The Big Empty – Unexpected Thoughts About the Universe.

Nature, it seems, is an obsessive recycler with a very small repertoire. If you were hoping for a universe of infinite, snowflake-like variety, I have some slightly disappointing news: the cosmos is essentially a series of variations on about four basic shapes. Whether you are looking at the staggering emptiness between galaxies or the twisted ladder of your own genetic code, you are effectively looking at the same architectural blueprint, just scaled up or down by a factor of several trillion. It is not a mystical conspiracy; it is just that physics is remarkably lazy and always takes the path of least resistance.

Think of it as a cosmic budget cut. Instead of inventing a new geometry for every pristine phenomenon, the universe relies on a limited repertoire of stable, efficient forms that keep the lights on without its strict laws being violated. When systems, whether they are clusters of dark matter or the delicate strands of your own ancestry, organize themselves under pressure, they do not look for the most ‘creative’ solution. They look for the one that requires the least amount of energy to maintain. It is less ‘divine creator’ and more ‘overworked intern reusing the same template because it is five minutes to the weekend.’

This is why, when astronomers peer into the deepest reaches of the night sky, they do not find random scatterings of stars. Instead, they find a ‘cosmic web’ that looks uncannily like something you might find under a microscope or inside a textbook on anatomy. We see bubble-like cavities surrounded by thin membranes and long filaments stretching between nodes like tendons or strands of connective tissue. It is a geometry that feels familiar because it is the same geometry used to pack billions of base pairs of DNA into a space small enough to fit inside a single cell. Nature, it turns out, is a master of the ‘good enough’ solution.

If we were to be slightly arch about it, we might suggest that the universe has a ‘binary’ of its own. In this limited repertoire, the bubble and the filament are essentially the zeroes and ones of existence. The bubble is the zero, the empty space, the placeholder, the void that defines the boundary. The filament is the one, the active data line, the signal, the bridge of matter. It puts a whole new slant on the idea that we are living in a simulation. We are not looking at a complex masterpiece of high art; we are looking at a highly optimized bit of cosmic machine code that figured out how to build a galaxy, a person, and a prayer using the same basic logic gates of ‘void’ and ‘link.’

There is a certain irony in the fact that our most profound symbolic systems, those diagrams of the soul and maps of the heavens like the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, or Yggdrasil, the Worlds Tree of Norse myth, adopt this same network logic. We like to think we are channelling some divine, unique insight when we draw circles connected by lines, but we are simply falling victim to a cognitive habit.

Our brains are hardwired to favour symmetrical, hierarchical structures because they are easy to navigate and even easier to remember. We are not discovering a hidden spiritual link; we are just using a cognitive tool that happens to be as efficient as a soap bubble or a neural pathway.

Ultimately, globes, nodes, and filaments appear everywhere because they are the most efficient ways to distribute resources, minimize energy, and maximize connectivity. A sphere minimizes surface area for a given volume, and a filament minimizes material while maximizing reach. It is a functional, no-nonsense approach to existence. Whether it is the expansion of a cosmic void or the unzipping of a genetic helix, the maths remains the same. We are not witnessing a grand, spooky design so much as a universe that realized it did not have the budget for anything more complex than a circle and a straight line. Nature did not invent the wheel; it just realized that at every scale of reality, the simplest shapes are the only ones that stay in the black.

I think there might be a book in this…