The nature of perception is strange. For some reason great truths can be revealed in a twinkling of an eye and from that moment onwards, the world has changed a little — or at least, the perception of it has. There is that sudden realisation and the rush of certainty of a truth or idea. It can come unexpectedly or as a result of a discussion or study. It can be an exhilarating feeling to know that you have suddenly ‘seen the light’ or a new door has opened. It comes with a flow of mental adrenaline and is almost physical in its effect.
Archimedes had it, Einstein had it, Galileo had it, Charles Darwin had it, Watson and Crick had it, Fleming, Copernicus, Plato – all these people have had that sudden revelation that has changed the world or the way we think.
However, it is not the exclusive prerogative of the super minds: ordinary people have it as well. In a minor sense, the solving of a problem or even a crossword clue can give that thrill of discovery. A major perception or realisation does not need proof or logic. It is there. A magic click, and all the bits of the jigsaw that have been floating around in the mind, suddenly fall into place. The whole picture is revealed. It is accompanied by the certainty that you know you are right. It is only afterwards that proof is required, but that is generally for the others.
Here is one of my own.
The Big Bang
My father spent his last remaining years researching Einstein and the Big Bang and we had many discussions on the creation of the Universe. He took nothing for granted and followed up every lead meticulously. Among other things, he was led to the opinion that the Michelson-Morley experiment was fallible in its logic which could mean that the speed of light was not constant and the possibly that the Theory of Relativity was also flawed. From my own reasoning I tended to agree with him, although my maths were nowhere near competent enough to go into the technical details of the theory, nor could I prove any of my own contentions. But it is my belief that Mathematics is merely a subset of language and that it is used to express conceptual ideas in terms which can be manipulated abstractly. I am not of the opinion that everything that can be derived from this manipulation is necessarily a true reflection of an actual situation in the real world and I also believe that some theories that are a result of pure manipulation of mathematics are as far from the truth as it is possible to get. i.e. : because negative values can be applied to an equation and a positive result can be obtained, it is not proof of the existence of an alternative universe, no more so than merely thinking about it actually creates it. However, pseudo-maths is a useful tool if you want to make a name for yourself or impress other astrophysicists. The ability to speak other languages, mathematics included, does not make you generally more intelligent or give you greater comprehension!
In a discussion on the nature of matter I suddenly got one of these insights. Scientists have been barking up the wrong tree for generations. The ‘Big Bang’ theory was totally wrong!
It had always struck me as a bit ridiculous that according to the mathematicians and whichever one of their models you believe in, that the entire universe was crushed by gravity into a size of either a grapefruit or even to such an extent that it was less than the size of a single photon. A singularity, having no observable dimensions. Having projected this image, it then gave them ample scope to write myriad books and articles on what happened in the first ten billionths of a second after the Big Bang. I think the first casualty was common sense.
In the current Big Bang theory, the unanswered question is what was there before the Bang? Was there a distribution of matter throughout the universe and this matter then gravitated to this single point, or was matter always contained in the central nucleus of what became the Big Bang? Unlikely, to say the least.
Then on the other hand, why should matter gravitate to a single point? There is no evidence for that in the current structure where different galaxies happily coexist with their neighbours, and far from gathering together again, they appear to be expanding away from each other. Further, the current theory states that the ENTIRE matter of the universe was contained in this single non-dimensional point. Why did it wait for that before exploding and is it even possible to gather the entire contents of the universe together from an infinite horizon? Again, I think not.
Then there is the problem of ‘residual radiation’, or the ‘echo’ of the Big Bang. Those scrambled dots we see on a television screen when there is no program.
The problem I have with this, despite the discoverers being awarded Nobel Prizes, is that firstly, if this is an echo, what is it being reflected from? The radiation emitted from the initial explosion has long since dissipated, and as it was a one-off event, there has been no more generated since, yet still we pick it up. The radiation travels at the speed of light away from the centre, and the matter that formed the galaxies must have travelled at a much slower rate, so how come we can still ‘hear’ it? Further, the radiation is not directional, as it should be if it emanated from a single source, but is omni-directional. It is coming at us from every angle, which tends to make me believe that this radiation source has been wrongly ascribed. The initial radiation passed beyond the visible and tangible universe before it was even formed, and as an echo needs to have something to reflect off, the theory must be self-defeating. There can be nothing out there beyond the edge of the physical universe!
But, if there was no Big Bang, as such, we are still here, so what then did happen?
The Crystallisation Theory.
Matter has always existed. It never had a beginning, it was just simply always there, even before time became a dimension. A very difficult concept to grasp, especially when we ourselves are locked into time frames. A sort of one-ended piece of string.
Imagine an immense timeless universe without a beginning containing an even scattering of matter held in perfect gravitational balance – no movement — no light – no stress – nothing, but a perfect and endless uniformity and harmony. Then one day, for want of a better phrase, something happened. In a quantum occasion, a piece of dust or a mere molecule moved! The result was everything we know today.
That one single movement fractured the entire universe. All the forces of pent-up nature were released. Physics came into being and time began. The nearest analogy is someone scratching a toughened glass window with a diamond. It doesn’t just mark the glass, the entire window explodes. All the forces that had been held in stable equilibrium are released. There is a flash of light, a bang and a heap of glass pieces the size of bath crystals – all from that one tiny little scratch.
I believe the universe started in a similar way.
