As matters currently stand in theories about physical reality and in philosophical analyses of those theories, there are no signs of homogeneity in the nature of spacetime at various scales of time and space though some assume and others hope. In general, created being at the quantum level (think of ‘subatomic’ levels of energy changes rather than small as such) seems sewed together with created being at the macroscopic level and there’s at least hints the universe might have its own nature apart from what it ‘contains’. See A Universe is More than it Contains for a discussion of a well-founded theoretical claim that the conservation of energy might not hold in our universe as a whole even if it holds at the macroscopic level as a true physical law.
Symmetry-breaking is a useful metaphor and seemingly a literal truth in some cases. Symmetries have been broken so that one elegant entity becomes two or more particular entities. Modern cosmological physics and particle physics have produced strong evidence that the electroweak force shattered into the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. Symmetry-breaking might have been involved in many of the events which led to our universe being in its current state. Created being was probably strongly unified, at least in many of its aspects, when the universe was so dense that it took up less space than an atom takes in this current stage of expansion — being has frozen and has shattered in various ways that can be compared to a large body of water freezing and cracking or shattering in various places. See one of my early essays, Update of Prior Entry: Symmetry-breaking, From Physics and Mathematics to Metaphysics for a discussion of this issue. In this way of thinking, the beginning of the current expansionary phase of the universe was largely a phase change, from an extremely hot state to a relatively cool state.
But I’m conjecturing that something stranger has occurred. This shattering of symmetry has split being along lines that we can’t perceive directly, only with our minds. Space and time don’t add up to form larger scales of spacetime, though, as I noted above, many assume or hope that the universe is just a gathering of macroscopic chunks of spacetime which are themselves somehow built up directly from the strange entities explored by subatomic physics. That is, the macroscopic realm of concrete being in this universe seems to be something more than, or different from, a mere assembly of large amounts of subatomic being. The universe, as I pointed out in the article already referenced: A Universe is More than it Contains, is its self, it has properties that don’t seem to correspond to a mere building-up of large amounts of macroscopic stuff.
At least as a speculative adventure, I’ll take seriously the lack of evidence of homogeneity of spacetime, perhaps the very nature of matter and energy, across different scales. I’ll claim:
There are cracks in created being, in a manner of speaking, and the very small, the medium-sized scale where we live, and the very large are somehow sewed together. (A bad way of speaking, but mathematicians do sometimes talk in such ways when putting together strange geometric structures or spaces.)
What does this mean? I don’t know and I’ll admit it might not prove to be literally true. Someone might come up with a brilliant theory which can tie together the ‘quantum’ realm, the macroscopic realm, and the cosmological realm as one homogeneous physical structure. Based upon the current state of our understanding of the physical world, I doubt this can happen. At the same time I do remain convinced that the universe is a coherent entity, in itself and as an assembly of other entities, just as a human being is a coherent entity while being composed of a variety of organs and materials, each of which can be understood separately in coherent terms though ‘coming to life’ only when part of the entire human organism. My claim that the universe seen in light of God’s purposes forms a world, unified and coherent and complete, isn’t dependent upon a strong form of homogeneity or isotropism.
The problem of tying together quantum theory and the general theory of relativity has drawn the efforts of many bright physicists and mathematicians and has resulted in exotic and insightful, but far from fully successful, theories such as various string theories which often hypothesize this universe as being a 4-dimensional ‘surface’ of a realm of being with more dimensions than that.
On the whole, the work on these sorts of theories doesn’t pass the ‘smell’ test for future success, seeming more like the ingenious theories being developed prior to Einstein to deal with the problems he dealt with in a surprisingly direct way — he accepted reality as being what it seems to be in terms of the best descriptions based upon solid investigations. Einstein inherited a lot of the pieces from Newton and Maxwell and Poincare and Lorentz, the latter two having been among that group of Einstein’s older contemporaries who had worked themselves into dead-ends.
