Where did our Universe come from? An essay by Mark Heffron
Thanks to Brian Greene and the people at worldscienceu.com for creating an environment for learning about the latest developments in knowledge about physics and cosmology from experts in their fields. If you have any interest in math, physics, and cosmology, please visit this site and take part in the Master Classes (little math expertise is required). I have found this site to be a virtual wellspring for new and inspirational ideas about our cosmos and our place in it.
In this essay I will recount some recent discoveries in cosmology, and then present my own ideas on the subject. There is one theory in cosmology which I have always detested: the concept of "eternal inflation", in which our universe would expand eternally and eventually suffer a "heat death", where matter would become so dispersed that a state of zero thermodynamic free energy would ensue and all life would end. To me, this concept flies in the face of everything we know about our elegant cosmos, where nothing ever seems to be wasted and everything that dies appears to be reborn through fire and beautiful pyrotechnics.
Einstein surfing on gravitional waves from an artist's viewpoint
Yesterday, on February 11th, 2015, it was announced by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, that scientists there had discovered the first evidence for gravitation waves, ripples in space-time, in our universe. Albert Einstein had predicted these phenomena over 100 years ago in his General Theory of Relativity. The gravitational waves discovered were created by the merging of two black holes, one with the mass of 29 of our suns, and the other with a mass of 36 suns; both were about 30 miles in diameter. This collision took place at about half the speed of light about 1.3 billion years ago. The three founders of LIGO, Rainer Weiss of M.I.T, and Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of the California Institute of Technology, will probably soon become Nobel laureates as a result of their efforts.
Current "map" of the expansion of our universe
Why are gravitational waves important in understanding the origins of our universe?
The theory of Cosmic Inflation was first introduced by Alan Guth, the current Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this theory, the early universe, just after the original "Big Bang", underwent an exponential expansion of its space at speeds greater than the speed of light (it was space that expanded, not the matter in it, so the speed limit of the speed of light was not broken) in an infinitesimal time interval, from 10−36 seconds after the Big Bang to sometime between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds afterward. Since then, the space of our universe has continued to expand at a much slower rate. This is why everything we observe in the universe is "red-shifted", an indication that all celestial objects are receding from each other like points on an expanding balloon. Recent discoveries have show that this expansion is actually accelerating, and cosmologists given the name of "dark energy" to the mysterious force that seems to be inflating our universe at an ever faster rate. The presence of gravitational waves in our cosmos is required for the theory of cosmic inflation to be true, so much time, effort, and money has been spent recently in trying to find them. Months ago, a scientist at a project called BICEP2 announced prematurely that he and his colleagues had found gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation, but this result was determined to have been caused by dust in our Milky Way galaxy. At the time I was taking a master class given by Paul Steinhardt at World Science U.,who believes in a theory of cosmology where "big bangs" are cyclically followed by "big crunches", a theory I like because it avoids the problem of eternal inflation and an eventual heat death. Just as gravity waves would be necessary for cosmic inflation to be true, these waves would be a death knell for Mr. Steinhardt's theory, and when Bicep2 announced the dust problem that voided their discovery of gravitational waves, I left this message in his discussion group.
Dust in the wind: It appears that the cyclic model (and others) have been given a boost by the finding that the gravitational waves purported to have been discovered by Bicep2 have been found to have been caused by interference from galactic dust.
A cyclic, or oscillating, universe: the big bang is actually a "big bounce"
I tried deleting the message after the LIGO discovery, but apparently that is not possible on this site (once you make a statement, you are apparently held to it), so I found out that it is better to wait for certified results (and non-results) before you start blabbering about things you only have an arm-chair knowledge about.
Map of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, the remnant heat left over from the Big Bang
After the Bicep2 failure to find gravitational waves, LIGO found them in a different manner by investigating the aforesaid black holes with two enormous laser interferometers located thousands of kilometers apart: one in Richland, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. This was the result that Alan Guth and proponents of the theory of cosmic inflation have been eagerly awaiting, and Professor Guth will probably be in line to receive a Nobel Prize of his own soon as a result of this discovery. Now the big question will be: "What is the mysterious Dark Energy which causes the universe to keep expanding?"
