As always, where to begin the discussion is difficult so we shall simply begin with the following statement;
Boson stars consist of four neutron stars conjoined in the same configuration as helium nuclei, and as giant or macroscopic bosons, these ‘Boson Stars’ in fact form the bulk of the missing or dark matter of our universe.
If that sentence at first seems a bit bland, the equivalent mathematical ‘sentence’
(a description physicists call an equation of state), is even more so.
w = 0
In cosmology, the equation of state refers to a property of materials which fall into a class termed ‘perfect fluids’, the properties of which are completely specified by giving its density and its pressure, and the equation of state gives the relation between density and pressure.
This relation is indicated by the symbol w, defined by w = pressure divided by the density times the speed of light squared.
The equation of state is crucial to understanding how a material will behave as the Universe expands and also governs the way in which the Universe will expand if dominated by a fluid of that equation of state.
The simplest case is w = 0, corresponding to no pressure, and refers to material where no forces are acting other than gravity and motion is non-relativistic (slower than the speed of light).
These could be fundamental particles or the ‘fluid’ in question could be made up of individual stars or even galaxies, neither of which have significant non-gravitational interactions.
The other important case is w = 1/3, which represents radiation, or more generally the fluid made from any relativistic particles.
A Universe dominated by radiation decelerates more strongly as it expands.
Not all types of material possess a unique equation of state, which requires there to be a unique pressure associated with any particular density.
Notwithstanding the fact that one of the most common modern usages of the term equation of state refers to dark energy, and indeed often the symbol w is used specifically to mean the (effective) equation of state of dark energy where w = -1, this paper does not discuss dark energy.
All fundamental particles in the Universe are divided into two classes, known as bosons and fermions.
Whether particles are bosons or fermions determines how they behave quantum mechanically. Bosons behave as indistinguishable particles, meaning that if the locations, velocities etc. of two particles are swapped, their quantum state is unchanged.
You cannot tell which particle is which. This is known as Bose-Einstein statistics, from which the term ‘bosons’ derives. Fermions, by contrast, are distinguishable particles.
Bosons are a candidate to be the dark matter in the Universe, and have even been postulated to condense into stellar-like objects known as ‘boson stars’.
While all known types of star, including white dwarfs and neutron stars, are made of fermions, there has been speculation about whether it is possible to form stellar-like objects from bosonic particles.
The most interesting possibility would be to construct stars from dark matter, although we do not know what dark matter is. The favoured assumption is that dark matter is made of fundamental particles, and given that it seems as likely as not that those particles might be bosons.
The properties of boson stars can be studied using a similar set of stellar structure equations to those used for more conventional stars; in particular the equations are quite similar to those describing neutron stars, and they result in similar properties.
Boson stars would be highly dense, and like neutron stars possess a maximum mass beyond which they are believed to collapse into black holes.
A related idea is that dark matter in galaxies could be in the form of giant halos of bosun stars and that the galaxies are embedded within those ‘halos’.
Just as helium nuclei (alpha particles) are bosons, four neutron stars in the same configuration as the two protons and two neutrons of the helium nucleus can form a boson star that resembles an alpha particle.
Four neutron stars stuck together like this would share similar properties with the helium nuclei, bur the most staggering similarity of all is that they will be bosons!
Like helium, they will be inert and will not want to react with other objects or matter.
They will have the properties of a superfluid, which opens up all kinds of possibilities for cosmology. The most striking of which is that as far as these dark matter boson stars are concerned, we can now describe dark matter by a single equation of state,
and that equation of state appears to be w = 0!
Giant elliptical galaxies are in fact comprised of trillions of these neutron star bosons and are much larger than the visible part of the elliptical galaxies.
Because they are bosons, collisions between these boson stars will cause waves that destructively interfere and will cancel one another out.
Toward the center of these dark matter galaxies, the density of the dispersion of the boson stars will increase, until they are nearly on top of one another near the center.
In this volume of higher density, collisions will be more frequent, and although the waves cancel each other, there will be an occasional break up of these boson stars as one or more neutron stars are dislodged in the collision.
The implication here is crucial, because when these four neutron star bosons break up they instantly stop behaving as bosons! The fragmented neutron stars and their components now suddenly behave as fermions!
The key point to remember here is that these separated neutron stars (the debris of the collisions of the boson stars) will no longer be excluded from Pauli’s principle.
Only a few percent, say four, of these boson stars within any galaxy will undergo this transformation due to collisions from bosons to fermions. That 4% will become what we perceive as our visible Universe, but the giant elliptical (spherical) galaxies in which they are embedded will forever remain invisible to our detection using any form of the electromagnetic spectrum to do so.
Physicists are in fact correct when they state that the so-called dark matter is probably non baryonic, meaning it is not made of ordinary matter.
This is because these four neutron star bosons will remain in this form for eternity, unless they collide with one another, and even then only four percent of the time will such collisions dislodge a neutron star.
So our Universe would appear to have three primary cases for equations of state, and in descending order of dominance, they are w = -1, w = 0 and w = 1/3.
Together they describe our Universe as a whole. The first one describes dark energy when using a cosmological constant. The second one describes a Universe composed of a single substance, in this case boson stars of dark matter that have the potential to change into fermions as soon as their shape is disrupted. The third case is of course, radiation, and includes all radiation in existence, caused by interactions with the fermions that make up the 4% of matter observed in the Universe.
W = 0 defines the invisible (and radio silent) giant elliptical galaxies as a whole and
w = 1/3 defines that central fraction of the dark matter boson star galaxy where collisions take place that lead to the implementation of the second law of thermodynamics for that fraction of boson stars which have disintegrated into fermions.
The single, double and triple neutron stars that make up the four percent of debris will go on to become single, double and triple bright stars as their composition and position in space-time empowers them to become obvious candidates to facilitate such a manifestation.
In conclusion, it is important to remember that a neutron star has the correct composition to become once again an ordinary star like our sun, as long as its neutrons can be released they will become what are known as free neutrons.
So, in effect, those 4% of fermions that make up all ordinary matter have the ability to run the entire cycle of the second law of thermodynamics and end up again as neutron stars, which can in turn transform into ordinary stars that convert hydrogen into helium, while changing a small amount of their mass into energy we perceive as photons as well as account for all the gas and dust in the Universe.
All that we observe in our Universe is merely the debris near the cores of galaxies that are much larger than the parts we do observe.
Monday 25 January 2010
Sunday 24 January 2010
What Really caused the CMBR?
The most distant image that we have of the Universe is an image taken by a satelite called WMAP.
The image is of what is called the last scattering surface of the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMBR.
This 'snapshot' is at a distance of just under 13.5 billion lightyears away.
It is an image of the first 'light' of the Universe.
The CMBR accounts for 99% of all the photons in the Universe.
All the light, heat, and other electromagnetic waves from all the stars and galaxies out there, make up the remaining one percent.
We are unable to see beyond this image of the CMBR, and yet all the processes described by the Inflationary Big Bang theory are described to have taken place beyond or 'behind' this image.
Inflation, the Big Bang, the baryogenesis that was somehow responsible for the existence ordinary matter, the nucleosynthesis of primordial helium nuclei and finally, the manufacture of the first neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium, all took place beyond the CMBR's last scattering surface.
The photons we observe in the WMAP image are the first photons that were free to travel, unhindered, throughout the Universe, and as mentioned, that light, that appears in every direction has taken more than thirteen billion years to reach us.
When the photons first left the final scattering surface, they were quite cool by cosmic standards.
The surface of the Sun is about 5500 degrees, while the photons. Of the CMBR's last scattering surface photons were about 3000 degrees when they were first sent on their way. That is all we really can tell about them.
What all this really means is that anything could have happened to cause the exitence of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
It does not mean or prove that the events as described by the Big Bang theory actually took place as many physicists will have us believe.
What do you think caused the cosmic microwaave background radiation?
The image is of what is called the last scattering surface of the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMBR.
This 'snapshot' is at a distance of just under 13.5 billion lightyears away.
It is an image of the first 'light' of the Universe.
The CMBR accounts for 99% of all the photons in the Universe.
All the light, heat, and other electromagnetic waves from all the stars and galaxies out there, make up the remaining one percent.
We are unable to see beyond this image of the CMBR, and yet all the processes described by the Inflationary Big Bang theory are described to have taken place beyond or 'behind' this image.
Inflation, the Big Bang, the baryogenesis that was somehow responsible for the existence ordinary matter, the nucleosynthesis of primordial helium nuclei and finally, the manufacture of the first neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium, all took place beyond the CMBR's last scattering surface.
The photons we observe in the WMAP image are the first photons that were free to travel, unhindered, throughout the Universe, and as mentioned, that light, that appears in every direction has taken more than thirteen billion years to reach us.
When the photons first left the final scattering surface, they were quite cool by cosmic standards.
The surface of the Sun is about 5500 degrees, while the photons. Of the CMBR's last scattering surface photons were about 3000 degrees when they were first sent on their way. That is all we really can tell about them.
What all this really means is that anything could have happened to cause the exitence of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
It does not mean or prove that the events as described by the Big Bang theory actually took place as many physicists will have us believe.
What do you think caused the cosmic microwaave background radiation?
Is entropy important?
A combustion engine is 50% efficient at converting its energy,
An electric motor (or generator) is 80% efficient in doing the same.
How efficient are we humans at converting our energy?
How much negative entropy do we need to consume in order not to have too high a gain in entropy?
Sunlight, water, food (and money) are all forms of negative entropy of necessity for humans to exist.
If we are deprived of any one of these, we will reach maximum entropy very quickly. Our individual entropy is finite.
Maximum human efficiency is attained when we use negative entropy, in an optimum way, without waste.
Indeed, over-exposure to negative entropy is just as bad for us, and will affect our efficiency rate, and thereby our optimum running condition.
If we are able to control our negative entropy efficiently, we will be able to run at our peak potential.
The same holds true for anything we do; for all we do, is expend energy.
Therefore, we should conserve energy, for it saves our precious entropy.
In this way, we can have far more opportunities to do, or expend energy on, the things we really want to. This is what we should do, while we slowly but surely, navigate the path of life until we reach maximum entropy. This is the realm of fulfillment and happiness we should strive for before we expire.
This is how the second law of thermodynamics affects all matter, and everything we humans, achieve.
An electric motor (or generator) is 80% efficient in doing the same.
How efficient are we humans at converting our energy?
How much negative entropy do we need to consume in order not to have too high a gain in entropy?
Sunlight, water, food (and money) are all forms of negative entropy of necessity for humans to exist.
If we are deprived of any one of these, we will reach maximum entropy very quickly. Our individual entropy is finite.
Maximum human efficiency is attained when we use negative entropy, in an optimum way, without waste.
Indeed, over-exposure to negative entropy is just as bad for us, and will affect our efficiency rate, and thereby our optimum running condition.
If we are able to control our negative entropy efficiently, we will be able to run at our peak potential.
The same holds true for anything we do; for all we do, is expend energy.
Therefore, we should conserve energy, for it saves our precious entropy.
In this way, we can have far more opportunities to do, or expend energy on, the things we really want to. This is what we should do, while we slowly but surely, navigate the path of life until we reach maximum entropy. This is the realm of fulfillment and happiness we should strive for before we expire.
This is how the second law of thermodynamics affects all matter, and everything we humans, achieve.
Owed to Neutrons
Someone once said that ‘discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.’
It is the purpose of this book to propose some such thinking, in the hope that it can be picked up on by some giant in the field of cosmology, who might put it through various tests to disprove its ideas. Or not.
It has also been said that the fate of a new idea in science is first to dismissed as ridiculous, then to become a revolutionary new theory, and finally to be regarded as self-evident.
The ideas proposed are those of a layperson, neither schooled in physics nor writing, but whose passion for popular science books, especially those on particle physics and cosmology, has culminated in this attempt to join the debate on the origin of the universe.
