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7:29

(In »Intensities and phenomena in a relationalist universe«)

A consequence of this is that space might have had completely different characteristics in previous historical stages than it has today. For example, it might have had many times more dimensions than today’s three under the extreme heat that prevailed during the Universe’s very earliest phase of genesis. This opens the way for the idea that both the expansion of cosmic space and today’s three dimensions of space can be regarded as by-products of a dramatic cooling down of initially incredibly hot, compressed, network-dynamical primordial space. Such a network-dynamics way of viewing the genesis of the Universe is called geometrogenesis. In its initial phase, multidimensional space is a maximally entangled pure geometry (it is pure in the sense that its nodes completely lack substance). But for every phase transition ever-more entanglements are dissolved, which means that space expands and is gradually cooled down. As a kind of compensation for the incrementally decreasing interconnections with each other in an expanding and cooled universe, the nodes receive the substance we associate with them today, and space thereby acquires its weight.