Does Reality Have a Bottom?

A company can die. Its people don’t have to (at least not right away 💀).

Its employees find new jobs, its computers are sold, and somebody else occupies its offices. The company itself, which could previously own property, borrow money, employ thousands of people, and enter into legal disputes, is gone. No special corporate substance ever held it together. Its existence depended on a particular organization of people, rights, obligations and expectations.

Much of what we encounter in everyday life exists in this peculiar fashion. A friendship cannot be located in either of the two people involved. A nation is something other than the sum of its inhabitants. Even the body of a living person is an organization of material that, considered separately, possesses none of the properties we associate with life.

The general term for this phenomenon is emergence. Properties and structures arise from interactions between components that do not themselves possess those properties.

We find it everywhere. From molecules emerge cells; from cells, organisms; from organisms, consciousness and relationships; from human relationships, institutions and societies. Each level introduces properties that cannot easily be understood by examining its components in isolation.

Extending this observation into a universal principle feels seductive. If so much of reality consists of structures emerging from other structures, perhaps emergence is simply what the universe does.

The difficulty is that emergence can become so fuzzy a concept that it explains very little. A corporation and a living organism both have properties their components lack, but that doesn't mean they operate by the same principles.

Still, one may ask: How far down does this process extend? Is there a fundamental layer of reality from which everything else arises, or might even the structures we regard as fundamental be emergent?

In September 2026, Charlie Wood published an essay in Quanta Magazine examining the holographic principle, one of the more intriguing developments in the search for a quantum theory of gravity. And while I don't claim to fully understand all details, it got me thinking.

The idea sounds weird: a universe containing three spatial dimensions might be completely described by a quantum theory existing in only two.

The earliest clues came from black holes. In the 1970s, physicists Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking found that the entropy of a black hole, a measure related to its information content, grows with the area of its boundary rather than its volume.

In 1997, physicist Juan Maldacena took the idea further, proposing a mathematical connection between a universe containing gravity and a quantum system with one fewer spatial dimension.

In certain theoretical models, a gravitational universe in three dimensions can be described completely by a quantum theory in two dimensions.

This does not establish that our own universe is holographic. The mathematical models involved describe universes quite different from ours, and their ultimate physical interpretation remains debated.

Still, the idea is striking: a three-dimensional universe might be fully described by a theory that requires only two spatial dimensions.

Another discovery makes it stranger still.

Quantum entanglement allows distant particles to show correlations that classical assumptions about independently determined local properties cannot explain. Distance does not eliminate these correlations, although they cannot be used for faster-than-light communication.

Some quantum gravity research suggests that entanglement patterns may help determine the geometry of spacetime itself.

We normally assume that objects are related because they occupy particular positions relative to one another. But what if the organization of relationships helps determine the positions in the first place?

This inverts something we rarely question. Space may not be a container in which everything happens. It could itself arise from the interactions of something more fundamental.

The physics remains incomplete, but the philosophical question is already interesting: if space is emergent, what else might we have mistaken for a prerequisite?

For most of modern physics' history, scientists have assumed the universe changes while the laws governing it remain fixed.

Stars form and explode. Galaxies collide. Life emerges and disappears. Yet the underlying equations are presumed to apply throughout these transformations, indifferent to when and where they occur.

Physicist Lee Smolin has spent much of his career questioning this distinction.

His theory of cosmological natural selection proposes that universes might reproduce through processes associated with black holes. Each offspring universe could inherit slightly modified physical parameters. Universes whose parameters favored the production of more black holes would consequently produce more descendants.

The supermassive black hole M87*. Physicist Lee Smolin has proposed that black holes might play a role in cosmic reproduction, although there's currently no evidence for this. Image: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

The proposal resembles biological natural selection, although the mechanisms would be entirely different.

There is no evidence that black holes generate offspring universes, nor any confirmed mechanism by which physical constants could be inherited and modified. Smolin's proposal remains speculative.

