| BRIAN LUMLEY'S NOT JUST ANOTHER T.O.E. (But a Very Big Missing Link, is all). |
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AS THE READER IS ABOUT TO DISCOVER, I’m no scientist, and only by an enormous stretch of the imagination could anyone describe me as “Some kind of theoretical physicist
sort of fellow.” And that’s despite that I’m so frequently struck by increasingly insistent thoughts of recondite and seemingly overlooked or avoided cosmological concepts of my
own.
Now, I really can’t say where they come from, these occasional glimpses of mine, for despite that I often mess around with numbers neither am I a mathematician. In fact I read and
write Science Fiction, or Fantasy, or just about anything else in the weird or macabre-to-horror genres; but there again so did Stephen Hawking – well, he at least read SF – along with
Isaac Asimov and a big bunch of others…but I believe it was mainly SF that attracted the majority of them; for along with their theories and aside from the more whimsical and
esoteric stuff, SF does seem to have been the other side of the coin and (perhaps) the thinking man’s brain fodder.
Anyway, I’m probably best known for my Necroscope® novels, about a metaphysically-minded hero for the dead, the so-called Great Majority, with whom Harry Keogh, the
eponymous Necroscope, has the power to communicate at will beyond the grave of sod or funeral pyre. But don’t turn away just yet, for there’s a whole lot of “science” in there
too…except it’s my science and may not be too highly regarded by all of those “real scientist” folks – so I’ll just leave all that out and only speak of what’s been theorized, or of what
we’ve accepted as proven and what we suspect might even be the facts about the truth that’s still out there.
And I’ll leave anything personal about me out, too, except the absolute basics should the need arise; which leaves only the universe itself to consider, because that’s what I’m working
on here. And as the title says this isn’t just another Big T.O.E. but far more my theory of a Big Missing Link – a Very Big Link! – “Missing” being the executive word.
And just like all those real scientists gone or going before me, I’m not very much ashamed of having to scramble over the epaulets of giants to get to it: by which I mean taking
advantage of all the massive discoveries of those genuinely scientifically inquisitive minds that have spent so much time dreaming up and often proving their theories, all long before
the rest of us rightly, wrongly or utterly ridiculously have done our best to explain everything to such lesser minds as mine and those of a great many others.
For let’s face it, without all those soaring historical (and a great many rather more modern) thinkers, it’s not at all unlikely that even if I’d had a whole heap of famous equations at my
disposal, still I probably wouldn’t have had enough of them to cover the entire enormous thing. Well, neither does the universe have all the answers, all the numbers and equations,
but only the ones that Nature, the Laws of Physics, and the Cosmos itself in its own three or four (or more?) dimensions has made accessible to us through this science thing, which
we have come to think of as “experimentation and observation:” the rather complicated but highly successful system which we’ve been stuck with ever since.
But ever since what?
Why, The Beginning, of course! Or rather, that moment which certain not quite so feeble brains were first capable of considering and theorising. But to quote Carl Sagan, (who by the
way wrote SF too,) “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Which I believe says it all, and as clearly and concisely – or more so – than anyone else has ever said it. Not
even Moses with his “IN THE BEGINNING” declaration, which in any case was far too complicated for the lesser souls of his era, if not too terribly wrong, despite that he was speaking
for the times – and thank goodness he somehow managed to steer clear of turtles!
Or perhaps some of our greatest brains might in fact have brushed against it, or at least glimpsed The Beginning – which I prefer to call The Intangible, or maybe The Continuance –
with their numbers, gedenken experiments, and sometimes their sheer intuitive and intellectual brilliance; but no one has yet succeeded in fitting it all together. Not with all their
theoretical juggling, sleight of hand and conjuration; and that includes me because I don’t have the math, or not nearly enough of it. And perhaps that is what saves me, for being
rather deficient in the Science of Quantities, it really is all down to the imagination – of which I have a lot.
sort of fellow.” And that’s despite that I’m so frequently struck by increasingly insistent thoughts of recondite and seemingly overlooked or avoided cosmological concepts of my
own.
Now, I really can’t say where they come from, these occasional glimpses of mine, for despite that I often mess around with numbers neither am I a mathematician. In fact I read and
write Science Fiction, or Fantasy, or just about anything else in the weird or macabre-to-horror genres; but there again so did Stephen Hawking – well, he at least read SF – along with
Isaac Asimov and a big bunch of others…but I believe it was mainly SF that attracted the majority of them; for along with their theories and aside from the more whimsical and
esoteric stuff, SF does seem to have been the other side of the coin and (perhaps) the thinking man’s brain fodder.
Anyway, I’m probably best known for my Necroscope® novels, about a metaphysically-minded hero for the dead, the so-called Great Majority, with whom Harry Keogh, the
eponymous Necroscope, has the power to communicate at will beyond the grave of sod or funeral pyre. But don’t turn away just yet, for there’s a whole lot of “science” in there
too…except it’s my science and may not be too highly regarded by all of those “real scientist” folks – so I’ll just leave all that out and only speak of what’s been theorized, or of what
we’ve accepted as proven and what we suspect might even be the facts about the truth that’s still out there.
And I’ll leave anything personal about me out, too, except the absolute basics should the need arise; which leaves only the universe itself to consider, because that’s what I’m working
on here. And as the title says this isn’t just another Big T.O.E. but far more my theory of a Big Missing Link – a Very Big Link! – “Missing” being the executive word.
And just like all those real scientists gone or going before me, I’m not very much ashamed of having to scramble over the epaulets of giants to get to it: by which I mean taking
advantage of all the massive discoveries of those genuinely scientifically inquisitive minds that have spent so much time dreaming up and often proving their theories, all long before
the rest of us rightly, wrongly or utterly ridiculously have done our best to explain everything to such lesser minds as mine and those of a great many others.
For let’s face it, without all those soaring historical (and a great many rather more modern) thinkers, it’s not at all unlikely that even if I’d had a whole heap of famous equations at my
disposal, still I probably wouldn’t have had enough of them to cover the entire enormous thing. Well, neither does the universe have all the answers, all the numbers and equations,
but only the ones that Nature, the Laws of Physics, and the Cosmos itself in its own three or four (or more?) dimensions has made accessible to us through this science thing, which
we have come to think of as “experimentation and observation:” the rather complicated but highly successful system which we’ve been stuck with ever since.
But ever since what?
Why, The Beginning, of course! Or rather, that moment which certain not quite so feeble brains were first capable of considering and theorising. But to quote Carl Sagan, (who by the
way wrote SF too,) “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Which I believe says it all, and as clearly and concisely – or more so – than anyone else has ever said it. Not
even Moses with his “IN THE BEGINNING” declaration, which in any case was far too complicated for the lesser souls of his era, if not too terribly wrong, despite that he was speaking
for the times – and thank goodness he somehow managed to steer clear of turtles!
Or perhaps some of our greatest brains might in fact have brushed against it, or at least glimpsed The Beginning – which I prefer to call The Intangible, or maybe The Continuance –
with their numbers, gedenken experiments, and sometimes their sheer intuitive and intellectual brilliance; but no one has yet succeeded in fitting it all together. Not with all their
theoretical juggling, sleight of hand and conjuration; and that includes me because I don’t have the math, or not nearly enough of it. And perhaps that is what saves me, for being
rather deficient in the Science of Quantities, it really is all down to the imagination – of which I have a lot.
