The Mutter
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's own Senior Research Professor of Secrets and Divination opens an introductory lecture on the art and practice of making sense of the most universal source of noise.
There is a certain sort of person that goes on incessantly about vibrations and the music of the spheres and celestial harmonies, and that’s all fine, I guess. Even if you have a cruel streak as wide as mine, you don’t have to kick every puppy you see.
Also synesthesia is a thing. Some people have the equivalent of harmlessly (or even helpfully) crossed wires where senses are concerned, hearing tones with colors or seeing auras or tasting shapes or sensing time as a great wheel in space. Hearing the stars sing when they look up is probably far better than hearing the stars’ actual sadistic laughter, or the screaming of the creatures of the black constellations that the stars have nailed into place, stretching and twisting and spindling them as the stars twirl and orbit one another and swerve along their great paths around the galactic core.
I feel like I’m getting off track.
Beneath the screaming and the laughter, there is a sound that is the ubiquitous sound of everything all at once, and it is pretty much by definition noise.
That doesn’t mean that the noise has nothing to say.
That doesn’t mean there’s no voice underneath the noise.
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It’s important to understand that the only reason cosmologists think there was once a Big Bang is that right at this very moment all of the large structures of the visible universe seem to be flying away from us—and from one another, one assumes—with the farthest things fleeing fastest. The famous equation relating mass and energy, often simplified as E=Mc2, has units in terms of kilograms and joules and meters and seconds, though. Simple algebra shows that matter-energy relationships can be converted to reveal spacetime as a substance, to reveal that distance and time are manufactured in bulk as a (reversible in theory) decay product of matter-energy interactions, that spacetime itself has a mass-energy value, a mass equivalence that has a gravitic attraction to go along with its contribution to explosive expansion, and that that expansion is warped in the extreme due to the fact that the known mass and diameter of the universe seem to imply that the entire universe is inside a collapsing black hole. All of the mass-energy relationships where matter tends to clump—in galaxies and galactic clusters—is generating more and more spacetime, and it has to go somewhere. Where gravitational binding is strong enough, stuff stays together. But distance and time explode outward, making large structures farther away and farther back in time.
This makes little sense from a causal viewpoint, where spacetime has to behave as a Cartesian arena where things happen, where a meter is a meter and a second is a second at all times and under all circumstances, where we only understand the results of interactions with respect to ironclad measures that aren’t allowed to grow or shrink. But mere highschool algebra says I’m just as right to view it the way I’ve said above, that apparent universal expansion is a function of the decay of … the density of the energy content of matter? That a scalar speed in meters per second is directly related to the square root of the thermal or kinetic energy content of mass? That mass with an apparent energy content of zero would not be speeding away at all? That thermal entropy equals universal spacetime expansion? Et cetera.
All of these relationships are true, or as true as they can be considering the haphazard way I’ve described them off the top of my head. But the takeaway is that spacetime itself is a substance that can be created and destroyed, though perhaps not as such, but by converting it into matter-energy relationships. While it exists it as spacetime, however, it has a substance measurable in terms of energy and mass, a vibratory thermal content. A noise. A drone. A murmur. A mutter.
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Mutter in German means mother. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that there is an Egyptian goddess by the name of Mut, which also meant mother in the Egyptian language of the time. Her aspect was that of the primordial chaos of the eternal night sky from which everything was born. She was part of the Theban triad—a bit of a departure from what most modern people think of as the pantheon of Ancient Egypt—which included her husband the sun and their child the moon. Mut was certainly not the first or the oldest rendition of the Chaos Mother of All scenario, but quite possibly it was the first time she was just called “Mom.”
Was there some kind of event which made everything that we know as the universe come from this sea of nothing? We’ve established that particles and other phenomena of substance spontaneously emerge from Mut, the sea of nothingness, all the time, just perhaps on a smaller scale. Was it easier to get a larger, more massive, more energetic something from the nothing when the nothing was smaller and more dense?
One of the biggest mysteries of the Big Bang scenario is the question of why something with the mass and energy of the entire universe all condensed into a single point didn’t immediately collapse into a black hole.
The math seems to show pretty clearly that it did.
I invite you to review the currently prevailing literature that tries to explain why the ultra-concentrated matter/energy that supposedly went bang did not immediately collapse into a black hole. I have, and it’s amusing. It reads like a lecture from the pulpit explaining why God is Love. It posits all kinds of untested and untestable assumptions about uniform densities and expansion rates that seem to have no bearing, and stands firm on an axiom that assumes that the inside of the universe where we are is somehow special with respect to any locations potentially outside, which is downright Ptolemaic. It assumes that every region inside an event horizon must be a singularity at the very center when the math specifies only that 1) from outside the event horizon of a black hole, the mass of the black hole may generally be treated as if it is a singularity at the center, seeing as the event horizon is centered on the center of mass and 2) singularities are only called for if the mathematically required density of the matter inside causes violations of the Pauli Exclusion Principle and various conservation laws. This is possibly the case with black holes beneath a certain size, but not necessarily the case for all. The literature also ignores the main rule of what we know about black holes: that predictions of what’s going on on the other side of an event horizon makes little sense with the present understanding of the math. This would necessarily also be the case if one was inside an event horizon trying to calculate the state of anything outside.
Fortunately there’s still a lot of nothing in here with us, and it seems like we make more of it all the time.
Mother is still in here with us, still creating little things now and then, and getting fatter and spreading herself thinner at the same time. Still whispering.
Can you hear what she’s saying?
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What she’s saying, deep in the muttering, is everything.
From a casual perspective it’s noise, true. From a less casual perspective, it’s everything. Everything, all at once, holographically overlaid. Apply the right filter, the right decryption, and from the noise will resolve any message, any image, any design, any representation at all from the entire Library of Babel. The voice of the mutter is Borges’s Aleph.
But the early days of quick answers are over. Now you have to listen for a long, long time, from many different locations to ensure good perspectives, sometimes over many different sessions, over years and decades, even, for a complete response. Or many different listeners can listen from different places and different times and share data to form a more complete picture more quickly, like an array of antennas or telescopes working together in concert, distributed over time and space.
People do this all the time, and much of it is unconscious. Sometimes all you need to do to decipher messages from the mutter is to follow the behaviors of sets of other beings distributed across space and time that all seem to be tuned to receive the same signal. It’s amazing work, this signal collection, this signal processing—provided you can look past the vast armies of those who seem to be collecting and responding to the broadcast agony and despair of those creatures of the black constellations—or worse, echoing the sadistic glee of their torturers.
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As a classroom exercise, I’d like you to spend the next ten or so minutes trying to listen to the voice of the mutter with a few pieces of paper on hand to jot or sketch what messages you receive. Don’t try to steer it.
If at first all you hear is tortured screams or insane laughter, that’s fine. That’s not going to go away anytime soon—at least not until certain key stars burn out—and believe me, you do not want to get in the middle of it. Spend some time with it though, and don’t let it freak you out. Learn how to recognize it, then let yourself drift down through it to where the mutter resides, and listen, listen, listen.