It’s a relevant query to ask- why do we exist in the first place? Why does this universe exist? Why such diversity and complexity of life? There is nothing necessarily theological about these questions. It is not akin to asking, as often suggested- whose slave shall I be if there is no master? To deny the most fundamental question of why is to deny what differentiates our self-awareness from that of other species. To be a homo sapien **is to ask why. There are those who remind us that it’s arrogant to assume that the ultimate reality of this universe should be perceivable to our ape minds. I’m aware of the biological limits to our cognition, but I refuse to be drawn into semantic debates. Obviously, what we attempt to do is to understand reality to the best of our ape capabilities, and the observation that there is an upper limit to our cognition is not an argument for surrender in the midway. In answering the question of origin, we will examine three broad fields: theological, scientific and speculative.
The Theological Explanations
In short- God did it.
More elaborately- God did it, but with the specific methods, purposes and timelines described in one specific set of human literature. Dismissing the theological explanation so easily is not atheist arrogance. There are good and simple reasons for discontentment- curiosity and intellectual honesty. Curiosity makes one dissatisfied with the short theological explanation, for it merely shifts all queries one level upwards. Intellectual honesty renders any elaborate theological explanation incompatible with a modern worldview. To give credit where due, one of the oldest religious texts that speak on origin, the Rig Veda, admits-
“Who really knows, whence came creation? For even the gods came after, did they not? None can know from where creation has arisen. The mighty one above, perhaps he knows. Or perhaps even he does not!”
The lament expressed in the Rig Veda’s Nasadiya Sukta is one we frequently encounter, for it exposes an unsurmountable gap in the nature of knowledge- it can never be complete. Humans can never stop asking why, and thus our knowledge can never be complete. There exists no imaginable point where we could accept an uncaused cause, for to reach there we would have to stop asking why. We will see how this necessary gap of knowledge inhibits every model we form, even if it were scientific or wildly speculative. The theological explanation is simply one which surrenders to the necessary gap in round one and fills the blank with the supernatural. This is called the god of gaps, and the astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson aptly describes arguing in favour of this god as a losing battle. By any measure, human ignorance is on a dwindling graph. The argument for god through gaps in current knowledge creates a god that is fated to be diminishing forever.
But some ancient philosophy does go beyond the traditional god-did-it surrender. Several Vedic hymns refer to a concept called brahman, variously translated as- the final cause of all things, the pervasive and creative principle behind the whole world, and the highest reality there exists. Justly summating the wealth of scripture on brahman is a monumental task this work cannot undertake, but it suffices for our study to say that brahman explains life, the universe and everything in traditional Vedic cosmogony. In Sixty Upanishads of the Veda, Paul Deussen states that brahman refers to the primordial reality that creates, maintains and withdraws within it the universe, along with several other attributes whose specificity proves that Upanishadic thinkers went far beyond simply stating that god did it. They very obviously perceived the problem posed by the necessary gap and posited the only thing that can bridge it. To liberate us from the curse of perennially asking why, we are told that brahman is absolute. Brahman is existence itself, so asking ‘what existed before brahman’ is a meaningless question- like dividing a number by zero or asking what existed before the Big Bang.
Some doctrines like ajativada and anutpada took another step in tackling the problem. They posited that brahman also possesses the attribute of being non-created or having no origin. This is simply another way of describing an uncaused cause. The Kena Upanishad asks some brilliant questions on causality, illustrating how deep its composers thought-
“Urged by whom does the mind fly?
Harnessed by whom does breath move the first?
By whom is urged the speech that folk utter?
And what harnesses the eye and ear?”
We learn that this prime mover is brahman-
“What is not expressed by speech, by which speech is expressed,
Know that as brahman.
What one does not think of by the mind, by which the mind is thought of,
Know that as brahman.
What one does not see by the eye, by which one sees eyes,
Know that as brahman.
What one does not hear by the ear, by which the ear is heard,
Know that as brahman.
That one does not breathe by the breath, by which breath is breathed,
Know that as brahman.”
On the other hand, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad gives us a lighter take on the frustrations inherent in the investigation of causality. This is a dialogue between the sages Yajnavalkya and his wife Gargi-
“Gargi- Since existence is woven onto the waters, on what are the waters woven?
Yajnavalkya- On air, Gargi.
Gargi- On what is air woven?
Yajnavalkya- On the worlds of middle-air, Gargi.
G- On what are the worlds of middle-air woven?
Y- On the worlds of Gandharvas.
G- On what are the worlds of Gandharvas woven?
Y- On the worlds of the sun.
G- On what are the worlds of the sun woven?
Y- On the worlds of the moon.
