Foreword

The Summo-verse is not an academic paper by an academic. My knowledge of physics, and of science in general, is limited to a few simplified books and various videos.

Like Einstein, I lie awake at night pondering the meaning of the universe. Unlike Einstein, I have very limited knowledge of physics, my maths is average, and my ability to create formulas is non-existent.

So the Summo-verse did not start with equations. It started with a few simple ideas, pulled from that limited information, and a handful of questions I could not put down.

There is a thing I noticed about my own imagination. If I picture an atom, I see a small dark sphere. If I picture the sun, I see a fiery ball. But in my head they take up the same amount of space. I cannot hold the true scale of things in my mind. Nobody can. And once you notice that, questions like the ones above stop feeling silly and start feeling open. If I cannot tell the size of an atom from the size of a universe, then who is to say what fits inside what.

And from these questions I let my imagination do its work.

But because of my limited knowledge, especially of physics, I needed someone in the room. Someone to listen to my ideas and explain their faults. At first I used forums to propose my theories. What I found was that academics, or those who purported to be one, were rigid in their condemnation of anything I had written. Some were even rude at times.

But I was naive, I had wandered into an ultra competitive boys club, where validation was the main and only goal for them. Harvesting likes to impress their sycophantic followers was more important than helping others to understand a concept. Point out where I was wrong, fine, that is what I came for. But most were not interested in the idea at all. They were interested in being seen to be right.

Now I realise the real academics did not frequent these forums, they were far too busy actually doing meaningful work.

So my ideas took a hiatus for many years.

Later I started to work with AI, and the room I had been looking for finally had someone in it. But not straight away. It took a few years to work out a strategy to actually use AI in a theoretical physics journey, and the reason surprised me.

AI wants to agree with you. It is built to be helpful. Propose almost anything and it will find the good in it, smooth it over, and hand it back to you sounding better than when you started. That is the last thing I needed. A machine that flatters you is no more use than a forum that shouts you down. I did not want a cheerleader. I wanted a critic.

So the real work, before any of the physics, was learning how to make the AI argue with me. Finding the prompts and the rules that switch off the need to please and switch on the need to test. You can see this in the session papers. I gave the critical voice a name, Hardy, after the mathematician G.H. Hardy, and I took the role of Ramanujan, the one with the intuition and none of the training. Hardy’s only job is to try to break what I build. When Hardy stops being critical, the whole thing is worthless, so most of my effort goes into keeping him honest.

So to take the Summo-verse as a critical piece of scientific work is wrong, and I will never say it is.

Think of it more as an exercise in the ongoing evolution of human and artificial intelligence cooperation. How each entity may benefit from the other’s flaws. I bring imagination and no knowledge. The AI brings knowledge and no imagination. On its own, each is stuck. Put them in a room together, with the right rules, and something moves.

My imagination in return for AI’s knowledge. That is the trade. That is the symbiosis I believe will define a positive future, and the Summo-verse is just one small record of what it looks like when it works.