From Big Bang to the Empyrean: a quantum story

The beginning is hidden in every thing. This essay defends that sentence as a claim about physics. A common picture places the origin of the world's particularity, the random deviations from uniformity that later grew into galaxies, stars and observers, in a single initial event: the Big Bang. I argue that this picture fails on its own terms. Four results of quantum theory are brought together: (i) the primordial quantum state of standard cosmology is homogeneous, and unitary evolution preserves that symmetry, so no particular deviation is contained in it; (ii) Bell's theorem, confirmed by loophole-free experiments, rules out that random outcomes were fixed in advance by local variables at a common source; (iii) decoherence and quantum Darwinism show that definite outcomes become facts through correlations between systems, recorded redundantly in their environments; (iv) the Page–Wootters mechanism shows that a globally static universe can contain time and change only as relations among its parts. Together these results support the view that the random deviation, Lucretius' clinamen, is not stored at the origin. It happens continually, in the relations hidden inside every object, and what fundamentally exists is the network of correlations: the matrix and its complexity. Dante's Empyrean, the heaven that "is not in place and has no poles" and in which all that is scattered across the universe is bound into a single volume, serves as the guiding image: a timeless whole whose life lies entirely in the relations among its parts. Every claim is labelled as established physics, open hypothesis or interpretation, and the interpretations in which the deviation does lie in the initial conditions (Bohmian mechanics, superdeterminism) are discussed explicitly. All figures are computed from first principles by open code included in this deposit, together with a script that re-derives every number quoted in the text and an interactive companion page that runs each figure live in the browser.