Watch. Something is happening. It is only the second something that has ever happened.
For four hundred million years, the universe has been a blindingly bright soup of atoms, hot and dense, apparently a picture of near-perfect uniformity. It is important that you watch, because there are no other observers. The universe contains nothing but hydrogen and helium, elements too simple to allow for the creation of complex structures, if the environment even allowed such combinations to occur. Which, until now, it has not.
But space is growing, and in some places dimming, and the first differences in the congregation of matter are beginning to appear. Here and there, a few trillion trillion particles of elementary matter start to coalesce in a gravitational whirlpool. The rules that allow for the existence of gravity are the same as those that allow the subatomic bits that form hydrogen and helium. Quarks and gravitons come popping out of a 248-dimensional mathematical manifold which hold these and all other possible matter and energy in its symmetrical lattice.
Within that design are The Rules for Everything.
Someday it will be said that it is the lattice itself that is reality, that what the creatures living within perceive as real are only the Platonic shadows cast upon the walls of the cave. But for now there is no one to say this, nor are there cave walls or shadows.
Today, a conglomeration of matter has condensed enough to create the first nuclear furnace, in the heart of an early member of the first generation of stars. Perhaps it is at 10 AM on a Tuesday. Choose a minute, an hour, a day of the week, and you will have a 10,080-1 chance of being right, for there once was a first star, and human abstractions like time may be extended back as far as we wish. Never mind that this was 712 billion Tuesdays ago.
Skip ahead 100 or so billion Tuesdays. You might as well, as there is nothing to see here but protostars, leftover gas clouds from the Big Bang, and cooling background radiation. The universe has been a boring and empty place. But now, the first star and its brethren are running out of fuel. It is poetic to surmise that the first star was the first to die, but in reality it is based more on the vagaries of how much gas was collected by each star, which in turn set the hard limits on the first nuclear reactors.
Watch. This is the third thing that ever happened, as the first dying star loses the propulsive force that kept it from collapsing in upon itself. Its mass contracts spasmodically, falling to the doom of its unitary existence. In some but not all stars, this causes a last violent burst of nuclear activity, blowing the star apart and scattering its mass—its indestructible, immortal mass—out into the cosmos.
For the first time, an oxygen molecule roams outward, with a dozen other newly released elements, moving on their parabolic trajectories into the gravitational minuet. We need not worry about the oxygen causing havoc to any iron atoms it meets, because there is still no iron, nor other heavy elements. The first stars were not sufficiently large to create them. We must wait for the cycle to repeat, perhaps several times, before those elements are introduced.
Skip ahead another three hundred billion Tuesdays. The universe has become a far more eventful place, so this particular day is not important to it, only to us. Another cloud of gas has begun to collapse inward, but it is rotating sufficiently fast to keep some of its mass in varying orbits. Over eighty percent of this orbital matter is eventually drawn to a single planet just over forty light minutes from the center of the system, leaving behind a motley collection of gases and heavier elements to form seven more planets and several hundred thousand smaller entities.
On one of these planets, a multibillion year process will eventually form mollusks and trees, built of the elements blown out of long-dead stars. One of its species, built out of these same elements, will eventually fashion such items into shrimp toast and coffee cups. It will be in vogue for that species to believe that they are the beneficiaries of a galactic omniscient intelligence, or simply fantastically lucky, that their planet was so wonderfully placed so as to allow for the existence of self-aware beings who could teach themselves to strain near-boiling water through pulverized plant embryos.
Of course, they are wrong. It is true that a small variation in the collection of gases and minerals making up the Earth would have created a vastly different playing field for evolution, with unimaginably differing results. But as one of their species noted, using as his example a “cat” made of heavier elements, it is more accurate to see their world as merely one of a nearly infinite set of possible outcomes.
Humans are not lucky to be living on their Earth; rather, all possible Earths exist simultaneously in multidimensional space, and the humans experiencing this one are not lucky; they are preordained as existing in a universe in which everything that can happen, does happen. And if it can happen once, it happens an infinite number of times through the same branching that led to their existence in the first place. Somewhere next door to the Earths covered with humans are the ones inhabited by extremophiles, who believe that 1,000 °Kelvin is a chilly day requiring warm socks.
But perhaps we can forgive humanity their conceits; a species that can mistake matter as being “real” may believe any number of strange things.
On one of those Earth worlds, an Earthmass of approximately seventy kilograms reaches out for a collection of molecules fashioned out of water, paper, wax, and trace biological products into a “coffee cup”. If you asked me, I would tell you that I chose to reach for my cup to take another sip, that I wanted to drink the coffee before it grew too cold. A neurobiologist would tell you otherwise, that the electrical impulse to reach for my cup occurs about 500 milliseconds before my conscious awareness of my desire to do so. This awareness, the “I”, appears to be a story I tell myself after the fact of my action.
Watching the movement of electrons in our brains, those elementary particles ordained in the dawn of the universe from a supersymmetrical mathematical structure, we read a message from reality that our free will may not be what we think it is. The choice to drink coffee may be as automatic as the choice to beat our hearts; it is the subsequent feeling of choice that may be the only difference. And what is it to say that we “think” it is something, without referencing our free will to begin with? We can follow that logic down into the fractal mollusk spiral, wrapping tighter and tighter curves, and discovering the unending Mandelbrot complexity in its center. Alice’s rabbit hole was never so deep.
I sip my coffee. Several billion trillion molecules of water join the self-aware mass forming “me”, carrying with them a far smaller number of caffeine molecules. Some of these in turn will enter my bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier, where they will goose the production of adenosine compounds, and temporarily increase the electrical activity in parts of my brain.
I experience this as a pleasant rush of sharpness, as the laws of chemistry interact with the programmatic results of the four billion years of evolution, and the five hundred years of commerce, that led to my cup of coffee on a warm spring day. Subatomic particles continue to create the web of forces within and outside of us, so unknowable that we were forced to invent concepts like “solid” and “visible” to describe their effects. Divergent realities branch off by the trillions as the universe collides into itself at nanoscopic scales, creating all that is and the tiny fraction of it that remains ours.
The subatomic dance creates, for now, both the environment and the “us” that observes it. Each of us experiences our own center of this chaos, taking in its macroscopic scale and believing ourselves to be, at heart, the reason for it. The violence of physics and unimaginable spans of time have combined to result in humanity, the I of the storm.