G- On what are the worlds of the moon woven?
Y- On the worlds of the constellations.
G- On what are the worlds of the constellations woven?
Y- On the worlds of gods.
G- On what are the worlds of gods woven?
Y- On the worlds of Indra.
G- On what are the worlds of Indra woven?
Y- On the worlds of Prajapati.
G- On what are the worlds of Prajapati woven?
Y- On the worlds of Brahma.
G- On what are the worlds of Brahma woven?
Y- Gargi, don’t ask too many questions or your head will split open. You ask too many questions about something which too many questions should not be asked.
The Upanishad tells us that poor Gargi fell silent at that rejoinder. Another way the ancient Vedics solved the fundamental question is by viewing time as cyclical. In traditional Vedic cosmology, the universe is cyclically created and destroyed over a timespan of nearly 9 billion years (modern physics places the age of our universe at around 14 billion years). This solves the question of origin, but it still leaves us asking why the endless chain of creation and destruction exists in the first place. Of course, if we view brahman as the source of this chain, the link is complete. There exist both similar and varying views in other cultures- Egyptian, Sumerian, Aztec, Greek, etc. We won’t go into the details of each of them, for the Vedic model is illustrative enough of how theology tackles tough questions.
But as we saw in the ground rules, epistemology is important. And crucially, Upanishadic epistemology does indeed begin with faith. There are three components to knowledge in Upanishadic thought- the knower, or subject; the known, or object; and the means of acquiring knowledge, the epistemology. The Vedantic teacher Sankara advocated three such means- perception, inference and scriptural testimony. To Sankara, each mode was important within its own sphere of influence, thus there was no conflict among them. Further, while perception and inference could give knowledge on the material world, only scriptural testimony could lead us towards knowledge of the self and the absolute. Both were beyond human senses, and thus only the revelations of scripture could establish the truth.
This reminds us of the idea of non-overlapping magisteria and shows us that it’s an ancient meme. Faith in scriptural testimony was the starting point for the Vedantin. From there, one proceeded through reasoning and perception to reach experience of the truth. Brahman is a fixed starting point in Upanishadic thought, its existence to be taken for granted because the texts say so. We will accept this starting point as we understand brahman in detail. But it is important to remember that brahman is the uncaused cause, or an inevitable leap over the necessary gap of knowledge. In other words, the next time someone leaps over this gap by triumphantly declaring ‘god!’ our response can be- ‘precisely.’
All variations of the theological model solve the problem of origin through positing an uncaused cause. Some call it god, others call it brahman. But in all cases, instead of resolving our queries, these models only shift them a level up. Of course, the curious among us will ask the same questions for god. The same goes for the concept of brahman. The doctrine of ajativada tells us that brahman is beyond the concepts of creation and destruction or becoming and unbecoming. Indeed, ajativada directly translates as the doctrine of non-creation. The Mandukya Upanishad says-
“There is no creation, no destruction, no bondage, no longing to be freed from bondage, no striving to be free from bondage, nor anyone who has attained freedom from bondage. Know that this is the ultimate truth.”
To be fair, without conceptualising this sort of an absolute brahman, we are fated to dally in endless regressions. The ancient Indians clearly realised this, and as we’ll later see, so do neo-Platonic mathematicians such as Max Tegmark. But it is also fair to ask why this world is considered an illusory representation of the absolute, while the latter is considered causal to it. We will visit these questions in greater detail in the chapter on consciousness. For now, as we move on to examining scientific models, it is worth spending some time on understanding the various human fields of inquiry and their characteristics. We’ve previously discussed how science is the body of knowledge we produce when using the scientific method. The scientific method has universal applicability, and nothing says it must be confined to physics, chemistry and biology. These sciences are simply descriptions of reality, working on us through different layers. As we will see, different layers of our reality originated at different moments in time.
Making Sense of It All: Human Discplines of Inquiry
Reality is made of processes. From gravity and natural selection to neurotransmission, the world works because these processes exist. They form the basis for a deist explanation of existence, which defines god as a clockmaker that wound this universe up and set it off. The clockmaker built mechanics and other laws into this clock, and need not interfere in its life after creation. But that’s yet another way of surrendering to the necessary gap cheaply, and god is a placeholder in a deist model.
The first processes to arise in this universe arose in a moment after the Big Bang called the planck epoch, which is defined as 10-43 seconds. That means taking the number 1.0 and moving the decimal point 43 places to the left- that’s how unimaginably short a planck epoch is, and we go through billions upon billions of them in a day. The processes that form the fundamentals of space, time and energy were built into the universe within this moment- electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force and gravity. The study of such processes, which is the study of the fundamentals of our universe, is called physics.
