New Ideas in Cosmology

 

This TED talks style presentation was first presented in the World U3a Forum on 3rd January 2021

here is a link to the powerpoint with notes style of presentation.

New Ideas in Cosmology.pptx

 

This isa recently revised and slightly updated version of this presentation

New Ideas in Cosmology tU3A 20210428.pptx

 

 

This is the original presentation in a web based format

 

 

 

 

The first and most important point is that what I have to present has absolutely no direct effect on our life on earth or how we should behave in any way.  

 

I plan to deal with that a bit later.  

 

However,  what I have to say has been at the root of Humankind's thinking since the dawn of intelligence and social groupings.  

 

What I am going to talk about is Cosmology,  the science of the origin and end of the whole universe that we live in.

 

Firstly let me briefly run through in simple terms what we know about our universe, 

 

I will start from the here and now of our existence and move outwards through space and time.  

 

 

Life on Earth

 We are very complex social and intelligent beings based on a carbon chemistry and share our planet with a lot of other plants and animals on which we depend for our survival.  

 

We also depend on the star we orbit, the sun, for a lot of our energy and the survival of the other plants and animals.

 

The sun is a pretty ordinary star that is about halfway through its Ten thousand-million-year life.  

 

At the end of its life it will brighten, expand and destroy all life on earth.    

 

Geology tells us that the earth is around 4 thousand million years old and traces of simple life exist back to around three thousand five hundred million years ago.  

 

Complex, multi-celled life on earth started about 600 million years ago and has evolved and survived many extinction disasters of various types over the intervening years.  

 

Complex human society has only been around for about 10 thousand years.

 

Apart from the gravity that holds us on the surface of the earth, absolutely everything that we are, sense and do is electromagnetic in origin.  

 

There are other forces involved in the interactions of the subatomic particles that make up the atoms we are made of, but these are very short range and act for very short times and are only detectable using high energy physics experiments and radioactivity which we cannot sense ourselves without special equipment.  

 

 

Atoms and Molecules

All the atoms of which we are made are composed of three components called Electrons, Protons and Neutrons.  

 

Electrons are very simple, light and totally fundamental they carry what we call a negative electrical charge.

 

Protons and Neutrons are composite and made of smaller components, but these can only be found in groups.  

 

A proton is stable and much heavier than an electron with a positive electrical charge.  

 

The Neutron has no charge and left on its own will fall apart to form an electron and a proton after about 12 minutes.  

 

Atoms have a small nucleus formed from lumps of protons and neutrons stuck together by the short-range forces I have mentioned before.  

 

They are surrounded by a cloud of electrons that balances the positive charge.

 

These components can form 81 stable elements.  Life makes use of some 20 or so of them in its chemical interactions.  

 

The earth contains all of the stable elements and a few very long-lived unstable elements.  

 

All chemistry involves interactions between the electrons near the surface of the electron cloud. 

 

 

Our sun and the Stars

Looking to our sun and the stars we can see that they form structured groups that formed at the same time and vary in size and age.  

 

For stars reasonably near to us, their distance can be measured directly using the parallax generated by the earth's orbital motion.

 

Detailed analysis of an individual star's light allows us to determine, its chemical composition, temperature, velocity along the line of sight. and estimate its absolute brightness, size and mass.  

 

Analysing different groups of stars that formed at the same time allows us to determine their life cycles. 

 

By comparison with stars whose distance has been measured we can estimate their distance.  

 

Stars are formed by cold clouds of gas and dust collapsing under their self gravity and the kinetic energy released by this collapse causing them to heat up.  

 

Stars consist of almost entirely of Hydrogen, the simplest element, and Helium the next simplest on the whole and can be modelled quite easily.  

 

Their light is largely maintained by the conversion of hydrogen to helium in a nuclear fusion reaction at the high temperatures and pressures in the centre of the star.

 

In the later stages of the life of larger stars more complex elements up to iron are created.  Heavier elements than this are forged in the violent deaths of large stars

 

It is interesting to note that every atom of which you consist of apart from the hydrogen in the water was forged at temperatures of millions of degrees and extreme pressures in the centre of stars.

