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What If the Universe Had No Beginning? Part 2: No Boundary, No Problem

(This is Part 2 of a series on Hawking’s no-boundary proposal. Read Part 1 first.)

I thought the whole point of this program was that we couldn’t just…get to the beginning of the universe, and now, thanks to the magic of Wheeler and DeWitt, we have the precise machinery we need to solve the beginning of the universe….if only we knew one thing, just one tiny piece of information, just one measly morsel…and we could do it.

Hawking did it. Well, he had an idea, which is more than anyone else had at the time.

Two decades after Wheeler and DeWitt, Stephen Hawking comes along and connects, as he usually does, several different lines of thought, and he realizes that the problem for one thing is actually the solution to another.

Check this out: Hawking is staring at the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. It’s a puzzle that reveals the universe, but all the puzzle pieces are scattered around, AND we don’t have the picture on the front of the box. If we know how to place just ONE piece, we can put together the quantum wave function of the universe.

We just need the first piece. The boundary condition that defines the beginning state of the universe. But we can’t measure it, we can’t read any device or look through any telescope to figure it out. Nothing gives us access to the first moment of the big bang. AND we have no theory of quantum gravity around the corner to just ASK.

So that leaves us with…taking a wild guess and seeing if it sticks.

Hawking decided that his wild guess would be as grounded as possible. He argued that the best boundary condition of the universe, the best statement that you can make about how it all gets started, had to be SELF-JUSTIFYING. That means the guess about the beginning of the universe couldn’t come from anywhere else: you can’t point to God or Wheeler or ANYTHING to just HAND you the answer, because the universe is every single thing to ever exist, in totality, and you can’t reach OUTSIDE that. There’s no hidden corner of the cabinet that exists outside the universe to just give us the boundary.

And the most self-justifying statement Hawking could make about the beginning of the universe is that it had no beginning.

In other words, what if the reason you can’t find the boundary at the beginning of the universe is not because it’s hidden or inaccessible, but because it genuinely isn’t there?

Now this is a very lovely thought to have. But we’re not here for lovely thoughts, we’re here for down and dirty physics. It’s one thing to say something crazy, it’s another to turn that into a working theory of nature. Thankfully, Hawking had exactly what he needed.

One of the defining features of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that it doesn’t involve time. It doesn’t know or care that the universe evolves, expands, does interesting things, heads out to dinner on a Tuesday night just because it’s wild like that.

The key that can unlock the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is a solid statement ABOUT time, specifically, the most important time of all: the beginning of the universe. So we NEED to involve time SOMEHOW in all this mess if we’re going to make progress.

So Hawking…involves time. Instead of just looking at space, he stitches together these geometries back to back like frames in a film. He makes a sequence of them, representing an evolution to the history of the universe. These frames tell the story of the cosmos. Now, we don’t know what that story is (I mean, from Wheeler and DeWitt’s machine; we can observe it and so we KNOW it, but we’re trying to EXPLAIN it), so Hawking constructs all these…paths. Possible histories of the universe. Trajectories, evolutions, stories. In some stories, the universe gets really big really fast and fizzles out to nothing. In others, it never even expands. In still others, there’s nothing but matter. And others, nothing but…nothing.

Now all of these paths, all of these histories of the universe, all share one thing in common: they’re in the usual spacetime that we know and love. Cause and effect, past and future, speed of light, all that. And they all have a BEGINNING. A first frame in the movie of the universe.

Well, what if we just made time behave differently? Now I’m going to share a term with you, and when I say it it’s going to sound really wrong, like icky, deep in your gut. But I’m going to say it, then I’m going to explain it. It…will still feel icky, but at least it will have an explanation.

Here goes: imaginary time.

Yeah, imaginary time. Time, but imaginary. Listen, I don’t know how much you know about imaginary numbers. But they’re really cool and fun and DEFINITELY worth bringing up in your next workplace all-hands meeting. The core idea behind imaginary numbers is to pretend to take the square root of, I don’t know, negative 4. The square root of regular four is 2, but the square root of negative four is…uh….what? In normal grade school math this is where your teacher scoffs at you and says you can’t take the square root of a negative number.

But this isn’t grade school. We’re not going to take the square root of a negative number. Instead, we’re going to say that the square roots of negative numbers are an ENTIRELY NEW KIND OF NUMBER. A brand new category. You have whole numbers, rational numbers, negatives, and now you have imaginary numbers, which are all the square roots of the negative numbers.