Within the first second of its existence the universe birthed particles- from quarks and bosons to the larger protons, neutrons and electrons. 300,000 years later, these coalesced into the first atoms, and then combined to form molecules. Thus arose the processes that govern molecular interactions. The study of such processes, which is the study of the interactions between atoms and molecules, is called chemistry. The physical reality of our universe possesses a chemical overlay. When physicists insist that their equations are all we need to describe reality, they’re displaying a form of reductionism- the view that the nature of complex things can be understood by reducing them to simpler or more fundamental things.
To fully understand chemistry, we certainly need to understand physics. But view it the other way around- Physics is essential to describe the universe, but it is not enough. There exist additional processes that can only be described by chemistry. A comprehensive understanding of reality must explain both physics and chemistry. The final answer to life, the universe and everything must be holistic, not reductionist.
The first stars and galaxies formed 300 to 500 million years after the birth of physics, and the study of their lives is astronomy. We consider it a sub-segment of physics because stars, galaxies and planets are governed by the same processes that physics has already described. Close to 10 billion years after physical processes originated, some atoms and molecules on earth organised to form increasingly intricate structures that we call life-forms (though this could have happened earlier on a different planet as well). Chemistry is essential to describe life-forms, but it is not enough. There exist additional processes that are both made of and more than chemical processes. The study of such processes, which is the study of processes that generate, sustain and evolve life-forms, is called biology. The physical and chemical reality of our universe possesses a biological overlay.
Among the life-forms of earth, an ape species in the homo genus developed a characteristic it calls consciousness. There are of course varying states of consciousness. A single-celled organism may be conscious only of physical vibrations. Plants are conscious of nutrients and sunlight. Birds, insects and animals display an astonishing spectrum of consciousness. But what we like to call true consciousness arose, obviously, in us. We are still unclear on what processes are at play when it comes to consciousness. The prevailing view accepts the logical conclusion of the laddered model of reality. As chemistry rose from physics, as biology from chemistry, consciousness rose from biology. We will examine the debate on this matter in the section on consciousness.
Powered by a higher order of consciousness, homo sapiens created the elaborate superstructures we know as culture. Processes were at work again, social processes that shaped symbols, morality, language, religion and institutions. At this point the universe of a physical, chemical, biological and conscious reality acquired another overlay. No longer could we define reality in objective terms alone. Now reality was also shaped by cultural processes. One example of this is the difference between sex and gender. Sex is a component of objective reality. There are biologically determinable differences between what we classify as male and female, including variations in between. But ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are rigidly defined products of culture. They are the result of large groups of homo sapiens together consenting to believe that something is true. ‘A man’s job is to work in the fields and provide for the household.’ ‘A woman’s job is to tend to the home and husband.’ These statements are not compatible with objective reality, but for thousands of years they have shaped the daily lives of billions through cultural realities.
Similarly, while homo sapiens are an objectively real component of the universe, ‘human being’ has been subjectively defined by cultures. Throughout history, the power of words and the meaning we place in them has helped us deem other groups of homo sapiens variedly as sub-human, non-human, simian and worse to make it easier for us to treat them different. Shaping our reality in this form has allowed us to repeatedly perpetrate exploitation, oppression, xenophobia and genocide of a kind other species are not capable of.
This difference between objective and consensual realities gives rise to alternate cultures and narratives on the meaning of life. Once we accept the difference between the objective and the consensual, we can spend our time on understanding the ways in which the consensual impacts us. How should it be formed? What should its values contain? Who should get to decide? Should human rights be a real thing? Or money? God? Should men and women be equal? Should homosexuals have the same rights as heterosexuals, and should it even matter? Should corporations have the same privileges as individuals? The consensual realities that humans create form the context in which objective reality is identified. None of our scientific discoveries would have been possible without language, commerce or governance. While our vocal abilities and wider consciousness are biological facts, everything else that separates us from other apes is a product of culture. This is when we turn the laddered view upside down and observe that all previous natural processes have led to self-aware biological units that now use epistemological tools to make sense of the very processes that originated them. A complete understanding of this universe must also explain why it contains these sapient units, and possibly contains many varieties of them on different planets.
Thus, while consciousness and all that precedes it are essential to explain this universe, they are not enough. There exist social processes that directly impact the very mind that perceives all previous layers of reality. The study of these processes is called history, and we ask forgiveness from social scientists for lumping linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and archaeology under this umbrella. Allowing for such broad sweeps in how we paint the canvas, these disciplines reflect the combined attempt of humanity to make sense of what is going on. Let us now see what the best of our application has to say about origin.
