An international team of physicists has developed an out-of-the-box theory which proposes that shortly after it popped into existence 13.8 billion years ago the universe was filled with knots formed from flexible strands of energy called flux tubes that link elementary particles together. The idea provides a neat explanation for why we inhabit a three-dimensional world and is described in a paper titled “Knotty inflation and the dimensionality of space time” accepted for publication in the European Physical Journal C.

According to current theories, when the universe was created it was initially filled with a superheated primordial soup called quark-gluon plasma. Kephart and his collaborators realized that a higher energy version of the quark-gluon plasma would have been an ideal environment for flux tube formation in the very early universe. The large numbers of pairs of quarks and antiquarks being spontaneously created and annihilated would create myriads of flux tubes.

Normally, the flux tube that links a quark and antiquark disappears when the two particles come into contact and self-annihilate, but there are exceptions. If a tube takes the form of a knot, for example, then it becomes stable and can outlive the particles that created it. If one of particles traces the path of an overhand knot, for instance, then its flux tube will form a trefoil knot. As a result, the knotted tube will continue to exist, even after the particles that it links annihilate each other. Stable flux tubes are also created when two or more flux tubes become interlinked.

In this fashion, the entire universe could have filled up with a tight network of flux tubes, the structure of which could provide an explanation for the three dimensions we experience in the current universe (as well as providing an explanation for where the energy to power an early period of cosmic inflation came from). Also, these three-dimensional knots unravel if you add a fourth dimension – thus making it impossible to create a higher-dimension space. (1)

Out of nothing.

Something is created.

One dimension.

Creating many.

Knots of existence.

Creating dimensions of nothingness…

Because only what Is Not, can be created…