The subject of the book is the neutron star, the densest form of matter known in the entire Universe, and its leading character is the yet unseen neutron, the particle with the highest threshold temperature. The threshold temperature is the temperature at which all of the rest mass of a piece of matter will transform into energy.
Discovered in 1964 by Jocelyn Bell, a neutron star is the imploded core left at the center of a supernova explosion, which supposedly signals the end of the life of stars of a certain size.
Not Jocelyn Bell, or indeed anyone else, has ever seen a neutron star. Evidence for their existence comes mainly from x-rays emitted by matter that has accreted around the magnetic poles of these stars that spin around at thousands of times a second.
For nearly thirty years now, scientists have been studying the pulsar (the name given to a rotating neutron star) discovered by Bell. They have now discovered that this pulsar is one of a rotating binary pair of neutron stars.
This leads us to the observation that although double and triple ordinary stars have been studied in detail, we never seem to read about triple neutron stars.
There seems to be no reason why such families of neutron stars might not exist.
The most obvious name for them would be ‘trinaries’.
The interesting thing about such a trio, locked in dance, is that they would almost certainly cause what is called a ‘black hole’. A black hole is considered to form when a massive star implodes and its core contains the mass of eight or nines times that of our Sun. Three neutron stars would have a mass of about nine Suns! So could trinaries also be candidates for black holes, or even worse, could stellar black holes be triplets of neutron stars? Stellar black holes are believed to be able to merge with one another, and thereby grow in density. Could this indicate that triplets of neutron stars are selectively gregarious, and will merge with other ‘trinaries’?
Out of every 100 newly born stars systems, 40 are triple and 60 are double or binaries.
Of the 40 triplets, 25 are long lived and relatively stable, while 15 of them promptly eject one of their stars to provide 15 binaries and 15 single stars.
Close encounters between stars then disrupt more of the binary pairs, increasing the proportion of single stars around in the galaxy at large.
Each binary yields two single stars and just 10 such disruptions changes the ratio to
25 : 65 : 35, making single stars more common than triplets.
This ratio makes it possible to speculate that triplets of neutron stars might be responsible for providing the helium abundance thought to have been produced in the early universe by a process known as nucleosynthesis.
These stable triplets might often possess the property that all three of the stars are the same size and of similar age. It is then probable that all three would have ended their nuclear fusion stages at a similar time. The fact that the ‘event horizon’, or area around a black hole from where no light can escape, somehow prevents the ‘contents’ of a black hole from reacting or interacting with material ‘outside’ of the black hole’s event horizon, might be the mechanism whereby, in a ‘bouncing’ Universe, the right proportion of ordinary matter to form helium abundances observed, was stored in this way until the black holes eventually ‘dissolved’ to expose their neutron star bounty.
In the likely event that protons will never decay outside the nucleus of atoms, the Universe could expand until all the matter within it will have broken up into protons, electrons and radiation. Excluding, of course, the trinary neutron stars locked up as black holes.
The iron ‘skin’ of a neutron star can, at a specific temperature, dissolve into helium nuclei. This process will be discussed later. Helium nuclei will not join up with anything, so it will remain separate from the protons and electrons that, upon further cooling, will form hydrogen atoms. These will go on to form hydrogen molecules made up of two H atoms. Once the skin of the neutron stars have fissioned into helium nuclei, the remaining neutrons forming the body of each neutron star will start to disperse as free neutrons because the mass of the remaining star will be less than the ‘Jeans mass’ required to hold a neutron star together.
At the right temperature, just a little below 1000 million degrees Kelvin, nucleosynthesis of helium takes place. This happens to be the temperature at the core of a neutron star! So within a few minutes, all the neutrons of the star’s core could change into helium nuclei. During this process, the observed abundances of deuterium (also known as heavy hydrogen) could also be produced.
The objective of the above postulation is to show that the Universe we presently occupy, might have come about in a manner other than described in the many versions of ‘Big Bang’ theories of evolution of the Universe.
We find that we have precisely the required ingredients for an early universe and we even have helium clumped into fairly dense clumps by way of the dispersed cores of the neutron trinaries. These may well be dense enough to allow star formation to take place in the manner that astrophysicists say that it does, by the coalescing of hydrogen and helium gas that then collapses under its own gravity to form a new dense core where fusion reactions can commence at the correct temperature.
It is the purpose of this book to propose some such thinking, in the hope that it can be picked up on by some giant in the field of cosmology, who might put it through various tests to disprove its ideas. Or not.
It has also been said that the fate of a new idea in science is first to dismissed as ridiculous, then to become a revolutionary new theory, and finally to be regarded as self-evident.
The ideas proposed are those of a layperson, neither schooled in physics nor writing, but whose passion for popular science books, especially those on particle physics and cosmology, has culminated in this attempt to join the debate on the origin of the universe.
The subject of the book is the neutron star, the densest form of matter known in the entire Universe, and its leading character is the yet unseen neutron, the particle with the highest threshold temperature. The threshold temperature is the temperature at which all of the rest mass of a piece of matter will transform into energy.
Discovered in 1964 by Jocelyn Bell, a neutron star is the imploded core left at the center of a supernova explosion, which supposedly signals the end of the life of stars of a certain size.
Not Jocelyn Bell, or indeed anyone else, has ever seen a neutron star. Evidence for their existence comes mainly from x-rays emitted by matter that has accreted around the magnetic poles of these stars that spin around at thousands of times a second.
For nearly thirty years now, scientists have been studying the pulsar (the name given to a rotating neutron star) discovered by Bell. They have now discovered that this pulsar is one of a rotating binary pair of neutron stars.
This leads us to the observation that although double and triple ordinary stars have been studied in detail, we never seem to read about triple neutron stars.
There seems to be no reason why such families of neutron stars might not exist.
The most obvious name for them would be ‘trinaries’.
The interesting thing about such a trio, locked in dance, is that they would almost certainly cause what is called a ‘black hole’. A black hole is considered to form when a massive star implodes and its core contains the mass of eight or nines times that of our Sun. Three neutron stars would have a mass of about nine Suns! So could trinaries also be candidates for black holes, or even worse, could stellar black holes be triplets of neutron stars? Stellar black holes are believed to be able to merge with one another, and thereby grow in density. Could this indicate that triplets of neutron stars are selectively gregarious, and will merge with other ‘trinaries’?
Out of every 100 newly born stars systems, 40 are triple and 60 are double or binaries.
Of the 40 triplets, 25 are long lived and relatively stable, while 15 of them promptly eject one of their stars to provide 15 binaries and 15 single stars.
Close encounters between stars then disrupt more of the binary pairs, increasing the proportion of single stars around in the galaxy at large.
Each binary yields two single stars and just 10 such disruptions changes the ratio to
25 : 65 : 35, making single stars more common than triplets.
This ratio makes it possible to speculate that triplets of neutron stars might be responsible for providing the helium abundance thought to have been produced in the early universe by a process known as nucleosynthesis.
These stable triplets might often possess the property that all three of the stars are the same size and of similar age. It is then probable that all three would have ended their nuclear fusion stages at a similar time. The fact that the ‘event horizon’, or area around a black hole from where no light can escape, somehow prevents the ‘contents’ of a black hole from reacting or interacting with material ‘outside’ of the black hole’s event horizon, might be the mechanism whereby, in a ‘bouncing’ Universe, the right proportion of ordinary matter to form helium abundances observed, was stored in this way until the black holes eventually ‘dissolved’ to expose their neutron star bounty.
In the likely event that protons will never decay outside the nucleus of atoms, the Universe could expand until all the matter within it will have broken up into protons, electrons and radiation. Excluding, of course, the trinary neutron stars locked up as black holes.
The iron ‘skin’ of a neutron star can, at a specific temperature, dissolve into helium nuclei. This process will be discussed later. Helium nuclei will not join up with anything, so it will remain separate from the protons and electrons that, upon further cooling, will form hydrogen atoms. These will go on to form hydrogen molecules made up of two H atoms. Once the skin of the neutron stars have fissioned into helium nuclei, the remaining neutrons forming the body of each neutron star will start to disperse as free neutrons because the mass of the remaining star will be less than the ‘Jeans mass’ required to hold a neutron star together.
At the right temperature, just a little below 1000 million degrees Kelvin, nucleosynthesis of helium takes place. This happens to be the temperature at the core of a neutron star! So within a few minutes, all the neutrons of the star’s core could change into helium nuclei. During this process, the observed abundances of deuterium (also known as heavy hydrogen) could also be produced.
The objective of the above postulation is to show that the Universe we presently occupy, might have come about in a manner other than described in the many versions of ‘Big Bang’ theories of evolution of the Universe.
We find that we have precisely the required ingredients for an early universe and we even have helium clumped into fairly dense clumps by way of the dispersed cores of the neutron trinaries. These may well be dense enough to allow star formation to take place in the manner that astrophysicists say that it does, by the coalescing of hydrogen and helium gas that then collapses under its own gravity to form a new dense core where fusion reactions can commence at the correct temperature.
The Strange Case of when the Chicken is the Egg.
From what I’ve read, Fritz Zwicky was not a popular character in the annals of physics history. He is said to have called everyone around him a ‘spherical bastard’.
When someone plucked up the courage to ask him why he regarded people in this way, Zwicky answered that ”no matter which way he viewed his contemporaries, they were all still bastards!” Seeing that almost every popular physics book I’ve ever read tells that story, I decided to include it in a rather novel way it in this story.
Another reason why Zwicky may have been unpopular is because he is the physicist who predicted the existence of dense dark (black) stars called neutron stars and he also determined that some invisible matter (we just call it dark matter) must exist in huge quantities all over the universe. So he’s left all us poor ******** to figure out what these peculiar entities might be. We are still trying, very hard.
Then there were of course Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr who in turn discovered general relativity theory and the mechanics of the quantum.
Just as Einstein and Bohr never stopped arguing, these two theories just don’t seem to meet and synchronize. (Although Einstein helped discover quantum physics, he never liked it.) Albert spent the rest of his life trying to unify gravity with electromagnetism.
Needless to say, he was unsuccessful in spite of all his efforts.
Then the other two forces of nature were discovered. They are the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force.
Since the time of their discovery right up until the present, physicists are still wracking their wonderful brains in an attempt to unify these four forces into an harmonious coherent whole. All they’ve managed to discover is a black hole.
They are still looking for a theory of ‘quantum gravity’.
Physics is in a mess, and as physicist and mathematician Peter Woit points out in the title of his book, the physicists are “ Not Even Wrong”. He also points out they are stuck.
What follow are some of my own views on why they are stuck.
Einstein’s classic formula, e = mc² sounds great and at a stroke elegantly explains how energy and matter are interchangeable, but there is also a deeper and more down to earth implication to this most famous formula in all of science. It is one we should bear in mind when we contemplate the origin of our Universe, and indeed, whether it had one!
The nuclear fission bomb (incorrectly called an atomic bomb) that annihilated Hiroshima was a huge lump of metal with some explosives wrapped around a smaller piece ( about the size of an orange ) of radioactive uranium. This great lump, I think it was called 'Fat Boy', needed the largest bomber aircraft of the time to deliver it to Japan.
The point of this most tragic analogy is that it demonstrates, explosively, the subtle difference between matter and energy.
Physicists might immediately protest that there is no difference.
The amount of matter or mass that was transformed into energy during the Hiroshima explosion, was less than an ounce! Less than a few grams! Talk about “three quarks for muster mark”! This is clearly a tiny fraction of ‘Fat Boy’.
This shows us that a grain of dust, when transformed entirely into energy, will make one hell of a bang.
Now a hydrogen bomb is a fusion device (as opposed to fission), and the fusion of
nuclear particles require a much higher energy than the fission of nuclear particles do.
