JWST and the origin of the universe

There’s an old saying, “you can’t see the forest for the trees,” which means that the parts are distracting you from comprehending the whole. You can’t see the entirety because you are preoccupied with the details and overlook the bigger picture or the end goal. In this context, it signifies the trees are obscuring the fact that they collectively form a forest.

Today, physicists are engaged in an effort to “show us how the Universe grew up to be the way that it is.” Recently they got excited when the James Webb Space Telescope found “doubly ionized oxygen at a rest-frame wavelength of 500.7 nanometers, which then gets redshifted … by the expansion of the Universe.”

I have no reason to doubt that those kinds of things might have happened at the beginning of our universe. But for me, it’s like saying they found a new species of tree, and yet they still don’t know there’s a forest right there in front of them. Maybe it’s time to take a step back and….

Back in the 1980s, I taught myself how to write computer programs, first in Applesoft Basic, then in Microsoft Basic. I ended up writing a very sophisticated program to automate a chiropractic office, which I called the Precision Chiropractic Computer System (PCCS — “As easy as A-B-C” — catchy, huh?) I was very fortunate that the PCCS worked extremely well and sold well, making me a nice income for a while. So, I know a little bit about writing computer code.

Now, back up to 2003… The idea that we might be living in a simulation really took off when Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom suggested it could be more likely than not that our reality is a hyper-advanced computer program. (You can read my Substack post of April 1, 2025 to get more information.)

And now back to the present. Imagine for a moment that you are an 8th grade student in an advanced civilization who has been given a science project to create a completely new universe with her high-powered personal computer. She’s going to sit and work for many hours and many days writing computer code (as I did) to create a program to produce a universe as realistic as possible. Finally, she decides she’s finished and is anxious to see how her code is working, so she types in “RUN” and hits Enter. Lo and behold, there appears a universe with stars and galaxies and black holes, and it’s expanding as her code demanded. And out of this, life arises, and consciousness, which at some point wonders how it got where it is and starts looking for the origin of the universe.

This isn’t as strange as it may sound. With our limited human intelligence and work-in-progress computing power, we are already producing video games that rival reality. Actually, the main thing missing in today’s games is a game character’s ability to make its own choices independent of any outside influence (what I call the centerpiece of “consciousness”). It doesn’t take too much more imagination to create a universe like the one we have if the computing power is available.

Sure…. After she types RUN and hits Enter, our student might see things in her program code that she doesn’t like or wants to tweak. So, it’s understandable that as we collect data about our universe — even back to the “Big Bang” — we might find data changing as we watch, or suddenly some data conflicts with other data, or unexpected objects appear “that weren’t there yesterday.” That 8th grade student doesn’t have any more restrictions on changing her code at will than I did.

“In May of this year, NASA released one of those pieces of news that makes your eyes pop: they found a galaxy called MoM-z14, which existed only 280 million years after the Big Bang. Yes, we’re talking about the early chapters of the universe: that represents only 2% of its entire history. This is the most distant galaxy, that is, the oldest, that humanity has ever been able to observe.

“And there’s more: from its structure and brightness, we can see that the [galaxy] formation process was much faster than previously thought.

“And then you might be asking yourself: OK, but what does this change in practice? The answer: a lot. The discovery of MoM-z14 forces science to rethink the entire narrative about the birth of the first galaxies. Until recently, the dominant theory said that large, bright galaxies took hundreds of millions of years to form. But now… we are seeing that this process may have happened much earlier, perhaps even before 200 million years after the Big Bang.

“And there’s another question: could the universe have organized itself faster than we imagined? Or could the models we’ve used to date have been wrong from the start? One thing is certain: this discovery opens a new chapter… in other words, the tide of revelations is just beginning.”[i]

The point is that it is quite possible (and logical) that our universe began when the one who wrote the computer code (whomever that might be) typed RUN and hit Enter. And although it’s called the Simulation Hypothesis, the name is unfortunate. Our universe is not really a “simulation” — meaning an “imitation.” Instead, it is the unique result of a carefully written computer program that can change at any moment — whenever the Coder wants to tweak her code.

EcoNews asked, “Could the universe have organized itself faster than we imagined?” Actually, the organization of a universe could happen instantaneously as the Coder typed RUN and hit Enter. Think of a movie set…. A lot of work goes into creating that set with the stage lights off. But when the lights are turned on, there is the set, fully organized and fully functional (à la The Truman Show).

So, yes, “the tide of revelations is just beginning.” We should expect many more “revelations” as astrophysicists discover new species of trees. Then, hopefully, they will eventually step back and see the forest — that we live in a holographic universe resulting from RUN and Enter.

[i] https://www.ecoticias.com/en/280-million-years-after-the-big-bang/17017/