An Answer for Albert

     Albert Einstein asked if god created the universe on purpose or not. I ask, is god even aware of their role in the creation of the universe? Not understanding theoretical physics doesn't give me anxiety. People who don't understand themselves, however, do. According to Robbert Dijkgraaf, a contributing columnist to Quanta Magazine, physics aims to understand in a precise, mathematical way all manifestations of matter and energy in the universe. I was never good enough at math to follow the dream of understanding physics well enough to understand myself. I resent math as a device we created ourselves to explain the universe. It has no words and conveys no feeling, to me, this is not a holistic enough approach to understanding. My curious self, however, couldn't exist without some understanding, so I looked for other ways to understand the universe's manifestation of matter and energy. How I came to my own understanding, I cannot entirely recall, but one moment- I just knew. I believe it's you and me. All of us, everything here that ever was or could be, was once just an inconceivable amount of energy that thought, and therefore it was. In my ignorant delusions, this theory is consistent with the Big Bang and will probably happen over and over again forever. 

    This initial thought triggered the 'I am" and the sudden miraculous existence of the beginning of everything, that was, god, creating the universe by becoming aware of themself. Their awareness of their own existence is what ignited the bang and hurled itself into the space they created to contain their newfound sentience, or I should say our newfound sentience. Some of the matter had a better chance of survival than others in its initial most basic state. I like to imagine teeny tiny little cells that just happened to be fused together in a way that offered them some advantage in interpreting their existence as motivation to adapt. Some of this energy managed to adapt, become multicellular, and eventually a plant or a fish. Some of it is forever stuck in rock form, and some of it survived to become people and invent iPhones and think of all this theoretical physics. Seeing all of this in the world satisfies me. I do not need to search for mathematical solutions to explain to me the feeling I have that everything is god, learning, growing, and surviving here. 

    However, I can't hate math because, in its purest form, it is us trying to understand ourselves. After so long of surviving for the hell of it, asking questions and finding ways to answer them became human nature. Those who are doing god's work, knowing to ask more, have found some interesting insight, and I will manipulate it to prove myself right. In a piece for The Imaginative Conservatism, theoretical physicist George Stanciu contemplates Physics, Beauty, and the Divine Mind. He explains beauty first in terms of Behtoveens music, how it is often associated with unexpected features that meld and make beautiful noise. Still, it's not just the surprise factor that makes his work incomparable. It's the fact that, no matter how shocking and unexpected the moment may be, it instantly gives the impression of being the only right note for that moment. Stanciu feels physics is beautiful in the same way. Every time he discovers something new, it feels inevitable despite the eternity it spent unknown. The most beautiful stories are those that unexpectedly have the same lesson in every language, despite rough translation. These lessons tend to be the most universal. 

    String theory is beautiful in its necessity for two languages to tell its story. To understand it, you need duality. Dr. Michio Kaku, another theoretical physicist, explains in his paper about M-theory the importance of duality in connecting seemingly disparate physical systems and unifying them into a single mathematical framework. Imagine it as two different puzzles that can fit together to make the same picture. Duality is necessary to develop connections between string theory's perturbative and non-perturbative regions. These connections are the only way to prove string theory's math 'without recreating the big bang', kind of explaining what would happen but scaled down. In the perturbative region, the outside factors that affect a system can be treated as small, separate corrections to a simple solution. This makes it possible to find answers by considering each factor one at a time and adding up the corrections they cause. However, in the non-perturbative region, the factors affecting a system can be so strong and interconnected that they cannot be treated as separate, small corrections. Instead, a more general and complex mathematical technique must be used to find a complete description of the system, rather than just an approximation. Fancy S-dualities, as taught to me by Dr. Kaku and discovered in the pursuit of understanding string theory, allow for previously impossible connections between its perturbative and non-perturbative regions. These dualities allow the same lesson from different stories and different languages. It is like piercing together one picture out of two real puzzles and a theoretical puzzle. 

     As I slowly understand this (I think), I am drawn back to my original discourse on math, that despite its beauty, its innate inability to capture feeling remains. What is feeling, if not energy, and shouldn't all energy be calculated in this equation? Perhaps the reason that despite all of this math and effort, we can still state, 'with a fair amount of certainty' that we still don't know what 95% of the universe is, other than that it consists of quasi-defined 'dark matter (Dijkgraaf).' I am interested in the extra special OUR-duality that allows for connections to be made in the ~extra perturbative region~, where we account for all of the strong and interconnected factors affecting the system of our divine mind and the energy that we can't see. When Dr. Kaku ruminates on the final theory or quintessential truth, he talks about it in terms of the number of dimensions and/or shapes of universes. I am feeling more towards physicists he quotes concerning their own thoughts, Schwartz and Townsend say maybe the final theory has no dimension and that dimensionality only even emerges when you look really hard for it. We can't probe the extra perturbative region and uncover the entire manifestation of the universe with math because it exceeds dimension and space-time. It doesn't exist within the bounds of math because math exists within the bounds of it, it created math.

     It would be beautiful to theorize over a collective analysis of subjective individual experiences, not to try to quantify them but to qualify and then learn a new way to apply them. To find a duality between the strings and everything other than physics. I suppose it has only been a relatively small amount of time, but maybe there are or already have been a group of beings (or IMO possibly a rock) who have figured it out. Look in the mind of a monk, the frequencies of animal noises, and the energy we give back and forth to each other every day. String theory all came from the brains of hundreds of genius scientists, the best of the best, trying to uncover the reason for our existence, failing to account for the energy that all of their minds share. What else would motivate them to have the same goal of understanding, once just existing, and initially simply surviving? Maybe to avoid uncertainty and mitigate the anxiety we humans carry not knowing the nature of our existence. Perhaps maybe it is the first and only thought we have ever had, which led us there. 

     I find comfort in imagining the 95% of the universe we have yet to account for manifests itself as energy and matter within everyone and everything. It is, inexplicably by math, constantly evolving, learning, teaching, communicating, and existing as 'god'. Learning from itself about itself. However you want to describe the other 95%, your ability to describe it exists in your thoughts and feelings because they are you, and you are them. Mans' so far fruitless endeavor of the universe's creation story leads me to believe that god is in fact, unaware of their role in the creation of the universe, and therefore yeah, Albert, I bet you we did do it on accident. I don't really understand physics, though, and Google say that dark matter isn't the divine mind, so take from this what you will. 

P.S. I personally doubt the answer is within the creation of an A.I version of life and feel strongly we should not pursue this. 

P.P.S If true, touche Elon, Chat GPT as data collection was a very you move. and we know if it's all 0s and 1s, we are in a simulation, so what do you suppose you can do about that? Go to another planet? 

Works Cited

Dijkgraaf, Robbert. “Contemplating the End of Physics.” Quanta Magazine, 27 July 2022, https://www.quantamagazine.org/contemplating-the-end-of-physics-20201124/. 

Kaku, Michio. “M-Theory: The Mother of All SuperStrings.” Official Website of Dr Michio Kaku RSS, https://mkaku.org/home/articles/m-theory-the-mother-of-all-superstrings/. 

Stanciu , George. “Physics, Beauty, & the Divine Mind .” The Imaginative Conservative, 16 Oct. 2022,

                 https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2022/10/physics-beauty-divine-mind-george-        stanciu.html#_edn26.