Cosmos versus Cosmology

 

We know exactly how old the Universe is. According to Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) God opened for business on a Sunday, the 27th of April in 3877 BC., at 11.00 am. central European time. Drinks were on the house.

In the 5th century Hellenistic scientists still knew that only the Earth’s spherical body could cast the kind of circular shadow that gives the moon the appearance of a crescent. Then came Cosmas Indicopleustes and published his Topographia in order to debunk Hellenistic science. It became dogma to think of the Universe as God’s little jewelry box, a box in the shape of Solomon’s temple. A millennium later, the Sistine Chapel was still designed in its image. Begging to differ could get you a slow roasting at the stake, after they broke every bone in your feet and gagged you to prevent you from saying memorable last words. The Inquisition interrogated even Kepler’s mother on charges of witchcraft. The astronomer had every reason to deviate only by increments from established wisdom. The discovery of the elliptic trajectory of Mars was already pushing the envelope, it could be construed as an affront to the “perfection” of the circular trajectories in Ptolemy’s and Copernicus’ cosmologies and it did spoil the “harmony” in Kepler’s own Harmonia Mundi. It is easy to be dismissive here, but in a period of thumbscrews and auto-da-fés the scientific community kept many things to themselves.

We think of Black Holes as the latest in cosmological haute couture; but muted ideas about the theoretical possibility circulated as early as the decade after the publication of Newton’s Principia. The Swiss mathematician Euler (1707 – 1783) spoke of them as the “dark lords of the Universe.” So we will never know whether he really meant it when, based on the fact that the sky remains dark at night, Kepler dismissed the idea of an infinite Universe. He wrote: “In an infinite Universe where every line of vision must end on the surface of a star, would the whole celestial vault not be as luminous as the Sun?" (Kepler, Conversation with the Starry Messenger, 1610). This argument became later known as "Olber's Paradox." The idea of an infinite Universe is of course not a novelty.

Epicurus, the Roman poet Lucretius and the Stoics already had thought of it; Nicolaus Cusano (1401 – 1464) suggested it in guarded language. Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) threw caution over board and spelled it out: "I can imagine an infinite number of worlds like the Earth, with a Garden of Eden on each one. In all these Gardens of Eden, half the Adams and Eves will not eat the fruit of knowledge, and half will. But half of infinity is infinity, so an infinite number of worlds will fall from grace and there will be an infinite number of crucifixions" (Girdano Bruno, On the Cause, Principle, and Unity, 5th dialogue). This was not likely to remain unnoticed by the ecclesiastic thought police. Bruno was burned alive, his books put on the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum and have remained there ever since. The first real scientist to take the idea seriously, was Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727). In his private notes Newton had anticipated much of Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955): "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of the Activity from the Particles of Light which enter the Composition?" I don’t know about you, but this is hitting pretty close to Einstein’s E=mv² (energy equals mass by the square power of light velocity). Sir Isaac even speculated that "another force, independent of gravity, magnetism, and electricity, might prevail only at the smallest distances." A truly eerie insight for a man of the 17th century. In his publications however, Newton decided to stake his reputation on Kepler's three laws of planetary motion.

Newton’s resulting law of gravity suggests a world collapsing on itself. So to prevent this from happening, Newton’s celestial mechanics require a homogeneous Universe stretching into infinity. Professor Hawking in his book A History of Time brushed this aside, claiming that even so all matter would ultimately coalesce and collapse into one dense mass. An example for a rushed snap-judgment, and this by the man who had proven that even black holes eventually must evaporate.

Kepler was as bright as Newton or Hawking. Still writing by candle light, it must have occurred to him that even an infinite number of candles doesn’t burn all the time. In 1676 Ole Roemer (1644 – 1710) calculated a good approximation of the speed of light, and in 1901 Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907) made the crucial step of expressing distances to stars in terms of their light signature’s travel time. In his paper On Ether and Gravitational Matter through Infinite Space, Lord Kelvin picked up on a suggestion by the poet Edgar Allen Poe, and pointed out that a star's lifetime is limited by it's available energy resources. As we look out into space, we also look back in time, to the darkness that existed before the birth of a luminous body and to the darkness that followed its expiration. Modern estimates of the distance of luminous bodies in the cosmic background give a value of 10²³ light years, meaning that in order to see a star’s emissions on every line of sight, such star must have been shining for at least 10 to the power of 23 years. But the lifetime of a sun-like star is only 10¹⁰ years. In other words the answer to the question where all the starlight has gone is, that it hasn't reached us yet, and some never will before our own solar system has expired. Even with all eternity available, in order to convene, the most distant objects will never arrive at the crunch point before they expire and disperse as microwaves; in a manner of speaking, there is just too much Universe. Of all possible explanations why and how in an infinite Universe the sky is dark at night, this is the most parsimonious with the least amount of theoretical assumptions. Therefore “there is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either 4,000 or twenty billion years ago,” says the Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfven (1908 – 1995).