It has been like a jigsaw puzzle to me, a puzzle lacking one or two important pieces without which, and as above, the rest hasn’t seemed to want to come together and make sense, no matter how certain rather more clever people
cheat, however unintentionally slicing corners or knobs off spare faux components, or trying to paint bits of mutilated scenery to match the most prevalent or acceptable backdrop or theory. But just recently, well comparatively
Personally, I like to think, to believe and hopefully to convince others, that Einstein’s most famous equation, E=mc2, while it was very much the real start of almost all our needing to understand such things, was also pretty
much the end of such necessity, except for certain not-so-small details, and at least one huge detail that still isn’t understood and which for some reason no one has really been gifted or daring enough to understand. (Which,
come to think of it, is a reasonably appropriate statement, because it really is rather weird and difficult to grasp.) Yet if I possibly can, I shall try to explain and make it understandable…that is, I’ll get round to it eventually.
But it’s what I said about sculpting faux bits of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle to fill the empty spaces left on the board. Because it seems to me that’s exactly what quite a few if not all of us theoretical physicists try to do from
time to time. It’s like when you were a child and found a “magic” wire puzzle in the cornflakes, or a cellophane packet of little plastic bricks of various shapes, from which you were required to build a perfect pyramid. All great
fun – but impossible if your father has been sitting by the fire and carelessly used the puzzle’s instructions slip to light his pipe! Because then, out of frustration, you might have taken a hammer to the wire puzzle and one or
two “Little Bangs” later – Abracadabra! – the puzzle works. Except when you give it a shake it comes to pieces again! Or, you almost burned the house down trying to melt one of those tiny plastic bricks into the right shape to
fill a hole in a pyramid that stubbornly refuses to materialize as an acceptable…well, pyramid! Neither for you, nor for your omniscient father, your mother, your sister or your big brother.
But you are so determined to succeed that if honest industry – that is mental and physical Experimentation and Observation – won’t turn the trick, why not go whole hog and simply cheat? After all, you won’t be the first. For
example there’s Schiaparelli.
Schiaparelli, he who invented the Martian “canali,” probably because he desperately wanted canali to be there (and then blamed them on failing eyesight, which was probably the truth, and finally backed off completely from the
notion); followed by Percival Lowell with his cobwebby canals: an absolute boon for a growing body of SF writers, including the outstanding H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and later the marvellous American fantasist Ray
Bradbury. But because Lowell had been seeing these canals for such a long time – from the late 1870s into the early 20th Century – seeing these pole-to-pole trenches in the red Martian sands that only a handful of other (bi-
polar? Excuse the pun) alleged astronomers could see – he didn’t seem able to back off from them and just kept on reaching for the hammer and warming the little plastic bricks, that’s all.
And how about Fred Hoyle? A leading thinker in cosmology; an expounder of the Steady State Theory of the Universe; powerful protester against the Big Bang Theory, (who couldn’t bring himself to believe in its everything-
out-of-nothing aspect); an enemy of Darwinism and naysayer of various other generally acceptable theoretical concepts…who finally retired from many such fields of study in 1972. And, wouldn’t you just know it, there’s
recently something of a rethink and resurgence of the Steady State
And then, of course, there’s Einstein.
What, Einstein too? Yes, even He erred in His science – or so even He thought – calling his Cosmological Constant his greatest blunder: in short a fudge! But little need to go into that here, especially since it turns out he may
not have been entirely mistaken after all! (I say, may not…) Okay, so what to believe and where to start? Because it’s not my intention to bore you to death, and a short sharp jab will often win a fight faster and more
decisively than twenty rounds of sweating and staggering through ever deepening serpentine contention. But I do have to build a case for what went before the Beginning…
Say what? Before the Beginning? Theoretical blasphemy yet?
Certainly! For if indeed there was a cosmic egg, wouldn’t we need a cosmic sparrow, or even two of them? And if you’re going to inflate your bubble some trillions of times in no time at all …well, where does one find that much
exceptionally hot air, eh?
Okay, let’s be serious and start again:
The Beginning.
We have Carl Sagan’s remarkable statement apropos that, which I prefer to Moses’ despite that Moses said it first, if perhaps more reverently. And remember, I’m only “standing on the shoulders of giants here,” repeating what
we may have been told and of which we’ve decided to believe…or not.
And so back to the cosmic egg.
Before the egg, and a microscopic – no, a subatomic egg at that – there was nothing. There was no space for anything to move about in and no time in which anything (if there had been anything) might be caused to move or
happen. In short there was no Universe, no Cosmos – in fact no anything! Now, I know you probably can’t imagine that, can’t visualize yourself being there, because there was no venue at which to be and no time to be “there”
anyway.
Yet in that very first instant (or, as it transpires theoretically, some 13 billion and a very large handful more years ago – BANG! – and allegedly the biggest ever hell-of-a-bang at that; well, at that time! (No, cancel that last word,
Time, and insert Immediacy.) The birth of the Universe! The Singularity! The thing from The Intangible Nowhere! (And forgive all the capitals, which from now on I’ll try not to use too frequently.)
But in that moment, that alleged very first moment when space came into existence…when it had to, yes, because previously (?) there was no time, except perhaps the 4th-dimensional space-time, as Einstein would later
designate it albeit subconsciously, wherein or out of Nowhere the ultra-sub-microscopic egg had exploded! It was love and marriage – a horse and carriage – and like that. They were here, and the one couldn’t be without the
other; space without time could not be, not as we know and experience them. And when we actually evolved as a species we did indeed experience them, despite that we weren’t initially, actually or especially conscious of them:
we were simply born into them, that’s all. They were there like the air, the stars, the warm and reassuring smell of your mother. But as for space-time…it would be a long, long time, an era – indeed a Planck-Era – and then quite a
few other eras, all totalling something more than 13,000,000,000 years actually!) before we arrived and got to appreciate, via Einstein, the remarkable linkage of that inseparable pair, space and time.
Alright so far? Good!
Because the rest of it is easy, old hat. Just the usual stuff that has all been theorized before… – well, most of it; which is just about all we know – but by no means everything there is to know – about everything. Or perhaps I
should say yet again it’s what we’ve been told to accept, while in fact the totality of what we understand is paradoxically only partial yet must suffice until we’ve learned more and know better. And there’s still much to correct, to
dispute and argue over, and of course much more in the limitless pool of knowledge into which to fall spellbound.
So for now we’ll accept the scientifically proven and occasionally conjectural “facts” as they continue to stand, and certain of the “best bet facts,” albeit tentatively; and we’ll even give momentary attention to the nonsense of
which there has been more than a sufficiency…apropos Martian canali, Venus as a swamp or failed comet, and not to forget tall towers of tough-shelled aquatic reptiles.
However, nonsense isn’t always an utter fudge. For instance Albert Einstein’s cosmological constant (his self-acknowledged biggest ever error, but even now only a possible error, and as such a justification for even the direst
mistake, forgiven in the true evaluation of the Science by which it may be proved eventually. Which is why such theories must at least be investigated – if only to establish (or not) their worth – and not simply throw them out
along with all those turtles! That, too, is why I’m here, offering my theory up for what may well be its if not my slaughter.