The LIGO observatory in Livingston, Lousiana
Dark Energy: At present, 74% of the mass of the universe is calculated to be dark energy, a theoretical repulsive force that opposes gravity and causes the universe to expand; 23% of the mass of universe is calculated to be Dark Matter, particles which cannot be detected by current scientific equipment because they do not interact with light , and only about 4% of the matter of our universe is composed of the atoms which make up the universe we know. Basically, we are ignorant of 96% of what our universe is made of.
We know that Dark Matter exists because of observations made of the rotation of galaxies by Vera Rubin and her colleagues, and the bending of light around large celestial objects, or gravitational lensing, by other researchers. Something hidden to our instruments has to account for the missing mass in the observations of these phenomena, and this material has been called "Dark Matter" because we cannot see it. There are several theories about what this matter consists of, and hopefully the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will soon detect some of these particles.
Dark Energy is even more mysterious than Dark Matter. In one of Albert Einstein's equations in the General Theory of Relativity, he introduced something he called the cosmological constant, which he later called his "greatest mistake". He had to add this constant to keep a "static universe" in his theory. Now, this cosmological constant is considered by many physicist to be the value of the energy density of the vacuum of space, which is repulsive. It is amazing that, even where Einstein thought he had erred, he had pointed to a hidden truth that has been rediscovered in modern times. Einstein was the first to understand that space is not nothing, and that it is possible for more space to come into existence, The cosmological constant did exist, but it was the repulsive force of Dark Energy which the "zero-point energy" of space exhibits!
Einstein's equation: the red capital lamda is the cosmological constant, which is now described as the energy density of the vacuum of space, which is repulsive and causes the universe to expand. This equation predicts that empty space can contain its own energy, which would not be diluted as space expands, ideas which many cosmologists accept today.
In my theory, the value of Dark Energy, or the energy density of space, is not constant, and in fact, neither is the speed of light, though both would change only very slowly over cosmic time. I will explain this later. At present, nobody knows exactly what Dark Energy is. There are theories about how it works as a kind of repulsive anti-gravity to expand space in our universe, but I've seen no theories on how this force arose or originated in our universe. I believe that my own home-grown theory sheds some light on its origin.
My own theory about the Big Bang
First, here is a message I left in a discussion group on Worldscienceu.com in Adam Riess' group about the nature of dark energy, which explains the basic theory of the black hole-offspring universe connection.
Mark Heffron 9 days ago
As far as dark energy is concerned, I appreciate certain theories of the big bang I have seen which postulate that black holes are the origins of new universes, and there is an aspect of these theories that might help to explain the origin of dark energy. (if you don't like reading armchair cosmological theories from a person whose math training ended with three-dimensional Calculus, scroll on please).
First, here is a message I left in a discussion group on Worldscienceu.com in Adam Riess' group about the nature of dark energy, which explains the basic theory of the black hole-offspring universe connection.
Mark Heffron 9 days ago
As far as dark energy is concerned, I appreciate certain theories of the big bang I have seen which postulate that black holes are the origins of new universes, and there is an aspect of these theories that might help to explain the origin of dark energy. (if you don't like reading armchair cosmological theories from a person whose math training ended with three-dimensional Calculus, scroll on please).
I'm not kidding myself by believing that I invented the idea of new universes originating from black holes,though I do have some ideas that I've never seen explained before in my theory. The Physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt have both postulated that new universes or big bangs begin in black holes, and the physicist Lee Smolin has even theorized that there is a process of natural selection involved in the births of new universes from black holes.
Here is another message I left in Michael Turner's WorldScienceU.com Master Class discussion group, in response to a question about whether Dark Energy is real or not:
Mark Heffron 2 days ago
It's real but its nature is not understood.
I hold with the theory that new universes (big bangs) are created in black holes. Matter and energy consumed by black holes are compressed down to infinitesimal points where the material can enter the tiny dimensions postulated by string theory, like play-dough being squeezed though the molds of a play-dough factory. This material is ejected into a new dimension where it becomes a big bang. The '"space" of this universe keeps expanding as long as the parent black hole is still feeding on new material. This is what "dark energy" is- the constant feeding of the baby universe by the parent with new "vacuum energy". When the parent black hole stops feeding, dark energy lessens and the offspring universe stops expanding and starts to collapse.
