Most of what came to exist above the quantum level from the initial moments of the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago, falls within the Newtonian-Einstein universe (N&E) of four dimensions: three dimensions of space and one of time.
For the purpose of this essay, I will not discuss the very first instants of the universe when time and space did not exist. I will also exclude from this essay ongoing discussions of the Standard Model, so far, the most successful theory of matter and fundamental interaction. I will also leave out the ongoing search for the nature of dark matter and dark energy and questions about the ultimate shape and the topological limits of the universe. The motivation of these choices is not that these domains at the limits of physics are not important, but because I think they are not relevant to the the emergence of our human bio-psycho-social existence.
The likely successful explanations of the nature of our existence as living, thinking, social beings are structures well above quantum mechanics1 and well within the larger boundaries of the N&E universe. A simple and reliable starting point to unify our knowledge of the phenomena relevant to human existence is that all things that may exist can be described in space-time relativistic coordinates of the Newtonian-Einstein universe. Every phenomenon we identify occurs somewhere at some time point: it has a beginning in relation to a reference point and eventually an end. It follows that we should regard all phenomena that have emerged so far in the universe as structures with four dimensions and that these can be investigated by a suitable branch of physics. In other words, physics implies that anything that exists within the Newtonian-Einsteinian universe must have four coordinates: three in the spatial dimensions and one in the time dimension.
- For example, see Denis Noble (2008): The Music of Life – Biology beyond genes. Oxford University Press. For more on this theme, see https://www.denisnoble.com ↩︎