The Scientific Explanation
In the previous section we saw how the laddered view of the universe tells us that the universe came before life, which in turn came before mind. But we will give the issue of mind a separate section, so the scientific fields of interest here are biogenesis and cosmogony, the origin of life and universe respectively.
Charles Darwin titled his magnum opus On the Origin of Species, and steadfastly avoided speculating on the origin of life itself. To Darwin, it would be explained by to-be-discovered physical and chemical processes. In a letter to a friend, he speculated that a ‘warm little pond’ in Earth’s ancient past might have accumulated a rich mix of chemicals. There, driven by chemistry, ever-greater molecules gradually coalesced into a brew that finally spawned life. This idea later emerged as the primordial soup theory. But before we speculate on the origins of life, is it not best to ask what exactly is life?
Paul Davies’ book The Origin of Life lists the fundamental characteristics of life. None of these work in isolation, but together they give a framework for what differentiates life from non-life:
- Reproduction- Not simply the ability to reproduce, but to also reproduce a copy of the reproducing apparatus itself. In other words, to reproduce successfully, organisms must replicate not only the genes but also the means of replication. Davies points out some interesting exceptions. Bush fires and crystals reproduce in a sense but are not considered alive, while viruses cannot multiply on their own and need a host to replicate but are a part of biology.
- Metabolism- Lifeforms process chemicals and garner energy to conduct activities such as movement and reproduction. But metabolism alone cannot account for life. Some microorganisms stay dormant for long periods. Seeds and spores do not possess metabolism, and we certainly do not think of them as alive. But they carry within them the means of replication, and of passing that knowledge on to the next generation.
- Nutrition- Like metabolism, it signifies the ‘continual throughput’ of matter and energy a lifeform needs to sustain to live. Davies points out that a nutritive process alone does not make life. The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is a matter and energy churning behemoth, but no one suggests we call it alive.
- Complexity- From a unicellular creature to the network of neurons and nerves that make us, life displays astonishing complexity at every layer. But there are again exceptions if complexity is taken in isolation. Hurricanes and galaxies are highly complex as well. Davies suggests that life needs organised complexity, which means that the components of a lifeform must cooperate under a standard operating procedure. For example, arteries and veins need to cooperate with the heart, while limbs must be tethered to the neurological processes that generate locomotion.
- Development and Variation- Not only do lifeforms grow and develop, as do crystals, rust and clouds, but they also variate. Gradual evolutionary adaption over successive generations, leading to variation and novelty, is a key characteristic of life.
Davies suggests further characteristics that draw from theories in information technology and artificial intelligence, but he points out that the two crucial factors that life possesses are reproduction and metabolism. Anything that has one but not the other could not be life in any meaningful sense. Admittedly, Davies’ book is a bit of a bait-and-switch. It doesn’t tell us about the origin of life as much as describe with vivid detail all that we currently know. The remarkable thing is that we do know quite a bit already. Before we identify the ‘big bang’ of biology, let us understand how we get there. The answer lies, broadly, in evolution by natural selection. It helps trace the lineage of all life on earth back to a common, parent microbe in prehistory. This does not mean that the parent microbe was also the first lifeform, but it illustrates how once life gets going, evolution can take over. The implications of this are often slow to dawn. Cattle, felines, canines, bears, elephants, giraffes, zebras, horses, birds, fish, whales, rice, wheat, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, onions, roses, lotuses, neems, peepals, fungi, viruses, the bacteria in your body and you- all can trace their ancestry to a single microbe that lived between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago. We are all truly related. An internet meme captures this beautifully. If you die without progeny, you will be the first lifeform in the direct line between that parent microbe and you to die without reproducing. The first in that direct line in 4 billion years. If this confuses you, think of your grandfather. He may have had multiple children, and consequently you have several cousins. As long as your cousins reproduce, your grandfather’s genes will be passed on. But if you don’t, the direct line of your grandfather, your father and you ends with you. Now extend this to that parent microbe 4 billion years ago.
Primary science education in India is largely secular, so we do not see absurd public debates on whether evolution should be taught to children or not (this was proven wrong 8 months after I wrote this). Most of us are fortunate to grow up with a vague understanding of what evolution is, and how it explains the creation of one species from another. This is not to say that we don’t carry horrible misunderstandings. The most common one is that we evolved from monkeys or chimpanzees. This is not what evolution tells us. Understanding evolution the correct way means understanding that, since both monkeys and homo sapiens are extant today, they are equally successful descendants of a common ancestor species. The closer in time to us that the ancestor species lived, the closer related we are. The common ancestor we share with other apes lived far closer in time than the one we share with monkeys, and so we are far closely related to apes than we are to monkeys. So much so that we are a part of the ape family, a species within the homo, or human, genus. In fact, in his book The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond makes a compelling case for reclassifying pan troglodytes (common chimpanzees) as homo troglodyte.