Then why is it so unpopular with present day cosmologists? “I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaitre proposed the theory of Big Bang for the first time,” says Hannes Alfven, “Lemaitre was both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas' theological dictum of creation out of nothing” (Hannes Alfven). Lemaitre believed to have an excellent reason to think so, and this reason seems to have convinced also many scientists who don’t share Lemaitre's theological preoccupation.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble (1889 – 1953) noticed a uniformly increasing red shift in the spectrum of light from galaxies and clusters at extreme cosmic distances. Since the velocity of a stellar object moving through deep space either makes its light signature shift towards the blue spectrum when it approaches us, like the Andromeda galaxy, or towards the red spectrum when it hurries away from us, the likely explanation is an universal motion away from the observer. The more distant the object, the greater, it seems, the velocity, but we should understand that Hubble’s variable is not an expression for the “expansion of space.” The idea of an expanding Universe comes in two forms: either the medium of space is expanding itself while the virtually stationary astronomical objects are carried along, or the astronomical objects disperse on their own through space. Only the latter will be observable in a shift towards red or blue in the object’s light-signature. "When the Hubble variable was discovered in 1926 it had a value of 500 kilometers per second per mega-parsec” (Halton Arp). However any value above sixty for Hubble’s constant “has the embarrassing feature of yielding an age for the Universe since Big Bang that is exceeded by the oldest stars in our Galaxy" (Riccardo Giovanelli, Less Expansion, More Agreement, Nature, 8 July, 1999, pp. 111-2). Which prompted Halton Arp to make the sarcastic remark: “During the past half-century this variable has gradually declined to 50.3 kilometers per second per mega-parsec. The radius of the Universe is inversely proportional to the magnitude of this variable. Accordingly the Universe is expanding by a factor of 100 per century. Dividing this factor into the above ratio discloses that the expansion began here on Earth 961 years ago, or 1015 AD. during the dark ages. Obviously, western cosmology was born in the dark and has been there ever since” (Halton Arp, 'Extragalactic Astronomy', Science, 17 Dec. 1971, vol. 174, p. 1189). That may be so; but there is a logical reason why we seem to sit at the center of this “expansion.”

As long as the boundaries of the Universe exceed the observer’s horizon, any observer’s horizon, no matter where he is located, such observer occupies the center of his observations. One doesn’t need to read Einstein to understand that there is no preference of one observer over the other, we are all equal in that we occupy the center of our observational horizon whether here or in one of the Sloan Galaxies. So, assuming a perfectly stationary but truly infinite Universe of an overall even distribution of matter, the tidal force from “outside” of every observer’s horizon must by far exceed the gravitational pull from “inside” the horizon. In other words, the light signature of objects closer to the observational horizon should be uniformly shifted towards red, regardless where the actual observational “center” happens to be. (If the edge to the “outside” of a finite Universe would coincide with the observer’s horizon, the situation should be exactly the opposite, the tidal force from “insight” would cause objects to rush inward and show a blue-shifted light signature. But since there is no “outside” to the Universe, nobody will ever observe it.)

The current value for the Hubble constant is seventy kilometers per second per mega-parsec, “with an uncertainty of ten percent.” This means that a galaxy appears to be moving 160,000 miles per hour faster for every 3.3 million light-years away from Earth. Apparently the Universe is rapidly dispersing into an ever thinner cloud of nothing, leaving behind merely a debris of microwaves.

The theorists of Big Bang like to present this debris as the fossil signature of the initial bang. For them it is the clincher for their theory but it would be difficult to concoct any alternative cosmology without some or other form of radiation in the background. There always has to be a debris of microwaves, whether it all started at the blink of an eye or whether since eternity the Universe is slowly burning away from a source of infinite supply. In fact the very presence of this radiation does actually put a question-mark on Big Bang. No matter in what direction we look into the Universe, the background temperature is pretty much the same in every direction, roughly 3º Kelvin with very minor fluctuations, but if we go by the assumption that a big bang actually had occurred, then not enough time has elapsed since this event for radiation to zip across the Universe and level out at the same universal average. It sounds innocuous and is barely mentioned among the pundits, but so far, every attempt to explain away the horizon problem has landed us in one or other violation of natural laws if we don't make allowances for a much more ancient age of the Universe. It is true, the connection between theory and the cosmic background radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson was made because of the physicist George Gamow's suggestion. However every other cosmological idea about cosmic radiation would have done the same service. It was the time when we just began to acquire a better understanding of radiation while still believing in a featureless vacuum between the stars.

Science is the story of hunches and ideas put to the test; the prove lies in the method of the testing. But the story how we stumble over our hunches and ideas is a messy affair and riddled with detours and one-way lanes and the pitfalls of ill applied logic. Genuine discoveries have been made because of false assumptions, assumptions which sometimes continue to cast their shadow on an otherwise perfectly valid fact. I am not much of a believer in anything, but as far as I am concerned Occam’s razor applies. The more complicated an explanation, the larger the margin of error.

