Over the last several years I have taken the opportunity to read much physics and I find myself always tending towards books with themes centered on the first few moments of the life of our universe. I remain at odds with theories that offer no options prior to the the Big Bang creation event. One day I found myself trying to summarize my gut feelings on how it all must have come to past. These thoughts are presented here.
It has been without significant scientific challenge since the mid 1960s; the universe is expanding and it had to start somewhere, somehow. The evidence for the occurrence of a “Big Bang” phenomenon is displayed, primarily, in the fact that all unlinked celestial bodies are rapidly receding from each other, and that there is a uniform ambient free-space temperature of a few degrees above absolute zero. By unlinked it is meant here to mean non-galactic stars and the galaxies, themselves. Planets, of course, are linked to their parental star. The uniform temperature of the universe implies that all space was once uniformly heated to the same starting temperature.
These two facts of science imply the prior existence of a big bang. It has also been quite certainly determined that the universe is approximately 13.5 billion years old. Scientists today are aggressively working towards the acquisition of a mathematical understanding of just how the physics of the first few moments of the explosive event functioned.
There are four fundamental forces in today’s universe. These forces are: the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity. It is theorized that prior to the moment of the big bang, and for fractions of a second(s) afterwards, that all four forces were unified as one. One might refer to this unified force field as “primordial energy”. Its role in life was nothing; it just was. At least, it just was until one day it may be shown to have some other function.
The potential disclosure that primordial energy played specific roles in pre-bang existence will be left for mathematics to unfold. Mathematics is the tools of scientific proof. If one is able to show mathematically that an event will, or has happened, then it can be accepted as a valid hypothesis. However, with today’s cosmological quests, a mathematical “fact” still must be considered a theory of physics until it has been demonstrated by experimentation or observation to be true.
Physics and mathematics became a non-divorceable marriage at the time of Isaac Newton. It was Newton who formulated the laws of thermodynamics, of energy, and importantly, that of gravity. However, with concepts like gravity, Newton didn’t understand why nature acted the way it did; he showed that it just was. Post-Newton there became a quest by physicists, aka, scientific mathematicians, to fold away the coverings which kept hidden a full understanding of the why’s of the four known energy fields.
By the middle of the twentieth century physicists had mathematically proven that the forces observed from magnets, and such things as electricity, radio waves, and light were different viewpoints of the same universal form of energy. They had thus unified these separately appearing forms of energy into one. And they called it electromagnetism.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century Albert Einstein did some remarkable things. The first discovery of note by Einstein was his development of the Special Theory of Relativity. The essence of this theory is that Time and Space are a netted and interlinked continuum; one doesn’t exist without the other. Distance and time depend on the observer; and that time and space are perceived differently, depending on the observer’s position in space.
This theory tied mass and energy together. From the Special Theory of Relativity came Einstein’s gravestone epitaph: e = mc2. This very simply says that energy and the mass of mater are linked, and that the faster one travels the heavier he’ll get. The logical extension of the formula is that as a body’s velocity approaches that of the speed of light, then its mass will approach infinite. It is because of this relationship that it is said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. To try to do so would require an infinite amount of energy. There have been many demonstrations which validate this theory.
This early work of Einstein’s didn’t put the jinks on the work done by Newton. But rather, they expanded man’s scope of things: from the earthly tied effects demonstrated by Newton, to what would be shown to happen when man broke the binds of earth and began to venture into outer space at never before traveled high speeds.
You can’t hold a good patent clerk down. Approximately ten years later Einstein unleashed upon the scientific stage his General Theory of Relativity. This theory tied together the theories of Newton with the theory of Special Relativity and that of mass acceleration in a gravitational field.
Simple aspects of this theory can be brought to mind by imagining what a bowling ball would look like if placed in the center of a trampoline. What you would see is a big dent in the fabric of the trampoline created by the mass of the bowling ball. Now, if you placed a marble at the edge of the trampoline, you would witness the marble start to roll towards the center of the trampoline. As it approached closer and closer to the bowling ball the speed of the marble would be increasing.
An amazing thing happens next. The marble doesn’t just run smack into the bowling ball; but rather, it tries to go around it. Actually, it almost gets away. The marble slows down as it gently follows the dented curve of the fabric and it returns towards the ball. This cycle continues around the bowling ball, approaching closer and closer, until, eventually, the marble comes to rest beside the more massive ball.
Picture in your mind a second ball placed in the pathway of the marble. This new ball is much lighter than the bowling ball, and as you would expect, it creates a shallower dent in the trampoline’s fabric. This lesser dent is directly related to the fact that the new ball has less mass that the original bowling ball.
