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.