The resultant energy is also far more devastating than the fission bomb of Hiroshima.
Yet even in fusion explosions or controlled fusion reactors like our Sun, and all the stars, only a very small proportion of matter ( hydrogen and helium) transforms into energy. However the small amount of matter that does transform, results in enormous amounts of energy.
The reason for this huge energy is simply that the speed of light, the constant c, when squared is such a huge number.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment we can undertake, but I must warn you, don’t try this at home, you could blow up your house!
Imagine we take a single grain of sugar, weigh it, and multiply its mass by three hundred thousand times three hundred thousand and your answer will be the amount of energy stored in that grain of sugar! It is a huge amount of energy, enough to blow up one’s own house and probably a couple of neighboring ones as well.
Don’t worry though, because you cannot really instantly transform the entire grain of sugar into pure energy, so that e actually equals mc².
There is only one known way of reducing our imagined sugar grain entirely into energy and that would be by bringing it in contact with a similar grain of antisugar!
If you were to witness such a duel, between a grain of sugar and its antigrain, you would not be safe unless you witnessed the duel from a considerable distance.
They will annihilate one another entirely in a huge explosion leaving just energy, which will dissipate after a short time, leaving no trace of anything. Only in such an instance does mass ever transform entirely into energy.
So the biggest explosion you could ever hope for can be found in this next thought experiment.
Let’s say two countries shared a common enemy by way of another country. Imagine that the enemy country is geographically midway between the countries of the two allies. Now if the allies were to simultaneously send off a missile towards the ‘baddies’, so that the two missiles collided head on over the enemy country, depending on what the missiles are made from, the enemy and country would be obliterated. (Such is the power of the explosion we are imagining!)
These two missiles will be very similar to one another although they need not contain very technically advanced munitions, they could simply be filled with sand, for example.
The only prerequisite is that the one missile should be filled with sand and the other one with antisand! ‘Yet they(the physicists) agree…’
End of story. They will annihilate on contact, transforming completely into energy, and cause the enemy country to transform into a country sized crater for the victors to gape at in awe. As ridiculous as this sounds, this is what will happen!
This is the real explosive power behind e=mc². All the other bombs we have discussed, and our Sun and all the stars, do not transform all their matter into energy.
They all only transform a tiny little bit of mass into energy! This is important, as we shall see later.
What they really do is change some matter into other matter, and in so doing, they transform a tiny amount of matter completely into energy. They do it slowly.
The reason for the volatile descriptions used above, is to use those facts to argue a far more delicate point. It is that we believe, or are expected to believe, that our entire Universe and all its contents were the result of such a Big Bang resulting from an amount of energy so enormous that the only way we can imagine precisely how much energy, is to imagine that our universe came into contact with its doppelganger counterpart, the anti-universe, and they annihilated one another.
Then we are also expected to believe that only our Universe emerged from that lot and the anti-universe mysteriously disappeared! ‘Yup, just check the numbers…’
It is the equivalent of saying that all the matter in our Universe came into contact with an equal amount of anti-matter and annihilated in the Big Bang to provide the required amount of energy to recreate only one half of the matter (the real matter). That half is now our Universe.
No wonder the physicists are puzzled about what could have happened to the anti-matter and especially why the half that was left, is the matter we know and love!
Going back to the analogy of the two sand filled missiles that collided over enemy territory, believing the result of the Big Bang, would be like having to believe the Victors would have witnessed enemy combatants and civilians alike, emerging out of the crater that used to be their country unscathed, each carrying a load of bricks and seeking refuge to build new shelters! Not very likely, to say the least!
“The only real way to think of the Universe, is to think of its contents, the mass of its matter, and the consequential forces that manifest from its interaction with itself, leading to the energy we perceive as photons which are responsible for our current cycle of light.”
The mass of our entire Universe is equivalent to an unbelievable amount of energy when multiplied by ‘c’ squared.
What I’m really trying to point out here is that the lives of physicists would far more enjoyable if they no longer persisted in looking for the origin of all our matter in such a vast “crater” as was left by Big Bang cosmology. Keep the cosmology, but lose the crater!
I’m asking, why blow up the matter in our Universe just to ‘create’ enough energy to ‘create’ another Universe filled with more matter, of which tiny pieces are indeed transformed entirely into energy over a long time?
I am entirely confident that we are not going to collide with our anti-universe, and never could have because that’s just plain stupid, but I am also confident that without such an annihilation, the amount of energy required to bring this universe’s matter into existence, could not exist.
Why can we not think of ‘our Universe’ to be merely behaving as a collection of so many stars, a bunch of planets, a few fission bombs, a few fusion bombs, an anthropic scattering of fission reactors (nuclear power stations), gas and diesel engines and finally, a few grains of sugar or salt???
For we do live in such a Universe, and all of the kinetic processes that take place in it turn ordinary matter into other ordinary matter, and in the process, transform the tiniest amount of ordinary matter into energy. It looks as if we have a false start!
Why don’t we start there, by saying that the irony of matter and the laws of nature, is that it may be designed to evolve with this ‘inefficiency’ built in as a prerequisite from the start.
After all, we know that apart from a few positrons and neutral pions (and the like) occasionally hitting the atmosphere of any planet that may have one, even a catastrophic failure of the components of our Universe will still yield other components, and fortunately they will predominantly be ordinary matter components.
What does all this mean?
Well, it means that matter might have always existed, and because of m = e/c², will continue to do so for a very long time, and when the fuel of all the stars is depleted, consider that matter, with the help of gravity and energy, will provide the new fuel for a further cycle of light.
“Unless we annihilate it, (and we all know how to do that now), the matter in our Universe will not all turn into energy!”
Why should my hot cup of tea, after succumbing to the second law of thermodynamics, be any different in that respect to the universe as a whole?
After all, I can still pick up my cup and drink the now cold tea or I could leave it outside to warm up in the sunlight. The negative entropy (new, useful energy) of the fusion process taking place in the Sun’s core will heat my cup of tea, and it will do so many times until the Sun’s fusion stops. Only then, will I really need to decide if I should drink it cold, or find a new sun!
Why, then, do we omit to think that a similar store of negative entropy could reheat the entire universe?
There is certainly a quantum chance of uncertainty that it could be so. Could reserves of energy be hidden from all detection (by us) and is it possible the answers lie somewhere in the work of Fritz Zwicky?
Neutron stars could be the ultimate ‘standard candles’ of our Universe in that they might renew themselves, and with the assistance of gravity, turn again into the 'first bright stars’. Now isn’t that a wonderful thing to think about?
Its so much easier than trying to puzzle out, as great minds are doing in all the world’s seats of learning, at present, “where all the anti-matter has disappeared to, that would be needed to create all the energy that would be needed to ‘create’all the matter we see (and are), and how come only ordinary matter survived?”
No wonder they are uncomfortable in accepting the odds of 2 billion to one that it happened that way, backed up by the incredible Richard Feynman’s QED.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that QED (quantum electrodynamics) deals only with the interaction of photons and charged particles.
QED is a magnificent theory, and so is Paul Dirac’s discovery of ‘anti-matter’ in the form of a positron. A neutron star has the neutral components that can transform into charged particles for QED to do its thing, but there will not be much anti-matter made in the process. It will just be matter transforming into other matter, with only a miniscule mass loss in the form of energy.
We should keep up with the times, (physics included) and say that maybe our whole universe is “green”. It may be that our Universe has a ‘hydrogen footprint’ rather than a ‘carbon footprint’ and that by recycling the neutrons in neutron stars, it can keep its ‘hydrogen footprint’ in check.
These dense stars might be ‘cosmic free range eggs’ that can provide new hydrogen and helium where and when it is needed, ‘to turn into the chickens that laid them.’
By that I mean that neutron stars contain the right ingredients to turn into bright stars.
We might say of our Universe, philosophically, that ‘without the glowing of the golden geese, we shall have no golden eggs, and without the golden eggs, we shall have no golden geese.’
Without the contents of the Universe, and the second law of thermodynamics running its course, we shall have no ‘golden eggs’ in the form of neutron stars.
This would indeed be a very ‘green’ process, because every single morsel of the neutron star, including its shell, grows into a sun or star with the aid of gravity.
It is also the most ‘fuel efficient’ way that the Universe could do such a transformation.
I hope these arguments make it evident that the so-called ‘arrow of time’ is mono-directional and that we simply find ourselves at present in a state called ‘far from equilibrium’ in terms of the second law of thermodynamics, and it is possible that the Universe will not reach a state of ‘maximum entropy’. Its matter will not all be converted into energy in one go (or the other way round) but only a little bit of it will do so all of the time.
There will always be a store of negative entropy (renewable energy) hiding in the invisible form of neutron stars, waiting to set another cycle of the second law in motion, in the same direction as before.
In conclusion, a little nursery rhyme about it all could go like this,
Ra! Ra! The answers all hide within a star
Oh twinkle, twinkle, I stand in awe of what you are
For without you the Cosmos cannot be
And that would of course include, not just me.
So is it e=mc² or m=e/c² ?
We’ll just have to wait and see.
From what I’ve read, Fritz Zwicky was not a popular character in the annals of physics history. He is said to have called everyone around him a ‘spherical bastard’.
When someone plucked up the courage to ask him why he regarded people in this way, Zwicky answered that ”no matter which way he viewed his contemporaries, they were all still bastards!” Seeing that almost every popular physics book I’ve ever read tells that story, I decided to include it in a rather novel way it in this story.
Another reason why Zwicky may have been unpopular is because he is the physicist who predicted the existence of dense dark (black) stars called neutron stars and he also determined that some invisible matter (we just call it dark matter) must exist in huge quantities all over the universe. So he’s left all us poor ******** to figure out what these peculiar entities might be. We are still trying, very hard.
Then there were of course Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr who in turn discovered general relativity theory and the mechanics of the quantum.
Just as Einstein and Bohr never stopped arguing, these two theories just don’t seem to meet and synchronize. (Although Einstein helped discover quantum physics, he never liked it.) Albert spent the rest of his life trying to unify gravity with electromagnetism.
Needless to say, he was unsuccessful in spite of all his efforts.
Then the other two forces of nature were discovered. They are the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force.
Since the time of their discovery right up until the present, physicists are still wracking their wonderful brains in an attempt to unify these four forces into an harmonious coherent whole. All they’ve managed to discover is a black hole.
They are still looking for a theory of ‘quantum gravity’.
Physics is in a mess, and as physicist and mathematician Peter Woit points out in the title of his book, the physicists are “ Not Even Wrong”. He also points out they are stuck.
What follow are some of my own views on why they are stuck.
Einstein’s classic formula, e = mc² sounds great and at a stroke elegantly explains how energy and matter are interchangeable, but there is also a deeper and more down to earth implication to this most famous formula in all of science. It is one we should bear in mind when we contemplate the origin of our Universe, and indeed, whether it had one!
The nuclear fission bomb (incorrectly called an atomic bomb) that annihilated Hiroshima was a huge lump of metal with some explosives wrapped around a smaller piece ( about the size of an orange ) of radioactive uranium. This great lump, I think it was called 'Fat Boy', needed the largest bomber aircraft of the time to deliver it to Japan.
The point of this most tragic analogy is that it demonstrates, explosively, the subtle difference between matter and energy.
Physicists might immediately protest that there is no difference.
The amount of matter or mass that was transformed into energy during the Hiroshima explosion, was less than an ounce! Less than a few grams! Talk about “three quarks for muster mark”! This is clearly a tiny fraction of ‘Fat Boy’.
This shows us that a grain of dust, when transformed entirely into energy, will make one hell of a bang.
Now a hydrogen bomb is a fusion device (as opposed to fission), and the fusion of
nuclear particles require a much higher energy than the fission of nuclear particles do.