I know this is true because Morgan Freeman, who has Himself played "God" in cinema, has been leaving many tantalizing and telltale clues among the various "endless inflation" red herrings on "Through the Wormhole".
Then there is this message that I left in Paul Steinhardt's discussion group (Professor Steinhardt does not believe in cosmic inflation and promotes the cyclic universe theory, and must be very disappointed at the apparent discovery of gravitational waves yesterday, which pretty much sinks his pet theory if they are verified)
Mark Heffron 7 days ago
Mark Heffron 2 days ago
It's real but its nature is not understood.
I hold with the theory that new universes (big bangs) are created in black holes. Matter and energy consumed by black holes are compressed down to infinitesimal points where the material can enter the tiny dimensions postulated by string theory, like play-dough being squeezed though the molds of a play-dough factory. This material is ejected into a new dimension where it becomes a big bang. The '"space" of this universe keeps expanding as long as the parent black hole is still feeding on new material. This is what "dark energy" is- the constant feeding of the baby universe by the parent with new "vacuum energy". When the parent black hole stops feeding, dark energy lessens and the offspring universe stops expanding and starts to collapse.
I know this is true because Morgan Freeman, who has Himself played "God" in cinema, has been leaving many tantalizing and telltale clues among the various "endless inflation" red herrings on "Through the Wormhole".
Then there is this message that I left in Paul Steinhardt's discussion group (Professor Steinhardt does not believe in cosmic inflation and promotes the cyclic universe theory, and must be very disappointed at the apparent discovery of gravitational waves yesterday, which pretty much sinks his pet theory if they are verified)
Mark Heffron 7 days ago
As you can see from my messages, the WorldScienceU.com classes can fuel one's imagination, even a non-scientist's, if you have a keen interest in science and cosmology.
So the theory I believe in goes like this.
A large star more than 25 times as massive as our sun, after it has burned up all its hydrogen by fusing it into helium, then its helium into carbon, then carbon into oxygen, oxygen into neon, neon into magnesium, magnesium into silicon, and then silicon into iron, finally reaches the stage where all it has left are iron atoms for fuel, which it cannot fuse. The end of its energy production causes the iron core of the star to collapse and its outer layers to fall into the core. The outer layers collapse so quickly that they rebound off the iron core in a shockwave at almost the speed of light. This causes the star to explode as a supernova, while the iron core collapses into either a neutron star or a black hole.
Once a black hole is created, nothing that fell into it can escape, not even light. Beyond its "event horizon", the black hole's edge where matter disappears into it, is a mysterious place where the current laws of physics no longer operate; this is called a singularity, where the gravitational force is so strong that all matter collapses down into a point, defying all laws of physics.
String theory postulates that there are six extra dimensions wrapped up in very tiny points of space
It is my belief that, when the matter in a black hole collapses into this point or singularity, it enters the very small dimensions that are predicted by modern Superstring theory, flows through them, and then ejects into a different dimension as a "white hole" or Big Bang in a new universe.
There are actually two different singularities that occur in modern physics. One is in the black hole and the other is at the point where the big bang begins. It's a simple matter of logic to try to connect these singularities so that the singularities disappear. If the singularity in the black hole is just the big bang in a new universe, then there really is no singularity. We can't see past the event horizon of a black hole, and we cannot see back before the event horizon of the Big Bang, but if the two are essentially connected, then the share the same event horizon and we might be able to understand their nature and workings.
When I considered this idea for the first time while reading about black holes, it seemed to be an obvious conclusion to me to connect the two singularities in a cosmological theory, and I found a few physicists who subscribe to this theory as I've mentioned above, but I've found very little written on the subject. I think that many cosmologists consider this scenario a possibility but will wait until they find enough scientific evidence for it before they voice their opinions.
The black hole-big bang connection can also offer interesting theories about the origin of Dark Matter.
"Fermi Bubbles" at both poles of the Milky Way galaxy, probably formed by gamma rays originating from the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A in the center of our galaxy
Black holes come in many different sizes, from small ones to the giant Supermassive Black Holes in the centers of galaxies, like Sagittarius A in the middle of our Milky Way.
