You can imagine trying to escape the solar system by shooting a huge number of tiny spacecraft into orbit, hoping that one tunnels into an escape trajectory.
As with a black hole, the observers would not really see anything going on inside since anything at the horizon of the bubble would be frozen in time. A few bubbles, however, will reach their maximum radius and tunnel to a larger radius inside the horizon. To the outside observers, they would see the bubble vanish at the point of tunneling. The bubble would still be there but would be completely cut off from its parent universe.
Although the tunneling event implies vanishing, the converse isn’t necessarily true. If the bubble did vanish, it isn’t clear if a new universe had been created or whether some other quantum effect was going on. Still, it would be clear that something different from the classical had happened.
Even if aliens created the universe, which this theory only suggests may be possible, those aliens are likely contingent on the universe they themselves inhabit, so it doesn’t answer the cosmological argument. Who started it all? It depends on whom you ask, and perhaps such a question necessarily goes beyond concepts like universes, matter, and energy or even mathematics to some undefinable and ineffable realm where cause and effect, being and non-being cease to have meaning.
Does God dwell there? If you believe in the logic of the cosmological argument, some non-contingent Being must.
Pruss, Alexander R. “The Leibnizian cosmological argument.” The Blackwell companion to natural theology (2009): 24–100.
Farhi, Edward, Alan H. Guth, and Jemal Guven. “Is it possible to create a universe in the laboratory by quantum tunneling?.” Nuclear Physics B 339.2 (1990): 417–490.