Making a Universe
So the universe started with a big bang.  That accounts for a lot of evidence, but to a naïve mind it sounds like magic.  *1 (Numbers with asterisks are point we will address. )
Fig 1

It gets worse.  Shortly after the bang, the universe enlarged faster than the speed of light.  But special relativity says E= mc2, and you can’t exceed the speed of light.  *2  Don’t worry about proving the theory; it’s just algebra working on well proven scientific laws. 

Ah, but it wasn’t the matter in the universe that exceeded the speed of light.  Space itself was expanding.  *3  That’s not much help for the naïve mind. 

At the beginning, everything was photons and other primary stuff, no ordinary matter.  But the only way to go from primary stuff to ordinary matter is to be “observed,” to react with ordinary matter, and there wasn’t any.  There had to be a “big observation.” *4

After the big observations, the laws of nature were established, and they turn out to be just right for life.*5

There were random fluctuations in the initial energy, and they can be seen, but they aren’t really big enough.  No problem, that initial expansion smoothed them out like you’d get wrinkles out of a sheet by tugging on it.  But it should have taken more than one tug. *6   Ditto random fluctuations in matter.  That would have to be straightened out at the same time, like straightening a sheet and blanket at once.  Tricky.  *7 

Then there is life; energy comes in, makes life and the energy goes away at a lower temperature.  Ok, but why pause; why not just interact with matter and get re-radiated as heat?

energy          life         energy

or
energy          matter         energy   *8

If you look at a galaxy, the stars are moving as if there was more mass than the stars themselves have.  The rest is “dark matter.” *9
If you look at distant galaxies, it looks like the expansion of the universe is speeding up.  This is called “dark energy.”*10

Anything science can learn can be taught to a computer.  Alan Turing proved that a computer cannot do abstract reasoning.  And a computer can work with anything science offers.  But we do abstract reasoning.*11

People, even animals, understand fair and unfair, if maybe to different degrees.  How?  *12

No life          life            no life

What’s the point?* 13

We’ll not be able to get rid of everything that looks like magic, but maybe we can reduce the number of things.  First let me borrow a neutron; L 1  I won’t need it long.

We shall assume there is nothing, which is the whole point, and call this nothing “Out There.”  So what must it be like Out There.

1. No matter.
2. No rules of logic.  (You can’t have logic without a universe to be logical about.)
3. No dimensions and an unknown number of potential dimensions, at least 3.
4. Time undefined, so we shall set it at zero going at zero speed.
5. No moral order, good or bad. 

So we set your neutron loose.  It follows an irregular course, because places where it bunches up tend to pull the path inward by gravity; you lent me gravity when you lent me the neutron, because a neutron has mass. The reason all neutrons are alike is because it’s all the same neutron.

Eventually the neutron flies right up its own tailpipe, and I can give it back to you at exactly the time you lent it to me.

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Fig 2

Now that we have a collection of mass, we can define time.  If you are looking down at something heavy, and I am down there shining a light up to you, the light has to climb against gravity, which makes it lose energy, which gives it a longer wavelength, so it wiggles slower.  I don’t make much of that up when I come up to you.  So time is moving slower for me.

Fig 3  Down a gravity well. 

Now suppose our tangle of neutron path is so dense that light cannot escape at all.  That is a black hole; ours will be three dimensional.  Now that we have a black hole we can define a difference between In Here and Out There. 

Fig 4.....................................................

("In here" of course is a region where the neutron spends a lot of its path, entering and leaving many, many times. Alas the program I am using does not let me show that. )

Out There time can wander around in any direction in any place; on average it will be slightly the opposite of time In Here.  But In Here it has to move always in the same direction, since our black hole, the contents, are contracting.  We will say that Out There time is moving forward while In Here it moves backward.  Not only can nothing get out, nothing that falls in can catch up with what’s already here so In Here we are truly isolated.  Of course it all has to wind up crunched in the middle, the opposite of the big bang, which didn’t happen; it just looks like that from In Here. J1

Once the crunch starts, nothing can stop it, because strong things carry sound faster; eventually that sound would exceed the speed of light, which it can’t so there’s runaway collapse. J2  Since matter is pulling on space, we aren’t surprised that it looks like space itself is falling in.  J3