Its philosophical implications are nonetheless worth considering.

We ordinarily treat the laws of physics as eternal fixtures. They govern the evolution of everything else but have no history of their own.

Smolin entertains the possibility that the laws themselves may evolve.

This brings us back to emergence. We are familiar with the way increasingly complex structures develop from simpler ones. But why should the development stop at the level of physical laws? Could the principles governing reality themselves be products of a deeper process?

One must be careful here. Emergence and evolution are not identical, and there is no reason to assume that the universe necessarily progresses toward greater complexity. Nature produces complexity and destroys it.

Nor should Smolin's ideas be confused with holographic gravity. They are separate proposals, potentially incompatible in certain respects.

What connects them is the willingness to question where the foundations of reality actually lie.

Perhaps the laws are fixed, and everything else changes. Perhaps the laws themselves possess a history. Or perhaps what we call a law is merely a regularity arising within a deeper system.

For now, we don't know.

The question becomes particularly difficult when we consider time.

According to contemporary cosmology, our universe evolved from an extremely hot, dense early state approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

The evolution of our universe over 13.8 billion years, from its earliest known stages to the present. But does the Big Bang represent the beginning of reality itself, or only the beginning of space and time as we know them? Image: NASA/WMAP Science Team.

Whether the Big Bang represents the absolute beginning of everything remains unknown.

If spacetime itself emerges from something more fundamental, its beginning need not coincide with the beginning of that underlying reality.

One can imagine universes emerging and disappearing repeatedly, perhaps without end. Such possibilities have been explored in various speculative cosmological models.

But there is a logical problem.

If the underlying reality is genuinely timeless, what would it mean for universes to emerge repeatedly?

Words such as before, after, and again already assume the existence of time.

A timeless quantum reality could conceivably contain multiple universes, each possessing its own internal history, without those universes existing before or after one another in any shared temporal sequence.

Alternatively, some more fundamental kind of time might permit successive cosmic cycles.

Physics has not established either possibility. Indeed, the best-understood holographic theories do not eliminate time from their descriptions.

Still, the distinction between the history of the universe and the history of existence deserves attention.

We tend to imagine eternity as an infinitely extended sequence of moments. But if time is an emergent property, infinity need not take the form of an infinitely long duration.

Perhaps a temporal universe could have a beginning and an end while the reality underlying it possesses neither.

This would not demonstrate that our universe has predecessors or successors. It would merely suggest that the question of whether existence has lasted forever might be formulated in the wrong terms.

We might have been asking how long reality has existed when the more basic question concerns the conditions under which duration exists at all.

I suspect part of my fascination with cosmology has little to do with physics itself (I had an F in high-school physics classes). I keep returning to a more personal question: How much can one person really understand, experience, and accomplish in a lifetime?

It's a question that becomes particularly relevant when you spend much of your life trying to build things.

I'm currently working my way through Hans Blumenberg's Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (1986), at infinitesimal speed. The book examines the growing discrepancy between our limited lifetime and the world's immense temporal dimensions.

This discrepancy has become increasingly apparent as humanity has expanded its understanding of reality.

For our distant ancestors, the accessible world consisted primarily of familiar landscapes, neighboring territories, and places known through stories.

Over time, geographical exploration expanded the known world to encompass continents and oceans.

Astronomy revealed that Earth was a planet orbiting the Sun. The Sun became one star among billions. Our galaxy became one among countless galaxies.

Human history, once imagined within relatively modest chronological limits, became a brief episode in a planetary history extending billions of years into the past. Biological evolution disclosed immense stretches of time preceding humanity. Modern cosmology extended that chronology further still.

And now theoretical physics raises the possibility that the framework of space and time within which we understand this history may itself require explanation.

The word world has changed its meaning repeatedly as a consequence of scientific discovery.

Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660), depicting an Earth-centered cosmos.

James Webb Space Telescope's first deep-field observation revealing galaxies across enormous distances and stretches of cosmic history. Nearly four centuries separate these radically different views of the universe. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.

