1Actually, everything comes from just one thing
I was just reading this supremely interesting post on how all of nature, animals, plants, microbes, dinosaurs, birds etc are simply scaled up versions of a ‘master creature’, a ‘template’. The whole article is mighty interesting but here’s a relevant snippet:
What did we learn from scaling in biology? We not only learned the network theory, but we learned that despite the fact that the whale lives in the ocean, the giraffe has a long neck, and the elephant a truck, and we walk on two feet and the mouse scurries around, at some 85, 90 percent level, we’re all scaled versions of one another.
There’s kind of one mammal, and every other mammal, no matter what size it is and where it existed, is actually some well-defined mathematically scaled version of that one master mammal, so to speak. And that is kind of amazing.
In other words, the size of a mammal, or any organism for that matter, can tell you how long it should live, how many children it should have, how oxygen diffuses across its lungs, what is the length of the ninth branch of its circulatory system, how its blood is flowing, how quickly it will grow, et cetera.
But I believe this pattern goes beyond just earth and like I told my friend @praveenvasudev a year ago, everything in our universe, from planets & stars & molten lava to the beating human heart comes from a single master source, a single ‘template’. That ‘thing’, I have no idea how it looks, how it works, and what the hell it is, but while explaining it to Praveen I used the analogy of a flag waving in the wind, where the material of the flag is the ‘master source’ and each wrinkle on the flag is an object of nature - a thin, long wrinkle on this ‘master source’ might be the fan that is rotating above your head while a short, fat one could be the sound of a car horn. Each ‘wrinkle’ on this ‘master source’ gives rise to every phenomena and being that exists in our universe.
As I was raised conforming to Hindu traditions, early on in my teens I came across this concept that ‘Everything came from nothing’. At that time, I was like yeah that’s BS. But now I see what they were talking about. It’s easy: imagine a flat, plain piece of cloth that is hanging on a clothes line. While it’s fluttering in the wind there’s lots of wrinkles on the cloth, but when the wind stops, the wrinkles die out and the cloth becomes flat again - no wrinkles. Empty! Nothing! Do you see it? It can be thought of as - all the wrinkles on that cloth came from nothing! Nothing is a ‘state’, not a ‘thing’ and ‘nothing’ does not mean that the cloth has never existed.
Everything came from nothing - ‘wrinkled’ state came from the ‘nothing’ state.
While I use cloth as an anology, even flat vs crumpled paper works. Here it is…
Everything came from nothing. This is what the old Hindu smartasses were talking about - the ‘state’. And they also lend credence to my ‘master source’ theory - you can’t talk about ‘state’ without there being a common object that generates these ‘states’, and this common object that generates the ‘states’ is nothing but the ‘master source’. Like the paper above that exists both in the ‘Nothing’ state and in the ‘Crumpled’ state, the ‘master source’ has always existed. But there was a time when the ‘master source’ had no wrinkles which the Hindu ancients called ‘Nothing’ and today the ‘master source’ has lots of ‘wrinkles’ which is everything that we have in the universe - the ancients call this ‘Everything’.
Everything comes from nothing. A bit misleading since it’s not immediately obvious that both ‘everything’ and ‘nothing are ‘states’. Which is why I prefer the title of this post - everything comes from just one thing - the ‘master source’.
It’s an amazing thought - that all this incomprehensible complexity that we in nature are just different manifestations of a single ‘master source’. Imagine this, it could even be possible that I, a particular ‘wrinkle’ on this ‘master source’ could morph/change into another ‘wrinkle’, let’s say a beam of pure light, if I could have control over this ‘master source’. Lots of questions remain - what is the ‘master source’ made of? Who/what made/controls this ‘master source’ and why? Will the universe end when the ‘wrinkles’ stop forming? What is beyond this ‘master source’? It’s impossible to see the earth rotating without going outside of earth and into space, so to see the ‘wrinkles’ form, move and die off, can I, a ‘wrinkle’ on this ‘master source’, ever see the ‘master source’ from outside of it?
To know answers to these questions, there has to be more than just ‘thought experiments’. The ancients stated the truth but could never prove it. Someday I hope to do just that - to get off my internet armchair and show that actually, everything comes from just one thing.
