(The young man takes a minute to look at the list.) “Well, actually, I don’t think anybody can. At least I’ve never read of anyone who could. Of course, there’s been a lot of talk about how we might answer some of them, a lot of partial theories and arguments and so forth that have been proposed, but I don’t think there are very many answers to these particular questions floating around that everyone agrees with.”

“That being the case, then, with regard to your first question of whether I’m worried because the experts don’t see the universe the way I do, let me point out there are no experts on the universe. There are experts on what we already know about the universe. Which is impressive in and of itself. But not on the overall, fundamental nature of the universe itself. If there were any experts, they’d be able to answer these questions.

On the other hand, as I said earlier, the initial conditions I’ve come up with provide us with a theory of the universe, a world view if you will, which answers most of these questions, albeit currently in a very general and abbreviated way, and which is also consistent with what we already know about the universe. In other words, while I don’t know all we know about the universe, what I do know about, Newton’s laws of momentum and gravity, the laws of thermodynamics, and so forth, not only finally fit perfectly into this world view, they all finally make very good sense.”

“Of course that’s good to know. Certainly the universe hasn’t made a whole lot of sense so far. And, if what you say is true, or even mostly true, I’m impressed. But I still have this uneasy feeling that, if, as you seem to make it out, the universe is going to be relatively easy to understand, others more qualified from a scholastic point of view should’ve been able to come up with this world view earlier.”

“Well, as long as we don’t get into the actual mathematical mechanics of it, which I don’t know how to do, it is true that the universe is fairly easy to understand from this purely qualitative point of view I’ve been proposing. But there’s more to it than just assigning the two fundamental properties of quantity and elasticity to energy, and saying that E waves travel helically through space. You see, you can’t really understand what the universe is doing, and how it’s doing it, until you can begin to think outside the universe.

For instance, if you think about it, while the property of quantity seems to be almost naturally a property of energy, what about energy’s elasticity? As you yourself asked, where does it come from? I mean, a rubber band has to be stretched first before its elasticity comes into play. In other words, we’re talking about a two stage process here. The stretching of the rubber band is stage one. Its release and return to its original state of equilibrium--which is, remember, the state where no further action takes place--is stage two. So if it’s energy’s elasticity that’s causing it to constantly try to return to some original or long-lost state of equilibrium, how did the energy that makes up our universe get deformed, and thereby loaded with potential energy, in the first place? To answer questions like this you really have to start thinking outside the universe. And before the universe began, as well. And, like I said, there’s not a lot of that going on right now.

Here, let me lay an analogy on you to illustrate what I mean about thinking outside the universe. Are you familiar with the energy conversion process which we call the fractional distillation of crude oil?”

“I know a little about it, but I’m no expert on it.”

“Like everything else here, me neither. But let me give you a quick run-down on it so I can use it to make my point.

As you probably know, the crude oil we take out of the ground is composed of a wide range of molecules, primarily composed of carbon atoms of different sizes and properties. The very largest and heaviest of these are like little ball bearings, and make great lubricants. The smallest, on the other hand, which are gasoline molecules, are highly volatile, and are extremely valuable in that respect. The problem is, when they’re all mixed together, as they are in their natural state, the big ones can’t lubricate very well, and the little ones can’t burn very well. Obviously, then, they all need to be separated by size and volatility, and that’s where the fractional distillation process comes in.

This is accomplished by first constructing a large sealed container. A portion of crude oil is pumped into the bottom of the tank and is then heated to such a temperature that all the carbon-based molecules are vaporized, much as water molecules appear as steam over a pot of boiling water. All of the process so far, the collection of the crude oil, the building of the sealed container, the heating of the crude oil, and so forth, I’ll refer to as stage one of the overall three stage refining process.

In stage two the fractional distillation occurs. Here the idea is to lower the temperature of the vapor, but only just enough such that the largest and heaviest molecules can no longer remain vaporized. As a result they distill out of the vapor, falling back down to the bottom of the container. From these molecules, once they are removed and processed further, come various waxes and paraffins, shoe polish, axle grease, and so on. Meanwhile, the other molecules, being lighter, still remain vaporized.

Lower the temperature a little more and out distills the next largest molecules. Being of a lighter, more liquid form, they are used for engine oils, machine oils, etc.

From the next largest molecules, because they express a fairly high degree of volatility, come heating oils to heat homes and other buildings. And, from the remaining still smaller molecules come kerosene and, finally, gasoline. Of course, modern refining methods are far more complicated than this, but you get the general idea.

Finally, keep in mind that there is a stage three to this process which has to do with how these various groups of molecules are used; for it is here that their ultimate purpose, and value, and the reason for the existence of the overall refining process, is determined.