An affirmation of Big Bang would require the Universe to look different in the past. There should be noticeably fewer heavy elements in the spectrum of ancient stars. Embarrassingly for the theory it doesn’t. Galaxies from twelve billion years ago show the familiar distribution of stellar ages and a similar spectrum of chemical elements just like our Milky Way. As recent as January 2004, the American Astronomical Society confirmed that the Universe of billions of years ago and in distances marked by high red-shifts in the spectrum is of a very similar composition than our cosmic neighborhood. Not that this means a whole lot. 99.999% of all matter in the Universe exists as plasma, a very thin gas in which the atoms are stripped of their electrons. This creates a medium of positively charged ions which respond to electric and magnetic fields in complex ways, a medium even filling the voids between the galaxies.

The electric force behind these events is a thousand trillion, trillion, trillion times stronger than gravity! Hannes Alfven was the first to provide proves for its existence: "Students using astrophysical textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of plasma concepts, despite the fact that some of them have been known for half a century" (Hannes Alfven).

In 1965 this did lead Hannes Alfven to postulate a cellular Universe that exists as a mixture of matter and antimatter which he called “ambiplasma.” When occasionally two such regions come in contact and annihilate each other, this creates a superheated state and rapid expansion into the space surrounding the area of annihilation, giving cause to nucleosynthesis and the observed superabundance of deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7. The Alfven model postulates that the regions of matter and anti-matter are larger than the presently observed Universe and are separated by double-layers in the plasma. A confident prediction, backed up by observed phenomena such as intergalactic Birkeland currents and plasma double-layers. The model does not invoke any exotic physics and employs well understood electromagnetic forces and gravity.

In other words, what we use to call “cosmology,” is restricted to the tiniest remnants of such tempestuous collisions between matter and anti-matter, to solids, liquids and gases, the physics just of 0.001% of the Universe. In the larger scheme of things, all our ingenious string theories and quantum mechanics are a mere glitch, barely a blip on the scale. Therefore it made sense for Willem de Sitter (1872 – 1934), to develop, in collaboration with Einstein himself, the model of an empty Universe with nothing “in it,” no stars and no matter, that nevertheless exponentially expands. An expansion of emptiness? It is not as nonsensical as it sounds. When we speak of "space" the question is, whether it is defined by the nature of the physical events inhabiting it or by the postulates of geometry. The mathematician will maintain that physical variables correlate with geometrical metrics, which is making it an intrinsic property of physical space, even if this space appears to be empty. Maxwell (1831 – 1879), Einstein, even Mercator (1512 – 1594) and Ptolemy (87 – 150 AD.) – yes the Ptolemy who had placed the Earth at the center of the Universe – understood that space is not an entity separate from matter, rather a mere feature of the stuff that constitutes the world. So even “empty” space is never absolutely void. De Sitter’s cosmology is a vision of almost mystical purity and clean mathematical logic. And given the average density of our Universe, which is extremely low, it may not even be so very far from the truth.

Einstein's field equations contain a fudge factor, a “cosmological constant.” The actual value of this constant is still everybody’s guess and therefore allows for multiple solutions of the equations, depending which value we prefer. Einstein himself later denounced this introduction of lambda as the “biggest mistake of my life.” It inspired Kurt Gödel (1906 – 1978) to propose his own solution of a spinning Universe.

Since there is no “outside” to the Universe, nobody “inside,” for lack of a point of reference, will ever notice the spin. Except we consider the gravitational effects of such a spin on the overall distribution of matter. The rotational velocity at the "cosmic pole" is zero and increases towards the "equator." (On Earth the rotational velocity along the longitude increases from zero to a speed of 1,500 km per hour on the equator). The "cosmic pole" is more likely to be void, like the “WMAP Cold Spot.” Closer to the equator, matter should accumulate, stretching in bands along the latitudes, like the “cosmic walls” in our telescopes – galaxies and clusters of galaxies, strung out a billion light-years across and streaming along at velocities that approach 1,000 kilometers per second. In 2003, a survey by the ROSAT x-ray satellite revealed another concentration of matter some twelve billion light years end to end. Who is to say this could not be the effect of a cosmic spin? And since in a spinning Universe the velocity of every region along a "cosmic latitude" must vary from the other regions above and below its "longitude," Kurt Gödel hoped, that traveling the cosmic latitudes would enable us to tunnel through time.

My math is woefully inadequate to appreciate all the niceties in Gödel’s solution; I hear it has been dismissed because it doesn’t allow for expansion. But the supposed telltale sign for expansion, the red-shift of distant objects, can also be explained as a tidal effect on objects nearer to the Universe’s “equator.”

© – 4/9/2009 – by michael sympson, 3,400 words, all rights reserved