This is an interesting area and worth following but it has now been superseded by the following chain of pages as ideas develop     

                         *An evolutionary Cosmology

Rethinking Our route to a Theory of Everything 

by Ian Kimber

Introduction

Every so often it is a good idea to stand back from the coal face and growing points of science and technology and think about what it we are really trying to achieve, because our attention to the detail may have blinded us to the overall picture and there may be newer and more fruitful routes to follow.  As a retired scientist and engineer with a reasonably successful career in the generation and stimulation of innovation, I have a long experience of when this technique may be of value and a good experience of using it successfully.  I have also always had a deep interest in the growing points of Astronomy Physics and Cosmology and have followed both the serious scientific press and the source material wherever practicable.  To my mind the current situation in this area is wallowing in a mire of its own success and complexity, warrants an application of this approach.

One point I must stress very early.  This is not one of those tirades about "scientists have got it all wrong" and there are conspiracies to hide the truth that permeate the efforts of "amateurs" to join into the hypothesis business.  I am happy that the standard models of thinking have got it mostly right and all that I want to introduce is some ideas and approaches that may provide some insight and lead others with better skills than me in some of the areas where mine are limited to take an interest in it.  One advantage in what I am suggesting is that the ideas presented may well be disprovable and disproving a hypothesis may be as valuable as proving it.  We already have a classical example of the success of this approach in that the effort to disprove the simple (but disprovable) "continuous creation" cosmology of Fred Hoyle in the fifties and sixties gave great insights into the currently accepted model of the observable history of our universe and even resulted in the continuous creation faction naming it, as "The Big Bang"!

In some ways what I am trying to present is as ambitious as what Fred Hoyle did then: that is to explain the whole of the universe (multiverse?) both observable and not observable in all space and time dimensions. One of the vital end products of what I am about to suggest is that the end result is not, as many people suggest a sterile multiverse with a tiny probability of complexity and life but a largely living multiverse with a good probability of complexity leading to life.

I have been writing small notes on this subject for many years and publishing them quietly on the internet under the broad heading of Evolutionary Philosophy,  Evolutionary Metaphysics and more recently Evolutionary Cosmology.  When I first started, no one else used these terms but more recently others have used them to express different ideas but I still think that this broad name best expresses what I am trying to talk about.

Background Thinking

This paper is not going to cover all the details of the history of Theories of Everything, for that I have included a bibliography together with a few more critical references to scientific papers at the end.  Let us briefly examine the time evolution of the universe that we can observe, the physical laws that have enabled this evolution and aspects of current efforts to find underlying theories that could lead to the universe that we observe.

Astronomy shows us clearly that we live in a changing universe that started very hot, dense and uniform.  It is expanding and cooling towards an eventual heat death.  During this process most of the universe is clumping together under the effects of gravity to form stars galaxies and black holes.  An important feature of black holes is that they are volumes that have become so dense that they have effectively cut themselves off from our universe.

The underlying physical laws are reasonably simple and only a few arbitrary "constants" are needed to complete the understanding of broad range of processes at work but these numbers appear to be very finely balanced to allow our universe to be complex in the way that it is and if these constants are varied very slightly the sort of complexity that we see would just not have developed.

Mathematical modelling is an essential part of our understanding process. This has shown that our changing universe is in good agreement with the physical laws that we observe and a standard model works well right back to the formation of nuclei. 

The most fundamental part of any model is the simplification process that allows the true complexity of composite particles, atoms, molecules, materials and plasmas planets, stars,  galaxies and eventually the whole causal unit of the observable and non observable universe to work.   This means that all models have limits of applicability and it vital to understand over what conditions these may apply.  It is a very powerful tool once a model has been created but unless the conditions are relatively simple models cannot synthesise new models very effectively.  This appears most times to require some sort of intuitive step or leap in the dark saying "what if it was like this!" and the subsequent analysis using a new model suggesting experiments and observations that may confirm or disprove the new idea

What should be included in a theory of everything

A theory of everything should include more than just a list of “components” and equations relating to their interactions and conversions it should include an understanding of how these laws work together to produce the results that happen and those that might have happened in the past or might happen in the future

Going back to basics

This is where the story really starts!

Analysing the Laws of Physics

A simple view of the collapse inside black hole

Bibliography and  References

Theories of everything

   "New Theories of Everything"  by John D. Barrow  (second edition 2007).

Mathematics Texts

   "The Road to Reality"  by Roger Penrose

Physics Texts

Astronomy Texts

Specific papers