So then: there was this really Big Bang.
But was there?
Must have been, for everything’s been inflating and expanding from the blast ever since. Everything, yes! Out of nothing, everything. But expanding, even against the will of the Great God Gravity? Well, yes, seemingly. For
suddenly there was space for things to move about in or expand into and through; and time for things – all things, the most basic of things, the beginnings of matter – to move around in. Space to permit all of that enormous
forced expansion, too…call it inflation if you wish. But can we prove any of that? Apparently, yes. Or at least, something like it.
Look to the sky…the proof is up there to be seen, and seeing is believing; or the closest we’ll ever get to it. But it isn’t The Beginning that’s up there, despite that there’s nothing we know of that’s farther away; and the Big
Bang isn’t for seeing anyway. That’s because in the wake of the Big Bang there was no light to see by (or for now, all these billions of years later, to look for.) For if we leave inflation out of it for a moment, still that far fogginess
we detect in our finest telescopes is something less than 14 billion lights years way, apparently…and it’s the first light that has ever reached this far, and is still reaching, or which has ever given its first dim glow to the Universe.
For paradoxically that seminal illumination didn’t come until the first stars were born and began to issue the light of their heartbeat nuclear ignition.
Well, I won’t try to teach Granny how to suck eggs, but I will remind you here of that word “inflation” and introduce one other word: “detonation.”
If you explode a stationary grenade on a flat, sandy surface – let’s say in a desert – the blast will form a hemisphere of blinding sand particles in the shattered air above the surface, and a more or less circular crater, in keeping
with the amount of explosive, in the sand beneath the place where the grenade was. But on the other hand, an undirected explosion in space, unaffected by contact with any other matter or force, will produce the energetic
violence of a complete however mainly hollow sphere bursting outwards from its source, which unlike the ground-burst of shrapnel and disturbed sand can’t immediately fall prey to gravity; and the fragmentary debris of its
sphere will maintain its velocity and increasing diameter for as long as it encounters no other force. Who says so? Why, Newton: his First Law.
And so much for bangs and Big Bangs, for now at least. (Except to say – )
When we look to the night skies, the faintest of the light to reach us is weary after its journey through all those light years. With which I think I agree, but yet there are problems here and I can’t say I’m all that sure. I’ll try to
explain why, shortly – and probably get shot down, initially at least – just for trying. But anyway, let’s get on:
The bursting egg…the infinitely minuscule, mathematically improbable, ultra-subatomic Singularity that started everything and was in fact (or at least theoretically) everything: the total cosmos of matter and energy from the
beginning to the eventual end of time that may be waiting for us there in the future, that made space and time – and space-time – and all the other stuff that fills it yet doesn’t nearly fill it; even gravity and light and us
eventually; and that’s not to forget who or whatever else may be out there.
Except…how do you follow an act as colossal as that? With something equally or even more colossal – like, maybe, Planck time? An “era” which yet took place in billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a second? Well why not,
but remember, it’s all theoretical – right?
Planck time: of which we know next to nothing except that it didn’t last too long. Not long enough to take pictures of, anyway – only billionths of trillionths of trillionths…and add near-infinit-onths of a second – so that even
had there been anyone around at that time with a quick finger and quicker camera, and following on the blistered heels of the Planck-era, somewhere around 13.5 or more billion years ago, when much of that universal, sub-
atomic plasmatic soup was solidifying and taking on shapes, albeit microscopic as yet – then…
Taking a Big Breath: all that was left of the Big Bang for the rest of time with its creation of gravity and space-time and lots of weird matter and star- and galaxy-shaping – all that remained of that monstrous explosion itself
(apart from a vast and expanding universe, of course) was the gradually fading background radiation of its original near infinite nuclear heat, whose flickering continues even today as it comes to us uniformly in near perfect
harmony and from each and every direction...or so we’re told. Which puzzles not just a few of today’s big thinkers and which we’ll get to eventually. But as for now…
Having “done” the universe however inadequately, from Moses to Einstein, (almost, but with just a bit more to come,) now let’s look from the minuscule to the mighty, from the almost infinitely minute to an almost equally
infinite Singularity, and from unthinkable, (well, to me at least, with my lack of maths,) astonishing shrinkage down to a mathematical point from the almost limitless mass of a gigantic star…I mean, what else can follow – what
more immediately springs to mind – but the single thing and the only equation that’s required here:
E = mc2.
Energy = mass x light-speed squared. Which simply means that under extreme conditions mass and energy are equal and interchangeable. Like, for instance, when? And under which extreme conditions? Well, and most
obviously: if anything with mass were able to accelerate to a speed as great as the square of light-speed – that’s 300,000 x 300,000 kilometres per second! – then, at which the vastly concentrated energy of mass, even as much as
trillions of tonnes of matter in a single mathematical point.…
But whoa! Say what?
Okay, I know, and I see you also know where we’re going now. But in case you don’t:
Well, there is a place – and perhaps a time, or the beginning of one – which we’re told or have been led to think might just be it. A Gedenken sort of thing, right? But let’s deal with the “where” first…
There are things called Black Holes, which it turns out are not at all rare. Indeed many if not all of the world’s ace theoretical physicists believe there’s a Black Hole at the centre of every galaxy worth mentioning, as well as in
other not quite so “Singular” places; which is to say perhaps as many as one billion to ten trillion Black Holes, and that’s a hell of a lot! But we do live in an awfully BIG universe.
A Black Hole is sometimes created when a star’s escape velocity exceeds the speed of light until the star eats itself, becoming a well of immense gravitational attraction in space-time. So let’s imagine this massive star, which has
undergone gravitational collapse to such an extent that its escape velocity does indeed exceed light-speed (300,000 kilometres per second,) and so becomes trapped in this self-created suicidal hole. And while approaching the
square of that unthinkable velocity – and upon shrinking to a near-critical radius – its mass has increased super-exponentially, and likewise its temperature; and while we can’t be sure of what happens at that point (and can’t see
or even compute what happens beyond it) but can at least theorize that the once-star is still collapsing, shrinking, and its mass and heat – and most importantly its velocity – are still increasing toward
E=mc2 …!
And once again, whoa!
Now, as one of the four forces that evolved out of the Big Bang, gravity has its own rules which we’re told apply across the Cosmos. Probably the simplest of these rules is the most easily proven. Gravity is the so-called weakest
of the principal laws of physics, but try telling that to the fellow who forgot his parachute and having left the plane three second ago is now falling towards the ground at close to a hundred feet per second, and accelerating at
33.17 additional feet per second every second, or would be if not slowed down somewhat by our atmosphere! But that’s only here on Earth. Elsewhere it could be much less depending upon the attraction of the body doing the
pulling, such as the moon…or very much more, like a star plummeting down the throat of a Black Hole.
The physics governing this rule is called universal, as above – but that’s universal as in this, as in our universe. And any universe where anything with mass has reached and/or accelerated up to or beyond the speed of light is
definitely not ours! For gravity is punching these Black Holes in space-time itself, and the once-star and everything attending it have been sucked out of our universe and even out of existence. Oh really? Out of existence?