The resultant energy is also far more devastating than the fission bomb of Hiroshima.
Yet even in fusion explosions or controlled fusion reactors like our Sun, and all the stars, only a very small proportion of matter ( hydrogen and helium) transforms into energy. However the small amount of matter that does transform, results in enormous amounts of energy.
The reason for this huge energy is simply that the speed of light, the constant c, when squared is such a huge number.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment we can undertake, but I must warn you, don’t try this at home, you could blow up your house!
Imagine we take a single grain of sugar, weigh it, and multiply its mass by three hundred thousand times three hundred thousand and your answer will be the amount of energy stored in that grain of sugar! It is a huge amount of energy, enough to blow up one’s own house and probably a couple of neighboring ones as well.
Don’t worry though, because you cannot really instantly transform the entire grain of sugar into pure energy, so that e actually equals mc².
There is only one known way of reducing our imagined sugar grain entirely into energy and that would be by bringing it in contact with a similar grain of antisugar!
If you were to witness such a duel, between a grain of sugar and its antigrain, you would not be safe unless you witnessed the duel from a considerable distance.
They will annihilate one another entirely in a huge explosion leaving just energy, which will dissipate after a short time, leaving no trace of anything. Only in such an instance does mass ever transform entirely into energy.
So the biggest explosion you could ever hope for can be found in this next thought experiment.
Let’s say two countries shared a common enemy by way of another country. Imagine that the enemy country is geographically midway between the countries of the two allies. Now if the allies were to simultaneously send off a missile towards the ‘baddies’, so that the two missiles collided head on over the enemy country, depending on what the missiles are made from, the enemy and country would be obliterated. (Such is the power of the explosion we are imagining!)
These two missiles will be very similar to one another although they need not contain very technically advanced munitions, they could simply be filled with sand, for example.
The only prerequisite is that the one missile should be filled with sand and the other one with antisand! ‘Yet they(the physicists) agree…’
End of story. They will annihilate on contact, transforming completely into energy, and cause the enemy country to transform into a country sized crater for the victors to gape at in awe. As ridiculous as this sounds, this is what will happen!
This is the real explosive power behind e=mc². All the other bombs we have discussed, and our Sun and all the stars, do not transform all their matter into energy.
They all only transform a tiny little bit of mass into energy! This is important, as we shall see later.
What they really do is change some matter into other matter, and in so doing, they transform a tiny amount of matter completely into energy. They do it slowly.
The reason for the volatile descriptions used above, is to use those facts to argue a far more delicate point. It is that we believe, or are expected to believe, that our entire Universe and all its contents were the result of such a Big Bang resulting from an amount of energy so enormous that the only way we can imagine precisely how much energy, is to imagine that our universe came into contact with its doppelganger counterpart, the anti-universe, and they annihilated one another.
Then we are also expected to believe that only our Universe emerged from that lot and the anti-universe mysteriously disappeared! ‘Yup, just check the numbers…’
It is the equivalent of saying that all the matter in our Universe came into contact with an equal amount of anti-matter and annihilated in the Big Bang to provide the required amount of energy to recreate only one half of the matter (the real matter). That half is now our Universe.
No wonder the physicists are puzzled about what could have happened to the anti-matter and especially why the half that was left, is the matter we know and love!
Going back to the analogy of the two sand filled missiles that collided over enemy territory, believing the result of the Big Bang, would be like having to believe the Victors would have witnessed enemy combatants and civilians alike, emerging out of the crater that used to be their country unscathed, each carrying a load of bricks and seeking refuge to build new shelters! Not very likely, to say the least!
“The only real way to think of the Universe, is to think of its contents, the mass of its matter, and the consequential forces that manifest from its interaction with itself, leading to the energy we perceive as photons which are responsible for our current cycle of light.”
The mass of our entire Universe is equivalent to an unbelievable amount of energy when multiplied by ‘c’ squared.
What I’m really trying to point out here is that the lives of physicists would far more enjoyable if they no longer persisted in looking for the origin of all our matter in such a vast “crater” as was left by Big Bang cosmology. Keep the cosmology, but lose the crater!
I’m asking, why blow up the matter in our Universe just to ‘create’ enough energy to ‘create’ another Universe filled with more matter, of which tiny pieces are indeed transformed entirely into energy over a long time?
I am entirely confident that we are not going to collide with our anti-universe, and never could have because that’s just plain stupid, but I am also confident that without such an annihilation, the amount of energy required to bring this universe’s matter into existence, could not exist.
Why can we not think of ‘our Universe’ to be merely behaving as a collection of so many stars, a bunch of planets, a few fission bombs, a few fusion bombs, an anthropic scattering of fission reactors (nuclear power stations), gas and diesel engines and finally, a few grains of sugar or salt???
For we do live in such a Universe, and all of the kinetic processes that take place in it turn ordinary matter into other ordinary matter, and in the process, transform the tiniest amount of ordinary matter into energy. It looks as if we have a false start!
Why don’t we start there, by saying that the irony of matter and the laws of nature, is that it may be designed to evolve with this ‘inefficiency’ built in as a prerequisite from the start.
After all, we know that apart from a few positrons and neutral pions (and the like) occasionally hitting the atmosphere of any planet that may have one, even a catastrophic failure of the components of our Universe will still yield other components, and fortunately they will predominantly be ordinary matter components.
What does all this mean?
Well, it means that matter might have always existed, and because of m = e/c², will continue to do so for a very long time, and when the fuel of all the stars is depleted, consider that matter, with the help of gravity and energy, will provide the new fuel for a further cycle of light.
“Unless we annihilate it, (and we all know how to do that now), the matter in our Universe will not all turn into energy!”
Why should my hot cup of tea, after succumbing to the second law of thermodynamics, be any different in that respect to the universe as a whole?
After all, I can still pick up my cup and drink the now cold tea or I could leave it outside to warm up in the sunlight. The negative entropy (new, useful energy) of the fusion process taking place in the Sun’s core will heat my cup of tea, and it will do so many times until the Sun’s fusion stops. Only then, will I really need to decide if I should drink it cold, or find a new sun!
Why, then, do we omit to think that a similar store of negative entropy could reheat the entire universe?
There is certainly a quantum chance of uncertainty that it could be so. Could reserves of energy be hidden from all detection (by us) and is it possible the answers lie somewhere in the work of Fritz Zwicky?
Neutron stars could be the ultimate ‘standard candles’ of our Universe in that they might renew themselves, and with the assistance of gravity, turn again into the 'first bright stars’. Now isn’t that a wonderful thing to think about?
Its so much easier than trying to puzzle out, as great minds are doing in all the world’s seats of learning, at present, “where all the anti-matter has disappeared to, that would be needed to create all the energy that would be needed to ‘create’all the matter we see (and are), and how come only ordinary matter survived?”
No wonder they are uncomfortable in accepting the odds of 2 billion to one that it happened that way, backed up by the incredible Richard Feynman’s QED.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that QED (quantum electrodynamics) deals only with the interaction of photons and charged particles.
QED is a magnificent theory, and so is Paul Dirac’s discovery of ‘anti-matter’ in the form of a positron. A neutron star has the neutral components that can transform into charged particles for QED to do its thing, but there will not be much anti-matter made in the process. It will just be matter transforming into other matter, with only a miniscule mass loss in the form of energy.
We should keep up with the times, (physics included) and say that maybe our whole universe is “green”. It may be that our Universe has a ‘hydrogen footprint’ rather than a ‘carbon footprint’ and that by recycling the neutrons in neutron stars, it can keep its ‘hydrogen footprint’ in check.
These dense stars might be ‘cosmic free range eggs’ that can provide new hydrogen and helium where and when it is needed, ‘to turn into the chickens that laid them.’
By that I mean that neutron stars contain the right ingredients to turn into bright stars.
We might say of our Universe, philosophically, that ‘without the glowing of the golden geese, we shall have no golden eggs, and without the golden eggs, we shall have no golden geese.’
Without the contents of the Universe, and the second law of thermodynamics running its course, we shall have no ‘golden eggs’ in the form of neutron stars.
This would indeed be a very ‘green’ process, because every single morsel of the neutron star, including its shell, grows into a sun or star with the aid of gravity.
It is also the most ‘fuel efficient’ way that the Universe could do such a transformation.
I hope these arguments make it evident that the so-called ‘arrow of time’ is mono-directional and that we simply find ourselves at present in a state called ‘far from equilibrium’ in terms of the second law of thermodynamics, and it is possible that the Universe will not reach a state of ‘maximum entropy’. Its matter will not all be converted into energy in one go (or the other way round) but only a little bit of it will do so all of the time.
There will always be a store of negative entropy (renewable energy) hiding in the invisible form of neutron stars, waiting to set another cycle of the second law in motion, in the same direction as before.
In conclusion, a little nursery rhyme about it all could go like this,
Ra! Ra! The answers all hide within a star
Oh twinkle, twinkle, I stand in awe of what you are
For without you the Cosmos cannot be
And that would of course include, not just me.
So is it e=mc² or m=e/c² ?
We’ll just have to wait and see.
We are Cameras Obscura
THE SIGHTS ARE SET
When setting nature on its current cyclic course, the Creator clearly made the following choice, and might have reasoned thus;
“Since all mass and all energy do I possess,
and one is equal to the other, then
in order to induce their transformation,
I could choose to make energy from mass.
Equally, I could choose energy to make mass,
for either would invoke a constant change.
Now, if I were to choose the former,
and change matter into energy,
the heavens will light up suddenly,
as neutrons start their inevitable decay,
and form the first atoms of the universal day.
Some matter (mass) would become visible and
appear to cluster, mesmerizingly, over time.
If I were to choose the latter, using energy to make mass,
it could clearly cause a mess, as only humans shall attest.
Far more trouble than it is worth!
So I choose mass to break this paradoxical inertia.
I shall let matter slowly transform itself into energy.
Oh, what a spectacle it will be to all that might behold,
for they will see the past from their present positions,
no matter what that position is at any time in the future!
Although I make this choice, man will still not grasp it.
He will persist in thinking I chose energy to make mass!
So I have no option but to make him see things upside down, and he’ll have to flip them in his brain…”
When setting nature on its current cyclic course, the Creator clearly made the following choice, and might have reasoned thus;
“Since all mass and all energy do I possess,
and one is equal to the other, then
in order to induce their transformation,
I could choose to make energy from mass.
Equally, I could choose energy to make mass,
for either would invoke a constant change.
Now, if I were to choose the former,
and change matter into energy,
the heavens will light up suddenly,
as neutrons start their inevitable decay,
and form the first atoms of the universal day.
Some matter (mass) would become visible and
appear to cluster, mesmerizingly, over time.
If I were to choose the latter, using energy to make mass,
it could clearly cause a mess, as only humans shall attest.
Far more trouble than it is worth!
So I choose mass to break this paradoxical inertia.
I shall let matter slowly transform itself into energy.
Oh, what a spectacle it will be to all that might behold,
for they will see the past from their present positions,
no matter what that position is at any time in the future!
Although I make this choice, man will still not grasp it.
He will persist in thinking I chose energy to make mass!
So I have no option but to make him see things upside down, and he’ll have to flip them in his brain…”
Will we find the Higg's Boson?
What yet lies beyond imagination is 99% of everything, and we are still marveling at the mysteries of the one percent of which we too form an insignificant fraction.
The above sentence typifies the dilemma in which the astrophysicists, cosmologists and particle physicists, of the scientific fraternity, find themselves at present.
Yet we can peregrinate our colure in our imagination, for that is the only field of vision available that will adequately resolve the real metaphysical issues.
To enter that realm of unexplored imagination, the 99% of mass/energy of the Universe that eludes us, we need to invoke something bigger than the ‘Big Bang’ of creation, a fleeting 13.7 billion years ago, for that only describes the existence of the 1% of mass/energy that we do see in the visible Universe.