This in turn implies that we are not the first human species to inhabit earth. The Neanderthals were human, so were homo habilis and homo erectus. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari provides a thrilling visualisation of what ancient earth could have been like with multiple human species co-inhabiting it. Another misunderstanding some of us entertain is that discrete species evolve into other discrete species. Since we cannot perceive how life makes that jump, we find reason to doubt evolution. But the discrete quality enters life only when viewed from the end-points of millions and billions of years. There is no specific generation between two species which we could point to where all the differences originated overnight.
Take for example the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees, said to have lived somewhere around 7 million years ago. In other words, 7 million years ago there lived a female ape who had two daughters. One daughter parented the human line, the other daughter was parent to the chimpanzee line. To visualise this, take a journey back to this common ancestor, generation by generation. Go to your parents first, then grandparents, and so on. At no point in this journey would you find a step where the parent generation is the ancestor ape species and the child generation is the human species. Each generation is, by definition, of the same species as its parents. Yet at the end-points of 7 million years you have an ancestral ape and a modern homo sapien. Is this discreteness a fundamental quality of life, or simply the perception we have with our small window of time? We could even go back down from the common ancestor ape to the modern chimpanzee with the same conclusions. Viewed at these end points then, homo sapiens and chimpanzees are two different species. But in the evolutionary game of life they are but slightly different manifestations of the same phenomenon. This exercise can be conducted between any two species with the same conclusions. Whether we are non-vegetarian, vegetarian or vegan, we all live by eating our biological relatives.
Evolution works over remarkably long periods of time that our ape minds have not evolved to comprehend. The moment the processes of replication and metabolism were activated within the first inanimate cellular structure, evolution by natural selection, over 4 billion years, produced the diversity we see on earth today. I use the term ‘moment’ quite loosely here. There was no singular nanosecond when life erupted into existence. Instead there likely was a long and gradual process, at the end-points of which are non-life and life. It is also worth noting that to Charles Darwin himself, natural selection was the main, but not the exclusive means of variation in species. Darwinians assert that Darwin was leaving space for variation by sexual selection and like to explain everything by these two means alone. In the next section I will share other theories of variation that do not rely on natural and sexual selection alone.
Darwin’s idea of evolution by selection is arguably the most profound thought to ever emerge from a human mind, and it is not unfair to place Darwin on the same genius pedestal as Einstein. The idea that larger and more complex things could assemble from simpler states has many implications, one of which was applied on the thought of life’s ultimate origin itself. Darwin realised this when he speculated on a warm little pond in Earth’s primitive past. In the in 1920s, JBS Haldane and Alexander Oparin realised this too, and they hypothesised a ‘primordial soup’ theory for the origin of life. This is the explanation given-
- The primitive earth contained a chemically reducing atmosphere. This means an atmosphere where conditions removed oxygen and other oxidising gases and vapours, preventing oxidisation (like combustion, where substances react with oxygen to product heat and light).
- In such an atmosphere, chemical processes gradually coalesced molecules into arrangements of increasing complexity. Over time, inorganic compounds transformed into simple organic compounds- essential ingredients for life.
- These compounds accumulated in ‘hot and dilute soups’ along shorelines, oceanic vents and natural geysers.
- Further transformation converted the simple organic compounds to complex organic compounds till the formation of a cell, and life was underway.
In 1953, the chemists Harold Urey and Stanley Miller decided to test this theory, and the experiment they set up was quite simple. The first step was to recreate the sort of environment assumed in the primordial soup theory for ancient Earth. Urey and Miller did this by mixing methane, hydrogen and ammonia in a flask with some water. There was no free oxygen in their environment, just like what was thought for pre-life Earth. They passed an electric spark through this mixture and thought to leave it for a week. Over the next few days the mixture turned reddish-brown, and analysis revealed the presence of amino acids. These are simple organic compounds that arrange themselves into proteins, which in turn are building blocks of life.
Remarkably, a simple lab experiment had revealed that recreating the conditions of ancient Earth could yield amino acids within a week. It was only logical to assume what would happen over millions of years. On its own, this was a profound realisation on the question of origin. The scientific method had demonstrated that we could recreate the first steps needed on the road to life. And we know that the conditions on ancient Earth could have coalesced a hot soup of molecules into organic compounds. That this is real, not divine mystery beyond mortal comprehension, is far more satisfying than any faith-based road on offer.