This is because the big bang only created the simplest elements, Hydrogen Deuterium Helium and Lithium.

 

 

Galaxies

The main feature of stars is that they are mostly in large groups called galaxies which have various structures depending on their form and interactions.  

 

Two important facts are that individual stars are very small compared with their separation and very rarely interact violently, but galaxies are quite large compared with their separation and do interact.  

 

Galaxies form clusters and groups with a sort of lumpy and stringy structure with large voids that contain very little. 

 

The really vital observation is that at the largest scales the galaxies are moving apart, and the universe is expanding at a mostly steady rate.  

 

This implies that everything was concentrated at one point at an instant (I will call this instant "now" and it will be referred to later) some 13.77 thousand million years ago give or take 40 million years.  

 

This instant “now” provides an absolute and unobservable time reference throughout the whole universe.

 

This fact was called "The Big Bang"  by a group who preferred a steady state model of the universe back around 1950 and the name has stuck.

 

 

The Big Bang Time Chart

This expansion was not by any means an explosion.  It was a very  smooth and controlled and rapid expansion of space itself from a very small volume with an extremely high temperature at a particular instant in time.  

 

We can still detect the expanded afterglow of this expansion in the form of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation. 

 

This occurred when the whole universe was at a temperature about equal to the surface temperature of a typical star say around 6000 degrees Kelvin and it became just like a star when we  can see its surface, when its atmosphere became transparent to light.  

 

This happened some 379,000 Years after the instant "now” this CMB radiation is now at a temperature of 2.72548 ± 0.00057 degrees Kelvin.  

 

I have stated some of these numbers to the full accuracy of our knowledge to show that they are really precise and well-defined measurements not just approximations.  

 

We can say all these facts with a great deal of confidence because they are in line with careful observations and precise supercomputer models of everything from atoms to stars and the whole expanding universe and comply accurately with measured simple physical laws.

 

 

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

The CMB surface is the farthest distance in both space and time we can see anything using light or radio waves.

 

The variations illustrated are tiny  onlt 1 part in 100,000 

 

This expansion and cooling of the universe point to its ultimate fate.  

 

That is, the stars burn out and/or collapse onto black holes which themselves after a vast amount of time evaporate back into to energy with no matter. 

 

There is one other important fact about our universe.   

 

Over the past 50 years we have gradually realised that the matter that we can see and detect is only a small part of it  about 5%  

 

The rest is in the form of Dark Matter 27%  and Dark Energy  68%.  

 

Dark matter is simply particles that only interact via gravity a bit like tiny black holes.  

 

Dark energy is energy that exists throughout the universe but not detectable directly but has something to do with the expansion of the universe.

 

 

The black hole image

I have just mentioned the term "Black Hole"  This is a term that most people have heard about but very few people understand.  

 

It is simply a body where gravity is so strong that not even light or anything else can escape from it.  

 

Black holes are, for their mass extremely small, for example to convert our sun which has a diameter of 1.4 million km and a mean density 1.4 times that of water into a black hole it would be necessary to squash it down until it had a diameter of only 6 km.  

 

The size of a black hole is a linear function of its mass.  

The 4 million solar mass black hole at the centre of our galaxy is only about 24 Million km across or about 17 times the size of our sun about as big as quite a lot of normal stars.  

 

A range of larger stars towards the end of their lives when they run out of hydrogen fuel at their centres and forge more complex nuclei up to iron can suddenly collapse in a way that their core is squashed enough to form a black hole while the rest of the star rebounds and explodes to form a supernova where the single star far outshines its galaxy before fading to nothing.  

 

It has been proved theoretically that inside the event horizon the force of gravity continues the collapse to a "singularity”

 

This is a tiny linear ring or a mathematical point in the very rare case that the black hole does not have angular momentum  i.e. is not rotating about an axis. 

 

It is well accepted that inside the event horizon space becomes like time and time becomes like space because of relativistic time distortion effects.

 

 

Our very unusual universe

Let us now come back from the edge of our universe and the event horizon for a little while to think about the physical laws that we have in our universe.  