Since we started out with an ordinary neutron, it’s no mystery where ordinary matter comes from.  J4

Either the laws of nature came with the neutron or the fact that the universe was going to have to produce life (wait for it) the laws had to be suitable. J5

Now if you take a universe that contains a photon and a warm particle and change the size of the universe, the photon will change right long with it.  It doesn’t take any more information to find the photon.  And the information content, and the energy equivalent, of knowing where the particle is changes because the temperature of the particle changes on average.  (If you’ve forgotten Maxwell’s Demon, ask that guy over there later.) 

But something is missing.  If you look at the energy of the particles in a gas, they are distributed along a curve such that the lowest energies have the most particles. 

Fig 5

At absolute zero, they all have no energy. 

....Fig 6

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That would mean that their location was somewhere in unlimited space.  Some clever guys took a very cold gas and placed the particles at some positive level using lasers. 

Fig 7

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Now the distribution is upside down.  The temperature is negative.  But to get there it had to go through zero.  So there is information in the location of a particle that is independent of its temperature.

But you knew that had to be true.  According to the curve, the most likely temperature is zero anyway.  Those particles should locate themselves at random, mostly Out There.  The universe would boil away on the PDQ.  So as In Here collapses, energy piles up.  There’s no quantum mottle, because quantum uncertainty only happens in reverse time.  J6, 7 

There’s no difficulty having orderly systems like life build up, because in forward time, order builds up automatically.  J8 Of course In Here we say that disorder is always increasing just as energy is always being dispersed, which is well and good but only in reverse time.

Since the temperature-independent location of matter is real information, and since

information         energy         mass gravity,

dark matteris just what you would expect.  J9

If we were Out There watching the universe collapse, we would see gravity building up, which means time is slowing down.  From In Here when we look out in space we see the universe when it was more collapsed, time was slower so it looks like we are speeding up.  There’s your dark energy.  J10. 

Now we’re going to need a second piece of magic.  We’ll call it a doohickey.  L 2

Fig 8

This thing has awareness, a memory – which is not always available to awareness – and abstract reasoning.  You might say that these are just three different ways of describing the same thing, if you like.  It should be familiar; it’s your personality. 

Now Turing proved you can’t make the doohickey In Here; the laws of logic won’t permit it.  So it had to exist Out There.  And like the neutron it takes many trips through the In Here.  So be nice to people, each of them is just you at a different point along your path.  J 11

Out there, since time can go any old way, there is no difference between good and bad, help and harm, creation and destruction.  But In Here, the difference is obvious.  Somehow the doohickey has figured that out.  J 12

And that is the point of the whole thing.  In its many trips through the In Here, the doohickey has had the opportunity to experience existence in a universe with moral order. J 13

The doohickey of course comes back in parallel experience; these two men were alive at the same time so one cannot be a reincarnation of the other, and yet they could share the same dookickey.

This is not to be confused with reincarnation, which can only run in series; these two men were not alive at the same time, and one could be a reincarnation of the other, but they might or might not share a doohickey.

A final word of caution (as if you needed it.)

If you are In Here and see something fall into a black hole in reversed time, in other words time as we usually understand it – outside the black hole on Monday and inside on Tuesday – it would unambiguously establish which way time is going.  They think they have seen two black holes spiraling into each other by seeing their gravity waves. 

There are two colors because there are two sensors.  What might we expect to see? 

1. Background noise with oscillation emerging.  Check.
2. If the black holes are different sizes, the heights of the peaks alternate higher and lower.  Check. 
3. The oscillations speed up as they spiral inward.  Check.
4. The waves get higher.  Check.
5. As the holes themselves swallow more and more of the energy, the waves start go get lower.  Check.
6. As the gravity well slows time, the waves get slower.  Check.

Their data pass six tests.  That’s pretty good.

But the whole thing works just as well in reverse, so it’s really no help in telling us which way time is going.

What we need is to identify both objects on Monday and only one on Tuesday OR one on Monday and two on Tuesday. 

Maybe tomorrow.  Or maybe we’ll wake up Out There. 

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