But things are not so neatly settled. Geologists are here to tell us that methane and ammonia were probably never abundant in the atmosphere of ancient Earth, and any hydrogen would have easily escaped into space. Instead, the atmosphere was likely rich in carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Experiments with these gases have not yielded amino acids. Further, despite several successful recreations of the original Urey-Miller experiments, we are no closer to creating complex organic compounds, or polymers, from simple organic compounds, or monomers. Amino acids fall in the latter category, and experiments have not been able to create anything more complex than that.
Paul Davies cautions us against reading too much into amino acids. He gives us the analogy of finding a pile of bricks on a road. The pile is no real guarantee that we will soon encounter a house. Similarly, creating amino acids is a long way away from creating life. Others argue that the presence of bricks is clear indication of the intent to construct, so the presence of amino acids does indeed imply life further down the road. And when the understanding of evolution is coupled with the results of such experiments, we are given a glimpse of how life could be a natural process in the universe. It is interesting to think of the ‘big bang’ of biology. Did the processes of polymer creation and natural selection begin at the time of the actual Big Bang? If yes, we should expect to find traces of life from a relatively early time onwards in the universe’s history. But if no, then when did the processes that create life originate? If life-creating processes originated once complex compounds were in the right place at the right time, where in the universe were these blueprints stored? And when were the blueprints seeded? We see that the answer to the origin of life must also comment on the origin of life-creating processes. To understand what we mean by this, let us digress into the periodic table of elements.
It’s easy for us to see the elements as discrete chemical objects, and fancy names like hydrogen, lithium and cobalt help us in this imagination. But how does one element differ from another? Simply by the number of protons in its nucleus. If the nucleus contains only 1 proton, we call the object hydrogen. Add another proton and we name it helium. 3 protons make lithium, 6 make carbon, 8 make oxygen and so on. The number of protons in the nucleus of an atom is called its atomic number, and it is the defining characteristic of an element. The other components of an element are neutrons and electrons. When the number of neutrons in a nucleus changes, it is still the same element but a different isotope. For example, the carbon atom has 6 protons in its nucleus. The most abundant isotope of carbon is carbon-12, which has 6 neutrons as well. But another isotope, carbon-13, contains 7 neutrons. That explains the numbering system at work. Carbon-12 contains 6 protons and 6 neutrons, thus a total of 12 nucleons (protons and neutrons are collectively called nucleons). Carbon-13 is so named because the extra neutron makes for 13 nucleons.
Protons and neutrons in turn are composed of sub-particles known as up and down quarks. Electrons and quarks are first generation elementary particles, which means they were among the first particles to be created after the Big Bang. There is thus a clear highway between physics and chemistry. The processes that arose from the Big Bang created electrons and quarks, which combine in known configurations to create atoms. The number of protons in different atoms signify distinct elements. The number of neutrons give us different isotopes of the same element. The highway then takes us to molecules and compounds, which can be identified as specific configurations of atoms. And that is where the highway abruptly stops. There is no larger periodic table of molecular configurations. No bounded combinations that create life in identifiably discrete units. In other words, we do not know if life-creating processes also arose from the Big Bang, like chemistry and physics.
This is one of the reasons why Paul Davies does not think that life is abundant across the universe. If biological processes originated later, they probably originated at a specific place as well. Given that earth is a live sample, we should surmise that our planet is the only specific place where the unique enterprise of biology is underway. In his book, Davies asks the question- where does biological information exist? Indeed, the same can be asked for any natural information.
The problem is not new to humanity. The Greek philosopher Plato envisaged an abstract space that contained the perfect form of everything we observed in the material world. This space was home to a perfect form of rabbits, of humans and of equilateral triangles. The neo-Platonian Max Tegmark tells us of the Hilbert Space, another abstract space which contains the wave function of our universe. A wave function is a mathematical object that describes a system completely. Tegmark believes that our universe is a mathematical object that contains spacetime within it, which leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that we cannot ask ‘where’ this object exists. The Hilbert Space is that unaskable where.
Wave functions are different to particles because they spread across space and describe linkages between particles. In this sense, wave functions are global entities, spread ‘everywhere.’ And particles are information manifested in a local context. To Paul Davies, what this means for biology is that biological information, like physical information, is embedded within wave functions that are global entities. They exist somewhere like the Hilbert Space, and thus outside spacetime. In turn, this means that biology is not on a uniform highway from physics and chemistry. It is not a function of physical particles and molecules, but of information that lies beyond. In Davies’ words, this means that “the explanation of the origin of life is deeply linked to the origin of the universe itself.”