We need to think outside the bubble. Or should that be box?
The Higgs bosun, the neutralino and the axion are all enthusiastically sought by scientists today. What are these strange names and how do they impact our universe at large? Why are billions of dollars being spent by governments, on their scientists’ forlorn quests, to find these holy grails of particle physics?
It is because their mathematical deductions and quantum hypotheses on the nature of matter, bound by the rules of general relativity, have led them to this point.
They are desperate. Their investigations have opened up more riddles than they sought to answer in the first place.
Even the particles that have been discovered have not been seen, only inferred by the consequences of the behavior of the four forces of nature and the laws that they obey.
This means that even the well-known and accepted scientific facts are themselves screened from our visual perception by the veils that are the peculiarities of quantum physics and the acceptance that the only true constant is that of the speed of light.
Notions such as supersymmetry, inflation, the virtual vacuum, Bell’s theorem, the branes of M-theory, multiple universes, the big bang of creation, and the inconceivable dimensions of the string theories are all inter-connected by their common attempt to answer some of the mysteries of the nature of our Universe.
It would take years of study to come up to speed on all those subjects and even then, one would still only be as baffled as the reader of the above paragraphs might be, if that reader were not a physicist. Here follow some mysteries that baffle the physicists at present.
Scientists have created an unanswerable mystery for us (and themselves) by asking themselves the question: “How did matter obtain its mass?”
Any philosopher worth his or her salt would answer that matter has always had mass.
Scientists have answered the question by postulating that a particle called the Higgs bosun interacted with matter and bestowed it with mass, at the beginning of time. That answer has led to their problem today, and it is why they are so desperate to find the ellusive Higgs bosun, because if they do not, then the existing theory of the origin of the Universe will crumble and the whole edifice will collapse. They will have to revise their thinking.
The discoveries of the astronomers have led to two metaphysical mysteries.
They are: “Why does there not appear more visible matter in the universe, when their calculations indicate that there should?” and the most puzzling of all,
“What anti-gravitational force is causing the acceleration in the expansion of the Universe?”
They have only answered these two questions by allocating names to the answers, those being Dark matter and Dark energy. They cannot tell us what dark matter or dark energy are, so they have postulated ‘neutralinos’ for dark matter, and reintroduced Albert Einstein’s “biggest blunder of his life” in the form of the cosmological constant. They are now stuck on these two issues.
I wonder what it’s going to take for them to ‘see’ the darkness and end this epoch in the doldrums of scientific discovery. For the knockdown price of a few billion dollars, I am prepared to go out on a limb and point out to them that the answers have been available to them for a while now, as a result of their own investigations, and will become self-evident before long.
Most of the answers can be found, believe it or not, in the behavior of neutron stars.
They will find far more answers from studying the evolution of neutron stars than they will in searching for the Higg’s bosun.
Once we have surmounted the issue of hubris and insolence, and we have overcome the argument that not enough neutron stars exist to account for all the ‘dark matter’, it will be found that we have completely overlooked these obvious candidates.
Such evidence will present itself in the form of further studies of elliptical galaxies, which are currently branded as fossil galaxies.
Beware the fossil that comes to life!
Elliptical galaxies contain many trillions of stars and are comprised of mergers of hundreds of spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. Beyond their visible ellipse, they portray being enveloped by an invisible gas cloud, five times bigger than the ellipse itself, that emits x-ray photons.
These enormous fossil galaxies themselves evolve beyond the faint relics we observe at present. They disappear or become invisible! Their mass does not disappear, only their emission of light and electromagnetic radiation.
They are in reality cosmic eggs and they will not hatch until such a time as the Universe reawakens in the distant future. That will not happen until all the galaxies in the cosmos have become elliptical galaxies and all their stars emissions have faded away.
The Universe will be entirely dark but its matter will still exist, gravity still its consequence. The Universe will exist entirely of ‘dark matter’!
These dark elliptical galaxies will still undergo the proper motions of Newtonian physics, and they will merge with each other, their mergers will cause the eddies that are the residues, to form the body and visible contents of a new Universe.
The furthest reaches of our Universe, in every direction, are a sea of invisible ellipticals and clusters of elliptical galaxies that have long since turned out their lights.
There are in fact so many of them beyond the last sources of light, that their gravitational effect on the galaxies closest to them is such that they are being attracted
at ever increasing speeds, or more accurately, the space between them and those galaxies is decreasing. This would account for our sense of an accelerating expansion and would explain dark energy as just more dark matter but very far away, exerting normal gravitational attraction on massive objects in its proximity.
There exists but one particle that can survive the forces and the timescales involved in the aforementioned scenario. It is the neutron.
Its survival and stability provided in the form of neutron stars that have stopped spinning but still have enormously strong magnetic fields and are the sole inhabitants of this sterile environment of burnt out elliptical galaxies.
This is a story where more evidence can be gained from the ashes of the Universe than can be gleaned from being mesmerized by gazing at its glowing cinders.
The bright stars are a mere fraction of reality, and we need to implement senses beyond our eyes and even the electromagnetic spectrum, to really ‘see’ all of reality, whether finite or not.
There is a paradoxical link between the Higgs bosun and gravity, for according to physics, the one cannot exist without the other, yet if the Higgs bosun is abandoned, gravity will still exist.
When we discard the Higgs particle, we will realize that mass has always existed and in spite of E equals mc squared, always will.
That mass is the Pantheon that forms the Edifice that is our Universe, and it survives in the form of the least likely candidate of all, the tacit, invisible neutron. All hail the neutron.
While we are at it, we should really change its name, we should rename it with a more reverend ring to it, like ‘popsicle’ or ‘bossbit’. How about the ‘Godtron’?
This blatant scientific blasphemy is not an attack on science or any of its scientists who have contributed so much in their fields of expertise.
Rather, it provides the mental momentum that is going to be required to overcome the inertial state cosmology currently endures. This proverbial fire-cracker will bring dynamism to stagnation. It will loosen the bowels of scientific discovery.
A whole new world of scientific research will open up.
For those who cannot wait for this information to become self-evident, please send a cashier’s cheque for one billion dollars to the writer, and he will willingly part with further details and information. For those who cannot wait but whose budget does not allow such a payment, free copies are available on receipt of an email address.
An initial copy will be forwarded to the “Edge” website, for its members mutual amusement, and just in case, also to protect the property that is the imagination of the writer.
Bon Voyage…
The above sentence typifies the dilemma in which the astrophysicists, cosmologists and particle physicists, of the scientific fraternity, find themselves at present.
Yet we can peregrinate our colure in our imagination, for that is the only field of vision available that will adequately resolve the real metaphysical issues.
To enter that realm of unexplored imagination, the 99% of mass/energy of the Universe that eludes us, we need to invoke something bigger than the ‘Big Bang’ of creation, a fleeting 13.7 billion years ago, for that only describes the existence of the 1% of mass/energy that we do see in the visible Universe.
We need to think outside the bubble. Or should that be box?
The Higgs bosun, the neutralino and the axion are all enthusiastically sought by scientists today. What are these strange names and how do they impact our universe at large? Why are billions of dollars being spent by governments, on their scientists’ forlorn quests, to find these holy grails of particle physics?
It is because their mathematical deductions and quantum hypotheses on the nature of matter, bound by the rules of general relativity, have led them to this point.
They are desperate. Their investigations have opened up more riddles than they sought to answer in the first place.
Even the particles that have been discovered have not been seen, only inferred by the consequences of the behavior of the four forces of nature and the laws that they obey.
This means that even the well-known and accepted scientific facts are themselves screened from our visual perception by the veils that are the peculiarities of quantum physics and the acceptance that the only true constant is that of the speed of light.
Notions such as supersymmetry, inflation, the virtual vacuum, Bell’s theorem, the branes of M-theory, multiple universes, the big bang of creation, and the inconceivable dimensions of the string theories are all inter-connected by their common attempt to answer some of the mysteries of the nature of our Universe.
It would take years of study to come up to speed on all those subjects and even then, one would still only be as baffled as the reader of the above paragraphs might be, if that reader were not a physicist. Here follow some mysteries that baffle the physicists at present.
Scientists have created an unanswerable mystery for us (and themselves) by asking themselves the question: “How did matter obtain its mass?”
Any philosopher worth his or her salt would answer that matter has always had mass.
Scientists have answered the question by postulating that a particle called the Higgs bosun interacted with matter and bestowed it with mass, at the beginning of time. That answer has led to their problem today, and it is why they are so desperate to find the ellusive Higgs bosun, because if they do not, then the existing theory of the origin of the Universe will crumble and the whole edifice will collapse. They will have to revise their thinking.
The discoveries of the astronomers have led to two metaphysical mysteries.
They are: “Why does there not appear more visible matter in the universe, when their calculations indicate that there should?” and the most puzzling of all,
“What anti-gravitational force is causing the acceleration in the expansion of the Universe?”
They have only answered these two questions by allocating names to the answers, those being Dark matter and Dark energy. They cannot tell us what dark matter or dark energy are, so they have postulated ‘neutralinos’ for dark matter, and reintroduced Albert Einstein’s “biggest blunder of his life” in the form of the cosmological constant. They are now stuck on these two issues.
I wonder what it’s going to take for them to ‘see’ the darkness and end this epoch in the doldrums of scientific discovery. For the knockdown price of a few billion dollars, I am prepared to go out on a limb and point out to them that the answers have been available to them for a while now, as a result of their own investigations, and will become self-evident before long.
Most of the answers can be found, believe it or not, in the behavior of neutron stars.
They will find far more answers from studying the evolution of neutron stars than they will in searching for the Higg’s bosun.
Once we have surmounted the issue of hubris and insolence, and we have overcome the argument that not enough neutron stars exist to account for all the ‘dark matter’, it will be found that we have completely overlooked these obvious candidates.
Such evidence will present itself in the form of further studies of elliptical galaxies, which are currently branded as fossil galaxies.
Beware the fossil that comes to life!
Elliptical galaxies contain many trillions of stars and are comprised of mergers of hundreds of spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. Beyond their visible ellipse, they portray being enveloped by an invisible gas cloud, five times bigger than the ellipse itself, that emits x-ray photons.
These enormous fossil galaxies themselves evolve beyond the faint relics we observe at present. They disappear or become invisible! Their mass does not disappear, only their emission of light and electromagnetic radiation.
They are in reality cosmic eggs and they will not hatch until such a time as the Universe reawakens in the distant future. That will not happen until all the galaxies in the cosmos have become elliptical galaxies and all their stars emissions have faded away.
The Universe will be entirely dark but its matter will still exist, gravity still its consequence. The Universe will exist entirely of ‘dark matter’!
These dark elliptical galaxies will still undergo the proper motions of Newtonian physics, and they will merge with each other, their mergers will cause the eddies that are the residues, to form the body and visible contents of a new Universe.
The furthest reaches of our Universe, in every direction, are a sea of invisible ellipticals and clusters of elliptical galaxies that have long since turned out their lights.
There are in fact so many of them beyond the last sources of light, that their gravitational effect on the galaxies closest to them is such that they are being attracted
at ever increasing speeds, or more accurately, the space between them and those galaxies is decreasing. This would account for our sense of an accelerating expansion and would explain dark energy as just more dark matter but very far away, exerting normal gravitational attraction on massive objects in its proximity.
There exists but one particle that can survive the forces and the timescales involved in the aforementioned scenario. It is the neutron.
Its survival and stability provided in the form of neutron stars that have stopped spinning but still have enormously strong magnetic fields and are the sole inhabitants of this sterile environment of burnt out elliptical galaxies.
This is a story where more evidence can be gained from the ashes of the Universe than can be gleaned from being mesmerized by gazing at its glowing cinders.