As the marble rolls towards the new ball it does not pick up as much speed as it did before. This is clearly expected because the dip in the fabric isn’t as great. Speed it does pick up, however, and we see that the marble simply makes a small orbital detour around the new ball and continues on toward the bowling ball’s position. The speed of the marble, together with its small mass, gave the marble enough momentum to be able to escape the otherwise captivating influence of the new ball’s dent field. The marble’s speed slows a bit as it pulls away from the once primary influence of the new ball and the marble’s fabric path is now woven to have it deal solely with the bowling ball’s dent.
If one imagines that the space-time continuum is akin to the fabric of the trampoline and that each stellar body in the heavens sits upon it as did the bowling ball, one would have an image of an effect of the General Theory of Relativity. This illustration has been done using 3-dimential objects; albeit very thin ones when compared to the dimensions of the universe. Now, try to picture that bowling ball suspended in mid-air and that no matter from which direction you released the marble, as it approached the ball it is sliding along a fabric which is planer to the ball.
There is no up or down for the marble as it increases velocity towards its destiny. Its eye is wedded to this thread of fabric and the marble will go wherever the weave takes it. If the marble had come from a location a few degrees off of its current course, it would have found itself on a different thread but one which would have the same accelerating destiny. The mass and speed of the marble will alter its journey towards the bowling ball.
Imagine now how our sun and the other stars are but balls of different masses floating on the unseen fabric of space and time. No matter which direction one approaches each of these masses, one will encounter a dent, and a downward slope in the fabric which must be dealt with. It depends solely on your mass and approach velocity whether you will enjoy a slingshot orbital bypass or whether you will be doomed to be sucked into the overpowering influence of the floating body.
These past thoughts have been an elementary attempt to portray the essence of gravity as presented by Einstein’s General Theory. Gravity is created by mass which dents the fabric of space-time. As with our illustration, the greater the mass, the bigger the dent and the more energy a passing body will require to avoid sure captivation.
To say the least, Einstein’s newest theory created quite a stir among the world’s physicists. It wasn’t until a few years later that Edwin Hubble discovered that the Milky Way was not the sole occupier of our universe. It was soon to be measured that all of the other bodies (galaxies and stars) were moving away from each other; not just from our earthly viewpoint. Although it had been confirmed earlier in science that we and our earth were not the center of the universe, these new observations of galactic recession brought it home with a smack.
It took the dedicated pronouncements of a Catholic priest, Father Georges-Henri Lemaitre, to finally focus science’s eyes on the fact that the universe is expanding. Stellar objects were not just receding from one another. What this had implied to the Father was that there must have been a beginning. There was no thought that a once, and forever, static universe just deciced to want to get away from itself. Why would it? Father Lemaitre postulated that if one were able to run the universe in a reverse motion, then there must have been a beginning point and time of the expansion. This point and time the Father coined as the Big Bang.
The field of Cosmology, the study of the universe, had a proboscis of a theory of origin to deal with. Logic dealt the cards. If the universe was expanding, then it had to expand from something. This was not just a game of circular logic. The ramifications of the extension of this thinking would be earth shattering to both the scientific and religious communities; Let alone to those of us who try to go to sleep at night with good thoughts about what may happen tomorrow.
Albert Einstein went to his grave; it has been said, refusing to believe in some of the ramifications of his general theory. His theoretical inventions seemed to have opened up a Pandora’s Box for the scientific community. Einstein consumed his later years trying to invent a single mathematical theory that would unite all four forces of energy into their genesis; being one grand form of energy.
Developing a Unified Theory of forces drove Einstein to his grave and its creation has eclipsed scientists’ and mathematicians’ attempts to date. Just as electricity and magnetism where earlier recognized as being of the same form, i.e., electromagnetic energy, so too have electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces been brought together, or unified.
The hold out is gravity. And the holdup is mathematics. No one has conquered the immense task of boiling down the formulae into solve able format.
It has been shown, in theory, that when subject to immense temperatures, exceeding many factors greater than that of the interior of our sun, three of the four forces of nature can be unified, i.e., become one. It is assumed that the force of gravity, too, must at some energy level succumb and join the team with the other three. Today, nuclear particle collider research seems to be the light on the horizon which will someday demonstrate unification.
Let’s go back those thirteen some billion years and have a look at what’s happening with what is out there. Now, this is going to be difficult to imagine. Sitting out there is a thing. This thing is a speck of stuff, sub-microscopically small, with a near infinite mass. Around this thing is nothing; and this is the hard part. Nothing doesn’t mean emptiness. Nothing means nothing! In fact, to say, “Sitting out there” is the wrong way to view positioning this thing. This thing, we’ll call a singularity, is just – it is; and that is all that is present.
Where did this singularity come from? Has it been there forever? Did time even exist before this singularity was discovered? Did the singularity exist before its own demise in the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang? Was the singularity really a very tiny, yet massively huge, object? Or was the singularity an infinitely strong, but infinitely small, bundle of energy?