From that moment when something moved and the equilibrium was destroyed a shock wave swept through the entire length and breadth of space and a force field was instantly created, affecting every particle in it. This force was the force of Gravity, and although in existence before, like in the glass window, was in a neutral state. From that moment when time started, every ‘molecule’ throughout this vast space started to be affected by its nearest neighbours, and they began to move towards each other. As soon as two met, the gravitational field was doubled and this attracted more molecules. Scattered throughout space, nuclei began to form, and from these nuclei, larger bodies grew at an ever increasing rate. However, as they grew, they started to be affected by the inner pressures of their own increasing gravity and the accompanying heat. But like the shards from the glass window, space formed into many millions of galaxy-sized independent pieces, on average, 200 million light years across, many gobbling up their neighbours and growing to the size of vast black holes. However, the rate of growth would not be identical. Many original nuclei, due to their initial position would be attracted to each other and grow at quicker rates than isolated nuclei. But, unlike the Big Bang model, I do not believe that all these vast masses became one single mass or that the gathering of all these molecules was confined to a single point. There is no logic for that.
As the internal pressures rose, so also did the temperatures. Then we have the physics of a Black Hole coming into existence. (New theory) First of all, matter as such began to break down into its various sub-atomic components and then the components themselves began to break down. At a temperature of 1016 Kelvins, matter itself starts to convert to energy – and at the rate of e = mc2
This is where my theory differs from the traditional Big Bang.
I do not believe that the temperatures can rise much above 1016 Kelvins and do not go as high as 1038 K as suggested in some models of the Big Bang.
At 1016 K, one unit of matter is suddenly converted to hundreds of millions of units of energy and at the same time, due to this conversion, I believe the gravitational mass of the body itself is lessened. Part of this conversion to energy is the generation of additional heat, which will then start a chain reaction. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that it will not take long for this increasing energy to vastly exceed the lessening force of the containing gravitational force. Result — BANG!
The major differences between this bang and the traditional bang is that firstly, this does not happen at the centre of the universe but can happen as soon as any body anywhere reaches the critical mass where the required conversion temperatures are produced. The resultant explosion results in the creation of a new galaxy.
All galaxies contain enough mass for a black hole, and often include one. (Possibly the signs of galaxy decay and reforming of the central nucleus.) Further, as all bodies spin on their axis, including black holes, by simple observation it becomes obvious that most, if not all galaxies were formed in this manner. They almost all resemble the results of an explosion.
The physics of any body even as small as the Earth itself illustrate that the pressure is greatest at the centre and this is where the temperature is the highest. The conversion from mass to energy happens from the centre of a body outwards. At the time of the explosion, with the uneven temperatures, matter could still exist in the outer shell of the body in its original form or at atomic component level and would explain the dilemma of where and how the heavier elements were formed in the afterglow of the bang. This situation does not exist in the Big Bang scenario, hence the convoluted theories around the first milliseconds after the explosion. As a corroboration of my own theory, recent spectro-analysis of a supernova have revealed large amounts of nickel surrounding the central parts of the explosion. This would also lead to a conjecture that there could probably be more heavy matter at the edges of a galaxy than there would be in the centre, and that planets would tend to form round the stars at the outer edges rather than in the centre(?) The centre would probably contain more gaseous matter and dust than the outer fringes. Observation of our own galaxy would tend to bear out all these conjectures, the ‘Milky Way’ being an illustration of this. Also it would explain the fact that in recent observations by the Hubble telescope, the universe appears to be considerably larger than originally thought and to contain far more galaxies. The distance that these newly discovered galaxies are away from the projected centre of the universes again gives problems with the classic Big Bang, since the most distant observed galaxies found by the Hubble telescope seem to pre-date this event! The distance they are away from us, plus the time the matter took to arrive in their observed position, form itself into a galaxy and start transmitting light in our direction is about one and a half times greater than the time that has elapsed since the Big Bang itself. I know of no mathematics that can explain that!
A worthwhile experiment might be to point the Hubble telescope in the complete opposite direction from where scientists believe the Big Bang originated and make a three week long exposure. If the single bang theory is right, it might give some indication of how long ago it happened by trying to estimate the distance of the furthest visible galaxy and calculate how far matter has travelled from the centre since the bang. On the other hand, this could prove it is just too far!
Conversely, if the telescope were pointed towards the centre where the Big Bang was supposed to have happened, there should be some large dark areas, due to the fact that the combined speeds of matter fleeing the centre in opposite directions should be greater than the speed of light, therefore invisible.
Then there is the problem of the expanding universe. The BB traditionalists present this as a proof of their theory, with matter fleeing from the centre. I would dispute their reasoning. On the surface it appears to be plausible, and I do not deny the universe appears to be expanding, but not for the reasons propounded by these scientists. I would say that the reason for this is that the number of galaxies is increasing!
As I explained before, the creation of galaxies was not synchronous. An overview of space/time is rather like watching cells divide under a microscope. You can observe how each new cell created pushes its neighbours to one side and creates its own space in which to exist. In so doing the mass itself expands. This is what I believe we are observing. A black hole has a gravitational pull on its neighbours and occupies a relatively smaller space than its neighbouring galaxies. Once it reaches critical mass and explodes, the outwards pressure pushes these surrounding galaxies away, and space expands to accommodate the new arrival.
Further proof of my contention lies in the existence of ‘residual radiation’, or the so-called ‘echo’ of the Big Bang. Visible as those scrambled dots we see on a television screen when there is no program. Despite the Nobel Prizes being thrown at this theory, I believe it to be wrongly ascribed. I think it is more likely that this radiation came from multiple bangs throughout the Universe, which would adequately explain the omni-directional nature of the radiation, and as the bangs were not synchronous, it would also explain why the radiation, like the light, continues to arrive.
I believe that if total time were to be compressed into a single day, an observer of the cosmos would witness not a one-off explosion but a veritable fireworks display. The process is not finished, and one day, if we live long enough, we may even discover another Big Bang coming towards us from the opposite direction.
Just don’t get too close!