Readers should not get the impression that science has figured out the origin of life with no gaps in understanding. In the paragraphs above we see how the amino acids experiment must be considered pragmatically, but also that biogenesis need not be a mystery relegated to religion and speculation. Other scientific theories on the origin of life talk of panspermia- the idea that life arrived on Earth from elsewhere, probably deposited by a comet or an asteroid. We will spend little time on exploring this idea, because much like religious definitions of god, it only pushes our inquiries a step up. Accepting panspermia does not remove the ultimate question- how did life originate? It only forces us to focus our studies on a planet other than Earth. In any case, the examination of wave functions and information in the previous paragraph show that some hints to the origin of life might be found in the origin of the universe itself.
This idea too has Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection as its inspiration. To Darwin, the manifestations and variations in a lifeform’s features, habits, instincts, diseases and vices were seeded in the embryological state itself. This is why, he pointed out, the same hereditary disease manifests at around the same age in a parent and a child’s life. The causative factors for this disease entered the parent and the child’s biology when both were embryos. Similarly, if life is considered a feature of this universe, perhaps the processes that create it were imbibed in the universe at the time of its gestation and birth. This allows us to move to the Big Bang, the prevailing scientific model for the origin of our universe. There exist alternate models on the fringes, but the Big Bang hypothesis of the universe is one of the greatest success stories of the scientific method. Max Tegmark summarises the hypothesis in Our Mathematical Universe as:
Everything we can observe was once hotter than the core of the sun, expanding so fast that it doubled its size in under a second.
Tegmark goes on to remind us that we can say nothing whatsoever ever about what happened before the Big Bang. The hypothesis does not imply that the universe was one second old at the time, or that it started from some sort of singularity. In fact, there is no evidence for a Big Bang singularity, and perhaps the universe hung in some sort of stasis for an indeterminable amount of time before the Big Bang (note how this could be paralleled with the Cosmic Egg origin scenarios in theology). There are other problems as well, like where exactly did the Big Bang occur? If it happened earlier in one region than in another, then the former region would have had a longer time to cool down. This means that the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation should display a wide spectrum depending on which direction we look in, but in reality it has a variation of only 0.002%. Since even two extreme points of our universe show the same temperature, this implies that both points experienced independent Big Bangs at the same time! There are other problems as well, and physicists have solved most of them by conceptualising what they call inflation- a rapid doubling of both density and volume. Inflation is understood by thinking of wave functions, which make it possible for effects to manifest ‘everywhere.’
It is interesting to note how the scientific method can acknowledge its own gaps and work to fill them. Contrast this with theological models, where pointing out gaps is akin to offending people- which is increasingly a controversial thing to do. The notion of origin through a Big Bang was first foreshadowed in Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which was not compatible with the then-prevalent model of a static universe. The theory’s view of spacetime mandated either an expanding or a shrinking universe, and Einstein was forced to add a ‘cosmological constant’ to make his equations balance out. He later called it his greatest blunder.
In 1927, Georges Lemaitre used Einstein’s equations without the cosmological constant, and proposed an expanding model of the universe. He was supported in this by observed redshifts in nebulae that implied that they were moving away from us. Two years after him, Edwin Hubble provided a comprehensive observational foundation for Lemaitre’s theory. Hubble found that the universe was expanding at increasing velocities in all directions- what physicists call inflation. Then, another two years after that, in 1931, Georges Lemaitre proposed that the expansion had a logical origin point, and that the universe began with an explosion of the primeval atom.
The Big Bang model was backed by consistent observational data, and it made the prediction that we would be able to detect remnants of the original explosion. Lemaitre himself took cosmic rays as that remnant, though we now know that cosmic rays originate within a galaxy. Later, shortly before Lemaitre’s death, we discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation- the remnant of our early universe. We thus know how our universe originated, and the Big Bang model is theoretically falsifiable. For example, if we were to find nebulae that were blueshifted, or moving closer to us, that would refute the Big Bang model. Physics does not stop at the Big Bang. It asks both what existed before it, and what it will lead to. But while such answers explain how the universe arose, they are less clear on the why. The why is better addressed by parallel universes, multiverses and multiple dimensions.
To begin with, it must be realised that our universe is infinite, in all directions. This means that there are regions of space that we currently cannot observe. But one day the light from them will reach us and they will come into the sphere of our observable universe. This is happening even now. The infinity of space increases every moment. The natural processes of objective reality apply universally across this space, but culture could create completely different consensual realities. In infinite space, our own solar system could exist an infinite amount of times. This includes our earth, and us. We need no higher physics to predict that the infinite space of our own universe is enough for infinite versions of ourselves!
