The Riddle of Existence
While it genuinely wants to lend a helping hand, the little acrobat is deeply fearful of losing its way amidst the landscape of probabilities. It proceeds once more to review the Questioner’s notes on the concepts that have invited themselves into the circle of fundamentals. It ponders over dark matter’s elusive nature, hoping to patch holes in the story of the dark sector. On one hand, a search is underway to seek evidence of dark matter in tiny trails of destruction imprinted within a rock’s crystalline lattice. On the other hand, Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) — whether modified inertia or modified gravity — disputes the necessity of such existence. At the one end of the theoretical spectrum, there is neither dark energy nor dark matter. At the other, an early dark energy may have decayed rapidly after recombination with negligible dynamical effects at late times.
Some dreams tell the incompleteness of an ideal. In them, ideas are drawn in pictorial forms. Carved in sand, their messages are washed away. Time, like a poetic image, can’t hardly separate its transforming action from the detail in the variations. Information slips through. Pieces are missing. At the heart of motion and communication lies a fundamental question: Can something remain its authentic self through the waves of resonance?
An eagle once asked the riddle of existence:”“What is, has passed, will be, and is always in the state of becoming?” On the edge of knowing, the little acrobat vows to answer as it crosses the threshold of the house of everything built brick by brick of evolving possibilities. New perspectives open windows in its exterior walls. It climbs high up in the roof rafters from where time, Nothingness, and the Quantum universe escape into thin air. There, carved into the beams, it finds the code of a hidden order inscribed in the language of absence with concepts dubbed dark energy and dark matter entering the circle of fundamentals.
In the race to unravel the mystery of time, theories are incomplete. They are partial representations of the riddle’s answer. They are adaptations, borrowing bricks from one version to the next with the ultimate goal of building a more complete house that counts for everything. Perhaps, the race is futile. There is no underlying theory. Like pieces of a puzzle, they fit quite perfectly under specific conditions and agree with each other where the circumstances overlap.
Statistical fluctuations come into being, enabling translational motion, repetitive patterns, and dynamic interplay of emerging entities. The riddle finds an array of answers in the timely manifestation of the Universe’s variations — its cosmological evolution in terms of cosmic time and material content. The quantification of cosmic time and measurements of material content constitute its algebraic form. As these calculations grow more precise, they change the preconceived idea of its topological outlook.
The accelerated structure formation at early times — that the Webb Telescope has confronted the human mind with—challenges the dark matter paradigm. Astronomers looking for one thing stumble upon another while MOND physicists interpret these anomalies as evidence of their theories. As astronomical observations deepen, they bring into question the basis of the Universe's algebraic expression. The apparent landscape at early times casts doubt on the cosmic time. It may however reveal deceptive, influenced by the presence of massive dark matter halos and nearby supermassive black holes.
Teachings are passed on by figures of the past and present who paint details of a four-dimensional reality with walls pierced by higher dimensions. The pursuit of a unifying theory turns into a quest for these higher dimensions with out-of-the-box concepts. With the expansion of the observable Universe, ideas and concepts sprout continuously. They pile up steadily mounting a landscape of ghost towers emerging off the ground as the knowledge base grows.
In Thoughtland, ‘dimension’ above and below the surface refers to a degree of freedom, a higher state, and perhaps another Universe as if transactional exchanges extend beyond the Boundary allowing dark matter to break down into massless fermions, or photons at the threshold of the visible sector. A single unique mesoscopic dimension was recently introduced as a ‘dark dimension’ in which the smallness of the dark energy leads to the emergence of a tower of weakly interacting light particles — graviton excitations coalescing into five-dimensional black holes.
Our juggler fumbles with new ideas. It follows an unmarked path in its very own swampland in which fields are drawn in geometrical patterns up and down the surface. It wishes to rein the horse, named time, to a stop and wonders whether it is the emergence of time or that of consciousness that necessarily depends on the inflow of photons into atoms. In a swirl of concepts, time is an invariant variational while the Universe is a variational invariant. The invariance of time is due to its dynamical necessity while the Universe lacking a singular beginning is invariably filled with variational details, preceded by and vanishing into a rhizomatic Nothingness. They are one and the same.
The core mechanism driving time carries the illusion that there is a necessary trend towards the betterment of it all. But from its standpoint — how things have passed, are, will be, and how they are always in a state of becoming — they tend to gravitate towards chaos for evolution takes them there. Being near (or in the midst of) chaos describes the stampede at the acrobat’s feet.
Whether or not consciousness is dependent upon the light of photons, it came last. First came agency, then sentience, then consciousness — a by-product of evolution. Had consciousness come first, there would have been a lot more consciously thought-out processes in the Universe aimed at upholding feelings of sympathy — a togetherness of being — once referred to by Kepler. But the order of appearance in the script is set. Kepler, the ghost of the Past, laments, “Where, the heck, have I ever seen the bond of sympathy, the state of feeling together?”
Sympathy is a level up from Whitehead’s take on ‘feeling.’ Feeling, the experiential way of an ‘individual’, differs from sympathy, the experiential way in togetherness. Feeling might be what triggers and animates those variational details. But Freedom, Existence, and Essence rule over how agency — a sort of territorial assemblage — plays out. Agency is how one variation relates to a community of them. In theory, only, sympathy, Kepler’s ideal, would have been able to uphold cohesion.
Going through a major transition, the conscious acrobat turns inwards, fully aware of the incredibly small value but rather heavy burden that its balloon of dark energy puts on its body. Bound with ropes, like a ball and chain, it waits for a chance to let it go. In the language of absence, if the ratio of ordinary matter to a nonexisting matter is governed by an invisible balloon, how does it affect the layout of its bubbles? It longs for its free will to prevail.
Its hitchhikers, meanwhile, hunker down, recalling the reality of their own evolution — death as they individually experienced it. Windows to the past, the three squatters need an ear to bend and confess: “We have been dead for a long time. We are, what humans would call, relics from an era gone million years ago. Consciousness has a price, little acrobat, that you might not be willing to pay. As you question your own raison d’être, you must realize that the problem with existence is that it is plagued with a fundamental fear. Struggles shape the ebb and flow of existence. Even the Universe is just a sphere rubbing against other spheres trying to make a place for itself, trying to exist within the Multiverse.”
Swamped in a forest of theories, the conscious acrobat would rather not be caught any longer in the labyrinth of particles and their crisscrossing fields. Deep down, it only wants to play, throwing lassos around targets, pulling and releasing them as it pleases. Its own ethereal nature is drawn irresistibly towards Nothingness, the strongest attractor of all for it feels at home in the shadows. With time coming to a stop, it retreats to where there is no light of photons. Its three companions withdraw in silence.
In the end, its bubbles detach from each other. One by one, they get carried down the cosmic flow. They tumble with filaments, breathe through comets, and return to the circles of dance in the deeper patterns of agency. Could such an outcome have been foreseen? As its rolling head emerges out of slumber, it swears it dreamt of what sort of a thing the Universe is in its simplest form. Breaking the silence, it utters words to describe it. But in a split second, it all vanishes. The image could not be wrung out of its slumber.