 

There have been several books written about the small number of values that define how things work and how finely they are balanced to ensure our universe produces, stars, planets and life.   In fact it appears that, if these values were allocated randomly, our universe is very special.  

 

We have been here several times before trying to explain life an its position in the order of things and always been proved wrong. What looks at first special turns out to be quite normal.

 

The current approach of many experts is to suggest that there must be a vast "multiverse" of otherwise sterile universes to ensure that there is one like ours.  

 

This is a terrible fudge to get out of doing some real thinking about the problem.

 

Lee Smolin, one of the few really deep thinkers in this area, in his book  "The Life of the Cosmos" published in 1997,  suggested that our physical laws were finely balanced to maximise the number of stellar mass black holes that are produced on our universe and there might be an evolutionary process somewhere that allowed this.  

 

Quite clearly if there was an evolutionary process whereby universes did not just appear and disappear randomly.  

 

If it was possible for one universe to create a number of child universes substantially similar to itself.  It would rapidly dominate the multiverse.

 

 

Antimatter 

Dirac when he was developing his quantum mechanical equations to describe the behaviour of an electron back around 1928 faced a problem that the equations had both positive and negative energy solutions that were matched to each other.

 

If these negative levels were empty, all the particles might, in theory, collapse into the lower energy states.   

 

He avoided this problem by assuming that they must all be full with other particles (antiparticles)  but it would be possible in theory to knock particles out of this.

 

The antiparticles would be the exact opposite of electrons that is with their  charge, spin, and time flow reversed.  

 

The existence of antiparticles for every particle that we can detect is now well established and understood.  

 

When a particle meets and interacts with its antiparticle the both vanish and are converted into energy in the form of two gamma ray  photons  going in opposite directions.    

 

Conversely it is possible when particles collide at very high energies (as in the LHC) particle-antiparticle pairs are produced. The energy of doing this is removed form the particle collision.  

 

Now during the big bang it was assumed that the matter in our universe was produced in this way, but what happened to the antimatter?  

 

Currently this is "fudged" by saying that there is an imbalance between matter and antimatter at high energies.   

 

Current experimental work is making the existence of this imbalance more and more improbable.  

 

This is a serious problem with current cosmological thinking.

 

 

 

Episodic Cyclic Big Bang Cosmology (ECBBC) 

It is simple to prove mathematically that the continued collapse of the matter inside the event horizon under its own gravity will release a vast quantity of energy rising to an infinite quantity of energy as the mathematical singularity is approached.  

 

It has also been shown using the Large Hadron collider (LHC) that our current known laws of physics are perfectly good in conditions far more extreme than the formation of a black hole by a collapsing star. In fact the LHC experts say they are studying the behaviour of matter all the way down to a lot less than one nanosecond after the instant "now".  

 

It follows that, if we wanted to, we could model the collapse a great deal further towards the abyss of the singularity.

 

In 2020  Neil Turock of the Perimeter Institute suggested a solution by saying that this antimatter must be locked up in a balancing collapsing antimatter universe.  

 

This is the final suggestion that allows the concept that creates the potential for an episodic cyclic cosmology. 

 

Beyond this point is my own original scientific thinking

 

This is where gravitational collapse in one universe creates a new universe.  

 

This Idea has been suggested many times in the past but no process for this has been suggested.

 

All we need to suggest that it is the vast energy release by this collapsing antimatter that is driving the expansion of the big bang in our matter dominated universe, and that this antimatter is in a collapsing black hole an antimatter universe that is similar to ours.

 

Conversely when a black hole forms in our matter universe it creates an expanding antimatter universe similar to ours.  

This is in different dimensions to ours and is not detectable in any way

 

This is a truly Episodic Cyclic Big Bang Cosmology (ECBBC) and not a random big bang.  

One important question arises.  

 

Where then is this tiny collapsing antimatter mirror universe to be found in our universe?

 

It has one tiny linear ring spatial dimension and multiple time dimensions one of which is our current linear time dimension from past to future.  

 

The answer of course is that it is in that critical instant "now" which still exists unobservable and in common throughout every particle our extended universe.

 

 

 

The next question is how then does this fit in with current theoretical and practical studies of the universe?  