Second, there exist regions of space that we can neither currently nor ever observe. This is so because the space between these regions and us is forever expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light, through ongoing inflation. Since light from these regions can never reach us, and we will never observe them, it is safe to call them alternate or parallel universes. Physicists have learnt that even the processes of objective reality can be different in these regions. The common example given is that of water. There are three different equations for water- each representing its liquid, gaseous and solid states. These states can be called water’s effective states. Different regions of space forever separated from each other are like different effective states, various manifestations of the same fundamentals. The forces of gravity, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics could have differently tuned settings in each universe.
The infinity of the above two concepts is enough to suggest the existence of multiple and parallel universes. Infinite regions of space, each with their own finely tuned settings, imply that every possible configuration exists somewhere. This is what leads to the common idea that there could be parallel versions of ourselves in universes that are only slightly different from ours. The physics exists to support this view, just as it does to support the view that there could be parallel versions of not-ourselves in universes that are completely different from ours.
Another model in physics suggests, looking at the fuzziness implied by the laws of quantum mechanics, that at every point where two scenarios are equally likely to exist, both are in fact instantiated. Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive, but we happen to be conscious in one scenario and perceive that scenario to be the only result. The other scenario also exists, but in what is now a split-universe. But the questions quantum mechanics forces us to ask about reality need not be fully resolved for us to understand infinity and variation. As discussed in the previous paragraph, the physics already exists to support the view that an infinite variation is possible on the current model of existence. We do not need to add infinity to infinity. Let the physicists engage with that to their satisfaction.
What’s more important to take away from this is how it trivialises improbability, and the light it thus sheds on why something exists instead of nothing. Before humans understood evolution by natural selection, they could not comprehend how such a vast diversity of discrete species could possibly have arisen through natural forces. Similarly, we were once led to wonder how coincidental it was that our universe and its mathematical constants were so delicately tuned to support life on Earth. Now we know that there are an infinite number of universes. In some of them, the settings would be completely alien to life. In some, the tuning might support lower lifeforms alone. In the rest, versions of you represent all the possibilities of your existence. When you roll the dice an infinite amount of times, all possible results are bound to occur. The same goes for existence as we know it.
But we must remember that ‘we’ exist, in the true sense, only in this universe. The variants in other universe are not really you, regardless of how much they look like you or possess similar memories. This is so because your consciousness resides exclusively inside you. If a singular consciousness simultaneously resided in all your variants, you wouldn’t wonder about the improbability of life in the first place. You’d be a pan-universal entity with a very different view of time and the constraints of choice. This has a profound implication on the question of why something exists instead of nothing. Evolution by natural selection shows us that, given enough time, an absolute diversity of life is possible. Physics and its understanding of the universe shows us that there exist an infinite number of alternate universes displaying infinite degrees of difference from our own. In both cases, our incredulity is diminished when confronted with infinity. Transcending our own consciousness shows us that everything that can exist also does exist. We are constrained by the simple fact that, for each of us, there is only one entity that knows what it like is to be that entity. If your consciousness was in another person, you wouldn’t be yourself- you’d be that person.
Once we’ve explained away all the diversities and improbabilities of existence, the only question that remains is why existence instead of non-existence. But taking the route we’ve been on so far a little further explains this as well. Think of it carefully- Non-existence is the lack of existence. Non-space is the lack of space. In a universe where infinity seems to be the norm, everything that can be possible also happens to instantiate. It thus stands to reason that non-space also exists somewhere, except that it cannot possibly exist in space. Non-existence also exists, except that it then becomes existence. You and I are conscious in one variant of existence, we cannot possibly imagine what it is like to be in another variant. We cannot even imagine what non-existence is like, because if there is something to be like non-existent, it would have to be existent.
This is not tautology, this is an extrapolation of scientific evidence to explain why something exists instead of nothing. ‘Nothing’ also exists, it’s just that we live inside of ‘something’, and so we cannot know what nothing feels like. To put it in theological terms, if brahman is the creative principle behind existence, then we can imagine a non-creative principle as well. But if a principle is non-creative, its only attribute is non-creation. We can talk in detail about existence, where we happen to be conscious. But we cannot talk in detail about non-existence, where we happen to be non-conscious. Non-existence proves that it is real by the simple fact of not existing. Life on Earth seems extremely unlikely, but an obvious result out of infinite possible results when objective reality is properly understood. Similarly, existence seems confounding and inexplicable to us, but an obvious alternate to non-existence in a universe bent on infinite variations.
In other words, ‘non-existence’ and ‘nothing’ has already been tried or is being tried right now- we cannot assign a tense to this because it is beyond the spacetime co-ordinates of our reality. You cannot possibly know it because you too are non-existent there. This means that the element of causality in our existence has been resolved, at least in its anthropocentric aspect. It helps tie up the issue of causality when we turn to speculative explanations for existence.