Maybe we should ask ourselves what Einstein would say about that. Because he had some very odd but indisputable notions about the equivalence of mass and energy, and space (and space-time, and especially gravity); and
given a bit more time – whatever time is, for he found that time, too, was something that needed putting right; something of which we can no longer be entirely sure – he may have come even closer to this piece of the jigsaw
puzzle, this missing link of a theory that I’m constantly edging closer to right here and now.
But is it a fact or simply a myth that he, Einstein, once said: “The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a persistent one.”? And if he did say it, might it not have been part of a Gedenken
experiment that was simply too esoteric, too way out even for him: A thought or idea that he himself couldn’t get his head round, and therefore couldn’t or wouldn’t expound upon?
Well, who could blame him for that?
But I write Science Fiction, and weird ideas are my bread and butter. So if I’m wrong then I’m wrong, but at least it will be an expert or experts who tell me so. And if there’s even a small chance that what I’m writing here might
find its way into print, well what writer could resist that?
But just don’t go thinking I wrote all the above in order to get noticed. Heck no! No way! With millions of book sales worldwide I already got noticed! But all the stuff I’ve barely touched upon here – and especially the people I
may perhaps have seemed to disrespect while taking my stance upon the shoulders of giants – now is when I’ll attempt to explain why I have brought just a handful of such matters into contention…
For instance, I’ve mentioned the background radiation from the Big Bang.
What seems to have bothered more than a few inquiring minds isn’t so much that it’s still there – indeed still everywhere, if little more than a birthday candle’s flicker – but that it’s still flickering in from every parsec of sky! But it’
s temperature was “predicted,” and as calculated is just two or three degrees above absolute zero. Now I don’t dare for a minute query the science behind the prediction, (or whether or not the prediction came before the
discovery,) but as for why this background radiation is there at all – surely the answer to that speaks for itself.
When we look into far distant space, we’re not so much looking at space as at time long since past, and the further we look the more primal the picture gets. So the furthest thing we see on the rim of our lumpy and by no
means perfect sphere of a universe – and no matter which direction we look in – we find the so-called Singularity’s soupy once-superhot subatomical super-cloud: “The Intangible,” as I once called it (but no longer); the
afterbirth or initial metamorphosis of the primal egg. And its light, however dim, and its heat, more than a little cool after all these billions of years, is still reaching us … for a reason I’ll get to, I promise.
And then there was Hoyle, who I haven’t mentioned all that much, but who I really should have. Fred Hoyle, yes, and especially his Steady State Theory of the Universe. Stephen Hawking killed that off, I think, and perhaps too
hastily. But we shall see.
Hoyle and his friend Thomas Gold, who along with others came out in favour of the Steady State Theory mainly because they couldn’t believe in the Big Bang’s “something” (indeed every- thing) “out of nothing” concept, and
so simply considered it a Big Fudge, a façade backed up by no real evidence, and so settled on Hoyle’s State of Equilibrium: That for everything destroyed, disappeared or otherwise removed from the universe, a like amount of
matter is created, so that the total mass of the universe is always in balance – ergo, in a “steady state.” And of course we should remember that Einstein with his E=mc equation was saying pretty much the same thing, albeit in
an entirely different way that could be proved…and has been proved, and drastically demonstrated.
More than that – and let’s face it there was much more than that – Einstein had this thing, almost an affaire, indeed a threesome, with light and speed. For close to light-speed items shrink; their mass gets enormous; their
temperatures go up and up; and depending upon where they do it all of these outrageous activities closely approach infinite intensity. But have I remarked that at light-speed time stops dead and bends space-time back on
itself far better than David Beckham bends his balls? (A painful thought!) So what about beyond light-speed? And, beyond that, how about multiples of light-speed?
Like…the square of light-speed? But as I’ve said above, the speed of light in this, in our universe is only 300,000k per sec. No wonder our intrepid theoretical physicists balk at the idea of the square of light-speed:
900,000,000,000 kilometers per sec! Even Einstein backed away from that; I think because es ist nicht daran zu denken! “not to be thought of” – or considered? (And it would definitely foul up his E=mc equation!) But there in
my Black Hole’s dimension it might just explain, well, almost Everything…
So then, we’re finally there…and now that Albert has thrown us that curve ball, that ultimate, cosmic geodesic, let’s put it all together:
I’ve talked about gravity and the way it affects time; and how a Black Hole’s intense gravity has sucked our imaginary collapsed star right out of our universe into an entirely different, alien orientation – a “place?” – where there’s
no space, no time, and nothing else. So where do we go from there?
Just for a moment let’s revisit the primal egg, the Singularity, The Intangible.
Where does it exist? At its birth. When does it exist? Thirteen billion years and a big bit more ago after it emerged from that place where there was no space, no time … well, until THEN, or so we’re told. But what is it really?
Why, the only thing it could be after avoiding the lumpy rim of the universe by tracking the ultimate geodesic and following the quickest route, as geodesics do, along a curve outside space-time to the Big Bang.
But why that route? Because it was there, and because it has always been there and always will be! The “place” where Gravity – the weakest force? – has solved the Cosmos’ and every theoretical physicist’s almost (but not
quite) ultimate problem. The only no-place this overstuffed mathematical point can go, because the future hasn’t happened yet and the past’s cul-de-sac…is a Singularity, the Singularity, where energy becomes mass and mass
has an opportunity – indeed the urgent requirement – to become at least the creation of matter!
Perhaps the most outstanding ideas or “theories” I haven’t approached are Dark Matter and Dark Energy. And frankly, I wouldn’t touch them with a cosmic bargepole! That’s because in my opinion, my theory, all this dark stuff
isn’t there! They are like the King’s New Clothes: we see them (or search for them) because we’re told they are there – and by very intelligent men – not because we see them.
Let me explain myself:
Back there in that wormhole (or the Black Hole conduit if you prefer) gravity is the boss; and there’s that law of physics – a Law of Gravity, which we’ve still to deal with – that carries over from our Cosmos…well, to whatever is
or isn’t there! Our collapsed star passed through the event horizon that it had created and went in at almost the speed of light – in our dimension – but just a second later it was traveling twice as fast and time had already
stopped…just so, for the conduit was now in the original region of no-space, no-time. And that being the case, the light-years were piling up and doing so without pause, indeed instantly – a word that might have been created
for this single purpose, because there was no time there – which balances the star’s reduction in volume, its intemperate temperature and truly massive mass however crushed. For no-space, no-time and near-infinite gravity had
already done their jobs and come up against the ultimate bumper: the beginning of time in this 5th Dimension’s singular conduit: a Singularity.
Which was what?
But by now you must surely see what it was.
It was the Cosmic Missing Link; it was yesterday, today, and would eventually be tomorrow. Or at least, that was how Einstein defined it. It was the Big Bang – but it wasn’t the biggest. Some billions more bangs (I don’t know
how many, and neither does anyone else; we don’t have the maths) were following it; and billions more bangs had preceded it. They were all screaming down their Black Holes, their missing links, and are doing it even now,
continuously, from all the cores of all the galaxies whose centres of gravity are greater than the speed of light!
But surely you’re going to ask me to hang on there, aren’t you? For Einstein didn’t believe in faster than light – did he?
