7 – The Kosmos: Beyond the Universe

There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.  - William Shakespeare

In this post: The Big Bang theory answers a lot of questions, but also causes a few. Some of these questions may be resolved if the Universe is not all there is, but rather, is part of the Kosmos.

Over the last century or so, we have become aware that the Universe is unimaginably vast. It boggles the mind to even think about how small our planet Earth is in a Universe with many billions of galaxies, each containing many billions of stars.

But is that vast Universe all there is? Based on the Big Bang theory, there had to be something before the existence of the Universe (at least the singularity), and some important scientists speculate that there are other Universes. Perhaps a four-dimensional (three dimensions of space, plus one of time) Universe is all that our limited brains can conceive of, while there are other hidden dimensions that we cannot experience because of our limitations.

Universe and Cosmos are two terms often used interchangeably, but for this discussion they are used quite distinctively. Let’s consider the word “Universe” to refer to the still-expanding entity that was created in the Big Bang. We know a lot about our Universe thanks to the brilliance of many scientists, their powerful observational tools and their logical deductions. It is usually defined as the totality of everything that is known or inferred to exist as a product of the Big Bang. That includes the largest objects that we know of (galaxies and clumps of galaxies) and the smallest objects (well below the level of the atom, extending to a panoply of strange particles) and the space between them. Although our estimates of its age fluctuate as astronomers, their instruments and their mathematics keep sharpening, most scientists today agree that it is somewhere between 10 and 18 billion years old. Today, it is most often estimated at somewhere between 12 and 14 billion years, but in the last 40 years the estimates have changed as often as a baby’s diapers.

There may actually exist much more than our Universe. Imagine the Universe in its initial state, 12 to 14 billion years ago, as a minute speck occupying no space or time (the singularity). That speck, it would seem, contained all the energy, matter, chemical and physical laws, and evolutionary processes needed to make our Universe.  Where was that speck located before it exploded into our Universe? Clearly it was not anywhere in the Universe — according to the laws of physics something cannot be inside itself. It was suddenly blown up by some force so powerful that the initial expansion plus the interaction of its own components have kept it expanding since then. What caused the singularity to exist, what ignited the explosion that caused it to expand? Where were these located? Was there anything else that existed before the Universe was formed?

Logically, the questions seem to have only one answer.  Our Universe must exist inside something that is much larger than our Universe and that existed before our Universe did. Is thIs reasoning a figment of my imagination? In fact, it is a broadly-held view that realms other than our universe are likely.

There was a time when “Universe” meant “all there is.” Everything. The whole Shebang. The notion of more than one Universe, more than one everything, would seemingly be a contradiction in terms. Yet a range of theoretical developments has gradually qualified the interpretation of “Universe.” The word’s meaning now depends on context.   Sometimes “Universe” still connotes absolutely everything. Sometimes it refers only to those parts of everything that someone such as you or I could, in principle, have access to. Sometimes it’s applied to separate realms, ones that are partly or fully, temporarily or permanently, inaccessible to us; in this sense, the word relegates our Universe to membership in a large, perhaps infinitely large, collection.

This quote comes from The Hidden Reality, written in 2011 by Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists, and his line of thought is not a singular deviation by one eccentric physicist. In fact, alternative Universes, multi-Universes, parallel Universes, the megaverse and other speculation about a cosmos of much greater size and content than our own Universe dominates the recent scientific literature, thanks in part to quantum mechanics and in part to the inadequacy of the (Big Bang) singularity as an explanation for how the creation of our Universe came to be.

Greene is referring to what are, within my definitions, the Universe and the Kosmos. Because some people use the word “Cosmos” to refer to what we call the Universe, while others, including myself, refer to the “Cosmos” as this much larger entity that contains the Universe, I prefer to spell this far larger realm with a “K,” thus: Kosmos.

Although science asserts that the Universe is finite, (with at least its origin and its age estimable), it is possible, if not probable, that the Kosmos is infinite. It is also possible or likely that the Kosmos is not bound by the same rules of physics as is our Universe. If that is truly so, it could provide a basis for explaining how a Universe (or even a singularity) can be created out of nothing, and how a singularity can exist in the Kosmos, though not as part of the universe it will become.

Another thing we might want (or not want) to think about is that we are, as a species, sensually attuned to a  three-dimensional world, and most of us have great difficulty thinking in terms of a fourth dimension (generally considered to be time). How many dimensions are there beyond that in the universe?  And outside of the universe,  in the Kosmos?  Thus, when we speak of the Kosmos  being “outside” the Universe, does that necessarily mean that it is “outside”  within the three dimensions we can think in, or within some other dimension that might exist?