If the big bangs of new universes originate in black holes, then it stands to reason that the size of the parent black hole would have an influence upon the initial conditions of the big bang(s) it would spawn. If the original vacuum energy in a big bang was larger than it was for our Big Bang, then the cosmological constant or value of Dark Energy would most likely be different too. If a big bang had a smaller density of vacuum energy, the new universe might not be able to expand at all, but instead collapse back upon itself like a popped soap bubble. If the initial vacuum energy was too large, this might result in a runaway expansion of the new universe, where it would be impossible for atoms and galaxies to form. It might be that, for every successful birth of a universe like ours, there are many failures, Perhaps, as physicist Lee Smolin believes, Black Holes are "naturally selected" over long periods of cosmic time which can parent healthy offspring universes. Perhaps black holes which cannot produce functional "babies" or offspring universes do not live very long and die off more quickly than successful parents.
My belief is that Dark Energy, or the "repulsive force of the universe", might not be a constant at all, and in fact, might not stay "repulsive" for the life of the new universe. My theory is that the parent black hole keeps "feeding" new vacuum energy, or new "space", into its offspring universe, nurturing it over time. The constant flow of new energy from the black hole parent into the baby universe is what Dark Matter is, And this flow of new energy is not constant, but fluctuates as the parent black hole "feeds" on new matter that crosses its event horizon.
When black holes are "feeding", they have bright rings around their event horizons called accretion discs, where friction is created between energetic particles orbiting the black hole at very high speeds. Astronomers have found many black holes in the universe by detecting stars with fast orbits around empty spaces, and many black holes are completely dark because they are not feeding upon new material. If one of these black holes should contain or generate an offspring universe, I believe that the Dark Energy in its offspring universe would probably be low. and this universe would not be expanding but contracting because of this fact. Also, its vacuum energy density would probably have lessened too, so the speed of light in this universe could have increased.
About the cosmic speed limit of light:
Scientists have always wondered why the speed of light is the fastest any particle or object can travel in our universe. When passing through the "vacuum" of space, the speed of light is about 186,000 miles per second. No particles have ever been discovered that can travel faster than this speed. Why is this?
Light passes at different speeds though different media or substances. Through water, light travels at only about 3/4 of its normal speed through space. Through other material, such as glass, it travels even slower. Scientists have invented something called a "refractive index" which describes how light propagates through various media. The refractive index of water is 1.33, meaning that light travels 1.33 faster in a vacuum than in water. Of course, when describing the speed of light in a vacuum, the question comes up: is a vacuum really empty?
According to Einstein and most modern physicists it is not, because of vacuum or zero point energy. From this perspective, space is not completely empty, so light has to interact with something in empty space which limits its speed. Even though a photon, the unit of light, is often called mass-less, it does have a very small mass calculated at less than 10−18 eV/c2 , or 10−18 electron volts divided by the speed of light squared, an extremely small number. When light passes through water, it has to interact with water molecules which slow it down. In space, it probably interacts with the vacuum energy where virtual particles like quarks capture and then re-emit the photons, which also moderates their speed and is responsible for the speed limit for all particles and objects in the universe.
So the speed of light is not constant. It has a limit in a vacuum, but that may not be constant. There may be areas of our universe where the vacuum energy is higher or lower. The speed of light might be faster in a lower density vacuum, and slower in a higher density area. scientists have not found areas of space like this yet, but they may exist, especially in different universes.
In my theory, it is the initial conditions of the big bang when a universe is created from a black hole that dictate what the vacuum energy of that space is, so light would have a higher speed limit in a space with a lower vacuum energy, and a lower speed limit in a space with a higher density value. The value of the the Dark Energy constant would probably differ too from ours, depending upon how much mass the parent black hole is currently consuming. Of course, when a universe is created from a black hole in a big bang, the parent black hole is always feeding, or it wouldn't have been able to generate the new universe in the first place.
Would the laws of physics be different in different universes?
