INTRODUCTION
In this blog I am going to propose how we may be able to explain some of the biggest problems in cosmology.
This is an ambitious task for an amateur scientist, but as Jim Watson said in the Weinstein lecture “if you are going to try to make big progress then by definition you are unqualified to do whatever it is you're trying to do”. To those who say that without maths it is just speculation, I quote Claude Shannon, one of the greatest minds and possibly the most creative brain of the 20th century. Shannon had a quality of leaping right to the central insight and leaving the details to be filled in later. As he once explained it, “I think I’m more visual than symbolic. I try to get a feeling of what’s going on. Equations come later.”
I am not going to challenge the Big Bang theory. Neither am I going to try to disprove Einstein’s General Relativity. They provide the structure of our cosmology and are tried and tested over 100 years. Still there are some massive gaps in our understanding.
Where did all the stuff in our universe come from
Dark Energy is 70% of our universe, but what is it?
Dark Matter is another 25%. We have been looking for it for more than 80 years.
Dan Hooper in his book ‘The Edge of Time’ says in his introduction -
“When it comes to understanding our universe and it's origin, incredible progress has been made...it is undeniable that we are facing many formidable questions and vexing problems. Perhaps these issues are just a series of loose ends.... But more and more often these days, I find myself wondering whether these problems might represent more than loose ends. Perhaps they are symptoms of a deeper problem with the lens through which we see the world.”
In his concluding chapter he talks about the failure to understand dark matter and dark energy, the 95% which is unexplained. How atoms survived the heat of the early universe and how the era of cosmic inflation may have played out. “ Perhaps these puzzles are not as unrelated as they might seem, but are pointing us to a very different picture of our universe’s earliest moments. When it comes to understanding our universe’s origin, I sometimes find myself wondering: Is a revolution coming?”
Dan Hooper "The Edge of Time"
Cosmology:
“The scientific study of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe” Wikipedia.
So how are we doing?
1. Origin - We know nothing about where all the stuff of the universe came from.
2. Evolution - 95% of our universe is unexplained.
3. Fate - How can we know how the universe will end when we don't know how it started and so much cannot be explained?
Initial Conditions
I am reminded about the story of the Scot who, when asked how to get to London said -
“I widnae start from here”!
With the wrong assumptions built into your model you will never get the right answers.
Now here's a crazy idea which is also beautifully simple - just change the initial conditions. Change the assumptions about the size of the universe. The problem is summed up neatly in a response kindly sent to me by sci-commer Paul Sutter, “as far as we can tell, the universe is totally self-contained. All of its dynamics are governed purely by its interior contents” While there can be no argument with this statement, it depends on your definition of ‘universe’.
The Great Debate
So how big is the universe? It is exactly 100 years since Shapley and Curtis held their great debate on this recurring question. Back then, the question was answered by bigger and better telescopes. Today we don’t have that option. We can never see beyond the observable universe. If we are to discover what is “south of the south pole” then we need to look for other solutions.
The universe has always been bigger and older than we thought
As Edwin Hubble himself said, the history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.
My simple solution to the big questions of cosmology is to assume that the cosmos is much bigger and older than our universe. I do mean much bigger. I do not mean an infinity of space into which our universe expands and I certainly do not mean a multiverse! We know that there are countless stars in our galaxies and countless galaxies in our universe. We will assume that the cosmos is full of countless masses. A few may be like our universe but others will be massive black holes.
From Philip Ball's profile on Penrose for Prospect Magazine Feb 2017
"Penrose was able to show that the conditions for the formation of a black hole were much less unlikely than previously thought—they could be real. When Hawking saw this work in the early 1960s, they began collaborating on gravitational singularities. The pair realised that you could think of the Big Bang as a collapse to a singularity in reverse: you start with a point of infinite density and then let it expand. In this way, they married ideas about black holes with the cosmological theory of the universe. The ramifications are tremendous: for one thing, it becomes possible to imagine entire new universes forming from black holes—so that our own universe could be just one among many."
This idea can be dismissed as pure speculation, story telling. However if by adopting these initial conditions we can explain some of those loose ends then perhaps it is worth exploring further. I will attempt to propose measurements and predictions which could support or falsify the story.
Problem 1. Origin.
The origin of our universe?
The stuff of our universe already existed. Our universe was created by an exploding black hole. Too simple? Possibly. What if this simple assumption also explains more of the loose ends? If we start with an exploding big black hole we may be better able to explain what we see in the sky.
No matter/antimatter problem; no need for a billion to one inequality.
No need for Inflation theory
The monopole problem
It might even get Lithium right.
Problem 2(i). Dark Energy.