Accept reality. Now I’ll seemingly switch course by suggesting a symmetry break is involved when the concrete stuff of this universe emerged from a more abstract stuff, but the symmetry is different from any that would give a set of laws which would ‘shatter’ directly to Schrodinger’s equation in quantum mechanics and Einstein’s field equation in the general theory of relativity. More accurately, the symmetry-breaks which resulted in the quantum and cosmological realms are examples of a more general event, the particularization of abstract forms of being. I don’t see any reason to believe that this particularization had to occur in such a way that ‘dimensionality’, the nature or even number of spacetime, would have to be the same at all scales of this universe.
If we consider all that we know and all the open questions, we’re probably farther from developing a theory of created being in its wholeness than Aristotle was from developing a valid theory of gravity. The best news in this field is the fact that we understand what is at issue, we have a variety of interesting and difficult questions, and we can make some intelligent statements about various aspects of this realm of created being — this realm which can be explored by empirical means or by various sorts of analyses allied with empirical investigation.
I’ll suggest here that we know not much more about the realms of being we can directly perceive than we do about the small and the large, as incomplete as our knowledge also is of those realms. What we do know is that the macroscopic realm is, in a manner of speaking, more intensely narrative. The universe is itself a narrative and, as it is seen as a world in light of God’s purposes, has a life-story, but it’s at the level of macroscopically observable entities, stars and galaxies as well as frogs and humans, that we see the emergence of some actual entities, and some plausible but as yet undiscovered entities, which are fully moral characters and not just things in a story.
How does this level of thing-like being, complete with living things, come into existence and maintain its existence? We readily admit the miraculous nature of life, but we err by not realizing how remarkable it is that this macroscopic level of narrative exists. If some disembodied intelligent creature from another universe were to be told about quantum levels of reality and about what we might call the Einsteinian universe, would he be able to posit the existence of our macroscopic realm? Would he be able to hypothesize that such a macroscopic realm would give rise to self-aware creatures, evolving in family lines and developing during individual lifetimes and sometimes even being self-aware and morally purposeful?
This macroscopic realm might result largely from matter and energy surging up from the quantum realm into the spacetime structure of this universe, but — I remind the reader — something else seems to come in from more abstract realms of being, something which differentiates this scale of being in this universe. Moral stories don’t come about by adding up quantum events nor do they take on only shapes dictated by gravity.
Again: how does the macroscopic level of thing-like being come into existence and maintain its existence? Let me start by conjecturing that the raw stuff of things pours into this universe from some vast sea of more abstract stuff. This is at least somewhat in line with the re-interpretations of quantum theory proposed by Louis de Broglie and David Bohm. In their systems, quantum events are seen as having somewhat more traditional casual relationships though my understanding is that it’s not necessarily true that determinism is re-established as even a possibility, not even at the most basic level of physical events. In a manner of speaking, this sea of raw stuff could be icy so that we could skate on it. That would give us a gliding motion and an ability to turn with little effort that would be a limited freedom, a freedom easy to over-estimate but real nonetheless. More generally, I actually think we’ll need to generalize our concepts of causation but I currently have no speculations in this area. Some sort of hyper-cause and hyper-effect relationships will hold in Creation, but that’s hardly more than a restatement of the problem.
For now I’ll limit myself to claiming that the macroscopic realm, the narrative realm in which human moral narratives occur, isn’t just some meeting point of the quantum level of reality and the cosmological level of reality, though it is in large part exactly that. It isn’t just made of what bubbles up from the great quantum sea of Bohm and de Broglie nor is it shaped only by the structures of Einstein. This isn’t to imply occult forces operate at any scale or level of this concrete realm of God’s Creation. It is to say that those three realms of created being which form the foundations of our human beings all draw separately — if that is the right word — upon more abstract realms of being. They come together to form a universe, which itself becomes a world, unified and coherent and complete, when seen in light of God’s purposes. None of this forces us to believe the universe is homogeneous over those three realms so far as the properties of spacetime is concerned. Nor are we forced to believe in homogeneity with regards to a variety of other aspects of concrete reality.