Cosmology & Sohnaris Cosmology

    Understanding the universe is a quest as old as time itself. The great questions it raises speak as much of our thirst for knowledge as of the limits of that knowledge and of our imagination:

• What was there before the Big Bang?
• Why do the cohesion of galaxies and the acceleration of the universe escape our laws of gravitation?
• What is the shape and size of the universe?
• Are we in a multiverse, or are there additional dimensions?

    When we wonder what there was "before" the Big Bang, the idea of an absolute nothingness keeps returning. But can we truly conceive of a total absence of matter, energy, space and time?

    From the standpoint of Sohnaris, such a nothingness is an impossibility, not in the universe but in thought. "Absolute nothing" is already a human abstraction, born of our mind and therefore an integral part of Sohnaris. Even in our effort to imagine the absence of everything, we remain within what we can conceive.

    Physics confirms this in its own way: the perfect vacuum does not exist. In the emptiest regions of space, as in the most advanced experiments, there always persist quantum fluctuations, in which particles ceaselessly arise and annihilate, along with a residual energy belonging to the vacuum itself. What we call the "void" in fact teems with incessant activity.

The primordial state

    For the idea of nothingness, cosmological models substitute that of a primordial state. This state, often described as a dense and burning "soup" of pure energy, forms the foundation of our universe. It is attested by the fossil radiation, or cosmic microwave background, discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1964.

    The theory of inflation, proposed by Alan Guth in 1981, suggests that the primordial universe underwent, in a tiny fraction of a second, an exponential expansion. It is this that would have imprinted upon the universe its large-scale structure; and as it dissipated, it would have given rise to the matter and radiation that compose it. Within the framework of Sohnaris, this state is not "external" to reality: it is one of its phases, just as is a hypothetical "pre-universe" in which the physical laws would not yet have existed. Such a scenario remains a construction of our mind, extrapolating beyond its observations.

    There remains the most dizzying question of all: why did the Big Bang ignite? A quantum transition in an unstable state, a collision of "branes"... hypotheses are not lacking. All of them hint that our universe might have arisen from an event belonging to a vaster reality, yet one always inscribed within Sohnaris. Rather than a birth out of nothing, the Big Bang is then understood as a transformation within this totality.

    For decades, scientists and philosophers have explored the idea that our universe might not be unique. According to theories such as eternal inflation, the observable universe would be only one bubble among a potentially infinite number of distinct universes. Each "big bang" would then be the origin of a new world, endowed with laws similar to ours or radically different.

    Some hypotheses go further and imagine these universes not as isolated entities but as interacting ones: they might touch, exchange energy, or even merge. Brane cosmology (notably the ekpyrotic scenario) thus posits that collisions between membranes, in a space of several dimensions, would be at the origin of our Big Bang, following cycles anchored in shared laws.

    Sohnaris naturally accommodates these visions. If all these universes share a common foundation (the fundamental laws of our reality), their multiplicity is only a variation within one and the same whole, and not a true outside. As concepts, they belong to Sohnaris the moment a human mind can conceive them.

    We must nonetheless remain lucid: the very idea of a multiverse often arises from the limits of our models. We seek to fill theoretical gaps, and this approach remains deeply rooted in our frame of reference, as much through the mathematical tools we use as through an imagination bounded by our reality. Verifying these universes empirically remains out of reach.

    The implications are staggering: if such universes exist, the uniqueness of our cosmos wavers. Sohnaris does not decide the matter; it allows us to think this immensity not as an established truth, but as an exploration of the possible.

    Scientific exploration rests on coherent and reproducible physical laws. But our ability to describe them remains tied to our position within Sohnaris. Useful for understanding our material reality, these laws also reveal their gaps as soon as we approach the infinitely small or the infinitely large.

    Dark matter and dark energy are the most striking example. Invisible, they are invoked to explain anomalies in our models: the first seems to ensure the cohesion of galaxies, the second to accelerate the expansion of the universe. Yet no direct proof of their nature has been obtained. Far from indicating a beyond of Sohnaris, they are a very real part of it, simply perceived incompletely: a reality that structures our universe without yet letting itself be grasped.

