BEFORE THE BIG BANG - Higher Dimensional Quantum Structure

By Shaun Higgins, PhD Physics…

I was taught to believe the Universe began as matter, and only later learned to think “outside the box” so to speak, or more accurately in this case, “outside the dimension”…

I no longer accept this as Creations starting point.

The deeper I follow the mathematics, the less I find “things” and the more I encounter structure… fields, symmetries, relationships that behave less like objects and more like memory. What we call reality begins to look like a record in progress, not a machine running forward, but a system that remembers itself into existence.

And this is where the fracture appears in our understanding.

Entropy should dissolve structure. It should erase distinction, flatten complexity, return everything to noise. Yet it does not. Information persists. Patterns stabilise. The Universe resists its own forgetting.

Why?

I have come to understand that we have mistaken the hierarchy. Matter is not primary. It is obedient. It follows pattern. DNA makes this explicit, not as chemistry alone, but as instruction… a discipline imposed upon matter, forcing it into form. What we call substance begins to look like the visible consequence of something quieter, something prior.

Structure…

Information…

Not abstract, not philosophical, but physical in the strictest sense… measurable, costly, conserved.

From this vantage point, even the great anomalies begin to soften. Gravity does not simply respond to mass, but to distribution, to form. What we name dark matter is not missing substance at all, but structure unaccounted for… patterns that bend spacetime without announcing themselves.

The Universe holds together not only through what we can see, but through what persists.

And consciousness… I no longer treat it as an afterthought.

It is what happens when information becomes coherent enough to recognise itself. Not separate from the Universe, but continuous with it. A local intensification of a process that appears to be everywhere… organisation, retention, differentiation.

What we experience as awareness is the internal texture of this larger act.

Even quantum entanglement reads differently. Not as an impossible distance anomaly, but as a reminder that separation is secondary. Correlation precedes space. Structure comes before location.

So I arrive at a thought I cannot easily dismiss.

The Universe does not simply expand… it accumulates. Not just energy, not just matter, but history. Every interaction leaves a trace. Every structure is a refusal to vanish. Space itself may be stretching not from force alone, but to accommodate the growing ledger of what has been.

Which leaves me with the question that now feels unavoidable, and far more intimate than any equation:

If the Universe is not simply physically inert, but is able to remember…

Then what is it that refuses to be forgotten?

And why, within that vast and silent persistence, has it organised itself in such a way that something like me can ask these kinds of questions at all?

(Dear Reader: please let me know if I should expand on this topic…)