No, but as a writer of weird stuff I perhaps prefer to believe that it wasn’t that he didn’t believe but where he drew the line; which statement I offer as my apology, and most reverently, indeed on my knees. But after all, it was his
theory, wasn’t it? Except it wasn’t just a theory but a fact. E=mc ! It’s that tiny-but-terrible, inverted-yet-immense in the equation that does it for me. That and all the other things that depend upon it, upon my theory, that is –
and upon its continuity – its Steady State, yes!
Fred Hoyle didn’t believe in something out of nothing – his big mistake. Oh, he instinctively got it right, but neither did he get the how of it right! He saw what was obviously impossible, but still fudged it because any other
conclusion must also be impossible (or, as Einstein might have considered it, however briefly) undenkbar. Note how I’m being very careful with my words here. I won’t go putting words or theories into His mouth, be sure…he
very rarely needed that kind of help, especially not in German. Now, I said rarely, but undenkbar, (“inconceivable,”) would be a far better word, and even then might only just suffice.
Very well, that’s one theoretical solution to one of the biggest problems we come up against on contemplating the Big Bang. But here’s another:
Edwin Hubble needs no introduction. As for his Universal Expansion Theory – a possibly if unevenly or not quite scientifically proven fact that has it the greatest distance in the universe is to its rim, which is continuously
getting greater – in short, that the universe is expanding – but in addition, that it is expanding more rapidly than the rest, even to the extent that the very farthest stars are fleeing at close to the speed of light! Which is an
incredibly strange thing, because that’s what we might more readily acknowledge as the very opposite of what we would expect. For in other words, let’s face it, we’re told that gravity is a universally attractive force; so how can
we accept on the one hand that every massy item in the universe attracts every other, when in fact everything seems to be fleeing away from everything else – and fleeing faster with each passing moment? Almost like gravity in
reverse…
Ah, well you see, that’s all down to Dark Matter – oh yes, and Dark Energy – which is to say Dark Forces. And quite frankly, I for one would much rather have been left entirely on The Dark Side of that Force along with Darth
Vader…
But let’s return to our stuffed star as it breaches the unimaginable escape velocity of its Black Hole conduit and bursts (literally) into a renewed existence as the primal soup at the beginning of time. The entire energy of a huge
star released from gravity’s grasp in that first instant of birth and of the universe. Now, what else would we expect it to do but expand from a mathematical point into an unthinkably massive primal soup bowl?
Well, okay – but just how big a soup bowl? Hmm! So let me put it this way:
I’m told that the energy unleashed over Hiroshima came from a very small amount – just one ounce – of uranium. So then, how much heavier is all the heavy metal in a giant star? Because that’s the amount that was slammed
together in my so-called initial singularity!
Initial? But this is all theoretical, remember?
And of course “initial,” because it’s a continuous occurrence. I mean, did you really think the fissionable content of just one giant star’s critical materials could create an entire universe of particles, pebbles, planetoids and
pulsars that keeps on expanding forever and ever? Or have I now perhaps thrust an element of doubt into your mind?
Let’s look once again, from my theoretical point of view, at how all this came about, and how it has been kept going:
Some star somewhere in the universe, gives its last gasp, flings off its shell or shells and collapses naked into itself – that is, into the gravitational Black Hole which it has become. Let’s say that it’s one of the first, the earliest
collapsing stars (note: but not the first, just one of them) far away in space and time on the outer rim of our lumpy universe, where it has chosen to perform its suicide and almost instantaneous subsequent resurrection as
quark-and-electron soup at the beginning of everything. There are many such stars in the Cosmos, even billions of them, indeed trillions, but not nearly enough to explain to our theoretical physicists the Cosmos’ pitiful
paucity of stars, galaxies, and indeed mass in general. They have it, and possibly correctly, that the mass of the universe is desperately sparse: somewhere between only nine or ten percent of what it should be, according to their
reckoning…
And I can’t argue against that, for every time one of those stars wherever it’s located opts for temporary oblivion, it takes a “hole” lot of material with it. In fact all of the stuff within the attractive radius of its gravity. And once
its gravitational force exceeds the speed of light…
Ahh! (you may say, before remembering that the Laws of Physics have just been totally torpedoed.) For I, you, we, have accepted that light-speed is only definitely finite in our universe, while down the Black Hole’s oesophagus
no such limit exists; certainly not that we know of. And that even as I’m writing this a vast and expanding shell of suicidal stars – possibly millions of them – are collapsing in upon themselves and taking the dust and gas and
debris of all those lesser objects with them along the route of Einstein’s ultimate curve. No wonder the future – which so many of us can only seem to envisage as a vast, gloomy dead-end where everything is doomed eventually
to run away from everything else – looks so very drab and empty:
But that’s all because the universe is emptying – and replenishing – itself! Or rather, it was and still is, according to me. And that’s because when we look way out there into space as far as we can see, all those quasars and all
those other vanishing “Singular” exceptions are not being sucked away into our future but into their past – as it was – after all that alleged primordial soup had metamorphosed into harder stuff – the stuff that the universe is
now!
That’s where most of that 90% of the universe’s mass has gone – and is still going – but only temporarily. And since there’s only one beginning, one continuity, one Initial Singularity, this has to be the most massive case of
Cosmic Constipation ever! Millions of stars – even the remaining galaxies and every last granule of mass and matter – carved out by the insatiable greed of gravity…all matter, within the range of the last Black Holes, returned to
the Big Bang!
But not all at once, because of course there can’t ever be the last Black Holes, only the next generation…
For while our universe is being denuded, stripped of matter at the bitter end, the paradox is this: that the end can never come! Because the sheer mass of that stolen – no, borrowed – 90% of matter is pushing itself out at the
opposite end of the Continuity, the collapsing Black Hole. It’s cramming itself into the as yet sparse newly created space at the Beginning. But while there’s no time in Einstein’s no-space no-time infinite curve, there is time
here, now, today, and there was time in all the time since time began. Which means the stuff that’s only just arriving EVEN NOW at the inception of the Big Bang is bursting forth – Big-Banging its way continuously into that
roiling primal soup bowl – driving ferociously into the reality of what was already there almost fourteen billion years ago (well, according to some…but in fact, and as God only knows, how many billions of years before that!)
Why can’t we see it; why can’t we picture it; where’s the evidence for it, you ask? But of course we can’t do any of those things. Its heat has replenished itself over and over, but can never die out; all evidence of it has been
replaced, vanished into time; its light, hasn’t so much as reached us yet! Because back then there wasn’t any light and wouldn’t (wont be!) for at least the first 400,000 years – nor the brightest light of stars and galaxies for at
least a billion more – and we human beings have only been around for 1/500th of such an amount of time, a measly couple of million years.
But since those stolen constantly consumed incalculable amounts of mass were uneven, so is/was the space being occupied as the Planck Era and other conjectural formative time-concepts zipped by – and the amount of our
universe’s mass that is being stolen today is still cramming it, or Plancking it, for room against all the soup that’s only just beginning to coagulate yesterday…
Except it wasn’t just for yesterday but every day that this Cosmic Cycle has been cycling and will continue to recycle forever. It’s the answer to the origin of all those huge empty spaces, the vast deserts of space-time that we see
in our best telescopes. It’s why there’s a limit to what we can see, or why we can’t see beyond a certain distance: because the closer to E=mc our fleeing, far-away stars and galaxies are, the fewer they get as gravity devours
them. It’s why the background radiation remains the same, because it is constantly replenished. And it’s why everything that’s here now is going to be eaten…and then spat out again and again, at the beginning of time. Not a
mere thirteen point something billion years ago but forever ago – or as far as we can imagine!