This history tempts us to think that reality must be infinite. Each time humanity discovers the world's apparent limits, another horizon appears beyond them.

Why should this process ever stop?

Strictly speaking, our history of discovering previously unknown structures provides no proof that reality contains infinitely many layers. We might eventually arrive at a final physical theory.

But there is a difference between discovering the most fundamental laws and exhausting everything those laws permit.

Even comparatively simple rules can generate an immense variety of possible configurations. A complete theory of elementary particles would not constitute a complete account of biology, economic history or the circumstances of an individual's life.

It is conceivable that humanity could discover the ultimate foundations of physics while facing an effectively inexhaustible world of phenomena.

Here Blumenberg's central tension becomes particularly powerful.

Our joint ability to accumulate knowledge exceeds any individual's capacity to experience or assimilate it. Scientific progress expands the possibilities of understanding while making the limitations of a single life increasingly obvious.

An individual today can know more about the universe than many generations of predecessors, yet participate in a shrinking fraction of humanity's accumulated knowledge.

We have become exceptionally good at enlarging the world accessible to us, without becoming correspondingly better equipped to inhabit it all.

Founders and CEOs experience a smaller version of this dilemma. There is always another company to build, another market to enter, another technology to understand, another opportunity to pursue. Ambition keeps expanding the horizon of what seems possible, but our available time remains stubbornly finite.

A company may eventually outlive its founder. But building it can consume a substantial part of that person's life. Every ambition we pursue comes at the expense of countless others, including those outside of business.

I find this tension difficult to resolve. How much should we attempt to accomplish? And at what point does the pursuit of more begin to diminish our ability to experience what we've already achieved?

And if time itself turns out to be emergent, Blumenberg's distinction would acquire an additional complication.

Cosmic time might no longer represent a fundamental property of reality.

Yet we would continue to experience aging, anticipation, memory and death. Our lives would remain temporally bounded, regardless of time's ultimate nature.

We would no longer face just a universe vastly older and larger than ourselves. We might discover that reality is even stranger than we imagined, and that our familiar ideas of time and space cannot fully describe it.

The world would have escaped another category through which we attempted to understand it.

There is something peculiar about the history of human cosmology.

We began by placing ourselves near the center of things, only to discover repeatedly that our position was less privileged than we had imagined.

Copernicus displaced the Earth. Subsequent astronomy displaced the Sun. Modern cosmology revealed the extraordinary scale of the universe and the brevity of human history within it.

Holographic physics now entertains the possibility that even the notion of a position in space may not be fundamental.

Is this another Copernican revolution? Unlike the Copernican model, the holographic interpretation of our own universe remains unconfirmed. But its potential intellectual consequence is considerable.

If space and time are emergent, they may not be fundamental features of reality, but instead arise from something deeper.

That would not render them unreal. Temperature is no less real because it arises from the collective behavior of particles.

We inhabit the levels of reality at which our lives take place.

A child understands distance long before encountering geometry. An adult experiences the passage of time without knowing anything about cosmology. Our participation in the world does not depend on possessing an accurate account of its ultimate foundations.

Perhaps humanity will eventually discover a theory beneath which nothing further can be found. Perhaps scientific inquiry will encounter limits it cannot overcome.

But even an ultimate theory would leave us with the variety of everything that emerges from it.

Blumenberg's problem survives either outcome. However sophisticated our understanding becomes, the world available to human experience exceeds the time available to experience it.

And each generation inherits a somewhat larger world than the one its predecessors knew, along with the task of discovering how much of that world it can make its own.

For those of us trying to build something within it, this creates a peculiar dilemma. The possibilities seem almost limitless, while the time available to pursue them is anything but.

Perhaps the hardest part of ambition is accepting that we cannot do everything, however much we might want to.

Disclosure: This essay grew out of a conversation with ChatGPT, which also drafted the text. I shaped the argument and edited the final version.