Part 1: The Foundation of Existence. Chapter 3. The Zero Point Field

There is something that is more fundamental than everything we normally mean by “the universe”. More fundamental than stars and planets, more fundamental than particles, even more fundamental than space and time. In our everyday thinking, we place things in space, and we let them move in time, as if space and time themselves are a kind of neutral background that is simply already there. In my mind, that is reversed. Space and time are not hard, given in advance markers, they are phenomena that belong to a particular state of something that lies beneath them. That underlying layer I call the zero point field.

In the previous chapter I worked from a concrete image. An astronaut hears tapping against the wall of the ISS, and discovers that space just above the Earth is anything but empty. That was not a loose anecdote, it was a first attack on the idea of vacuum as “nothing”. If even there, where we use the word empty almost automatically, dust, debris, charged particles, and radiation are still present, then what do we actually mean when we talk about emptiness? Most of the time we mean nothing more than this, “there is less than I can perceive”, or “there is less than I find relevant”. Emptiness then becomes a boundary of our attention, not a property of reality.

You can keep that observation superficial, as a fun fact about spaceflight. You can also take it seriously. If nowhere does true emptiness seem to exist, is it not far more plausible that, at the deepest layer of reality, there is always something, even if it is invisible and even if it is perfectly calm? That “something” does not have to lie on a table, it does not have to have a shape, it does not even have to fit inside our ordinary idea of space. It can be the carrier of space itself. That is what I mean by the zero point field.

Modern physics already offers a hint in that direction. In classical physics you can, in thought, pump a box empty until there are no gas particles left, and then you can say, now it is a vacuum. In quantum theory that does not work. Even if you imagine all particles away, irreducible activity remains. There is a so called zero point energy, there are fluctuations, virtual particle pairs appear and disappear again. The vacuum is never perfectly still. It is not nothing, it is a minimal, unerasable “noise”.

I do not want, in this book, to pretend that I am building a new theory on top of that. What I do want is to take the philosophical step that is already hidden underneath it. If even our strictest physical vacuum still shows activity, why would we hold on, in our worldview, to “nothing” as the ultimate basis? It is far more coherent to say that the ground layer of reality is a field that is always present, even when nothing recognisable is happening. That field can be calm or restless, homogeneous or structured, but it does not simply disappear because there are no stars anymore. The zero point field is the supporting layer, not a piece of scenery.

You can picture it as an ocean without coastlines. Even when the surface is mirror smooth, the ocean is still there. There are molecules, there is gravity, there are possible currents. When the wind picks up, waves form. But the wave is not something next to the water. The wave is water in a particular form. That is how I see the structures in our universe, as waves in the zero point field. The fields and particles we distinguish in physics are, in this view, excitation states of an underlying medium. They cannot be thought separately from the zero point field, they are ways in which the zero point field organises itself.

That brings me to a second layer. In my mind, four things in the zero point field are never truly separable from one another, energy, space, time, and information. We have neatly separated them in physics, we give them different symbols and units, but I think that is useful bookkeeping, not an ontological truth. Energy says something about how strongly the field is pulled locally away from its ground state. Space describes how different regions of field arrange themselves relative to one another. Time orders changes in the field, it is the sequence in which patterns unfold. Information is the collection of possible patterns the field can take on, and the regularities in how that happens. In the zero point field, these four aspects are one fabric. If you have a field, you automatically have the possibility of space, time, energy, and information.

That brings us to a question people almost automatically ask, what is the beginning of that field? Here you see how deep the tendency runs to assign a clear starting point to everything. Myths begin with creation, religions begin with “in the beginning”, textbooks begin with the Big Bang. We apparently find it uncomfortable to live with something that has no start moment, something that simply is, without a scene in which it “appears”. You see the same reflex in physics. The time coordinate gets a zero moment, t is zero at the Big Bang, and the question “what was there before” is then often dismissed as meaningless, but usually that happens without addressing the feeling underneath it.

I think the question about the beginning of the zero point field is a category mistake. We ask for a “before” in a context where the concept of “before” itself does not yet exist. Time, in my mind, is not an external clock that the field sits inside, time is a way in which changes in the field are ordered. That means it makes sense to ask how a particular pattern in the field began, for example our universe, but not to ask how the existence of the field itself began. As long as you use the word beginning, you assume a timeline. The field is that timeline. You cannot logically ask about the time “before” the carrier of time.

Here lies one of the great freedoms of the zero point field. It does not need a beginning. It is not an object inside a larger world that has to be explained. It is the precondition of every world you can imagine. When we ask where the field comes from, we are using our psychological grip on cause and effect in a place where that structure does not apply. The human mind is used to sorting stories into “it started then”, and “after that this happened”. The zero point field does not fit into such a storyline. It is not an event, it is the background against which events gain meaning.