And you ask why, amidst all this pushing and pulling, is the universe expanding? But it isn’t; it’s gone as far as it can go; because all the energy of that ninety percent that’s endlessly pushing – all of that continuous cramming
that the previous emptiness can barely keep up with – was/is at least as strong as gravity’s pulling! All of which constitutes the maintenance of my Steady State Theory!
But then again it’s only a theory, and however you accept or reject it, still it makes me wonder: could this be the answer for every galaxy, and therefore the entire Cosmos? Which leaves, I think, only three last infuriating
questions:
When did it all begin…and how…and most importantly, why?
Finally, while I’m probably in for a kicking from most of you, still I believe I’ll get a nod from Albert himself: him with his, “The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a persistent one.”
And I’ll leave you with a choice:
Is it remotely possible that I got it right? Or did you, and do you still, believe in something for nothing? From a mathematical point – infinitely less than a single grain of sand – to every beach on every watery world in the galaxy,
indeed the entire Universe?
Whatever your choice, I lift my glass to you.
Cheers!
Brian Lumley
Torquay, Devon.
17 June 2016
cheat, however unintentionally slicing corners or knobs off spare faux components, or trying to paint bits of mutilated scenery to match the most prevalent or acceptable backdrop or theory. But just recently, well comparatively
Personally, I like to think, to believe and hopefully to convince others, that Einstein’s most famous equation, E=mc2, while it was very much the real start of almost all our needing to understand such things, was also pretty
much the end of such necessity, except for certain not-so-small details, and at least one huge detail that still isn’t understood and which for some reason no one has really been gifted or daring enough to understand. (Which,
come to think of it, is a reasonably appropriate statement, because it really is rather weird and difficult to grasp.) Yet if I possibly can, I shall try to explain and make it understandable…that is, I’ll get round to it eventually.
But it’s what I said about sculpting faux bits of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle to fill the empty spaces left on the board. Because it seems to me that’s exactly what quite a few if not all of us theoretical physicists try to do from
time to time. It’s like when you were a child and found a “magic” wire puzzle in the cornflakes, or a cellophane packet of little plastic bricks of various shapes, from which you were required to build a perfect pyramid. All great
fun – but impossible if your father has been sitting by the fire and carelessly used the puzzle’s instructions slip to light his pipe! Because then, out of frustration, you might have taken a hammer to the wire puzzle and one or
two “Little Bangs” later – Abracadabra! – the puzzle works. Except when you give it a shake it comes to pieces again! Or, you almost burned the house down trying to melt one of those tiny plastic bricks into the right shape to
fill a hole in a pyramid that stubbornly refuses to materialize as an acceptable…well, pyramid! Neither for you, nor for your omniscient father, your mother, your sister or your big brother.
But you are so determined to succeed that if honest industry – that is mental and physical Experimentation and Observation – won’t turn the trick, why not go whole hog and simply cheat? After all, you won’t be the first. For
example there’s Schiaparelli.
Schiaparelli, he who invented the Martian “canali,” probably because he desperately wanted canali to be there (and then blamed them on failing eyesight, which was probably the truth, and finally backed off completely from the
notion); followed by Percival Lowell with his cobwebby canals: an absolute boon for a growing body of SF writers, including the outstanding H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and later the marvellous American fantasist Ray
Bradbury. But because Lowell had been seeing these canals for such a long time – from the late 1870s into the early 20th Century – seeing these pole-to-pole trenches in the red Martian sands that only a handful of other (bi-
polar? Excuse the pun) alleged astronomers could see – he didn’t seem able to back off from them and just kept on reaching for the hammer and warming the little plastic bricks, that’s all.
And how about Fred Hoyle? A leading thinker in cosmology; an expounder of the Steady State Theory of the Universe; powerful protester against the Big Bang Theory, (who couldn’t bring himself to believe in its everything-
out-of-nothing aspect); an enemy of Darwinism and naysayer of various other generally acceptable theoretical concepts…who finally retired from many such fields of study in 1972. And, wouldn’t you just know it, there’s
recently something of a rethink and resurgence of the Steady State
And then, of course, there’s Einstein.
What, Einstein too? Yes, even He erred in His science – or so even He thought – calling his Cosmological Constant his greatest blunder: in short a fudge! But little need to go into that here, especially since it turns out he may
not have been entirely mistaken after all! (I say, may not…) Okay, so what to believe and where to start? Because it’s not my intention to bore you to death, and a short sharp jab will often win a fight faster and more
decisively than twenty rounds of sweating and staggering through ever deepening serpentine contention. But I do have to build a case for what went before the Beginning…
Say what? Before the Beginning? Theoretical blasphemy yet?
Certainly! For if indeed there was a cosmic egg, wouldn’t we need a cosmic sparrow, or even two of them? And if you’re going to inflate your bubble some trillions of times in no time at all …well, where does one find that much
exceptionally hot air, eh?
Okay, let’s be serious and start again:
The Beginning.
We have Carl Sagan’s remarkable statement apropos that, which I prefer to Moses’ despite that Moses said it first, if perhaps more reverently. And remember, I’m only “standing on the shoulders of giants here,” repeating what
we may have been told and of which we’ve decided to believe…or not.
And so back to the cosmic egg.
Before the egg, and a microscopic – no, a subatomic egg at that – there was nothing. There was no space for anything to move about in and no time in which anything (if there had been anything) might be caused to move or
happen. In short there was no Universe, no Cosmos – in fact no anything! Now, I know you probably can’t imagine that, can’t visualize yourself being there, because there was no venue at which to be and no time to be “there”
anyway.
Yet in that very first instant (or, as it transpires theoretically, some 13 billion and a very large handful more years ago – BANG! – and allegedly the biggest ever hell-of-a-bang at that; well, at that time! (No, cancel that last word,
Time, and insert Immediacy.) The birth of the Universe! The Singularity! The thing from The Intangible Nowhere! (And forgive all the capitals, which from now on I’ll try not to use too frequently.)
But in that moment, that alleged very first moment when space came into existence…when it had to, yes, because previously (?) there was no time, except perhaps the 4th-dimensional space-time, as Einstein would later
designate it albeit subconsciously, wherein or out of Nowhere the ultra-sub-microscopic egg had exploded! It was love and marriage – a horse and carriage – and like that. They were here, and the one couldn’t be without the
other; space without time could not be, not as we know and experience them. And when we actually evolved as a species we did indeed experience them, despite that we weren’t initially, actually or especially conscious of them:
we were simply born into them, that’s all. They were there like the air, the stars, the warm and reassuring smell of your mother. But as for space-time…it would be a long, long time, an era – indeed a Planck-Era – and then quite a
few other eras, all totalling something more than 13,000,000,000 years actually!) before we arrived and got to appreciate, via Einstein, the remarkable linkage of that inseparable pair, space and time.
Alright so far? Good!
Because the rest of it is easy, old hat. Just the usual stuff that has all been theorized before… – well, most of it; which is just about all we know – but by no means everything there is to know – about everything. Or perhaps I
should say yet again it’s what we’ve been told to accept, while in fact the totality of what we understand is paradoxically only partial yet must suffice until we’ve learned more and know better. And there’s still much to correct, to
dispute and argue over, and of course much more in the limitless pool of knowledge into which to fall spellbound.