The bright stars are a mere fraction of reality, and we need to implement senses beyond our eyes and even the electromagnetic spectrum, to really ‘see’ all of reality, whether finite or not.
There is a paradoxical link between the Higgs bosun and gravity, for according to physics, the one cannot exist without the other, yet if the Higgs bosun is abandoned, gravity will still exist.
When we discard the Higgs particle, we will realize that mass has always existed and in spite of E equals mc squared, always will.
That mass is the Pantheon that forms the Edifice that is our Universe, and it survives in the form of the least likely candidate of all, the tacit, invisible neutron. All hail the neutron.
While we are at it, we should really change its name, we should rename it with a more reverend ring to it, like ‘popsicle’ or ‘bossbit’. How about the ‘Godtron’?
This blatant scientific blasphemy is not an attack on science or any of its scientists who have contributed so much in their fields of expertise.
Rather, it provides the mental momentum that is going to be required to overcome the inertial state cosmology currently endures. This proverbial fire-cracker will bring dynamism to stagnation. It will loosen the bowels of scientific discovery.
A whole new world of scientific research will open up.
For those who cannot wait for this information to become self-evident, please send a cashier’s cheque for one billion dollars to the writer, and he will willingly part with further details and information. For those who cannot wait but whose budget does not allow such a payment, free copies are available on receipt of an email address.
An initial copy will be forwarded to the “Edge” website, for its members mutual amusement, and just in case, also to protect the property that is the imagination of the writer.
Bon Voyage…
The Timeless Philosophies of the Origin of the Universe
The scene is set by the first speaker, Xenophanes, who laments:
“No human being will ever know the Truth,
for even if they happened to say it by chance,
they would not know they had done so.”
Plato then makes the point:
“Discovering the Father and Creator of the universe is a supremely difficult task; and having found Him it would be impossible to tell anyone about Him.”
My following statement proves them both right:
“Our universe was created exclusively from neutron stars, the sole remnants of
the previous universe, this being the prime matter created by the Oneness.”
Pythagorus casts a sagely smile in response to my almost inaudible and seemingly meaningless statement, politely clears his throat, and says:
“On the one side is God, the active principle, who acts.
On the other side is matter, the passive principle, that undergoes.”
Einstein lights his pipe stuffed with tobacco stolen from Niels Bohr, blows a huge smoke ring into the crowd, and announces in a strange accent:
“Mass equals energy divided by the speed of light squared.”
Pythagorus glances up suspiciously and a few genuine coughs erupt within the crowd, so Empedocles stands up to calm matters down, and says:
“There are two sides to this tale. On the one hand the many unite to become the Oneness, and on the other hand the Oneness divides to become the many. Things continually shift between being united by love and divided by strife.”
Decorum is restored and then it is remembered that the oracle of Orpheus posed the following question:
“How can all things be One, yet each thing is separate?”
With deep insight Anaxagoras presents the following:
“Appearances are a glimpse of what is hidden.”
Again Empedocles sums it up beautifully:
“God is the unity of Oneness in which I dwelt myself before I was snatched away by the conflicts of opposites and born into the world of plurality organized by strife.”
Cicero boldly concurs by asking the following question to mankind in general on behalf of the group:
“Why will you not admit that the universe is a conscious intelligence since conscious intelligences are born from it?”
Plato announces:
“The universe is a single whole, comprised of many parts that are also whole.”
To which Heraclitus proclaimed:
“The One is all things. All things are One.”
Cicero humbly claims:
“Human beings were created to contemplate and reflect the universe,
They are not themselves this great perfection, but are particles of perfection.”
Hermes Trismegistus passionately eloquated:
“He is too great to be called by the name ‘God.’
He is hidden, yet obvious everywhere.
He is bodiless, yet embodied in everything.
There is nothing that he is not.
He has no name, because all names are his name.
He is the unity in all things, so we must know him by all names
and call everything ‘God’.”
Plotinus concludes by summarizing as follows:
“Man as he now is has ceased to be the All.
But when he ceases to be a separate individual,
He raises himself again and permeates the universe.”
Needless to say, I staggered out from this gathering speechless and I tacitly lauded all participants posthumously with awards far greater than the Nobel.
All the above quotes are the words actually uttered by these fathers of metaphysics.
“No human being will ever know the Truth,
for even if they happened to say it by chance,
they would not know they had done so.”
Plato then makes the point:
“Discovering the Father and Creator of the universe is a supremely difficult task; and having found Him it would be impossible to tell anyone about Him.”
My following statement proves them both right:
“Our universe was created exclusively from neutron stars, the sole remnants of
the previous universe, this being the prime matter created by the Oneness.”
Pythagorus casts a sagely smile in response to my almost inaudible and seemingly meaningless statement, politely clears his throat, and says:
“On the one side is God, the active principle, who acts.
On the other side is matter, the passive principle, that undergoes.”
Einstein lights his pipe stuffed with tobacco stolen from Niels Bohr, blows a huge smoke ring into the crowd, and announces in a strange accent:
“Mass equals energy divided by the speed of light squared.”
Pythagorus glances up suspiciously and a few genuine coughs erupt within the crowd, so Empedocles stands up to calm matters down, and says:
“There are two sides to this tale. On the one hand the many unite to become the Oneness, and on the other hand the Oneness divides to become the many. Things continually shift between being united by love and divided by strife.”
Decorum is restored and then it is remembered that the oracle of Orpheus posed the following question:
“How can all things be One, yet each thing is separate?”
With deep insight Anaxagoras presents the following:
“Appearances are a glimpse of what is hidden.”
Again Empedocles sums it up beautifully:
“God is the unity of Oneness in which I dwelt myself before I was snatched away by the conflicts of opposites and born into the world of plurality organized by strife.”
Cicero boldly concurs by asking the following question to mankind in general on behalf of the group:
“Why will you not admit that the universe is a conscious intelligence since conscious intelligences are born from it?”
Plato announces:
“The universe is a single whole, comprised of many parts that are also whole.”
To which Heraclitus proclaimed:
“The One is all things. All things are One.”
Cicero humbly claims:
“Human beings were created to contemplate and reflect the universe,
They are not themselves this great perfection, but are particles of perfection.”
Hermes Trismegistus passionately eloquated:
“He is too great to be called by the name ‘God.’
He is hidden, yet obvious everywhere.
He is bodiless, yet embodied in everything.
There is nothing that he is not.
He has no name, because all names are his name.
He is the unity in all things, so we must know him by all names
and call everything ‘God’.”
Plotinus concludes by summarizing as follows:
“Man as he now is has ceased to be the All.
But when he ceases to be a separate individual,
He raises himself again and permeates the universe.”
Needless to say, I staggered out from this gathering speechless and I tacitly lauded all participants posthumously with awards far greater than the Nobel.
All the above quotes are the words actually uttered by these fathers of metaphysics.
Avoiding the Black Hole Information Paradox
Although there are seven main approaches to the solution of the information paradox.
One interesting approach is that information is stored in a massive remnant.
This approach seems to gravitate toward 'Occam's razor', that suggests that the simplest theory that fits the facts is the one most likely to be correct.
The massive remnant approach, has the advantages that no mechanism for information escape is needed (as it is in the black hole approach), and also that a large amount of information does not need to be stored in a small object ( as it is in the tiny Planck-sized remnant approach).
When discussing the disadvantage of the massive remnant approach, physicists merely point out that no appealing mechanism that could stop Hawking evaporation of a macroscopic black hole is known.
Maybe so, but Nature is starting to indicate new clues about neutron stars that stunned astronomers and astrophysicists, who had expected that black holes should exist in their place, but do not.
That is the subtle mechanism whereby we might be able to avoid Hawking radiation altogether, by avoiding black holes.
If we deal with dense massive remnants of almost similar mass and density to black holes, then we find that a neutron star is not far off the mark.
One is tempted to glue two or more neutron stars together in a thought experiment, (Commercials tell us they've used Pratley's putty on the moon!)
When relativistic ( which means traveling near the speed of light) quantum particles collide, there are three possible general results for a collision.
1. The collision is elastic.
2. The collision is non-elastic.
3. The collision causes annihilation.
In a sentence we could say; some things recoil, some things fuse and a few things disappear in a flash.
Unless neutron stars are also their own anti-matter, when two of them collide near the speed of light, at the end of a decreasing binary orbit, we are almost obliged to select option 2 above.
The collision is non-elastic.
Just like their quantum counterparts, they will fuse together, like nucleons.
All current computer simulations suggest that two such stars will merge and probably coalesce into a larger sphere for an instant and then collapse into a black hole.
That's the part I feel is not quite right.
I believe that two neutron stars will fuse just as two nucleons do, and lose a small amount of matter which is transformed into a huge amount of energy in the form of a gamma ray burst.
If we imagine four neutron stars fused together (resembling an alpha particle or helium nucleus) that somehow did not collapse into a black hole, but remained a massive solid remnant.
The radius of such a remnant, measured from its common centre, will lie within its Schwarzchild radius, measured from the same point.
This remnant would share some properties of a black hole, like mass and density, but it will not display Hawking evaporation because it is not a black hole!
For such an object there will be no disadvantage of resolving the black hole information paradox, and every bit of information is stored within this dense 'quadron'.
One interesting approach is that information is stored in a massive remnant.
This approach seems to gravitate toward 'Occam's razor', that suggests that the simplest theory that fits the facts is the one most likely to be correct.
The massive remnant approach, has the advantages that no mechanism for information escape is needed (as it is in the black hole approach), and also that a large amount of information does not need to be stored in a small object ( as it is in the tiny Planck-sized remnant approach).
When discussing the disadvantage of the massive remnant approach, physicists merely point out that no appealing mechanism that could stop Hawking evaporation of a macroscopic black hole is known.
Maybe so, but Nature is starting to indicate new clues about neutron stars that stunned astronomers and astrophysicists, who had expected that black holes should exist in their place, but do not.
That is the subtle mechanism whereby we might be able to avoid Hawking radiation altogether, by avoiding black holes.
If we deal with dense massive remnants of almost similar mass and density to black holes, then we find that a neutron star is not far off the mark.
One is tempted to glue two or more neutron stars together in a thought experiment, (Commercials tell us they've used Pratley's putty on the moon!)
When relativistic ( which means traveling near the speed of light) quantum particles collide, there are three possible general results for a collision.
1. The collision is elastic.
2. The collision is non-elastic.
3. The collision causes annihilation.
In a sentence we could say; some things recoil, some things fuse and a few things disappear in a flash.
Unless neutron stars are also their own anti-matter, when two of them collide near the speed of light, at the end of a decreasing binary orbit, we are almost obliged to select option 2 above.
The collision is non-elastic.
Just like their quantum counterparts, they will fuse together, like nucleons.
All current computer simulations suggest that two such stars will merge and probably coalesce into a larger sphere for an instant and then collapse into a black hole.
That's the part I feel is not quite right.
I believe that two neutron stars will fuse just as two nucleons do, and lose a small amount of matter which is transformed into a huge amount of energy in the form of a gamma ray burst.
If we imagine four neutron stars fused together (resembling an alpha particle or helium nucleus) that somehow did not collapse into a black hole, but remained a massive solid remnant.
The radius of such a remnant, measured from its common centre, will lie within its Schwarzchild radius, measured from the same point.
This remnant would share some properties of a black hole, like mass and density, but it will not display Hawking evaporation because it is not a black hole!
For such an object there will be no disadvantage of resolving the black hole information paradox, and every bit of information is stored within this dense 'quadron'.
The Celebration of the Court Jester's Insight
The inertial state of all the matter in the Universe, is clearly the result of some initial force or ‘prime mover’, yet we still do not know what that force was.
Today, such knowledge is worth a king’s ransom but no one has claimed it yet.
The Inflationary Big Bang Model, serves for now, as the official kick-off that got the game underway for the Universe.
