Big Crunch, Big Freeze, Big Bang

My car isn’t running as it should. She (sic) shakes at high speeds, stalls at traffic lights, and won’t start on wet mornings. I’ll take it to a mechanic I know. He’ll (sic) know what to do.

Sure enough, Sid diagnoses the problem, implements a fix, et voila, I’m back in the pink…sort of. No more shaking but starting and stalling are still issues. So I’ll take my car to another shop. Hank fixes the stall, but ‘old Betsy’ still won’t turn over in the rain. 

So now I’m off to the new shop in town – just opened. I’m introduced to Marge! Who’da thunk it? (I must be living in 2025.) Marge works her magic and now  my 1970 Chevy runs like new.

No one mechanic had all the answers but by putting their heads together I was able to complete my cross country trip without a hitch. Say ‘Hello’ to the Quantum Mechanics…the best pit crew any driver ever had:

Planck, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Everett, Bell, Feynman – it’s a star-studded roster – and that’s just to name a few. If I take something from each - making sure not to let Bell undo Bohr, etc. - I might be able to piece together a coherent and heuristic model of the real world.

Let’s give it a go:

According to Schrodinger, being is a wave function that describes the probability (P) that an entity (X) will exhibit a discrete value (M) in a specific region of spacetime (R). The wave function fills spacetime and therefore constitutes a field. 

Spacetime is discrete (Zeno) but it behaves as if it were a continuum down to the Planck metric; therefore, on any realistic scale any defined region will seem (doxa) to be continuous.

The wave function predicts that X will have a specific value (M) at R with a probability of P. The Sum of the Probabilities of all values of M equals 1. Everyone is someone!

Likewise, X is potentially found in any sub-region of spacetime but the probability that X is found within any one sub-region (R) is less than 1. However, the probability (P) that X will be found in R plus the probability that it will be found outside of R does equal 1. If P(R) = .25, P(-R) = .75. 

Now things get interesting! According to Schrödinger and Feynman, P of M at R evolves deterministically; but according to Everett, ‘probability’ is off the table entirely. All possible M’s occur at every R and each specific M at each specific R corresponds to its own unique Universe. (Hence, Everett’s model is known as the ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’, MWI, of Quantum Mechanics.)  

According to Everett, the world is continually branching, everywhere, every when, and each branch creates its own distinct universe. Everybody is somebody sometime!

The math works…but the metaphysics is unsatisfying. The number (N) of Universes grows exponentially! After just 10 generations of events, N > 1,000. Unimpressed? Ok, 10 generations later (20 total), N > 1,000,000 distinct universes. Dizzying! 

MWI is best represented as a lattice of nodes (N) with each node assuming one of a finite number (e.g. 2) of possible values. Assume each node (N) has a value (M) of 1 or 0. According to MWI, every N takes on both an M of 1 and an M of 0 (both...and, not either...or) so the Universe itself bifurcates, with one daughter universe including M = 1 and the other including M = 0.

So, everything is a wave, a field, a probability function. When the wave function collapses, M becomes 100% probable, i.e. certain, at one particular R. When P=1 at R, X manifests as a particle. 

Beyond the cosmic horizon, particles are receding from us faster than the speed of light. In that case, those particles should behave like tachyons which we would normally experience as particles traveling backwards in time.

In this case, however, since it is space that is expanding faster than c rather than the photon receding faster than c, we experience the tachyonic effects a bit differently. Instead of particles travelling backwards in time, we see the cosmic horizon effectively collapsing on us as a singularity. I am my own black hole. 

The day will come when the Planck Scale will have been so inflated that the lifetime of the universe will be insufficient for light to span it. 

Contrary to the Yellow Submarine, reversing the flow of time does not make our watches run backwards. We experience ‘time reversal’ as the contraction of the observable universe. Yes, it is Big Bang run backwards… sort of.

While the cosmos itself is expanding, our visible universe is contacting. Celestial objects potentially visible today will no longer be visible tomorrow. Eventually, the observable universe will devolve into a point-like state at or below Planck. We have come to call this state ‘Big Crunch’; but instead of a Hot High Density state, as assumed in previous models, the cosmic temperature approaches 0° K in our model. 

Phenomenally then, Big Crunch and Big Freeze turn out to be the same thing (ontological isolation @ 0° K) – not a fun state to be in - just viewed from different perspectives. What is experienced locally as Big Crunch is experienced globally as Big Freeze; both are manifestations of a single universal phenomenon, Heat Death. Either way we are talking about an approaching singularity and a temperature of Absolute Zero, the universe’s ‘omega point’.

And now, for my final act, the one you’ve all been waiting for, I turn Heat Death into Big Bang! As in the Book of Revelation, Alpha is Omega and vice versa. To quote Queen Mary, “My end is my beginning.” ‘Time’ is an epiphenomenon characteristic of our expanding-contracting Universe. To the extent that time runs ‘forward’, Omega is the Alpha point, but to the extent that time runs ‘backwards’, Alpha is Omega. 

The state of the Universe at Big Bang, Big Crunch, and Big Freeze is exactly the same. Big Crunch = Big Freeze viewed on opposing spatial scales (spatial), while Big Bang = Heat Death viewed from opposing temporal perspectives.

Caveat: The identity of parameters at Big Bang and Heat Death have led some to introduce a concept called, ‘Big Bounce’. There is no bounce, the universe is not perpetually regenerating. There is just one cosmic singularity which can be called Big Bang, Big Freeze, or Big Crunch at the discretion of the speaker.  

However, this neat model has one drawback: it predicts that everything should be nothing. Inconvenient! But perhaps after all “we are such things as dreams are made of.” (The Tempest) 

According to this model, the Universe is a perpetual process of autogenesis and auto-annihilation. We are the friction, the  turbulence at the interface. We are Derrida’s differance, the infinitesimal displacement between coming to be and being.

Our model telescopes Penelope’s 3 year process of weaving and unweaving Laertes’ shroud into each and every moment. Space collapses to a Planck ‘point’, time to a Planck ‘instant’. It’s not the cosmic extravaganza we’d imagined…but if the shoes fit, no matter how ugly, we might just have to wear them. 

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Piero di Cosimo’s The Destruction of the World by Fire and Water (c. 1524–29) imagines a universe collapsing in elemental fury, much like our own cosmos where Big Bang and Big Crunch are not opposites but two perspectives on the same singularity.