Phew, I swear I’m going somewhere with this.

The trick Hawking pulled was that he took all these histories of spacetime and replaced “time” with “imaginary time”. He multiplied the passage of time by the square root of negative one. Now, we actually do this in quantum mechanics all the time (or should I say imaginary time?) as a TRICK. Sometimes when we get equations that are really, really hard to solve, we replace time with imaginary time and they become easier. Then we solve them, then we swap back. Just a little reshuffling in the backend to work through some thorny problems.

But when Hawking does this to the spacetime of the universe, he gets a bonus. It’s not a party trick anymore. It’s a statement. You see, in normal spacetime, the universe has a beginning. But when you replace time with imaginary time, the beginning…goes away. This procedure actually puts space and time on equal footing. It makes them all creatures of curvature and geometry, with no separate identity. Which makes the beginning of the universe no special time at all. It becomes like the south pole, which is really just any other point on the globe. You reach the south pole and keep walking, and it’s only ever north from there. You reach the beginning of the universe, and it’s not special or unique (maybe a little hot); all you have is the future in front of you.

No beginning. No start. No boundary. A universe that justifies itself.

By making the switch to imaginary time, Hawking could ENCODE his “the universe has no beginning” idea, AND he could crunch through the math.

Voila: a key that unlocks the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and the know-how to run the mathematical machinery.

And what do you get for all this work? Nothing less than a wave function for the universe.

In Part 3, the wave function delivers something Hawking didn’t even ask for: our universe, more or less, for free.

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A Tren de Aragua Leader Is Killed in a Joint Strike, U.S. and Venezuela Say

A strike this week in Venezuela killed a gang leader known as Niño Guerrero who was wanted in the United States, officials in both countries said.

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NASA Study Challenges Theories on Where the Ingredients for Life Came From

The question of how life began here on Earth, or how simple organisms emerged from chemical compounds, remains a bit of a mystery. While scientists have confirmed through fossil evidence and the geological record that life began roughly 4 billion years ago on the seafloor (around hydrothermal vents), it is still unclear how the ingredients for life came to Earth. The generally-held view is that they were brought here by comets and asteroids from the outer Solar System, which also delivered Earth’s surface water.

This theory states that planetesimals delivered these elements to the inner Solar System during the Late Heavy Bombardment, thought to have occurred between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago. However, a new NASA-supported study is providing new information about how primordial Earth acquired life-essential elements (LEEs). Their findings, published in the journal Science Advances, indicate that Jupiter likely played a key role in the process.

The research team hails from Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. As they indicate, the timing of the deliver of LEEs to Earth remains debated, as does the geochemistry of the planetesimals involved. Traditional models attribute it to outer Solar System chondrites, stony meteorites that formed two to four million years after the first solids formed in the Solar System. However, as the team noted, this accretion age rules them out as the earliest source of LEEs.

*Artist’s impression of a circumsolar debris disk, from which systems of planets form. Credit: NASA*

To break it down, all life on Earth requires the same basic elements, known by the acronym CHNOPS: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. These elements formed through the fusion of hydrogen and helium in the first generation of stars (Population III), which were then dispersed throughout the cosmos as clouds of gas and dust when these massive stars went supernova at the end of their short lifespans (tens of millions of years). These and other heavy elements (including silica, iron, and various metals) then coalesced to form subsequent generations of stars and planets.

Roughly 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun formed from a collection of this gas and dust (nebula), experiencing gravitational collapse at the center. The remaining material formed a disk around the new star, slowly accreting to form the Solar planets and planetesimals. What material remained, in the form of asteroids and comets, settled into different orbits, most into the Main Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt. Others, meanwhile, fell into the orbits of planets – like Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) or Jupiter’s Trojan and Greek populations.

Over time, many of these objects have crossed Earth’s orbit, impacted the surface, and were recovered as meteorites. The study of these objects provides a window into the early Solar System, a much more chaotic time when Earth was still in formation. Meteorites fall into two categories, both of which originated from planetesimals that formed at different times in our system. These include dense metallic objects (iron meteorites) and stony chondrites, the latter of which constitute the majority of those found on Earth.

