Photon

It’s possible, but the theory assumes we’re operating within the same physics, just different scales of time and space. Supposing there are other universes with their own laws of physics is rather arbitrary, and you could literally argue anything :)

I would argue a universe as a unit is a terrible candidate for an atom for a super-universe since our physics assumes it is a closed system. It would be neat if we weren’t bound by the heat-death of the universe and somehow low entropic states could leak back in. But that is all pure speculation and it cannot be proven or disproven from a scientific point of view.

Subatomic particles are still constrained by the same speed of light as larger objects. As you scale up the speed by which this recursive universe operates in, this limit becomes more and more significant, and fewer interactions can occur in the relative unit of time.

To put it another way, if this super-universe were to use solar systems as atoms, the speed of light would mean their timescale would be in the billions of our years to their seconds. This is derived from the picosecond delay of forces acting between our atoms and scaling up to the solar system “atoms” that make up our galactic neighborhood (10-100 light years apart). So solar systems couldn’t be atoms on this timescale because they would do little but coalesce some of the intergalactic medium and die in seconds.

The biggest issue with this idea is the speed of light. Atoms participate in a lot of interactions because subatomic particles act nearly instantaneously. There are millions of interactions occurring within a single proton at any given moment, with various virtual particles annihilating one another. Even if you increased the time scale, space is extremely large and there just wouldn’t be a lot happening in a solar system. There would be slight perturbations in orbits, and the sun would go through cycles quickly, but it’s extremely stable when compared to an atom.

Then if you look on a galaxy-wide perspective, the actions within the solar system are irrelevant to most of the galaxy. It would take a hundred thousand years for even the sun burning out to register, and more than likely it wouldn’t even matter for any other solar systems in our area.

Then if you look beyond galaxies, it’s mostly just the intergalactic medium being siphoned one way or the other, with only the random movement of galaxies determining anything.

Atoms have the weak and strong nuclear forces, as well as electromagnetism to create the complexity of the universe. Solar systems have little else but gravity, constrained by incredible distances even on the scale of the speed of light.

This is another one of those videos that spends a lot of time in lateral subjects without diving deeper in the main subject. I thought the idea that earth radiates energy made by biological processes fairly significant, and a far more interesting thought experiment to meditate on (Can we find aliens by looking at the thermal signature of exoplanets? Is there a methodology we can use to measure the efficiency of life?). Instead, it covers extremely basic principles of thermodynamics and heat pumps, which has been done to death in other videos.

Wow. It’s insane seeing the “you” next to you.