Up there with the question of the origin of the universe is Dark Energy. Science has no explanation of Dark Energy. If proof were needed, just listen to any of the videos on the subject. No-one ever puts it into words without embarrassed stumblings over words which they obviously don't believe. When cosmologists can't explain something they usually resort to quantum mechanics and yet another catastrophe is born. Vacuum energy indeed!
At this point I would like to quote myself. “Only real things happen in the universe”.
It is simple - Dark Energy is just gravity.
The observed acceleration of our galaxies out into space is the gravitational pull of the cosmos.
As this chart shows
the first few billion years of our universe was dominated by matter and radiation but the energy from the Big Bang explosion was sufficient to stop a crunch back into the initial black hole. In recent (billions of) years the expansion of our universe started to accelerate as our universe expands out into the cosmos.
Not a Big Crunch nor is it a Big Rip. If Dark Energy is constant then the rate of expansion will asymptote to 55 km/s/Mpc ( Ethan Seigel) )
If Dark Energy is the gravitational pull of the cosmos then the rate of expansion will continue to increase slowly as our universe expands out into the cosmos.
Only time and more and better data will tell.
This part of my theory is both testable and falsifiable.
The rate of expansion of the universe will increase with time as the gravitational pull of the cosmos increases as we move out into the cosmos.
The local cosmos is unlikely to be homogeneous so the expansion will not be isotropic. There will be dipole in the direction of the biggest and/or closest mass out there.
These are discussed in more detail in my blog “Further evidence that Dark Energy is Cosmic Gravity”
Prediction 1 will be tested thoroughly in the quest to establish the real value of Ho. I hate to spoil a good argument, but it is possible that the Planck results and Adam Reiss are both right. The difference between 67 and 73 is real and not systematic errors. The acceleration in our universe is increasing with time.
The LCDM model proposes that the value of Ho will asymptote down to ~50km/s/Mpc as the universe expands and mass and radiation are diluted. So called Dark Energy remains constant (although no one can explain why).
In my model the gravitational pull of the cosmos will increase as our universe expands out into the cosmos. Ho will increase over time, not decrease.
This leads to prediction 2, anisotropic expansion. Of course this is difficult to measure, but there is already some evidence of anisotropic expansion. Costas Migkas's paper April 2020 may have found the evidence I need. His new paper out soon hopefully will confirm his results. There is other evidence for anisotropy but the LCDM group chooses to ignore it.
Vacuum energy or a cosmological constant cannot explain this.
When we can accurately measure the true expansion rates net of local effects we will be able to get a better picture of our observable universe and some clues to the shape of the cosmos beyond.
We can never see beyond our universe, but we can measure the gravitational effects of the cosmos on our universe.
Summary
By simply changing our assumptions about the size and age of the cosmos two of the biggest problems in cosmology may be explained. No new physics required; no creative mathematics. No need to resort to quantum mechanics.
No challenge to the Big Bang theory, well maybe some doubt cast on Inflation Theory.
Our place in the cosmos can be calculated / modelled by General Relativity. It is just gravity.
A large part of the structure of cosmology can be completed without shaking the foundations.
The possibility of taking astronomy beyond our observable universe is exciting beyond words. Who would not want to be the first to detect evidence of other universes beyond our own.
Further work
There are some obvious implications for the fate of the universe. I suspect a happier fate than proposed elsewhere as our universe is recycled out there in the cosmos.
More challenging is the question of Dark Matter. That is if Dark Matter prevails over MOND. If our universe is made up largely of Dark Matter then it came out of the same black hole as the rest of us.
The real question for me is what really happens within black holes. What happens to those neutrons when two neutron stars collide and form a black hole? What happens to the particles inside the enormous black holes we see in our universe. What phase change may occur under the massive gravitational forces inside the supermassive black holes we know exist within our universe or the cosmic scale black holes beyond?
DM is not a particle as we understand them or we would have detected it by now. I will allow myself a guess. It could be in the form of Primordial Black Holes. If our universe was created out of a cosmic scale black hole then it is possible that most of the matter remained as black hole stuff - Blarks - and only 15% of it came back out in baryonic form.
The case for DM is far from complete. The outsider is MOND. If what we see in the sky can be explained by modified gravity then if Dark Energy is just gravity then it might help MOND to explain the behaviour of galaxy clusters. The External Field Effect may be much stronger than previously assumed.
Before we fully understand our cosmos we need to know what is south of the south pole and what is inside a black hole. We won’t know if we don't investigate.
Cosmology wants a new paradigm, it needs a new paradigm, but there ain't no way it's ever going to love it.
"2 out of 3 ain't bad".
Meatloaf 'Bat out of Hell' 1977