The Donut Theory of The Universe - Scott Adams

A number of you asked me what I believe about the universe, given that I’ve ruled out God and I also have suspicions about evolution. That’s a revealing question because I think the real reason anyone believes anything is because uncertainty hurts. So we pick a side and rationalize it later. If there appear to be only two explanations, don’t you have to pick one or else forever be known as a waffling weenie?
Personally, I’m totally comfortable with a state of eternal confusion. It’s practically a lifestyle.
To backtrack for a moment, I don’t believe evolution is entirely false. I just think it smells a little finchy (nerd pun) and that we might be missing a big piece of the puzzle.
For example, maybe scientists will discover that the experience of a mother tends to activate or deactivate features in the unborn child’s DNA. So if, for example, the mother gives birth during an unusually cold winter, perhaps the baby has a bit more fat cells or a thicker fur coat on average. And perhaps that baby’s baby would retain that trait at least some of the time. That would be very different from the randomness of natural selection and still support the general notion of species changing over time. I’m not suggesting that this is true; it’s just an example to help you imagine that scientists could revise evolution in entirely scientific terms. It wouldn’t be the first time. Stephen J. Gould mixed things up too.
Today I will give you a thought experiment to help you imagine how the universe could be here just the way it is without God, evolution in its currently understood form, or aliens. I call it the Donut Theory and it goes like this:
Imagine an ant on a donut. The ant is running in a straight line from the outside of the donut toward the center. If he continues he will go through the center of the donut and end up exactly where he started.
Now imagine that the universe is the shape of the donut but we can’t see it that way because each of us is one ant running along a straight line. It’s impossible to see the whole thing.
This sort of a model has its limits and the analogy will fail more than a few times. But remember that Einstein described gravity as a bowling ball on a mattress. That analogy falls apart in many places too, but sometimes bad analogies are the best we have. So work with me here.
Now imagine that the ant isn’t a physical ant. He’s more like the control point on a computer program that is running. We imagine the control point as moving but in fact it’s more of a concept.
Now imagine that the donut is comprised of a frozen image of every event in your past and future in a straight line defined by the imaginary ant’s path. One ant-step ahead is an exact copy of you that has changed a tiny bit, and so on. To your left and right are copies of you that are just slightly different. You could call them other dimensions. Each has its own ant running toward the center of the donut.
When all of those realities reach the center of the donut, they become too tightly packed. There isn’t as much space as there is on the rim of the donut. And so, like a black hole, all of those realities are crushed into near nothingness before emerging out the other side. This hypothetical donut has a very tiny hole.
When all of the crushed bits emerge on the other side of that tiny hole, it’s the equivalent of the Big Bang. Everything seems to spring from a tiny point.
Nothing is moving in this model of the universe except the imaginary ant. Everything else is a still picture of various possibilities along the ant’s path. As the ant walks, he views these still pictures like frames of animation, and they seem like motion to him. But only the ant is truly moving.
In this analogy, the ant is your consciousness. It “moves” like the control of a program but without having physical form.
Now imagine your descendants along your ant’s straight line in what seems – by our human perception – to be millions of years from now. They know the universe will contract on itself, and all will be destroyed in a giant black hole, only to trigger the next Big Bang. Your descendants will want to preserve themselves. They will have millions of years to figure out how to send a program through the black hole that will recreate humans on the other side. It might take 15 billion years for that program to run, but only the simplest of programs could make it through the black hole. The program would be more like a seed made of nature’s building blocks, at a granularity we can’t yet imagine.
And so these geniuses of the future figure out how to send this “evolution” program through the black hole, to create humanity again, and in effect guarantee they are reborn in another 16 billion years or so when the ant comes back around.
That’s their world view. But if you could look at it from the outside – the God view – it would appear to be a bunch of still frames packed in a donut shape with a black hole in the center.
This model explains why the universe seems to be expanding and scientists don’t know why. It’s because we’ve recently (15 billion years ago) come through the donut hole and are heading toward the far edge of the donut where everything is roomy. Once we get to the far edge and reverse direction, the universe will seem to us that it is contracting. That’s when the scientists of the future will start working on their programming code to survive the black hole/big bang of the future.
This model also solves the problem of a causeless beginning. If God created the universe, who created God? If the Big Bang happened first, what caused the Big Bang?
In the Donut model, nothing is moving except our consciousness. And without movement of anything physical, time is nothing but an illusion. The question of what came first is meaningless.
The Donut theory also solves the problem of evolution apparently having a designer. Our future selves are the designers. We built ourselves.
This model also explains gravity. As we move toward the outside of the donut, each still frame is slightly larger than the one before. So it looks as if objects are moving toward each other but all that is happening is that each frame is occupying more space, so the relative empty distance between objects is shrinking. Gravity is an illusion, just like time and motion.
You could argue that the donut theory also allows for reincarnation. At the end of one set of still frames that include your life, your ant continues and picks up the next frame in the line, whoever that might be.
If you want to preserve your sense of free will, imagine that you can move your ant (your consciousness) to a neighboring path if you concentrate hard enough. Everything in a straight line is predetermined, but you can move your ant to experience a different path of predetermined realities. So in one line of reality you open a letter and it’s a bill. In another it’s a check.
Last but not least, the Donut Theory preserves the notion of God if you want to define Him as the shape of the Donut. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to describe the Donut’s shape as timeless, perfect, all knowing, all powerful, and outside of nature – since a shape is not a physical thing. That’s a bigger discussion but you can see how it would work.
And your ant – I called it your consciousness – isn’t a far stretch from what you might call a soul. So you can keep your soul too in this theory. You’re welcome.
Let me confess a million problems with this theory of the universe. But remember that every theory has holes. Scientists are baffled by all the so-called invisible dark matter. And the God theory would be a lot stronger if we could find that ark.
The point of the Donut Theory of the Universe is to help you imagine that there could be entirely different explanations for the universe. The model can’t go beyond being a tool for your imagination. No need to go all math and physics on my ass.
And don’t even start with me about spelling it “doughnut” with all of those unnecessary letters. We must band together to make “donut” the common usage. Otherwise life is meaningless.