It was Nikola Tesla who said that if you want to understand the universe, “think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration”.
That statement, in itself, doesn’t really explain anything at all to the average person like me. Maybe a scientist can make something of it, but even for scientists, such answers are incomplete. In fact, I would argue that the biggest questions all remain unanswered.
I mean questions such as, for example, What happened before the Big Bang?
That’s a question that‘s been around at least as long as the Big Bang theory itself, which says that the universe exploded into existence around 13.8 billion years ago.
Now, a scientist might argue that it’s meaningless to ask questions about what happened before the Big Bang because there was no time and no space then. That argument might make sense to scientists, but I’m not totally persuaded by it, to say the least.
Especially as now – with the James Webb Telescope finding apparently fully formed galaxies that are estimated to be older than 13.8 billion years – many scientists are having to completely rethink their estimates of the age of the universe.
Incidentally, the Big Bang Theory – the scientific theory, not the TV series – was first postulated by Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, in 1931, not Stephen Hawking, as I had thought. One learns something new every day.
The universe is 26.7 billions years old?
One scientist, Rajendra Gupta, an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa, says he has calculated the universe to be more than 26.7 billion years old.
We have no idea how old the universe is or how to calculate it, but 13.8 billion years seems like a short time for all this to happen. And it’s an astonishing miracle that we are the only intelligent life – or any kind of life – we have observed anywhere at all.
Anyway, that’s all beyond the scope of this article – we just wanted to ask a few scientists the awkward question: What is the fundamental, underlying automation system of the universe?
Very few scientist would go on record with any theory beyond what has already been articulated by famous scientists of the past, but we managed to collate the responses we received into at least a brief outline of what they know so far.
The reality thing: Can you feel the force?
When brainstorming ideas for articles for this website, we realised that the universe often appears to us as a vast, automated system. Stars spin in distant skies, planets follow orderly orbits, objects vibrate with invisible rhythms, and energy flows in countless forms.
Leaving religion out of it, we note that, for many centuries, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain the principles that guide these cosmic patterns. And modern science has offered powerful theories that help us understand why the world behaves as it does.
But while explanations abound, no one seems to have discovered the fundamental force that drives all this automation. The only attempt – and the most widely accepted one – is the Big Bang theory.
In the following sections, we’ll explore the most established ideas behind the universe’s fundamental forces, the nature of energy, and the role that frequency and vibration play in shaping the reality we experience. Our aim is to summarise these concepts for non-scientists like us, and for those interested in automation systems, and, of course, the universe itself.
The answer is 42
The four fundamental forces of nature
So far, scientists have found “four fundamental forces of nature”. The concept took a couple of hundred years to form, beginning with Isaac Newton’s explanation of gravity, through to the discovery of the weak nuclear force in the 20th century.
Nearly every event in the universe, from the gentle fall of an apple to the swirling of galaxies, can be traced back to four fundamental forces, according to science. These forces set the rules for how matter and energy interact on every scale.
1. Gravity
First described by Newton in 1687, after supposedly being knocked on the head by an apple falling from a tree, gravity is the force that keeps planets circling stars and holds us firmly to the ground.
Albert Einstein expanded on Newton’s work in his General Theory of Relativity, explaining that gravity is not just an invisible pull; it’s a result of how mass and energy warp the fabric of spacetime.
According to Einstein, the more massive an object, the more it bends spacetime around it, guiding the paths of other objects. This bending is what keeps the Earth orbiting the Sun, causing day and night, seasons, and the rhythm of celestial motion.
2. Electromagnetism
It was James Clerk Maxwell who first explained the electromagnetic force in the 19th century. While it applies to objects of all sizes, at the small scale, electromagnetism is the force behind light, electricity, and magnetism.
Electromagnetism is said to govern how charged particles interact, attracting or repelling depending on their charges.
This force also is said to explain why atoms stay together: negatively charged electrons orbit the positively charged nucleus, creating the structure of matter.
Electromagnetic interactions give rise to light, radio waves, and the full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, enabling energy to travel across empty space, making it perhaps the most interesting force from a layman’s point of view.
3. The strong nuclear force
While sounding a little scary, the strong nuclear force is present inside the atomic nucleus, a powerful glue holds protons and neutrons together despite their natural tendency to repel each other due to their positive charges.