So for now we’ll accept the scientifically proven and occasionally conjectural “facts” as they continue to stand, and certain of the “best bet facts,” albeit tentatively; and we’ll even give momentary attention to the nonsense of
which there has been more than a sufficiency…apropos Martian canali, Venus as a swamp or failed comet, and not to forget tall towers of tough-shelled aquatic reptiles.
However, nonsense isn’t always an utter fudge. For instance Albert Einstein’s cosmological constant (his self-acknowledged biggest ever error, but even now only a possible error, and as such a justification for even the direst
mistake, forgiven in the true evaluation of the Science by which it may be proved eventually. Which is why such theories must at least be investigated – if only to establish (or not) their worth – and not simply throw them out
along with all those turtles! That, too, is why I’m here, offering my theory up for what may well be its if not my slaughter.
So then: there was this really Big Bang.
But was there?
Must have been, for everything’s been inflating and expanding from the blast ever since. Everything, yes! Out of nothing, everything. But expanding, even against the will of the Great God Gravity? Well, yes, seemingly. For
suddenly there was space for things to move about in or expand into and through; and time for things – all things, the most basic of things, the beginnings of matter – to move around in. Space to permit all of that enormous
forced expansion, too…call it inflation if you wish. But can we prove any of that? Apparently, yes. Or at least, something like it.
Look to the sky…the proof is up there to be seen, and seeing is believing; or the closest we’ll ever get to it. But it isn’t The Beginning that’s up there, despite that there’s nothing we know of that’s farther away; and the Big
Bang isn’t for seeing anyway. That’s because in the wake of the Big Bang there was no light to see by (or for now, all these billions of years later, to look for.) For if we leave inflation out of it for a moment, still that far fogginess
we detect in our finest telescopes is something less than 14 billion lights years way, apparently…and it’s the first light that has ever reached this far, and is still reaching, or which has ever given its first dim glow to the Universe.
For paradoxically that seminal illumination didn’t come until the first stars were born and began to issue the light of their heartbeat nuclear ignition.
Well, I won’t try to teach Granny how to suck eggs, but I will remind you here of that word “inflation” and introduce one other word: “detonation.”
If you explode a stationary grenade on a flat, sandy surface – let’s say in a desert – the blast will form a hemisphere of blinding sand particles in the shattered air above the surface, and a more or less circular crater, in keeping
with the amount of explosive, in the sand beneath the place where the grenade was. But on the other hand, an undirected explosion in space, unaffected by contact with any other matter or force, will produce the energetic
violence of a complete however mainly hollow sphere bursting outwards from its source, which unlike the ground-burst of shrapnel and disturbed sand can’t immediately fall prey to gravity; and the fragmentary debris of its
sphere will maintain its velocity and increasing diameter for as long as it encounters no other force. Who says so? Why, Newton: his First Law.
And so much for bangs and Big Bangs, for now at least. (Except to say – )
When we look to the night skies, the faintest of the light to reach us is weary after its journey through all those light years. With which I think I agree, but yet there are problems here and I can’t say I’m all that sure. I’ll try to
explain why, shortly – and probably get shot down, initially at least – just for trying. But anyway, let’s get on:
The bursting egg…the infinitely minuscule, mathematically improbable, ultra-subatomic Singularity that started everything and was in fact (or at least theoretically) everything: the total cosmos of matter and energy from the
beginning to the eventual end of time that may be waiting for us there in the future, that made space and time – and space-time – and all the other stuff that fills it yet doesn’t nearly fill it; even gravity and light and us
eventually; and that’s not to forget who or whatever else may be out there.
Except…how do you follow an act as colossal as that? With something equally or even more colossal – like, maybe, Planck time? An “era” which yet took place in billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a second? Well why not,
but remember, it’s all theoretical – right?
Planck time: of which we know next to nothing except that it didn’t last too long. Not long enough to take pictures of, anyway – only billionths of trillionths of trillionths…and add near-infinit-onths of a second – so that even
had there been anyone around at that time with a quick finger and quicker camera, and following on the blistered heels of the Planck-era, somewhere around 13.5 or more billion years ago, when much of that universal, sub-
atomic plasmatic soup was solidifying and taking on shapes, albeit microscopic as yet – then…
Taking a Big Breath: all that was left of the Big Bang for the rest of time with its creation of gravity and space-time and lots of weird matter and star- and galaxy-shaping – all that remained of that monstrous explosion itself
(apart from a vast and expanding universe, of course) was the gradually fading background radiation of its original near infinite nuclear heat, whose flickering continues even today as it comes to us uniformly in near perfect
harmony and from each and every direction...or so we’re told. Which puzzles not just a few of today’s big thinkers and which we’ll get to eventually. But as for now…
Having “done” the universe however inadequately, from Moses to Einstein, (almost, but with just a bit more to come,) now let’s look from the minuscule to the mighty, from the almost infinitely minute to an almost equally
infinite Singularity, and from unthinkable, (well, to me at least, with my lack of maths,) astonishing shrinkage down to a mathematical point from the almost limitless mass of a gigantic star…I mean, what else can follow – what
more immediately springs to mind – but the single thing and the only equation that’s required here:
E = mc2.
Energy = mass x light-speed squared. Which simply means that under extreme conditions mass and energy are equal and interchangeable. Like, for instance, when? And under which extreme conditions? Well, and most
obviously: if anything with mass were able to accelerate to a speed as great as the square of light-speed – that’s 300,000 x 300,000 kilometres per second! – then, at which the vastly concentrated energy of mass, even as much as
trillions of tonnes of matter in a single mathematical point.…
But whoa! Say what?
Okay, I know, and I see you also know where we’re going now. But in case you don’t:
Well, there is a place – and perhaps a time, or the beginning of one – which we’re told or have been led to think might just be it. A Gedenken sort of thing, right? But let’s deal with the “where” first…
There are things called Black Holes, which it turns out are not at all rare. Indeed many if not all of the world’s ace theoretical physicists believe there’s a Black Hole at the centre of every galaxy worth mentioning, as well as in
other not quite so “Singular” places; which is to say perhaps as many as one billion to ten trillion Black Holes, and that’s a hell of a lot! But we do live in an awfully BIG universe.
A Black Hole is sometimes created when a star’s escape velocity exceeds the speed of light until the star eats itself, becoming a well of immense gravitational attraction in space-time. So let’s imagine this massive star, which has
undergone gravitational collapse to such an extent that its escape velocity does indeed exceed light-speed (300,000 kilometres per second,) and so becomes trapped in this self-created suicidal hole. And while approaching the
square of that unthinkable velocity – and upon shrinking to a near-critical radius – its mass has increased super-exponentially, and likewise its temperature; and while we can’t be sure of what happens at that point (and can’t see
or even compute what happens beyond it) but can at least theorize that the once-star is still collapsing, shrinking, and its mass and heat – and most importantly its velocity – are still increasing toward
E=mc2 …!
And once again, whoa!