With all this in mind, then, let’s make a wildly hypothetical assumption here that during stage two some of the gasoline molecules flying around inside the sealed container somehow, in some way, gain the ability to be aware of themselves and their surroundings. I know it’s totally impossible, but work with me here for just a minute. And, further, let’s say that, using telescopes and microscopes and so forth, they begin to observe and document the overall process of cooling and distillation going on around them. Unfortunately, since they have no way of knowing of the existence of anything beyond the inside surface of their container, and therefore can have no inkling of even the existence of stages one and three, there is no way they’re ever going to make complete sense out of what’s going on in stage two--their universe; which is, as far as they can ever know, all there is to reality. Thus they have no idea that their universe was created for a reason, or even consider at all how it might have been created. Or that the real value of the various molecules, including themselves, is related not to what goes on in their world, which is stage two, but to how they are used outside their world in stage three. That is, how they contribute to the parent reality after they distill out of the vapor. Indeed, because they never seem to be able to make any sense at all of their universe, some have even been heard to say that the only thing for certain in their world is distillation and taxes.

All right, then. I think you can see my point here. I’m saying the universe is stage two of an enormous--by our standards anyway--two stage, or maybe even three stage, energy conversion process. And it’s no wonder that natural philosophers have not been able to answer a single fundamental and important question about the universe. They can’t possibly until they become aware of the existence of stages one, and possibly stage three, and how stage two relates to them.”

“But how are we to find out about stages one and three?”

“Granted, we’re still physically stuck inside our universe. But by learning as much as we can about it, enough, anyway, to deduce its initial conditions, and especially the fundamental, underlying principle driving the evolution of the universe, which I’m saying is energy’s search for equilibrium, we can begin to identify where the universe is heading; what it’s doing and so forth. Then, assuming that this end product or state of being of the universe has some connection to the parent reality, we can begin to theorize what this connection might be; thereby giving us some information about the parent reality itself. Similarly, having identified the initial conditions, we can begin to figure out what would have had to happen in the parent reality to cause the universe to exist and act the way it does. But first, before we can even entertain such thoughts, we need to recognize that there is a reality--a physical reality just as physical as our universe--bigger and older than the universe within which the universe exists.”

“All right, then, I guess I can buy that. But you better be leading up to something here. What is it?”

“That’s the question I was hoping you would ask. Imagine you have in your hand one of those light, foam rubber balls that kids play with.”

“You mean a nerf ball?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Let’s say you squeeze it up into a really tight little ball and then release it. Naturally it’s going to spring back to its original size and shape. So what causes it to do that?”

“Its elasticity, of course. Is this how you’re saying our universe started? That our universe is like a giant nerf ball?”

“In a very general way, yes I am. But, of course, there’s a whole lot more to it than that. First of all, I say this because it appears the evolution of the universe can be so well explained if we assume that its energy is constantly searching for ever more stable states of equilibrium. In the second place, this constant search for equilibrium strongly implies that the universe’s energy had to have been in a highly unstable state of equilibrium at the beginning of the big bang. Finally, then, it seems only reasonable to assume that, like a foam rubber ball, the universe’s energy was originally distributed evenly throughout the space of its parent reality before it was somehow squeezed into a tiny ball. Because of the energy’s elasticity, the work required to do the squeezing would then show up as the potential energy of the ball. All that needed to be done, then, was to release the ball, in which case the highly unstable energy would immediately seek, by means of traveling E waves, to return, or fall, if you will, back to its original state of completely stable equilibrium.”

“If that’s true, then where did matter and the rest of our universe come from?”

“Enter the symmetry-breaking event. However it happened, whether the expanding E waves encountered some already existing high energy field, or whether, perhaps, in their helical expansion they interfered with each other at the very beginning of the big bang when they were so close together, somehow, some of the E waves were torn up into bits and pieces, which were then forced into the tight little standing waves we call particles.”

“And this was the beginning of our universe?”

“Yes, I think so. As a matter of fact, if you think about it, if the earlier discussion about the origin of what I’m calling Newtonian time is correct, our universe couldn’t actually begin until the standing wave particles began to form. Now I don’t want to get too cute here, but it’s tempting to speculate that our universe may not actually have started at exactly the same time the energy was released to begin the big bang. That there may have been some time delay, measured, of course, in the parent reality’s time, between the beginning of the big bang and the beginning of our universe. But, like so many other things here, I need to leave that to others to resolve.”

“I don’t know. It all sounds promising. But all this depends on some assumptions you made about a parent reality we don’t even know exists. I’m still having a lot of trouble with that.”

“I hear you. But I didn’t just pull these ideas about energy elasticity and squeezing it into a tight little ball in some completely unknown parent reality, and so forth, out of a hat. The bottom line here is that if we make these assumptions, then I think we’ll be able to answer all the questions on that sheet of paper you’re holding. As a matter of fact, like I said earlier, even I can answer a lot of them right now. All things considered, then, I think that the overall world view I’m proposing here is at least a good place to start.”

“Perhaps so. (The young man begins again to look at the list.) All right. I see here, starting at the top, that you’ve come up with at least a few ideas about the nature of energy, and you talked earlier about how it might propagate through space, but do you know why it always travels at the speed of light?”