In Alan Guth's theory of eternal inflation, many "pocket universes" such as ours would be created in a multiverse from the primary expansion of space (this is the theory that postulates that our universe will eventually suffer a "heat death" and keep expanding into a thin lifeless soup of tiny particles spread out over ever-vaster distances, an idea I find both repellent and very unlikely). In his theory, the laws of physics could be different in the various universes formed, causing many to abort end perish, and others to expand under different parameters than ours. In this scenario, each universe would be like a cosmic experiment, resulting either in success or failure. I like this idea, as it follows the concepts of natural selection in our universe, where aberrations from genetic norms often lead to improvements in species (and at a severe cost and suffering to individuals). Some computer models have been created by scientists to test if changes in the physics of a universe could result in a working universe, and there have been some positive results. Changes to the values of quarks, the building blocks of the constituents of atoms, have shown that if the masses of certain quarks were changed, the six known quarks could still work in harmony if the masses were adjusted for other quarks. In these simulations, hydrogen would no longer be stable, but its heavier isotopes could be. Also, an isotope of carbon, carbon-14, also would be stable, as would a form of oxygen, so that the chemical reactions necessary for life could be present in such a different universe, Universes with different physical processes than ours would still need some form of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen to create the constituents of life as we know it.
Other scientists studied what would happen if the weak nuclear force, which allows protons to turn into protons and vice versa, was missing in a different universe, and they found that they could make up for the missing force by changing the values of the other three fundamental forces could compensate for the missing weak force and still allow stable elements to be formed. So universes with a different physics than ours have already been show to be possible in theory.
The constituent of a universe which seems to be the most important in its potential success or failure as a viable world appears to come down to that mysterious cosmological constant, otherwise know as the value of zero-point vacuum energy or pressure of space, aka Dark Energy, the enigmatic lamda in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. If this value is changed by a small amount from what it has been calculated to be in our universe, disastrous consequences can ensue. If the value is slightly too high, a runaway expansion of the universe would never allow galaxies to form. If slightly to low, the universe would collapse.
The sensitivity of the Dark Energy value is another reason why I prefer the theory that new universes originate in black holes. In this theory, black holes. which already contain the material of a successful universe, feed the baby universe with the space-energy that causes it to grow. It is still possible for the black hole to be a "bad parent" and overfeed or underfeed the new universe with a maladjusted cosmological constant, causing the it to die or become a kind of galactic delinquent, but I doubt that it would be necessary to create billions or trillions of new universes just to get one functional one, as some theories of "eternal inflation" multiverses suggest. In the black hole theory, the physics of new universes might change too over cosmic time, but at a much slower pace, as the offspring universe would contain most of the heredity of its parent, similarly to the way evolution takes place in biological species on our planet.
Where is all the antimatter that should have been created in the Big Bang?
This is another question which as dogged physicists ever since the theory of the Big Bang was formulated. At the time of the Big Bag, equal amounts of matter and anti matter should have been formed For every quark that was formed, and antiquark should have been created, for every electon, a positron, etcetera. In Alan Guth's theory of cosmic inflation, the universe is postulated to have begun with a small amount of vacuum energy, which through a process called quantum uncertainty, caused amounts of matter and anti-matter to be created in slightly uneven amounts. After the particles in the majority canceled out all their anti-particles, a small amount of positive matter remained, which eventually, through the inflation of space, became the universe we know today.
This might be what happened, though this theory does not explain how the original vacuum energy came into existence, as the black hole theory does. Matter and antimatter are basically the same thing, the difference being that the particles have an opposite electric charge. We call the substance of our universe "matter" because we didn't discover antimatter until 1932. Other universes which contain what we call antimatter would call the material in our universe "antimatter". The basic rule is that the two types of energy, when they interact, annihilate each other in an explosive burst of high-energy gamma protons, the same amount of energy that was used to create the pairs in the first place. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is considered to have been produced by the collisions and mutual annihilation of matched particle and antiparticle pairs in the early stages of the universe.
Another difference between my theory of how black holes create new universes and those of others I have read, involves the antimatter problem, and offers an explanation as to where all the antimatter went after the Big Bang. In my searches for theories of black holes creating new universes, I have found none that contain this hypothesis, nor have I found any that include my idea of how black holes provide the initial vacuum energy for infant universes. I'm not saying I'm the only one who has ever considered these ideas, just that I haven't found them published. That's one of the reasons I am publishing this essay in a blog.