This is the strong nuclear force. It’s extremely powerful but very short-ranged, acting only over tiny distances. Without it, atomic nuclei would fly apart, making stable atoms – and all matter as we know it – impossible.
It was Hideki Yukawa who first proposed the strong nuclear force in 1935. But by this time, science was increasingly collaborative activity and discoveries were often made as a team.
4. The weak nuclear force
The weak nuclear force – the articulation of which is credited to Enrico Fermi – allows certain particles to transform into others, enabling processes like radioactive decay.
It helps stars produce energy through nuclear fusion, turning hydrogen into helium and releasing the immense power that shines across the universe.
I like the way the universe moves
Newton’s laws of motion and energy transfer
One of the reasons RoboticsAndAutomationNews.com exists is because we like the way robots move – precise, swift and, although completely different from the way humans and animals move, similar in principle when it comes to activities that require a high level of co-ordinated movement, such as in some sports, dancing and so on.
And when it comes to comparing robots to the movements in the universe, only classical science offers a similarity in that it describes straight lines. Everything else since has been chaotic and random.
Before Einstein’s relativistic view, Isaac Newton’s laws formed the bedrock of understanding motion of objects small and large. Newton said that objects move in straight lines unless acted upon by a force. Planetary orbits and spinning stars arise as rotating clouds of gas collapse under gravity.
Moreover, the principle of conservation of angular momentum dictates that as a cloud of dust and gas contracts to form a star or planet, it spins faster – like a figure skater pulling in their arms – resulting in the rotating bodies we see in space.
As I keep saying, I’m no scientist, but it seems Newton’s straight lines concept – like the apple falling in a straight line from the tree – seems to hold at the small scale when nothing else is considered – such as the motion of the planet that the tree is on.
Yes, the measurements would have to be extremely tiny to observe any deviations from the straight line, but that apple doesn’t even exist unless Newton observes it, according to later scientists. Confound it and convolute it. It may sound crazy, but Erwin Schrödinger and everyone else says it’s true.
You mean all energy is from the Big Bang?
Energy: Forms and transformations
Energy is often defined as the capacity to do work or bring about change. While somewhat abstract, this definition underscores a key idea: energy can take many shapes.
It can be stored as gravitational potential (water behind a dam), move objects as kinetic energy (a baseball flying through the air), or emerge as thermal energy (heat) and electromagnetic radiation (light).
Crucially, energy is neither created nor destroyed. According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, it simply changes form. The Sun’s energy, for example, comes from nuclear fusion at its core, where hydrogen atoms fuse into helium, releasing vast amounts of energy as heat and light.
Plants capture a fraction of this sunlight as chemical energy, and when we eat those plants, that energy fuels our bodies. This chain of transformations connects the smallest organisms to the largest stars.
This means that the universe already holds all energy that will ever exist and has ever existed. This seems somewhat difficult to believe, but then, so are many other scientific theories.
The ultimate engineering machine
Frequency, vibration and Tesla’s perspective
Nikola Tesla, a pioneering figure in electrical engineering and theoretical thinking, once said, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” His words point to a deep truth: the universe is awash in oscillations and rhythms.
What is frequency?
Frequency, in the simplest sense, is how often something repeats in a given period. This could be a wave oscillating up and down, a pendulum swinging back and forth, or an electron transitioning between energy states in an atom.
Frequency is not only a measure of repetition but a key quality that defines the behaviour of many physical systems.
Waves and vibrations
Much of what we perceive – sound, light, and even the warmth of sunlight – can be described as waves. Waves have peaks and troughs that pass a certain point repeatedly, giving them a frequency.
For sound, frequency determines pitch: a high-frequency vibration is perceived as a high note, while a lower frequency corresponds to a deeper tone. For light, the frequency determines its color: red light has a lower frequency than blue light.
Playing on the quantum field
At the quantum level, particles are described by wave-like properties, each having characteristic frequencies related to their energy states. Electrons in atoms occupy energy levels that can be thought of as standing waves.
When an electron moves between these levels, it either absorbs or emits energy in the form of photons – packets of electromagnetic energy with their own characteristic frequency. Thus, frequency and energy are intimately linked: the higher the frequency of a photon, the more energetic it is.