The oldest planetesimals are the source of iron meteorites, while chondrites originate from the second generation that formed 2-3 million years later. While some evidence points to chondrites from the outer Solar System delivering the ingredients for life late in Earth’s formation, scientists continue to debate which type of meteorites delivered Earth’s stock of LEEs. The new study suggests that things might have happened differently than traditional models suggest.

Using laboratory experiments and geochemical models, the team reconstructed a map of phosphorus-nitrogen (P/N) ratios across the early Solar System. Their results showed that during the first generation of planetesimals (iron), objects had a higher ratio of P/N in the outer Solar System, which decreased toward the inner Solar System. This trend was reversed in the second generation, where chondrites had higher P/N ratios in the inner Solar System.

*An illustration of our solar system. The asteroid belt lies between Mars and Jupiter, separating our system into the inner and outer regions. NASA/JPL-Caltech*

The team theorized that during the first generation, an outward flow of material raised the P/N ratio in the outer Solar System. This changed with the arrival of Jupiter, whose gravitational influence restricted the movement of phosphorus and nitrogen from the inner to outer Solar System. This meant that when the second generation of planetesimals appeared, those that orbited within the inner Solar System were left with a higher P/N ratio than their counterparts that orbited farther from the Sun.

These results suggest that, contrary to previous models, Earth acquired its phosphorus and nitrogen (both essential to life) primarily from the inner Solar System, without additional contributions from the outer Solar System. Their findings are reinforced by geochemical accretion models showing that Earth’s present-day P/N signature is best reproduced by inner Solar System planetesimals, regardless of whether they are related to iron or chondrite meteorites. As Rajdeep Dasgupta of Rice University, the senior author on the study, said in a NASA press release:

For our own solar system, Jupiter’s presence and growth history, indeed, seem to have played a critical role in determining the distribution of the basic chemical ingredients necessary for habitable worlds. It remains an open question whether a life-essential element budget similar to Earth’s can be established without a Jupiter-like planet in the population.

“The study suggests that Earth acquired its inventory of the life-essential elements phosphorus and nitrogen primarily from the inner solar system, without requiring a significant contribution from outer solar system chondrites,” added Pathak. As for the other LEEs, the means through which they were delivered to Earth billions of years ago remain to be seen and will be the subject of future research.

Further Reading: NASA, Science

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Fugitive wanted for 2 killings found in Laos after 8 years

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An 8-year-old manhunt for a suspect in two California killings came to an end this week after a South Korean national was detained abroad and returned to the United States to face murder charges.

Myung Jin Kim, 31, was wanted in connection with two killings, including a botched murder-for-hire plot in San Jose in 2016 and the killing of Kim’s friend in the parking lot of a CVS in Westminster two years later.

Prosecutors filed an arrest warrant for Kim in November 2018, but he is believed to have fled and eluded authorities for eight years.

Myung Jin Kim, 31, was taken into custody by Laotian authorities in late May.

“Mr. Kim’s cowardly acts of violence finally caught up with him, despite being halfway across the globe,” said Patrick Grandy, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, in a statement.

Kim is believed to have hired a hitman for the ambush and killing of a man in San Jose on June 27, 2016.

Police say the victim was shot in his car after stopping by a residential neighborhood. But the investigation by San Jose police determined the hitman had killed the wrong person.

For years, however, no arrest warrant was issued for Kim.

Then on Sept. 5, 2018, Kim was suspected of shooting and killing his friend, 26-year-old Christopher Kim, in the parking lot of a CVS in Westminster after the two argued over money.

Authorities say Kim allegedly shot his friend six times in front of his girlfriend and then fled on foot.

On Nov. 20, 2018, police in Orange County issued an arrest warrant for Kim.

San Jose police continued their investigation into the 2016 killing as well and, on Feb. 3, 2020, an arrest warrant was issued for Kim for allegations of murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the botched murder-for-hire plot.

Kim eluded law enforcement for years until December 2025 when, according to a statement by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, Westminster Police Department, FBI, San Jose Police and Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office, he was found living in Laos. Kim was taken into custody for alleged immigration violations, including using fraudulent travel documents.

Orange and Santa Clara county officials worked with the FBI and U.S. marshals to locate and bring Kim back to the states to face felony charges.

Kim was booked into Anaheim Police Department jail Tuesday, and he was transported to Santa Clara County on Wednesday.

Federal officials noted Kim was the first person detained and returned to the United States from Laos.