It is riddled with problems and it is inevitable that the scientific fraternity will one day have to issue (in one form or another) the following statement or headline;
“We have discovered that the Higgs Boson does not exist!”
Are we ready for that headline? Are we prepared? How will we feel?
All hell will break loose in the world of Cosmology, and chaos will rule.
I once asked an astrophysicist, who was hosting a discussion on the Inflationary Big Bang theory, that very question. What if the Higgs boson is not found?
He calmly replied that they are already working on that possibility. He said in that event, they will attempt to introduce something called MOND to the forefront of physics.
He explained that ‘MOND’ is a mathematical model of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics. “Gravity,” he said, “might be found to change under extreme conditions.”
I do not believe they will get very far with MOND.
Besides, Newtonian dynamics remains to this day, a sure footing, and does not need to be underpinned by a new foundation.
Just as Inflation replaced the ‘singularity’ as the cause of the Big Bang of Creation,
MOND will attempt to alter the gravity that was supposed to have caused the singularity.
To me, this smacks of a snake biting its tail while flipped into a figure eight!
If we were to use this snake as a V-belt to drive the pulleys of Newton’s Universe, we will end up going backwards!
Inflationary theory relies on the existence of the Higgs field, and that in turn relies on the existence of the Higgs Boson.
The Higgs Boson is considered to have endowed every particle in existence, via the Higgs field, with mass. That’s right, mass.
They say that without the Higgs (which may not exist), all known particles that do exist, would be massless !
That in turn implies that gravity would not exist either, and without gravity, there would be no light ! Holy smoke !
We end up with a Universe of supposedly ‘critical’ density, composed of matter without mass, just like a bunch of bosons lurking about with nothing to do.
We might ask; “where did all the fermions go”.
Now imagine a court jester telling his King (of the Cosmos) that this conclusion makes no sense at all.
The King will tend to agree with the fool, and by default, so will his subjects, (all the stars and planets).
So the King sagaciously declares; “The whole argument bears no weight, there has to be another way!”
The jester replies, “Sire, methinks that mass was always hiding in this dark matter, and is occasionally allowing us to see the gravity of the matter in a new light.”
The King looked totally perplexed…
With that single statement, the jester was immediately appointed as the ‘Astronomer Royal’.
After many years of observation into the darkness of space, and endless hours of deep thought, the jester appeared before the King as the astronomer royal, and drearily declared; “Sire, I have the solution.”
“I warn you, Fool, I take a dim view on the matter!” said the King.
So before hearing the jester’s explanation, the King asked him the following twenty questions from a checklist he had personally compiled on a royal letterhead.
The wise King had made sure that in his opinion, the answer to each question was known to be “NO”.
Are we at the center of the Universe?
Does a singularity exist?
Have you needed to modify Newton’s work?
Can gravity exist without mass?
Can energy be created without matter?
Can matter exist without mass?
Can mass exist without energy?
Have they found the Higgs Boson?
Have Supersymetry’s famous neutralinos been found?
Have they found an Axion?
Have we discovered any hidden dimension of the superstring theory?
Has General relativity been disproved?
Has M-theory proved to be correct?
Has every action ever been proven not to have a reaction?
Has the concept of inertia ever been disproved?
Can we prove that the evolution of the Universe is not cyclical?
Do we know what causes dark energy?
The Jester Royal answered every one of the King’s questions correctly up to this point, to the utter disbelief of the subjects of the Cosmos.
The King said, “Well done, Fool, but now for the final question, and be warned, it’s the most difficult of all”.
“Question number twenty is ;
Do we know what dark matter is?”
Starting to giggle and bubble, the jester answered, ‘No Sire, but I have the solution! '
He told the court that in a fit of madness, it had occurred to him that dark matter consists of four neutron stars welded together, and from their common center, they share a common radius that lies inside their common Schwarzchild radius.
The subjects gazed blankly at this ex-joker, the Astronomer Royal.
Some even nodded off.
After a long, thoughtful pause, the King announced; “By Jove, Jester, you’ve found the missing mass ! ”
The King said that he would get his goldsmiths to weld him up just such an object, to be used as the royal seal from that time onward.
The King named the object of the jester’s dreams, the “Quadron”, and commented that it did indeed make the perfect container in which to store and hide vast amounts of hydrogen from view.
The King was a bit of a ‘throne physicist’, and he worked out that if there were enough quadrons, and some of them spilled their neutrons, there would be plenty of hydrogen about to form the first stars.
He determined that about four percent of the quadrons should get smashed.
The King bellowed, “Let’s celebrate the fool’s discovery of mass with a really big bash!”
All the subjects of the Cosmos rejoiced; it was like the fourth of July, and they felt somehow emancipated.
This was because deep down, they all had vague suppressed memories of once being part of a neutron star, and it was the village idiot that had caused the champaign corks to pop, in celebrating this enlightenment. What a party!
Nine (hundred million) months later, infant stars, the first-born, entered the visible Universe, and boy, were they a welcome ray of sunshine to a previously dark and gloomy lot, still hung over from the party.
All these newborn stars were the illegitimate progeny of a few quadrons who became absolutely smashed during the celebrations of the jester's insight.
The King was delighted, because science was back on track, and all his subjects behaved as was expected of them.
The Jester Astronomer Royal lived happily ever after, because the King gave him his old job back.
The King philosophically professed, isn’t it amazing that we are even here at all, in spite of there being no Higgs Boson, to leave such a fantastic tale to all who come hereafter? He called it the 'mild' anthropic principle.
The End.
Today, such knowledge is worth a king’s ransom but no one has claimed it yet.
The Inflationary Big Bang Model, serves for now, as the official kick-off that got the game underway for the Universe.
It is riddled with problems and it is inevitable that the scientific fraternity will one day have to issue (in one form or another) the following statement or headline;
“We have discovered that the Higgs Boson does not exist!”
Are we ready for that headline? Are we prepared? How will we feel?
All hell will break loose in the world of Cosmology, and chaos will rule.
I once asked an astrophysicist, who was hosting a discussion on the Inflationary Big Bang theory, that very question. What if the Higgs boson is not found?
He calmly replied that they are already working on that possibility. He said in that event, they will attempt to introduce something called MOND to the forefront of physics.
He explained that ‘MOND’ is a mathematical model of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics. “Gravity,” he said, “might be found to change under extreme conditions.”
I do not believe they will get very far with MOND.
Besides, Newtonian dynamics remains to this day, a sure footing, and does not need to be underpinned by a new foundation.
Just as Inflation replaced the ‘singularity’ as the cause of the Big Bang of Creation,
MOND will attempt to alter the gravity that was supposed to have caused the singularity.
To me, this smacks of a snake biting its tail while flipped into a figure eight!
If we were to use this snake as a V-belt to drive the pulleys of Newton’s Universe, we will end up going backwards!
Inflationary theory relies on the existence of the Higgs field, and that in turn relies on the existence of the Higgs Boson.
The Higgs Boson is considered to have endowed every particle in existence, via the Higgs field, with mass. That’s right, mass.
They say that without the Higgs (which may not exist), all known particles that do exist, would be massless !
That in turn implies that gravity would not exist either, and without gravity, there would be no light ! Holy smoke !
We end up with a Universe of supposedly ‘critical’ density, composed of matter without mass, just like a bunch of bosons lurking about with nothing to do.
We might ask; “where did all the fermions go”.
Now imagine a court jester telling his King (of the Cosmos) that this conclusion makes no sense at all.
The King will tend to agree with the fool, and by default, so will his subjects, (all the stars and planets).
So the King sagaciously declares; “The whole argument bears no weight, there has to be another way!”
The jester replies, “Sire, methinks that mass was always hiding in this dark matter, and is occasionally allowing us to see the gravity of the matter in a new light.”
The King looked totally perplexed…
With that single statement, the jester was immediately appointed as the ‘Astronomer Royal’.
After many years of observation into the darkness of space, and endless hours of deep thought, the jester appeared before the King as the astronomer royal, and drearily declared; “Sire, I have the solution.”
“I warn you, Fool, I take a dim view on the matter!” said the King.
So before hearing the jester’s explanation, the King asked him the following twenty questions from a checklist he had personally compiled on a royal letterhead.
The wise King had made sure that in his opinion, the answer to each question was known to be “NO”.
Are we at the center of the Universe?
Does a singularity exist?
Have you needed to modify Newton’s work?
Can gravity exist without mass?
Can energy be created without matter?
Can matter exist without mass?
Can mass exist without energy?
Have they found the Higgs Boson?
Have Supersymetry’s famous neutralinos been found?
Have they found an Axion?
Have we discovered any hidden dimension of the superstring theory?
Has General relativity been disproved?
Has M-theory proved to be correct?
Has every action ever been proven not to have a reaction?
Has the concept of inertia ever been disproved?
Can we prove that the evolution of the Universe is not cyclical?
Do we know what causes dark energy?
The Jester Royal answered every one of the King’s questions correctly up to this point, to the utter disbelief of the subjects of the Cosmos.
The King said, “Well done, Fool, but now for the final question, and be warned, it’s the most difficult of all”.
“Question number twenty is ;
Do we know what dark matter is?”
Starting to giggle and bubble, the jester answered, ‘No Sire, but I have the solution! '
He told the court that in a fit of madness, it had occurred to him that dark matter consists of four neutron stars welded together, and from their common center, they share a common radius that lies inside their common Schwarzchild radius.
The subjects gazed blankly at this ex-joker, the Astronomer Royal.
Some even nodded off.
After a long, thoughtful pause, the King announced; “By Jove, Jester, you’ve found the missing mass ! ”
The King said that he would get his goldsmiths to weld him up just such an object, to be used as the royal seal from that time onward.
The King named the object of the jester’s dreams, the “Quadron”, and commented that it did indeed make the perfect container in which to store and hide vast amounts of hydrogen from view.
The King was a bit of a ‘throne physicist’, and he worked out that if there were enough quadrons, and some of them spilled their neutrons, there would be plenty of hydrogen about to form the first stars.
He determined that about four percent of the quadrons should get smashed.
The King bellowed, “Let’s celebrate the fool’s discovery of mass with a really big bash!”
All the subjects of the Cosmos rejoiced; it was like the fourth of July, and they felt somehow emancipated.
This was because deep down, they all had vague suppressed memories of once being part of a neutron star, and it was the village idiot that had caused the champaign corks to pop, in celebrating this enlightenment. What a party!
Nine (hundred million) months later, infant stars, the first-born, entered the visible Universe, and boy, were they a welcome ray of sunshine to a previously dark and gloomy lot, still hung over from the party.
All these newborn stars were the illegitimate progeny of a few quadrons who became absolutely smashed during the celebrations of the jester's insight.
The King was delighted, because science was back on track, and all his subjects behaved as was expected of them.
The Jester Astronomer Royal lived happily ever after, because the King gave him his old job back.
The King philosophically professed, isn’t it amazing that we are even here at all, in spite of there being no Higgs Boson, to leave such a fantastic tale to all who come hereafter? He called it the 'mild' anthropic principle.
The End.
The Gravity of the Matter
What to Make of it All
What do you think dark matter consists of?
Evidence is increasing to suggest that 'dark matter' clumps gave birth to all our bright or visible galaxies.
Today, the mystery of the composition of this stuff still lingers, and thus far, it eludes every human mind on our planet.
Maybe we should assist the astrophysicits and see if we can glean an insight from their observations.
Instinctively, one senses that the mystery will have such a simple solution.
The first consideration should be about where all this dark matter might have come from in the first place.
It is unacceptable to simply bolt on the notion that the Big Bang must have produced it.
All the bolts protruding from the Big Bang model are turning the theory into a monster.
An intuitive answer may well lie in astronomers recent observations that very old and distant galaxies contain less luminous matter than galaxies that are closer to our own.