I suggest, that in the early universe, some kind of separation occurred between much of the matter and antimatter. Though most scientists have always thought that matter and anti-matter are gravitationally attracted to each other, this idea has never been verified in experiment, due to obvious reasons. Recently a man named Massimo Villata from the Observatory of Turin has shown that the answer can be found in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Villata has shown that the current formula for general relativity predicts that matter and antimatter are both self-attractive, while matter and antimatter mutually repel each other. Villata also suggests that it might be antimatter that is the cause of the cosmological constant, or the repulsive energy of space, and suspects that there might be great voids of antimatter in our universe. My idea is somewhat similar, though I believe that the early antimatter in the universe collapsed into black holes because of the pressure created by the enormous gravitation force the majority of matter placed upon it. I think that antimatter in black holes is actually causing the expansion. I also believe that black holes in our universe are made entirely of antimatter, and that the reason high speed protons and electrons have been observed shooting out of the poles of black holes is that the black holes are expelling or coughing up regular matter and only consuming the antimatter that is being created in the very hot accretion discs that surround them. In my theory, black holes separate matter and anti-matter universes from each other. They are a kind of barrier between the mutually destructive forces. Black holes, the original havens for antimatter in our universe, will only consume antimatter from their parent universe and eject any regular matter through jets (and possibly through Hawking Radiation when they get "indigestion"), and somehow, they also eject unwanted regular matter into new infant universes through the infinitesimally small dimensions postulated by String Theory. Excuse the metaphor, but it's as if they are vomiting out regular matter that they consume back into their own parent universe, while also birthing or excreting baby universes of matter into new dimensions through repulsive gravity. You end up with parent and baby universes made of matter, connected by black hole tunnels made up of antimatter, a polarity that I find, in the new language of physics, very "elegant", very symmetric, and I would add, very"yin-yang."
Considering this idea of mutual repulsion of matter and antimatter, and the fact that early universe had a different energy environment and composition than it does today, I believe it is possible that "islands" of antimatter formed within the early sea of energy, where regular matter was in the majority and compacted the antimatter through mutual gravitational repulsion. This would also explain another quandary that physicists are in concerning black holes.
It is now thought that the supermassive black holes that are the cores of galaxies actually created these galaxies through their strong gravitational attraction. Just as our sun caused the formation of the planets from the early dust and gasses of our solar system with its gravity, black holes were responsible for pulling all the material of galaxies into orbits around them, and over time, creating galaxies of many types. The earliest galaxies may have all been elliptical, until the rotation of the black holes eventually caused them to become spiral in nature.
The puzzling question that physicists are faced with now is: if the existence of black holes preceded the formation of galaxies, where did these black holes come from in an early universe? My theory answers that question. They were created by the repulsive force of the majority of matter upon antimatter, creating black holes made of antimatter, and black holes have been consuming all of the antimatter in our universe since then. Someday I hope evidence is found that, in a universe mostly comprised of regular matter, quantum events, and quantum uncertainty have a bias, and actually produce more matter than antimatter by a very small degree. There are current theories about baryon asymmetry that would account for this imbalance.
I have so far described in my theory, how black holes beget new universes, how black holes provide the vacuum energy for the beginnings of new universes, how constant feeding of this energy into offspring universes accounts for the Dark Energy that is currently causing our universe to expand, and the role that antimatter plays in the creation of black holes and the maintenance of both a connection and energy barrier between linked universes. I will continue to explain some of the more exotic elements in this theory in part two of the essay in the next post
If the big bangs of new universes originate in black holes, then it stands to reason that the size of the parent black hole would have an influence upon the initial conditions of the big bang(s) it would spawn. If the original vacuum energy in a big bang was larger than it was for our Big Bang, then the cosmological constant or value of Dark Energy would most likely be different too. If a big bang had a smaller density of vacuum energy, the new universe might not be able to expand at all, but instead collapse back upon itself like a popped soap bubble. If the initial vacuum energy was too large, this might result in a runaway expansion of the new universe, where it would be impossible for atoms and galaxies to form. It might be that, for every successful birth of a universe like ours, there are many failures, Perhaps, as physicist Lee Smolin believes, Black Holes are "naturally selected" over long periods of cosmic time which can parent healthy offspring universes. Perhaps black holes which cannot produce functional "babies" or offspring universes do not live very long and die off more quickly than successful parents.
NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory photo of Centaurus A, showing the jets emitted from its central supermassive black hole which has a mass of 55 million times that of our sun
My belief is that Dark Energy, or the "repulsive force of the universe", might not be a constant at all, and in fact, might not stay "repulsive" for the life of the new universe. My theory is that the parent black hole keeps "feeding" new vacuum energy, or new "space", into its offspring universe, nurturing it over time. The constant flow of new energy from the black hole parent into the baby universe is what Dark Matter is, And this flow of new energy is not constant, but fluctuates as the parent black hole "feeds" on new matter that crosses its event horizon.
Artist's concept of a black hole feeding on a companion star. Note the jets of high-speed protons and electrons originating from the poles of the Black Hole. "Feeding" black holes like this one could pump lots of new energy into an offspring universe, creating a large value for its repulsive Dark Energy and causing its expansion to accelerate
When black holes are "feeding", they have bright rings around their event horizons called accretion discs, where friction is created between energetic particles orbiting the black hole at very high speeds. Astronomers have found many black holes in the universe by detecting stars with fast orbits around empty spaces, and many black holes are completely dark because they are not feeding upon new material. If one of these black holes should contain or generate an offspring universe, I believe that the Dark Energy in its offspring universe would probably be low. and this universe would not be expanding but contracting because of this fact. Also, its vacuum energy density would probably have lessened too, so the speed of light in this universe could have increased.
Scientists have always wondered why the speed of light is the fastest any particle or object can travel in our universe. When passing through the "vacuum" of space, the speed of light is about 186,000 miles per second. No particles have ever been discovered that can travel faster than this speed. Why is this?
Light passes at different speeds though different media or substances. Through water, light travels at only about 3/4 of its normal speed through space. Through other material, such as glass, it travels even slower. Scientists have invented something called a "refractive index" which describes how light propagates through various media. The refractive index of water is 1.33, meaning that light travels 1.33 faster in a vacuum than in water. Of course, when describing the speed of light in a vacuum, the question comes up: is a vacuum really empty?
According to Einstein and most modern physicists it is not, because of vacuum or zero point energy. From this perspective, space is not completely empty, so light has to interact with something in empty space which limits its speed. Even though a photon, the unit of light, is often called mass-less, it does have a very small mass calculated at less than 10−18 eV/c2 , or 10−18 electron volts divided by the speed of light squared, an extremely small number. When light passes through water, it has to interact with water molecules which slow it down. In space, it probably interacts with the vacuum energy where virtual particles like quarks capture and then re-emit the photons, which also moderates their speed and is responsible for the speed limit for all particles and objects in the universe.
In my theory, it is the initial conditions of the big bang when a universe is created from a black hole that dictate what the vacuum energy of that space is, so light would have a higher speed limit in a space with a lower vacuum energy, and a lower speed limit in a space with a higher density value. The value of the the Dark Energy constant would probably differ too from ours, depending upon how much mass the parent black hole is currently consuming. Of course, when a universe is created from a black hole in a big bang, the parent black hole is always feeding, or it wouldn't have been able to generate the new universe in the first place.
In Alan Guth's theory of eternal inflation, many "pocket universes" such as ours would be created in a multiverse from the primary expansion of space (this is the theory that postulates that our universe will eventually suffer a "heat death" and keep expanding into a thin lifeless soup of tiny particles spread out over ever-vaster distances, an idea I find both repellent and very unlikely). In his theory, the laws of physics could be different in the various universes formed, causing many to abort end perish, and others to expand under different parameters than ours. In this scenario, each universe would be like a cosmic experiment, resulting either in success or failure. I like this idea, as it follows the concepts of natural selection in our universe, where aberrations from genetic norms often lead to improvements in species (and at a severe cost and suffering to individuals). Some computer models have been created by scientists to test if changes in the physics of a universe could result in a working universe, and there have been some positive results. Changes to the values of quarks, the building blocks of the constituents of atoms, have shown that if the masses of certain quarks were changed, the six known quarks could still work in harmony if the masses were adjusted for other quarks. In these simulations, hydrogen would no longer be stable, but its heavier isotopes could be. Also, an isotope of carbon, carbon-14, also would be stable, as would a form of oxygen, so that the chemical reactions necessary for life could be present in such a different universe, Universes with different physical processes than ours would still need some form of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen to create the constituents of life as we know it.
