Fundamentals of Cosmology

An article by Shubhransh Rai, published March 7, 2025 in Quantum Information Review, caught my eye. In it, he posed three fundamental questions:

• Is spacetime even real?

• Do the concepts of ‘when’ and ‘where’ even make sense?

• Is what we call ‘reality’ just a projection of something more fundamental? 

The way Mr. Rai frames the questions tells us volumes about the biases inherent in Western metaphysics since Plato. We are hung up on the difference between real (Plato’s cave) and imaginary (Plato’s shadows). This distinction is one of the first things we teach our children…after we’ve dispensed with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

On the other hand, Jesus of Nazareth (aka the Christ) offers a dissenting view: “Unless you become again as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Mt.18: 3) 

Jesus was on to something big (no kidding)! The ‘under 5 set’ swims freely in an ontologically democratic universe. The adult dichotomies of reality and make believe, dreams and perceptions, are at most poles of a continuum in kids’ minds. 

We force our kids to internalize our sorting algorithm. They resist…to the best of their limited abilities (they’re under 5 after all). They know a ‘false dichotomy’ when they see one, even if they lack the language proficiency needed to label it as such or the logical tools required to falsify it. 

Eventually, we sweep up even the most stubborn rug rat into our so-called ‘real world’. Unless they undergo a religious conversion on the road to Detroit, we must resign ourselves to waiting for the next generation of geniuses to be born…and corrupted.

Needless to say, the kids we’ve so thoroughly spoiled are now only too eager to corrupt their own offspring, and so the ‘fallacy of reality’ self-perpetuates. Fortunately, the major discoveries of the 20^th century are forcing us to pry open our minds after almost 2500 years on lockdown. I am referring of course to Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Entanglement.

Plato, genius though he was, is to the philosophical development of the West what first grade is to the intellectual development of our children: it marks the end of plasticity and the onset of rigidity, the crystallization of ideology, a phase change from fluidity to solidity. 

We speak of our ‘thoughts crystallizing’ as though it were a good thing, as though it did not rather signal the suspension of thinking per se. A ’crystallized thought’ is like a 1,000,000 year old mosquito fossilized in amber. It is different from the infernal buzzing in my bedroom on hot summer nights. The biases we’ve inherited as adult participants in contemporary Western civilization make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to understand pre-Socratic (i.e. pre-Platonic) philosophers…and pre-school children. 

Case in point: Parmenides, the father of Western philosophy (c. 525 – 450 BCE), distinguished between ‘the apparent’ (doxa) and ‘the actual’ (aletheia)…but he regarded both as irreducibly real: “You shall learn…how the things that seem (doxa) had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely.”

He understood something now understood only by quantum mechanics and small children: what we call ‘the world’ is a product of ‘complementarity’. The actual differs from the apparent but only in so far as both together constitute reality. Like so-called ‘Irish twins’, the actual and the apparent continually clash…yet share an unbreakable bond. 

We build models. We build models that we label ‘real’ and other models that we label ‘imaginary’ but there is only one actual world encompassing multiple levels of epistemology. Not that all models are equal. We can evaluate models heuristically, aesthetically, perhaps even spiritually, but such valuations are not equivalent to ‘real/unreal’ or ‘right/wrong’. Different models do different things for us in different situations.

A map can never be its own territory. A model fulfills a purpose; it is reality viewed from the perspective of that purpose. So now the answers to Mr. Rai’s questions seem simple and obvious:

• Spacetime is real; what else could it be? But it’s not fundamental. Events are the fundamental quanta of being. What else could be? If there are such things as events, they cannot be other than substructural. 

Spacetime is real, but ‘real’ only as a relational web that knits myriad events into a single cosmos. Events may, or may not, include distinguishable ‘elements’, but those elements cannot pre-exist the events themselves. Events occur; they are not manufactured…except by the media. 

‘Spacetime’ is what happens between events but there is no spacetime within an event. How could there be? An event is a quantum of being; it is irreducible! 

In 1964, John Bell proved that a single event can span any arbitrarily large cosmic space without sacrificing its identity…like a gerrymandered Congressional district in a swing state. Of course, he was elaborating on something Marcel Proust ‘discovered’ in his Remembrance of Things Past. A single event can span an arbitrary interval of time and space but no, it cannot be used to repeal history or repair an unhappy childhood.   

So, when and where do make sense, obviously, but only as relational terms. The notion of a location in spacetime is non-sensical in the context of an isolated event: ‘X is on the right’ – right of what? ‘Y came before’ – before what? Spacetime is not prior, historically or logically, to the events that populate it.

What we call ‘reality’ (i.e. events in 4 dimensional spacetime) is in fact real (above), but only as a projection of something even more fundamental. Again, the conclusion is obvious. It is only by ‘bad faith’ that we can maintain the view that ‘what we see is what we get’. 

What if I brought you to a library where the entire contents of each book was printed on its cover and where the contents of all the books in the stacks were printed on the exterior walls of the building itself? May I introduce you to my friend, Black Hole?

What if I bought you a top for Christmas that spins 720° rather than 360° each time it rotates on its axis? Now you see it, now you don’t, now you do, now you… Meet the ubiquitous electron and the rest of his blinkin’ (fermion) family.

What if I told you that an event happening right in front of you now is just one side of a single event, the other ‘half’ of which is occurring simultaneously many light years distant from us? What if I told you that both ‘sides’ are highly, and simultaneously, correlated and that either ‘side’ of the event could occur (randomly) in either location, i.e. either here…or in a galaxy far, far away?

Would you congratulate me on the vividness of my imagination…or would you report me to the ‘proper authorities’, be they parents, teachers, bosses, social workers, doctors…or cops? And yet, this is precisely the world we live in. ‘Child’s play’ under 5; ‘absurd’ thereafter. But the children have the last laugh: “Hey Boomer, your emperor has no clothes.”

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Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) collapses the boundaries between subject, painter, and viewer, just as relativity and quantum mechanics reveal that ‘when’ and ‘where’ only make sense relationally, never in isolation.