There are several important puzzles about quantum mechanics to which this Episodic Cyclic Big Bang Cosmology solves.

 

It provides an understandable explanation for the quantum mechanical problem of superposition and entanglement.  

 

This is where the measurement of the state of one entangled particle instantly defines the state of another entangled particle even though they may be a very considerable distance apart.  

 

This is because the information is in the instant "now".

  

It also clearly solves the antimatter problem by showing where the antimatter is.

 

It solves Dirac's problem with antimatter requiring the universe to be full of antimatter but have it hidden.

 

It also explains why Dark Energy makes up such a large proportion of our universe because half of the total energy of the universe is bound up and hidden in the instant "now".

 

It also solves the dimensionality and ghost particle requirements for string and quantum gravitational theory.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fitting this with current theoretical Physics 2

One of the reasons that I started working on these Ideas about 25 years ago was that it was becoming clear that the current purely Mathematical approaches to fundamental Physics notably String Theory and Quantum gravity were becoming bogged down in the fact that mathematical synthesis tends to produce equations that tell you about all the vast number of possible solutions to a problem that there might be.

 

It can then be almost impossible to identify the one that matches the physics that we can observe and measure.  It needs a bit of " outside the box" real physical thinking to identify the path that should be taken.

 

To go fully into this aspect of my work at the "popular science" level and time available is not possible  I will however summarise some important results.

 

The string theory of quantum particles is built on the gauge symmetries of our current known particles and there are a vast number of possible solutions that could produce universes that last a long time but no way of knowing which solutions to explore in detail.  

 

The favoured solution is called  E8XE8 but this suffers from negative energy "ghost" particles just like the Dirac electron equation did back in 1928.  The proposed  ECC solves this problem.  

 

Another important requirement is that the concepts require Eleven dimensions most of which are "compactified" in some way to end up with our observed universe which has  three dimensions of space and one of time.   The ECC offers the required eleven dimensions.

 

Quantum gravity has the big problem that it needs to select a geometry to study in detail the current preferred approach by many considers tiny loops to be essential the collapsed antimatter balancing universe in the ECC provides these loops as a starting point

 

 

The next step Creating a truly evolutionary cosmology

The  ECBBC has all the requirements for an evolutionary process to maximise the production of  (stellar mass) black holes. 

 

The next phase of this work is to look seriously at how, starting with what we understand as the quantum mechanical vacuum long lived universes similar to ours could have evolved over an indefinite time. 

 

This is work in progress.  

 

Time limits prevent me from going into this for this presentation

 

 

 

Coming back to our reality

If science manages to create a fully evolutionary process for the origin of our own universe we have, in effect, finally removed any suggestion of the need for any sort of creator God outside of our universe.  This initially appears to pull the rug from under the world's religions.   

 

This is completely untrue because there is no need for any external influence to provide such a basis for religion.

 

All the world's "soft line" religions, tell us to behave well towards other people and our planet and take them into consideration when we moderate our personal wishes.   

Quite clearly I have to exclude a few hard line aggressive religions and sects which aim at domination without compromise.  I will call these cults.

 

I am saying this because the really important job that we have to do is to look after and protect intelligent life on this isolated planet together with all the the plants and animals that are essential for its survival bearing in mind that there is no external force that will save us from our own folly.  

 

If you really need to personify a focal point or God you will find it in the instant now.

 

The hope of many religions of an eternal spiritual life is not a personal thing it is what we do to look after and protect the life on this planet.  

To do this we need to work together in large groups each person doing their own small contribution.  

 

Religion is one of the ways that we gather together to think about (pray) and collectively express our feelings (in the form of symbolic rituals) to achieve this ideal.   

This goes beyond the limits of nationality and commerce and can still act as a truly unifying factor.

 

There appears to be a religion shaped "hole" in every person and this will be filled with something that defines our behaviour at the deepest levels.  

The important thing is not the fine details of the story or ritual but the aim of an overall end of sustaining life by controlling our personal desires.  

 

From an evolutionary point of view it is important that there are many different approaches with slightly different priorities. 

"let a thousand Flowers bloom" because if one group thinks that they have all the answers they are by definition wrong.