The constituent of a universe which seems to be the most important in its potential success or failure as a viable world appears to come down to that mysterious cosmological constant, otherwise know as the value of zero-point vacuum energy or pressure of space, aka Dark Energy, the enigmatic lamda in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. If this value is changed by a small amount from what it has been calculated to be in our universe, disastrous consequences can ensue. If the value is slightly too high, a runaway expansion of the universe would never allow galaxies to form. If slightly to low, the universe would collapse.
This is another question which as dogged physicists ever since the theory of the Big Bang was formulated. At the time of the Big Bag, equal amounts of matter and anti matter should have been formed For every quark that was formed, and antiquark should have been created, for every electon, a positron, etcetera. In Alan Guth's theory of cosmic inflation, the universe is postulated to have begun with a small amount of vacuum energy, which through a process called quantum uncertainty, caused amounts of matter and anti-matter to be created in slightly uneven amounts. After the particles in the majority canceled out all their anti-particles, a small amount of positive matter remained, which eventually, through the inflation of space, became the universe we know today.
This might be what happened, though this theory does not explain how the original vacuum energy came into existence, as the black hole theory does. Matter and antimatter are basically the same thing, the difference being that the particles have an opposite electric charge. We call the substance of our universe "matter" because we didn't discover antimatter until 1932. Other universes which contain what we call antimatter would call the material in our universe "antimatter". The basic rule is that the two types of energy, when they interact, annihilate each other in an explosive burst of high-energy gamma protons, the same amount of energy that was used to create the pairs in the first place. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is considered to have been produced by the collisions and mutual annihilation of matched particle and antiparticle pairs in the early stages of the universe.
I suggest, that in the early universe, some kind of separation occurred between much of the matter and antimatter. Though most scientists have always thought that matter and anti-matter are gravitationally attracted to each other, this idea has never been verified in experiment, due to obvious reasons. Recently a man named Massimo Villata from the Observatory of Turin has shown that the answer can be found in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Villata has shown that the current formula for general relativity predicts that matter and antimatter are both self-attractive, while matter and antimatter mutually repel each other. Villata also suggests that it might be antimatter that is the cause of the cosmological constant, or the repulsive energy of space, and suspects that there might be great voids of antimatter in our universe. My idea is somewhat similar, though I believe that the early antimatter in the universe collapsed into black holes because of the pressure created by the enormous gravitation force the majority of matter placed upon it. I think that antimatter in black holes is actually causing the expansion. I also believe that black holes in our universe are made entirely of antimatter, and that the reason high speed protons and electrons have been observed shooting out of the poles of black holes is that the black holes are expelling or coughing up regular matter and only consuming the antimatter that is being created in the very hot accretion discs that surround them. In my theory, black holes separate matter and anti-matter universes from each other. They are a kind of barrier between the mutually destructive forces. Black holes, the original havens for antimatter in our universe, will only consume antimatter from their parent universe and eject any regular matter through jets (and possibly through Hawking Radiation when they get "indigestion"), and somehow, they also eject unwanted regular matter into new infant universes through the infinitesimally small dimensions postulated by String Theory. Excuse the metaphor, but it's as if they are vomiting out regular matter that they consume back into their own parent universe, while also birthing or excreting baby universes of matter into new dimensions through repulsive gravity. You end up with parent and baby universes made of matter, connected by black hole tunnels made up of antimatter, a polarity that I find, in the new language of physics, very "elegant", very symmetric, and I would add, very"yin-yang."
It is now thought that the supermassive black holes that are the cores of galaxies actually created these galaxies through their strong gravitational attraction. Just as our sun caused the formation of the planets from the early dust and gasses of our solar system with its gravity, black holes were responsible for pulling all the material of galaxies into orbits around them, and over time, creating galaxies of many types. The earliest galaxies may have all been elliptical, until the rotation of the black holes eventually caused them to become spiral in nature.
I have so far described in my theory, how black holes beget new universes, how black holes provide the vacuum energy for the beginnings of new universes, how constant feeding of this energy into offspring universes accounts for the Dark Energy that is currently causing our universe to expand, and the role that antimatter plays in the creation of black holes and the maintenance of both a connection and energy barrier between linked universes. I will continue to explain some of the more exotic elements in this theory in part two of the essay in the next post
