The Transition

As the tinkering acrobat runs about revising its body parts, it recalls confessing to an interstellar visitor how hard it had tried to escape the pull of abstract thinking, only to fail each time. It feels at home among circles of concepts, dancing words, and geometric drawings. Yet, circles are merely oversimplified figures trembling into imperfect orbits. It had hoped to pop all its bubbles. Instead, it leaves them as they are to pursue writing a book about Nothingness.

Still holding its red balloon of dark energy, it bumps into Gustave, a well-known dreamer, after Maria, the Nantucket astronomer, has vanished into thin air. Gustave sees himself in the little acrobat and decides to stick around, at least for a while. As they begin their journey together, like two ducks gliding across the water, he says, “Indeed, what seems beautiful is a book about nothing, a book without external attachment… a book which would almost have no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible.” 

Nothingness, the strongest attractor of all, is winning back the little acrobat’s heart. They decide to pick up where it left off: exploring the predicament of an 'absolute' vacuum and the fundamental emptiness deriving from it. Whether it lacks a medium that can slow down light or any matter or energy capable of bending space, if gravitation and electromagnetism are two facets of the same underlying structure, the distinction between gravitational vacuum and electromagnetic vacuum becomes irrelevant. 

This ‘absolute’ is simply geometry stripped of any substance. It precedes the onset of 'matter' conditions, marked by a subtle presence of low energy and a slight indication of gravitational interaction. While emptiness fluctuates, geometry creates matter. It is the emptiness’ fluctuations that stir the layout of all things, essential to the formation of atoms and the expansion and contraction of distances in between. 

From an old Nature article, our two amateur ‘sleuths’ infer the existence of a gravitational dark energy connecting our world to the ‘hidden’ sector. The vacuum energy which may be all that is referred to as ‘dark energy’ has an incredibly small value, if not zero, compared to the bulky Universe. It lies at the Boundary, like an in-between entity with one foot in the hidden sector and the other on the ‘matter’ side.

They can’t quite wrap their heads around how negative energy and entanglement are intimately related, only that energy levels in a vacuum may fluctuate from zero to negative numbers. They know by experience the great impossibility — that a simple sequence of events dipping below the ground could induce the quantum vacuum to release energy it didn’t appear to have. They swear that a deep resonance brings information across.

Our two imaginary characters are dwellers of their own topological space. They are intimately aware that the hidden sector pertains not only to the realm of consciousness filled with dreams and probabilities but also to the realm of the unseen where extra dimensions reside. Are there gatekeepers to those higher dimensions? Photons maybe, as their flickering lights induce consciousness. The distinction between gravitation and electromagnetism becomes clearer when the degree of separability between them increases. As quantum entanglement decreases, ‘matter’ conditions get a start. 

After much sleuthing, the Juggler and its ghost friend are in a bind. They recap what they have learned so far: ‘Below the ground’ sounds a lot like what poets, painters, and composers alike have conveyed before with verses, paint brushes, and musical notes. Gustave, a writer during his lifetime, is very familiar with the process: at every burst of inspiration, words rise through.  If you ask them, they would say that all the extra dimensions, compactified in the quantum vacuum of spacetime, unfold before their very eyes.

The little acrobat knows too well what fills its head, the togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe. Humans, however, it’s a different story. Shedding light on human thought, Gustave says, “The future torments us, and the past holds us back. This is why the present escapes us.” Despite the present being the only reality humans physically experience, even the night sky seems stuck in the past filled with compelling stories of astronomical events frozen in time. 

In the ongoing debate over the nature of reality, the extra dimensions may be what is ‘hidden’ from humans’ view and experience. If on all of those different dimensions, there are a lot of other fields, then the labyrinth of particles is a multidimensional one. Humans however can anchor local appearances against the backdrop of time. To some, those dimensions marked with different time stamps, look like a light cone structure that extends between past and future with both ends in infinite shadows. 

Those shadows are out-of-focus projections showing snapshots, in the present, of their timeless inner being, one photon at a time. Time is revealed in the threads that weave the present into a monster blueprint of space, melting past and future into an invisible web full of dynamics pulling and repelling, splitting apart humans’ bodies and souls, keeping tight invisible cords while mounting scaffolds of consciousness breaking up beneath the surface of things. 

Time ignites movement in all dimensions, prompting objects to rotate, vibrate, move up and down, forward and backward. By connecting past, present, and future,  humans create a mental image of an intricate manifold. From afar, spacetime looks the same in all directions on large enough scales. In close-up, the quiet Milky Way is a neutrino desert, contrasting with large-scale clustered structures filled with exploding stars and binary objects merging, all bursting with gamma rays. If those large-scale structures leave aligned footprints in the night sky, is it merely by chance?  And if one gazes back at this corner of the Universe, would they make the same observation?

Gustave and the little ‘street urchin,’ lost in the Quantum Universe, swim through the deep Ocean and find themselves stranded on a different type of island. Whether it is outside or inside the horizon of a black hole, they are unable to know its exact location. They follow the cross-dimensional trails, dream of the Higgs field and the strong force dancing with geometry, and visualize matter mounted on a brane embedded in a five-dimensional bulk space. 

Our little acrobat has become a stargazer in the Universe’s Ocean where shapes of nebulae and supernova remnants compete with those of translucent jellyfish and squids. Gustave sees genuine happiness in his friend’s eyes and says, “Humans, too, will be filled in the future with immense joys. They will travel among the stars, with air pills in their pockets. Unfortunately, the rest of us came either too early or too late. We will have done however what is most difficult and least glorious: the transition.” Already contemplating its next adventure, the little acrobat vows to dip deeper below the ground, and wonders whether the Earth's oceans’ floor holds the key to the mystery. It hopes to one day ask jellyfish and squids whether, in their own experience, time feels different. 

Gustave, the Dreamer of balloons, bids his companion farewell with these concluding remarks: “The most beautiful works are those in which there is the least amount of substance. The closer the expression comes to the ethereality of thought, the more the word adheres to it and disappears. The future of the Arts lies in these paths, where form no longer knows any orthodoxy and is as free as the will that produces it.” Free will leads the way beneath the surface of things. He, too, vanishes beyond the Boundary. 

Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 1850-1854