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We don’t know the original state of the universe. Did the Big Bang begin from a singularity?
It is pretty well established that this universe started as a singularity. We know this because this universe had to start as a smaller object than it is today, else we could experience the continual expansion since.
The background
That does not negate the possibility that this singularity was the result of a prior collapsing universe, but THIS universe began @ t = 0 and was a small but very energetic object, expanding at FTL for a moment, resulting in an explanding plasma of superheated energy, a state of pure chaos.
As the fledgling universe cooled energy began to convert into matter and the first (mathematically) self-organizing elementary particles emerged from the dynamic quantum fields.
Generally, chaos is not solved mathematics. While quoting a philosophical encyclopedia from Stanford can help someone understand some fundamental ideas, the maths are very limited in most real problems.
Solving the Three Body Problem
Behavior among multiple bodies may be chaotic , but but always mathematical in origin.
This is what results in probabilistic, but ultimately deterministic action among all relational objects in a dynamic environment.
And while I enjoy Antonsen’s delivery, he is illustrating cleverness more than maths. I.e, he is showing how powerful basic maths can be. He is not exploring advanced maths. I don’t understand how this relates to a wellspring of life.
I see that more as a demonstration of the general mathematics inherent in all recurring patterns.
The Table of elements is a perfect example of mathematical patterns, where the organization of the pattern determines the character and potential of each atom, which all consist of the same constituent parts arranged in unique patterns that determine the same unique value of same atoms (patterns).
IMO, the first example that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Note that the earliest atoms were the simplest patterns emerging from the cooling plasma.
This is what I gleaned from the folks at Cern:
The Big Bang
In 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the distances to far-away galaxies were proportional to their redshifts. Redshift occurs when a light source moves away from its observer: the light’s apparent wavelength is stretched via the Doppler effect towards the red part of the spectrum.
Hubble’s observation implied that distant galaxies were moving away from us, as the furthest galaxies had the fastest apparent velocities. If galaxies are moving away from us, reasoned Hubble, then at some time in the past, they must have been clustered close together.
Hubble’s discovery was the first observational support for Georges Lemaître’s Big Bang theory of the universe, proposed in 1927. Lemaître proposed that the universe expanded explosively from an extremely dense and hot state, and continues to expand today. Subsequent calculations have dated this Big Bang to approximately 13.7 billion years ago. In 1998 two teams of astronomers working independently at Berkeley, California observed that supernovae – exploding stars – were moving away from Earth at an accelerating rate. This earned them the Nobel prize in physics in 2011.
Physicists had assumed that matter in the universe would slow its rate of expansion; gravity would eventually cause the universe to fall back on its centre. Though the Big Bang theory cannot describe what the conditions were at the very beginning of the universe, it can help physicists describe the earliest moments after the start of the expansion.
Origins
In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe was extremely hot and dense. As the universe cooled, conditions became just right to give rise to the building blocks of matter – the quarks and electrons of which we are all made.
A few millionths of a second later, quarks aggregated to produce protons and neutrons. Within minutes, these protons and neutrons combined into nuclei. As the universe continued to expand and cool, things began to happen more slowly. It took 380,000 years for electrons to be trapped in orbits around nuclei, forming the first atoms.
These were mainly helium and hydrogen, which are still by far the most abundant elements in the universe. Present observations suggest that the first stars formed from clouds of gas around 150–200 million years after the Big Bang.
Heavier atoms such as carbon, oxygen and iron, have since been continuously produced in the hearts of stars and catapulted throughout the universe in spectacular stellar explosions called supernovae.
IOW, there is clear evidence that since the beginning, the universe has been engaged in a probabilistic but individually deterministic self-organization into ever greater complex patterns, eventually self-organizing into bio-chemical patterns that allowed for dynamical growth of “living patterns”.
Note that extremely complex biological growth patterns like humans did not emerge until some 14 billion years of dynamical interactions and pattern forming.
But also note that the single celleld bacteria (prokaryotes) and paramecium
and slime mold (Eukaryots) exhibit mathematical behavior, not from knowledge but from inherent mathematical properties of non-chaotic self-organized patterns .
Living system emerged very gradually. On Earth it took 4 billion years after 10 billion years of elementary pattern-forming.
