A Tale of Entropy and the Big Bang

In my previous essay on the topic of God creating the universe, I condensed humanity’s scientific journey towards an answer in the past 200 years starting from Georges Lemaître challenging Albert Einstein (who mocked Lemaître’s mathematics), then Edwin Hubble confirming Lemaître’s calculations via telescopic observations, followed by Alan Guth taking this further to propose an inflaton field, and finally, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovering proof of this field using their advanced telecommunication antenna.

What a scientific journey it has been! But alas, it feels like we are none closer to an answer to the question that we originally started with:

Where did our universe come from?

I am happy to share that there is hope in this matter. Why don’t we start there?

Taking Heart in our Journey so far

It is easy to get wound up in philosophical miseries and stare at nihilism, which might say:

All our scientific efforts are in vain; we will never find the answer to our original question.

But I say we take heart in our efforts so far. Think about it. Not only did we (some of humanity’s finest) postulate how the universe could have begun some 14 billion years ago, but we also came up with mathematical simulations of what the lingering after-effects would be today.

And we did not stop there; we invented measuring devices that confirm that these after-effects do indeed exist today. That is quite something in my books.

So, what next? Based on these mathematical calculations and measurable observations, can we say that the universe did indeed begin with a big bang? Well, not quite.

As I mentioned in my previous essay, the big bang is not the only possibility that could have led to the inflaton field that we are able to observe today as the cosmic microwave background radiation. There are other possibilities too.

But before we even consider other possibilities, it is worth investigating the big bang with the lens of entropy. The underlying question here is as follows:

How does our universe keep increasing its entropy, whilst consistently creating lower entropy phenomena like stars, planets, life, etc., along the way?

The answer to such questions could leads us towards an answer to the question we started with.

Entropy and the Big Bang

In my essay on entropy for dummies, I covered the notion of entropy using fair coin tosses. When we randomly flip 100 fair coins at the same time, we know inherently that a 50–50 result is more likely than a 99–1 result. Why is this?

The answer lies in the entropy involved. Higher entropic states are much more likely than lower entropic states. Ever since birth, we have been experiencing higher entropic states and have grown accustomed to expect them.

In other words, a 50–50 result is a higher entropic state whereas a 99–1 is a lower entropic state. High entropy states are the norm; dime-a-dozen. On the other hand, lower entropy states are unique; truly special.

This essay is supported by Generatebg

So, what would the entropy have been just before the big bang happened? It is an interesting question, isn’t it? I recommend that you ponder upon this question for a moment before you continue reading.

Did you really ponder or just continue reading immediately? From my experience, taking the effort to think is a lower entropic state as compared to continuing to read. So, if you took a moment to ponder, you did something truly special.

Now, back to the moment before the big bang happened. What would the entropy have been in this moment? Well, based on our empirical observations and mathematical calculations, the entropy of our universe would have been at its lowest from that point until today.

Therein lies our conundrum. Lower entropic states trigger questions in us. To understand this further, let us visit the coin flip experiment once again. If we flipped 100 fair coins randomly at once, and ended up with a 99–1 heads-to-tails result, you would be surprised to say the least. In fact, your instinct might prompt you to question whether the coins were fair in the first place.

A much more likely situation could have been that a human being had manually rearranged each coin to artificially arrive at this spectacular result. In all our scientific and philosophical wisdom, we are looking for an analogous explanation for our universe and the big bang as well.

Who or what made it possible for our universe’s entropy to be so low in the moment before the big bang?

Looking for the Haystack in a Needle

Scientists have postulated that in the moment before the big bang, the inflaton field could have been wildly fluctuating. Imagine something like the surface of boiling water. A locally flat section of the field would be highly improbable. But such a low-entropic section would not be impossible!

If such a locally flat (relatively fluctuation-free) section had occurred in the otherwise highly-fluctuating inflaton field, it would have triggered repulsive gravity, which in turn would have resulted in the big bang.

All this is great, but it doesn’t answer the question of who or what could have made such an ultra-low entropic state possible. In my essay on Chaos in Perception, I explained how we reduce the entropy of a system by borrowing energy from an even lower entropic reservoir. This is what we call “useful work”.

So, one explanation could be that in the moment just before the big bang, there existed a entropic reservoir that had even lower entropy than the locally flat section of the inflaton field. This lower entropic reservoir is what religion fondly refers to as “God”.

However, there is yet another possibility; something that is hiding in plain sight. To understand what I am talking about, let us once again (oh dear!) go back to our coin-flip example.

When you see a 99–1 result, part of you questions the fairness of the coins. But what if the result was indeed natural? That is, the coins ended up in a 99–1 configuration fairly and purely by chance.

Mathematicians call this a statistical fluke. You might have to keep flipping for thousands and thousands of years, but it will eventually happen, merely because it is a possibility.

Similarly, the low-entropic flat section of the inflaton field could have merely occurred by chance. Mind you, we are talking about big bang time frames here; there is nothing for us to compare against such time frames.

Imagine a hypothetical being that is as old as our universe for whom only one day has passed in its temporal dimension. In such a time frame, merely waiting for a few minutes could lead to such a spectacular low-entropic state.

It is all relative. “Chance” is truly a potential answer that has been hiding in plain sight all along. But our human nature nudges us to stay blind to it.

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Further reading that might interest you: 

• Perpetual Motion machines: The Elusive Hunt For Infinite Energy
• Why Does Science Love Simplicity?
• How To Understand The Mathematics Of Language

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Reference and Credit: Brian Greene