Black holes exist. Black holes represent to the cosmos what a near infinitely massive, but dimensionally small, bowling ball would mean on a substantially stretchable trampoline fabric. Picture the marble racing towards the edge of the black hole’s pit.
There is a point of closeness for the marble to the bowling ball’s pit which represents what is called its event horizon. The event horizon is the marble’s point of no return. Where the event horizon is for a given marble depends on the marble’s mass and its velocity. So, the slower any given marble is moving, the farther away from the center of the pit its event horizon will be.
The black hole is a voracious cosmological eater of things. As it consumes nearby formerly passing objects, like stars and inner-galactic content, it becomes more massive. With its increased mass comes an increased gravitational force field surrounding it and a resultant increase in mass density, i.e., it gets smaller, yet stronger, gravitationally.
As the mass of the contents of a black hole increases, the further away from its center the event horizon moves for all nearby matter. What this means to the idly grazing star nearby is that it is now sitting atop a section of fabric of space-time which is no longer so flat. The fabric is sloping enough now that the attraction to move toward the black hole is greater than the equilibrium it had had with its nearest neighbor stars.
With the stars ultimate consumption the black hole can now present to the universe an even greater warp in the continuum that is the fabric of space-time. One might envision where this is leading. If I were still a farmer, I’d bet on getting all of the cows rounded up and locked down in the corral.
Science has calculated the age of the universe to be 13.5 billion years old. If one assumes that the origination of the universe was from a spherical explosion, then the universe today has a diameter of 27 billion years. To convert this to something more down-to-earth; this is (27x109 yr) x (9,460,730,472,580.8km/yr), where 9,460,730,472,580.8km is one light-year, or the distance light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year. This becomes approximately 2.4x1023km, or, 2.4 with twenty three zeros. This is how big the universal balloon has been blown up.
If the diameter of the universe is 2.4x1023km, then the radius would be half that, or 1.2x1023km. Meanwhile, over a period of billions of years, the black hole has consumed billions of stars. As a result of this consumption the event horizon for the black hole has approached the radius of the age of the universe, as felt by the average galaxy or star. The black hole has grown in mass density and shrunk into a near infinitely small body, with near infinitely large gravitational mass. What is its destiny?
Recall that it has been proven that the universe is expanding. This expansion is powered by an energy source which has yet to be specifically identified. Scientists today refer to this unseen source of energy as dark energy. The dark in dark energy is a spinoff of the term dark matter, which accounts for a large portion of the calculated mass of the universe. It is called dark because it is unseen, yet known to be present.
With an enlarging event horizon our black hole is slowly laying out an anchor on the expansion of the universe. As must eventually come to pass, universal expansion will become universal retraction. This is because the ever increasing gravitational force associated with the black hole will negate dark energy’s antigravity effect. Retraction, however, will greet the sunny disposition of the remaining cosmos with the nastiest set of jaws imaginable – death to all that is.
Gravity is a force which can only exist if there are two bodies to play in the game. At some unfathomably distant time our universe will have been consumed by a single black hole. This single black hole will be the only item remaining in the past universe, or so it is thought.
Far, far away there is a star. This body may actually be a distant associate of a nearby universe. The star has no emotion regarding its kinship with its distant and non-influential neighbors. So, slowly, and with what seems to take an infinitely long time, it begins a migration towards the black hole.
The black hole, in the mean time, is doing nothing but existing and trying delicately to fully digest the last red dwarf it consumed. The black hole is at the bottom of the infinitely deep pit it has formed in the fabric of space-time. Nothing, not even the odd gamma ray, has escaped its event horizon for the last several billion years. How could one exist in a happier state?
The pace of the star has become heated in the last billion years, or so. It is approaching the event horizon of the black hole at the speed of light. As it passes across its point of no return it has accelerated to beyond the speed of light. Never since the occurrence of the Big Bang has mass exceeded the velocity of the speed of light.
The infusion of this remaining celestial body collapses the gravitational field of the universe. There is nothing remaining which can be influenced by the energy from the field, once called gravity. There remain no two bodies in the heavens. In fact, there remains no more void we once called space.
This is not the end, however. This is just the beginning. Gravity no longer exists as a force.
The fabric of space-time disappears. No longer is there an imaginary weave upon which our marble can roll. The black hole can no longer be pictured as an infinite mass residing at the bottom of a fathomless dent on the trampoline that once was our depiction of space-time.
There was never an ability, nor the need, to unify gravity with the other three forces. The sudden ingestion of a colossal amount of both energy and mass, created by the engulfment of the final star traveling faster than the speed of light, collapsed the universe and for an unmeasureably small fraction of what we will call time a new singularity existed. The result: a Big Bang. Now you know the answer to the Chicken and the Egg.
R.F.Duncan
September 5, 2007
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