Faint, irregular galaxies, seem to suggest that the first bright stuff to emit light, emerged from the cores of these early dark matter globules or clumps.
It is as if the dark stuff gave birth to the bright stuff.
That leads to a problem, because most physicists now believe that dark matter cannot consist of the 'baryonic' matter that our visible Universe consists of.
Baryonic matter simply means protons and neutrons, that make up all ordinary matter.
We, for example are made from baryonic matter, and so are our homes and autombiles.
All the objects we observe in the Cosmos are made from baryons.
The reason that cosmologists and astrophysicits think dark matter is non-baryonic, is because it would interact with bright or ordinary matter if it were baryonic, and dark matter appears to be inert to bright matter.
The way around this is to consider that dark matter may be baryonic, but is somehow prevented from undergoing nuclear and electromagnetic interactions.
What in the Universe could serve to render dark matter invisible and immune to the effects of ordinary matter?
Gravity could hold the key.
Gravity might cause all the objects that shine and glow in the heavens, to eventually stop emitting light or any form of electromagnetic radiation.
The Laws of Thermodynamics do not apply in the absence of heat.
So if gravity were to exhaust all the hydrogen to helium fusion, thereby using up all the hydrogen needed to form stars, stars would no longer form.
The ones that have formed will eventually burn out their fusion fuels, go supernova, and leave small massive dense cores that slowly cool down until even the Second Law of Thermodynamics abandons them, when they reach a point of almost maximun entropy.
Just because the Second Law no longer applies at this point does not mean that the cold dense core remnants of all the stars that ever existed will simply cease to exist.
Indeed, they will exist in darkness, devoid of any heat transmissions.
There is no reason to believe that just because of the absense of electromagnetic radiation, the Universe will contract again under the force of gravity, because dark energy will still be around to counter gravity from collecting all the cold ash and debris scattered across the sky and crushing it into one great mass..
Rather, gravity will continue to easily overpower dark energy's anti-gravitational effects at close range, meaning that gravity will continue to hold comic remnants like old neutron stars together, in spite of the continuing accelerated expansion of the now dark Universe.
It is this dark Universe that will give rise clumps of dark matter (which is also not going anywhere anytime soon) in which gravity can reheat some matter in the clump cores until there eventually appears new light in them.
The force of gravity could turn out to be the Universe's ultimate negative entropy or 'renewable energy' provider, but it would need 'something to squeeze' and that something would have to be everything that was in the Universe when the lights went out.
If that 'something' (matter) happened to be free neutrons and alpha particles, before long, gravity will be happily making new stars.
Only then will the Second Law of thermodynamics apply again, as it manages this new energy in the way that it manages all enegy.
From an observer's point of view, it will appear as the birth of the Universe.
What do you think dark matter consists of?
Evidence is increasing to suggest that 'dark matter' clumps gave birth to all our bright or visible galaxies.
Today, the mystery of the composition of this stuff still lingers, and thus far, it eludes every human mind on our planet.
Maybe we should assist the astrophysicits and see if we can glean an insight from their observations.
Instinctively, one senses that the mystery will have such a simple solution.
The first consideration should be about where all this dark matter might have come from in the first place.
It is unacceptable to simply bolt on the notion that the Big Bang must have produced it.
All the bolts protruding from the Big Bang model are turning the theory into a monster.
An intuitive answer may well lie in astronomers recent observations that very old and distant galaxies contain less luminous matter than galaxies that are closer to our own.
Faint, irregular galaxies, seem to suggest that the first bright stuff to emit light, emerged from the cores of these early dark matter globules or clumps.
It is as if the dark stuff gave birth to the bright stuff.
That leads to a problem, because most physicists now believe that dark matter cannot consist of the 'baryonic' matter that our visible Universe consists of.
Baryonic matter simply means protons and neutrons, that make up all ordinary matter.
We, for example are made from baryonic matter, and so are our homes and autombiles.
All the objects we observe in the Cosmos are made from baryons.
The reason that cosmologists and astrophysicits think dark matter is non-baryonic, is because it would interact with bright or ordinary matter if it were baryonic, and dark matter appears to be inert to bright matter.
The way around this is to consider that dark matter may be baryonic, but is somehow prevented from undergoing nuclear and electromagnetic interactions.
What in the Universe could serve to render dark matter invisible and immune to the effects of ordinary matter?
Gravity could hold the key.
Gravity might cause all the objects that shine and glow in the heavens, to eventually stop emitting light or any form of electromagnetic radiation.
The Laws of Thermodynamics do not apply in the absence of heat.
So if gravity were to exhaust all the hydrogen to helium fusion, thereby using up all the hydrogen needed to form stars, stars would no longer form.
The ones that have formed will eventually burn out their fusion fuels, go supernova, and leave small massive dense cores that slowly cool down until even the Second Law of Thermodynamics abandons them, when they reach a point of almost maximun entropy.
Just because the Second Law no longer applies at this point does not mean that the cold dense core remnants of all the stars that ever existed will simply cease to exist.
Indeed, they will exist in darkness, devoid of any heat transmissions.
There is no reason to believe that just because of the absense of electromagnetic radiation, the Universe will contract again under the force of gravity, because dark energy will still be around to counter gravity from collecting all the cold ash and debris scattered across the sky and crushing it into one great mass..
Rather, gravity will continue to easily overpower dark energy's anti-gravitational effects at close range, meaning that gravity will continue to hold comic remnants like old neutron stars together, in spite of the continuing accelerated expansion of the now dark Universe.
It is this dark Universe that will give rise clumps of dark matter (which is also not going anywhere anytime soon) in which gravity can reheat some matter in the clump cores until there eventually appears new light in them.
The force of gravity could turn out to be the Universe's ultimate negative entropy or 'renewable energy' provider, but it would need 'something to squeeze' and that something would have to be everything that was in the Universe when the lights went out.
If that 'something' (matter) happened to be free neutrons and alpha particles, before long, gravity will be happily making new stars.
Only then will the Second Law of thermodynamics apply again, as it manages this new energy in the way that it manages all enegy.
From an observer's point of view, it will appear as the birth of the Universe.
Friday 15 January 2010
Is dark matter shedding light on baryonic matter?
Recent experiments measuring the proportions of baryonic matter compared to dark matter in different sized galaxies, has sparked a lot of excitement in the quest to discover what dark matter actually consists of.
Scientists have discovered that the larger galaxies tend to contain the most baryonic matter (about 17%), compared to its dark matter content, while the smaller dwarf galaxies appear to contain as little as one percent of the bright stuff (and 99% dark).
This bodes well for theories supporting the notion that galaxy formation occured within larger gravitationally bound clumps of dark matter, spread across the Universe.
What has not been postulated until now, is that dark matter might, under certain extreme conditions, transform into bright (or baryonic) matter made of ordinary atoms.
To this end, we could observe dim dwarf galaxies that have higher percentages (than 1%) of baryonic matter and determine if they have existed for a longer time.
If this were found to be the case, then it could imply that dark matter in those slightly brighter galaxies had transformed into bright matter.
This then, would clearly link dark matter more closely with baryonic matter, pointing to the possibility of dark matter being baryonic, albeit somehow in a non reactive form.
The stumbling block remains though,that bright matter does not appear to react or interact with dark matter.
That is why many physicists believe dark matter to be non-baryonic
These recent findings could cause these assumptions to be re-visited.
Is it possible that galaxies start off composed entirely of dark matter, that gradually transforms into bright baryonic matter?
If any dim dwarf galaxies appear to brighten, even slightly,then such a notion is worth investigating.
Such an investigation might start with the question; "Is dark matter unstable, or is it just me?"
Scientists have discovered that the larger galaxies tend to contain the most baryonic matter (about 17%), compared to its dark matter content, while the smaller dwarf galaxies appear to contain as little as one percent of the bright stuff (and 99% dark).
This bodes well for theories supporting the notion that galaxy formation occured within larger gravitationally bound clumps of dark matter, spread across the Universe.
What has not been postulated until now, is that dark matter might, under certain extreme conditions, transform into bright (or baryonic) matter made of ordinary atoms.
To this end, we could observe dim dwarf galaxies that have higher percentages (than 1%) of baryonic matter and determine if they have existed for a longer time.
If this were found to be the case, then it could imply that dark matter in those slightly brighter galaxies had transformed into bright matter.
This then, would clearly link dark matter more closely with baryonic matter, pointing to the possibility of dark matter being baryonic, albeit somehow in a non reactive form.
The stumbling block remains though,that bright matter does not appear to react or interact with dark matter.
That is why many physicists believe dark matter to be non-baryonic
These recent findings could cause these assumptions to be re-visited.
Is it possible that galaxies start off composed entirely of dark matter, that gradually transforms into bright baryonic matter?
If any dim dwarf galaxies appear to brighten, even slightly,then such a notion is worth investigating.
Such an investigation might start with the question; "Is dark matter unstable, or is it just me?"
Do neutron stars share more in common with stellar mass black holes than just density?
Toward the end of 2005, astronomers studying the results from NASA's Chandra x-ray observatory determined that a very massive star, in excess of 40 solar masses, collapsed to form a neutron star instead of an expected black hole.
One obvious implication of the results is evident; that many more stars than previously thought, are ending up as neutron stars.
It is as if Nature is telling us that this family of ultra-dense stellar objects, are more fundamental to the evolution of our Universe, than we might ever have imagined.
Neutron degenerate pressure, does not seem to be the end of the line though, before gravity causes a runaway implosion toward the 'singularity' lurking beneath the event horizon of a Kerr stellar black hole.
Such evidence can be speculated to imply that upon reaching its maximum degenerate pressure, the super-dense nucleon fluid at the core of a neutron star, might change its properties, from fermionic behaviour to bosonic behaviour.
Various physicists have used computed simulations to support evidence for postulated 'quark stars' or even 'electroweak stars', where quarks have decayed into leptons such as electrons and neutrinos which allow for a higher outward pressure to counter gravitational collapse.
However, these are all still fermions, and as such, are subject to Pauli's Exclusion Principle.
If the fluid of the core took on bosonic properties, the particles will behave according to Bose-Einstein statistics.
So, the s-matrix of the system that is a neutron star, is proving to contain far more probable solutions than might have previously been overlooked.
One obvious implication of the results is evident; that many more stars than previously thought, are ending up as neutron stars.
It is as if Nature is telling us that this family of ultra-dense stellar objects, are more fundamental to the evolution of our Universe, than we might ever have imagined.
Neutron degenerate pressure, does not seem to be the end of the line though, before gravity causes a runaway implosion toward the 'singularity' lurking beneath the event horizon of a Kerr stellar black hole.
Such evidence can be speculated to imply that upon reaching its maximum degenerate pressure, the super-dense nucleon fluid at the core of a neutron star, might change its properties, from fermionic behaviour to bosonic behaviour.
Various physicists have used computed simulations to support evidence for postulated 'quark stars' or even 'electroweak stars', where quarks have decayed into leptons such as electrons and neutrinos which allow for a higher outward pressure to counter gravitational collapse.
However, these are all still fermions, and as such, are subject to Pauli's Exclusion Principle.
If the fluid of the core took on bosonic properties, the particles will behave according to Bose-Einstein statistics.
So, the s-matrix of the system that is a neutron star, is proving to contain far more probable solutions than might have previously been overlooked.
Thursday 14 January 2010
A Plan Elevation of our Reality
“…creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn
and erecting a skyscraper in its place.
It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider
views, discovering unexpected connections
between our starting point and its rich environment.
But the point from which we started out still
exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller
and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the
mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.”
Albert Einstein
and erecting a skyscraper in its place.
It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider
views, discovering unexpected connections
between our starting point and its rich environment.
But the point from which we started out still
exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller
and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the
mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.”
Albert Einstein
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