The Brief Relief for Existential Crisis at Midnight.

It seems off topic for a physics aspirant point of veiw to have existential crisis while overthinking at the night. Here are things that let me loose sleep at night.

1. Are we significant enough to bear insignificance?

The universe is bigger than we can imagine. Like say 93 billion light years and 2 trillion galaxies are not a wholesale numbers. We are like a mites in a plum and plum is the planet Earth, as said by Sagan. And at the same time it is indifferent. We are in the universe. We are the part of universe.

It is also true that, we are made up of atoms that mainly consist of Carbon, Nitrogen, Calcium, Oxygen. These ingredients of our bodies are made in the core of stars. The abundancy of each of the elements, relies on what we call the metalicity of the stars. High metalic stars produces more heavier elements. So we can say many atoms from our bodies are traceable to different stars on its origin. Under the unfoldings of geochemical forces, we somehow tapped into conscious being. And yes we are the way for universe to experience it itself. So, the most poetic things about astrophysics is that the universe is living within us in human form.

So whenever people say, they feel so small after reading astronomy. I say rather we are significant in the sense because each of us are precious in cosmic perspective.

2. Are we the glitch in the matrix?

According to laws of physics, we are supposed to be the glitch of matrix. Let me explain you in a bit nerd way. To create universe out of nothing, let us dig a hole in ground, you will cause the lumps of soil equal to the space of hole. Let us suppose the hole to be antimatter and the lumps of soil is a matter. But there is a problem, the matter and antimatter annihilates. So the universe becomes nothing. But at the begining, it was quite interesting and different in our universe. One in one billion particles however survived the annihilation with antiparticles. For this big how, it is still a mystery that we are struggling with in physics. This is the glitch, where we are scratching our head.

3. Are we odd?

Life is extremely rare phenomenon in universe. And to think about a smart life such as us is like finding a grain of salt in a huge pile of sand. It is odd. It may be there but the condition might be different so they could have different morphology and anatomy or even might have different biochemistry. There is a paradox that universe is full of life. If it is so, where are they? This is fermi paradox. It is more related with the presence of intelligent like such as you in other corner of universe. But there still may be many possibilities out there.

4. Are we the incharge of everything that we do ?

The notion of freewill is the idea that the person at the crossroad have the grip over his choice between many options, like the poem of William Wordsworth. And there is a notion, in principle, things turn out to be deterministic. Like in classical physics, we can use a equations to tell, when and where the objects should be. But when we look the nature of quantum physics, it turns out to be uncertain, and things are random. So there is probability. And so far, we can say, if both the notion of randomness and determinism are consistent with eachother at stake, the sensation of freewill is seemingly a illusion. But the sensation is real. We think that we are the incharge of decision we make. Decisions are made randomly. But randomness also emerges from something that is deterministic. Like we may change the outcomes by changing the number of experiment over time, but the probability of getting either is always the same. And when we think of making random decision in life, we are the custodians of the life’s meaning.

5. Is universe a simulation?

We understand universe under the notion of "when" and "where". If we interrogate where, in reality it is 3 dimensional space. And, while we interrogate when, it comes 1 dimensional, unidirectional, time. And so we can say, there is 3+1 dimension in the universe. And one solution suggests that, when we go deeper down so much at the scale of quantum physics, we see the reality in terms of information. And those information are encoded in 2 dimensional surface. And so, why may not we say the universe is entirely the projection of 2 dimensional quantum information. And why not say that we are in the 2 dimensional simulation projected in 3 dimensions. If this hypothesis is true, it is true that we are in self simulat universe.