Something from nothing

For most of history there were two stories about where everything came from. In one, the world was created: there was a beginning. In the other, it was eternal: cycles of becoming and dissolving with no first moment. Both were held with total conviction, and neither could be checked.

Then, in the twentieth century, it became something we could check.

The evidence

In 1929 Edwin Hubble showed that distant galaxies are moving away from us, and the farther away they are, the faster they recede. Run that film backward and everything converges. In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson picked up a faint microwave hiss coming from every direction in the sky. It was the afterglow of the early universe, the cosmic microwave background, and it matched what a hot, dense beginning predicts.

Today the best estimate is that the universe began about 13.8 billion years ago. The Big Bang wasn’t an explosion in space. It was the beginning of the expansion of space itself, and, in our best theory of gravity, of time too.

Here’s the part that still stops me. The observable universe holds roughly 1.5 × 10⁵³ kilograms of ordinary matter. Put that through E = mc² and you get something like 10⁷⁰ joules. All of it, every star, every planet, every body, came out of a condition that was not inside space and time, because space and time are among the things that came out of it.

A nothing beyond space and time

So the universe came from nothing. But this isn’t the nothing of empty space, because there was no space yet. It’s a nothing that is transcendent to space and time: no location, no duration, and yet the source of every location and every moment that followed.

Physics has arrived, by its own route, at a ground that is prior to space and time. That is exactly where the contemplative traditions have always pointed: a source that isn’t a thing among things, that every thing arises from. The cosmologist and the mystic are describing the same origin.

A universe that keeps creating

The deeper lesson for me isn’t the beginning. It’s what happened after. For 13.8 billion years this universe has done one thing over and over: it has produced what didn’t exist before. Particles became atoms. Atoms became stars, and stars forged the heavier elements. Chemistry became life. Life became nervous systems, and nervous systems became minds that can look back and ask where they came from.

You aren’t watching that process from outside. You’re one of its latest results, and it isn’t finished.

If the universe is creative all the way down, the question isn’t whether you have creative power. It’s what keeps it from coming through.

Most of us spend our days in a defended state: braced, scanning, holding on to what’s familiar because familiar feels safe. That state is good at protecting what already exists. It isn’t built to let something new emerge.

The evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner has a name for capacities that appear long before the conditions that call for them: dormant innovations. Nature is full of them. They sit unused for millions of years until the context changes and they wake up. I hold, with conviction, that human beings carry capacities like that, and that the overwhelm of modern life is the kind of context that calls them forward.

That is what my colleagues and I study at The New Human University. Not how to squeeze more out of the human being as it is, but what the universe that made something from nothing is still making of us.

Adapted from an essay I first published at The New Human University, May 11, 2022. Read the original ↗