That does not mean we must give up all questions. You can still ask about the properties of the zero point field. Why does it have certain symmetries and not others? Why does it allow certain phases that are stable, such as a universe in the form of a three sphere, and perhaps not others? Why does it seem that the patterns we call “laws of nature” are robust and not arbitrary? Those are very real questions. But they are questions about structure, not about origin. Origin is no longer a useful concept here. That takes getting used to, but I think it is necessary if you truly want to step out of “something out of nothing” thinking.

Let me make this more concrete with the image of the Big Bang. In the standard story, it is the moment at which space and time themselves arise, a kind of cosmic zero point with nothing behind it. In my picture, the Big Bang is not a moment zero in which being jumps out of nothing. It is a phase transition in the zero point field. A situation in which a calm, symmetric ground state becomes unstable, and flips into a dynamic, less symmetric state. In that new phase, a pattern emerges that we recognise as an expanding universe, with its own direction of time, its own spatial lines, and its own matter structures.

You can compare that to water that freezes or boils. Water as such does not have to begin, it only changes phase. Ice, liquid water, and steam are different manifestations of the same substance. Their beginning does not lie outside the water, it lies in a change of conditions, such as temperature and pressure. I see our universe as such a phase of the zero point field. The zero point field does not need a beginning, the universe as a phase can very much have a beginning moment, namely the moment that phase started. That is a subtle, but essential distinction.

Once you look at it that way, the question in cosmology shifts. Instead of asking “where did the universe come from”, you ask “which phase of the zero point field is this, which parameters belong to it, and why is this phase stable enough to exist for billions of years”. That is a fundamental rephrasing. The universe no longer has to be the ultimate brick of reality, it is a state. Perhaps the only one possible under certain boundary conditions, perhaps one of many. But in all cases, it does not rest on nothing, it rests on a field.

For GLV, that field is not only a philosophical anchor point. It is also the natural carrier of the optical effects that my model turns on. If light never travels through true emptiness, but always through a medium with structure, then it is logical that light paths wind, and that the optical route deviates from the geometric distance. All those small mass irregularities, from dwarf galaxies to filaments and gas ripples, are in my mind local variations in the zero point field. They are not “things in space”, they are condensations of the field itself. The gravity they exert is then an expression of how the field is deformed around those condensations. So it is not mysterious at all that light does something different from what we would expect in a fictional empty space.

Black holes are the most extreme places where the zero point field shows its teeth. In standard terminology we speak of singularities, points where the curvature of spacetime goes to infinity and the theory stops. In my worldview, such a singularity mainly says that we are calculating in the wrong way. I do not think there is actually a physical infinity at the centre of a black hole. I think the field configuration there has been pushed so far that ordinary particle structure no longer exists. The excitation we call matter dies away. What remains is the zero point field in something very close to its ground state. The black hole then becomes not a hole in being, but a place where structure collapses. The relic curvature around the black hole is then the imprint in the field of everything that happened there. We will return to this in detail later.

From the zero point field it is also very natural to see the universe, on the largest scales, as a three sphere. A three sphere is a finite, but edgeless structure. You cannot “fall off” it, but you can traverse it completely. For a field that does not need an external space, such a self closing configuration is an elegant solution. The zero point field does not have to lie inside an endless, flat space. It can organise itself into a finite, coherent phase, in which we experience spacetime as a closed, but stretchable whole. That fits much better with the idea that no “outside” of the universe is needed. There is only another phase, or another region, of the same field.

I think this way of looking has another advantage. It takes away the Big Bang’s mythical weight. Instead of the almost religious “here everything began”, you get a more sober picture. Here this specific pattern in the zero point field began. That does not remove the wonder, but it makes room for continuity and cycles. Before our universe there may well have been another phase of the field, perhaps with very different properties. After this universe another phase may follow. None of that affects the existence of the zero point field. It is not there because of the universe, the universe is there because of the field.

The deepest shift may be here. As a species we are used to thinking in absolute origins, in stories, in religions, in models. The idea of a zero point field asks for a different attitude. Not “where did this come from”, but “what are the properties of that which was always there”. That may sound vague or airy, but in my view it is exactly the opposite. It spiritualises nothing, it makes the basis more sober. No divine button, no magical leap out of nothing, but a field that simply is, a field that allows certain phases and not others, and we appear to live in a phase in which stars, planets, and brains are possible.

In the rest of this book I therefore use the zero point field as a quiet reference point. When I write that space is never empty, I mean there is always field. When I write that light winds, I mean it finds its way through a fine grained field structure. When I write that we systematically overestimate mass and distance, that is because we act as if the field is empty, and as if light takes the highway. And when I write that dark matter and dark energy may not be needed at all, that is because I think the zero point field, and its optical consequences, already take over much of that role.

From here I can build further. In the next chapter I will discuss how such a universe carried by a zero point field can look on the largest scales, why I think a three sphere fits, and how that picture connects with the idea that the universe is not what it seems. But under every step one thought remains, there is no beginning needed for everything. There is a field that needs no material basis, and everything we call universe is a temporary, but beautiful ripple within it.