    Particle accelerators allow us to probe these mechanisms. By recreating states close to those that followed the Big Bang, such as the quark-gluon plasma, they show that certain initial conditions could be reproduced. Hence a dizzying question: if the Big Bang stems from a reproducible mechanism, would we be able, in theory, to bring forth a new universe?

    These mechanisms are not, however, absolutes. They are tools of exploration, bounded by our capacity to observe and interpret. The anthropic principle, according to which the universe appears calibrated to allow the existence of observers, reminds us of this in its own way: every reflection on reality is conditioned by our own position as observers. Sohnaris sees in this no hidden purpose, only this inevitable circularity, which is not a weakness but the very mark of our limits.

    However effective they may be, the laws of physics leave shadowy zones. Dark matter, dark energy, or certain unexplained fluctuations signal that our models are only partial approximations. The quest for unification makes this clear: loop quantum gravity and string theory seek to connect the infinitely large and the infinitely small, but run up against persistent incompatibilities, foremost among them that between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

    It is tempting to see in this the trace of an "outside-Sohnaris," a vaster reality that would contain the true workings of the universe. But that would be to forget what the concept implies: a genuine outside would be, by definition, inaccessible and mute. It could neither be conceived nor inform us of anything whatsoever. Nothing that illuminates our questions could therefore come from it.

    These shadowy zones are not the windows of another world: they are the internal frontier of our frame of reference. The "hidden workings" of the universe do not lie beyond Sohnaris, but in its regions still inaccessible to our observation and our conceptualisation. The inexplicable is not so in essence; it is so because it touches the limits of what our frame allows us to reach.

    This limit is not sterile: it draws the exact contour of our knowledge and reminds us that to understand the universe is also to recognise where, for now, our grasp of it ends. On what thought cannot reach, Sohnaris does not invite us to speculate into the void, but to gauge the real extent of our knowledge.

    Sohnaris invites us to rethink the nature of the universe and the mysteries that compose it. It reveals at once the grandeur and the vanity of our quest for truth. Grandeur, because seeking to understand the universe, even in its most inaccessible recesses, drives us to push back ever further the limits of our knowledge. Vanity, because this quest is endless: we will never pierce the ultimate secret of existence. Every answer opens new questions, and every advance reminds us of the extent of our ignorance.

    Rather than promising a beyond that would deliver its answers, Sohnaris sheds light on why certain facets of our reality escape us: they reside in regions that our tools and our minds cannot reach. It does not help us to understand everything, but to accept that the inexplicable is an integral part of the universe, just as finitude belongs to all things.

    This apparent vanity is not, however, a weakness: it is the engine of our exploration. As long as we have not reached the limit, we do not know where it lies, or even whether it exists. The search for a unification, however imperfect, always brings us closer to a deeper truth about the universe and its origins.

    What remains, then, is a stance more than an answer: to explore tirelessly, while knowing that reality, in all its complexity and apparent contradictions, will always keep a part that escapes us. It is precisely this quest, humble and immense at once, that defines our relationship to the universe.

• "A Brief History of Time" (1988) by Stephen Hawking.
• "The First Three Minutes" (1977, revised edition 1993) by Steven Weinberg.
• "Black Holes and Time Warps" (1994) by Kip Thorne.
• "The Inflationary Universe" (1997) by Alan Guth.
• "The Fabric of the Cosmos" (2004) by Brian Greene.
• "Parallel Worlds" (2005) by Michio Kaku.
• "The Trouble with Physics" (2006) by Lee Smolin.
• "Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang" (2007) by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok.
• "The Hidden Reality" (2011) by Brian Greene.
• "Cycles of Time" (2010) by Roger Penrose.
• "The Particle at the End of the Universe" (2012) by Sean Carroll.
• "Our Mathematical Universe" (2014) by Max Tegmark.
• "A Beautiful Question" (2015) by Frank Wilczek.
• "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs" (2015) by Lisa Randall.
• "The Beginning and the End of Everything" (2021) by Paul Parsons.
• "On the Origin of Time" (2023) by Thomas Hertog.