It would be difficult to explain such things in layman’s terms, but it seems to me that the human eye – for want of a better observation system – acts like a camera that, when it takes a picture of what looks like a wave, shows it on our retina – the equivalent of film – as a particle.
Which makes me wonder about the frame rate of the universe and the stop-motion nature of reality. And I also wonder what these waves would look like if they were photographed using the world’s fastest camera – which has a frame rate of 156 trillion frames per second.
It’s only in 2018 that the shape of an electron was been claimed to be “perfectly spherical”, while earlier this year, photons were found to take many interesting forms, resembling shapes generated through cymatics. But that’s a whole ’nother article in itself.
Universal patterns
From the orbital motions of planets to the vibrations of molecules and the oscillations of electromagnetic fields, frequency could be said to act as a unifying concept.
Frequency describes how quickly systems change states, transfer energy, and communicate information. By focusing on frequency, we uncover patterns underlying nature’s seemingly complex systems.
Tesla’s advice to “think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration” encourages us to see beyond static objects and recognize the dynamic processes that truly govern the universe.
Spanner in the works
Quantum mechanics and the nature of the very small
As I suggested earlier, when we look beyond our earthly scale – either into the very small scale of tiny atoms and particles, or outwards to our solar system and beyond, classical rules often break down.
Quantum mechanics teaches us that particles like electrons and photons have dual natures: sometimes acting like particles, other times like waves.
This wave-like nature introduces the idea of probability – or at least that’s how scientists have sought to resolve the ambiguity. Instead of knowing exactly where a particle is, quantum theory provides only probabilities of finding it in a particular place.
Vibrations at the quantum level
Atoms vibrate due to quantum rules, and although no one has yet explained who made the rules, quantum mechanics has been found to be more accurate than classical physics hen it comes to describing the vibrational motion of tiny particles like atoms and molecules.
These vibrations determine the thermal energy of materials. When you feel warmth, you’re sensing the vibrations of atoms and molecules transferring energy into your skin.
At very low temperatures, these vibrations slow down, but they never stop entirely, illustrating that zero energy states are unreachable, which is said to be a consequence of quantum laws.
Law and order
Thermodynamics, entropy, and the flow of energy
Thermodynamics deals with heat, work, and the flow of energy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy – often described as disorder – tends to increase. Over time, differences in energy become less pronounced: hot things cool down, concentrated forms of energy spread out.
While the universe may have started in a more ordered, low-entropy state after the Big Bang, it has been evolving toward greater complexity but also greater overall entropy as it expands.
This directionality, built into thermodynamics, explains why certain processes are irreversible. You can’t “unmix” cream from your coffee or “unburn” the fuel in a rocket. As energy disperses and systems evolve, the universe’s grand narrative unfolds.
Standards are relative
The Standard Model and relativity
To attempt to bring coherence to our understanding, physicists developed the Standard Model of particle physics, classifying fundamental particles and outlining how the forces interact at tiny scales.
Meanwhile, Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity govern large-scale structures. Special Relativity shows that mass and energy are interchangeable (E = mc²), while General Relativity explains how mass and energy bend spacetime.
These theories, together with quantum mechanics, form the backbone of our current understanding of the cosmos.
The Big Bang explains everything
Stepping back, cosmology asks how all these pieces fit together. The Big Bang Theory suggests the universe began as a singularity with immense energy, expanding and cooling over billions of years.
The formation of stars, galaxies, and eventually planets—and perhaps life – was guided by the interplay of fundamental forces, the flow of energy, and the subtle shifts in frequency and vibration that define the properties of matter and radiation.
Dark matter and dark energy, though not fully understood, are crucial in explaining the structure and accelerating expansion of the universe.
Perfect harmony
From the dance of atomic particles to the sweep of galaxies, the universe’s behavior arises from a handful of fundamental principles and forces.
Gravity moulds the large-scale structure; electromagnetism lights the way; the strong and weak nuclear forces shape matter’s stability.
Thermodynamics and quantum mechanics explain how energy changes form and how vibrations echo through everything.
And woven into this tapestry is frequency – the repeated pattern, the pulse of creation.
As Tesla hinted, thinking in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration reveals the hidden harmonies that guide our world, helping us see the universe as a continuous, dynamic interplay of forces, waves, and energies.
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