“I think you have to remember here that E waves probably appeared before our universe began. Based on that, it’s my opinion that, while our universe of Newtonian matter has its own dimensions of time and space, it actually exists within the larger, older space-time of its parent reality. So, if you think about it, we’re talking here about one set of space-time dimensions actually existing within another set of space-time dimensions.

For an analogy consider a large, indoor swimming pool. Let’s say it’s late at night so that the water’s very quiet and the underwater lights are on. Then let’s say you’re able to carefully place a capsule of blue dye in the middle of the pool so as not to disturb the water. Then let’s say the capsule, because its gelatin coating has a specific gravity just slightly greater than the water, begins to slowly sink until, when it’s half way to the bottom, the gelatin coating dissolves and the dye begins to spread out symmetrically in all directions.”

“Kind of like our big bang.”

“Right. After a given period of time, then, you could say that there are two sets of space and time dimensions here. One for the blue-dye world and one for the larger, parent swimming pool. With one set inside the other. Now, if you were to shine a narrow beam of light from one side of the pool to the other so that it passed through the blue-dye world, it would exist in both space-times at once.

But, you would say, all this is of no real importance since the two sets of dimensions have a one-to-one correlation to each other. And you would be right. However, and now I’m switching back to the idea of our universe existing within its parent reality, as Einstein mathematically demonstrated in his theories of special and general relativity, our clocks can slow down so that our time does not pass at the same rate that time passes in our parent reality. In the case of special relativity, time passes slower for matter when it is in motion. And we’ve already talked about how this gives us two separate dimensions of time, one within the other. In the case of general relativity, where the slowing of our time is, because of gravitational fields, a function of position in space, then, according to Einstein, our space will undergo a degree of expansion related directly to the slowing of our time in that space. This means that there have to be not only two dimensions of time, one within the other, so that Newtonian time can slow down while the other one doesn’t, but two sets of three-dimensional space, so that one set can expand while the other set doesn’t.

Why does this expansion of space happen in the case of general relativity? Well, let me put it this way. Like the blue-dye universe, our universe exists within a larger reality. But we don’t know this yet because we’re made of matter. And, until the last couple of centuries, we’ve only been interested in what goes on, what changes take place and so forth, in our Newtonian world of matter. So we only measure changes that take place in it in terms of our own Newtonian time and space. Now it’s true that energy in the form of traveling E waves is an integral part of what goes on in our universe. It can interact with our matter; we can turn on a light and cause light waves to radiate in all directions like a mini-big bang. So, obviously, we’ve always thought of traveling waves as being part of our universe just like everything else. But then along comes Einstein, who basically says that you know, I can mathematically model what happens to objects when their speed begins to approach the speed of light, and what happens to space and time in a gravitational field, if we assume the speed of light, for some reason or other, never changes.

But no one’s ever been able to figure out why the speed of light never changes. I’m saying it’s because, while light waves do indeed interact to some degree with the standing waves of our universe, they actually are a part of the larger, parent reality within which our universe exists. It’s sort of like someone standing in the yard outside the house, reaching into the house through a window to do something inside the house. Only in our case the inside of the house and the outside of the house are in the same place. We can make matter speed up and slow down. But we can’t make light waves speed up and slow down because they’re always part of the parent reality. We can bend them and so forth, but we can’t speed them up or slow them down because their speed is controlled by the dynamics of the parent reality.

As to why the speed of light is exactly what it is, well, I’d say that equilibrium considerations come into play in the parent reality the same as they do in our own little Newtonian universe. That being the case, light waves, which, remember, are always trying to spread out in search of their original long lost state of absolutely stable equilibrium, are going to propagate at whatever single speed requires the least amount of effort to get there. Remember, elasticity’s always working, even in between states. Which is where, by the way, the least action principle comes in. In other words, for them to propagate any faster or slower, extra work’s going to have to be done on them.

Now of course, like all this stuff I’ve been telling you, I’m only engaging in some speculative metaphysics here, and not physics. But if I’m right, or mostly so, then wherever gravitational considerations cause a slowing of our Newtonian clocks, the Newtonian space there is going to have to stretch or expand so that light waves can continue to move at the same speed in our universe as they must do in the parent reality.

In fact, if you think about it, while we are taught that Einstein’s theory of relativity expresses the relativity of our scientific laws in gravitational fields or when matter is in motion, as well as the relationship that truly does exist between our time and our space, he actually did more than that. What he really did, through the use of the constant speed of light, is begin to express the relativity of our universe’s space-time to the space-time of its parent reality. As a matter of fact, when Einstein imagined himself to be riding a light wave so he could look at the universe from that point of view, he was probably the first living human being to imagine himself outside the universe. Now I don’t know if he thought about what he was doing in that way, but I do know the rest of us are going to have to start thinking about the larger, older, and likewise physical parent reality within which our universe exists if we’re ever going to completely understand the origin, nature, and reason for our universe.”