Now, as one of the four forces that evolved out of the Big Bang, gravity has its own rules which we’re told apply across the Cosmos. Probably the simplest of these rules is the most easily proven. Gravity is the so-called weakest
of the principal laws of physics, but try telling that to the fellow who forgot his parachute and having left the plane three second ago is now falling towards the ground at close to a hundred feet per second, and accelerating at
33.17 additional feet per second every second, or would be if not slowed down somewhat by our atmosphere! But that’s only here on Earth. Elsewhere it could be much less depending upon the attraction of the body doing the
pulling, such as the moon…or very much more, like a star plummeting down the throat of a Black Hole.
The physics governing this rule is called universal, as above – but that’s universal as in this, as in our universe. And any universe where anything with mass has reached and/or accelerated up to or beyond the speed of light is
definitely not ours! For gravity is punching these Black Holes in space-time itself, and the once-star and everything attending it have been sucked out of our universe and even out of existence. Oh really? Out of existence?
Maybe we should ask ourselves what Einstein would say about that. Because he had some very odd but indisputable notions about the equivalence of mass and energy, and space (and space-time, and especially gravity); and
given a bit more time – whatever time is, for he found that time, too, was something that needed putting right; something of which we can no longer be entirely sure – he may have come even closer to this piece of the jigsaw
puzzle, this missing link of a theory that I’m constantly edging closer to right here and now.
But is it a fact or simply a myth that he, Einstein, once said: “The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a persistent one.”? And if he did say it, might it not have been part of a Gedenken
experiment that was simply too esoteric, too way out even for him: A thought or idea that he himself couldn’t get his head round, and therefore couldn’t or wouldn’t expound upon?
Well, who could blame him for that?
But I write Science Fiction, and weird ideas are my bread and butter. So if I’m wrong then I’m wrong, but at least it will be an expert or experts who tell me so. And if there’s even a small chance that what I’m writing here might
find its way into print, well what writer could resist that?
But just don’t go thinking I wrote all the above in order to get noticed. Heck no! No way! With millions of book sales worldwide I already got noticed! But all the stuff I’ve barely touched upon here – and especially the people I
may perhaps have seemed to disrespect while taking my stance upon the shoulders of giants – now is when I’ll attempt to explain why I have brought just a handful of such matters into contention…
For instance, I’ve mentioned the background radiation from the Big Bang.
What seems to have bothered more than a few inquiring minds isn’t so much that it’s still there – indeed still everywhere, if little more than a birthday candle’s flicker – but that it’s still flickering in from every parsec of sky! But it’
s temperature was “predicted,” and as calculated is just two or three degrees above absolute zero. Now I don’t dare for a minute query the science behind the prediction, (or whether or not the prediction came before the
discovery,) but as for why this background radiation is there at all – surely the answer to that speaks for itself.
When we look into far distant space, we’re not so much looking at space as at time long since past, and the further we look the more primal the picture gets. So the furthest thing we see on the rim of our lumpy and by no
means perfect sphere of a universe – and no matter which direction we look in – we find the so-called Singularity’s soupy once-superhot subatomical super-cloud: “The Intangible,” as I once called it (but no longer); the
afterbirth or initial metamorphosis of the primal egg. And its light, however dim, and its heat, more than a little cool after all these billions of years, is still reaching us … for a reason I’ll get to, I promise.
And then there was Hoyle, who I haven’t mentioned all that much, but who I really should have. Fred Hoyle, yes, and especially his Steady State Theory of the Universe. Stephen Hawking killed that off, I think, and perhaps too
hastily. But we shall see.
Hoyle and his friend Thomas Gold, who along with others came out in favour of the Steady State Theory mainly because they couldn’t believe in the Big Bang’s “something” (indeed every- thing) “out of nothing” concept, and
so simply considered it a Big Fudge, a façade backed up by no real evidence, and so settled on Hoyle’s State of Equilibrium: That for everything destroyed, disappeared or otherwise removed from the universe, a like amount of
matter is created, so that the total mass of the universe is always in balance – ergo, in a “steady state.” And of course we should remember that Einstein with his E=mc equation was saying pretty much the same thing, albeit in
an entirely different way that could be proved…and has been proved, and drastically demonstrated.
More than that – and let’s face it there was much more than that – Einstein had this thing, almost an affaire, indeed a threesome, with light and speed. For close to light-speed items shrink; their mass gets enormous; their
temperatures go up and up; and depending upon where they do it all of these outrageous activities closely approach infinite intensity. But have I remarked that at light-speed time stops dead and bends space-time back on
itself far better than David Beckham bends his balls? (A painful thought!) So what about beyond light-speed? And, beyond that, how about multiples of light-speed?
Like…the square of light-speed? But as I’ve said above, the speed of light in this, in our universe is only 300,000k per sec. No wonder our intrepid theoretical physicists balk at the idea of the square of light-speed:
900,000,000,000 kilometers per sec! Even Einstein backed away from that; I think because es ist nicht daran zu denken! “not to be thought of” – or considered? (And it would definitely foul up his E=mc equation!) But there in
my Black Hole’s dimension it might just explain, well, almost Everything…
So then, we’re finally there…and now that Albert has thrown us that curve ball, that ultimate, cosmic geodesic, let’s put it all together:
I’ve talked about gravity and the way it affects time; and how a Black Hole’s intense gravity has sucked our imaginary collapsed star right out of our universe into an entirely different, alien orientation – a “place?” – where there’s
no space, no time, and nothing else. So where do we go from there?
Just for a moment let’s revisit the primal egg, the Singularity, The Intangible.
Where does it exist? At its birth. When does it exist? Thirteen billion years and a big bit more ago after it emerged from that place where there was no space, no time … well, until THEN, or so we’re told. But what is it really?
Why, the only thing it could be after avoiding the lumpy rim of the universe by tracking the ultimate geodesic and following the quickest route, as geodesics do, along a curve outside space-time to the Big Bang.
But why that route? Because it was there, and because it has always been there and always will be! The “place” where Gravity – the weakest force? – has solved the Cosmos’ and every theoretical physicist’s almost (but not
quite) ultimate problem. The only no-place this overstuffed mathematical point can go, because the future hasn’t happened yet and the past’s cul-de-sac…is a Singularity, the Singularity, where energy becomes mass and mass
has an opportunity – indeed the urgent requirement – to become at least the creation of matter!
Perhaps the most outstanding ideas or “theories” I haven’t approached are Dark Matter and Dark Energy. And frankly, I wouldn’t touch them with a cosmic bargepole! That’s because in my opinion, my theory, all this dark stuff
isn’t there! They are like the King’s New Clothes: we see them (or search for them) because we’re told they are there – and by very intelligent men – not because we see them.
Let me explain myself:
Back there in that wormhole (or the Black Hole conduit if you prefer) gravity is the boss; and there’s that law of physics – a Law of Gravity, which we’ve still to deal with – that carries over from our Cosmos…well, to whatever is
or isn’t there! Our collapsed star passed through the event horizon that it had created and went in at almost the speed of light – in our dimension – but just a second later it was traveling twice as fast and time had already
stopped…just so, for the conduit was now in the original region of no-space, no-time. And that being the case, the light-years were piling up and doing so without pause, indeed instantly – a word that might have been created
for this single purpose, because there was no time there – which balances the star’s reduction in volume, its intemperate temperature and truly massive mass however crushed. For no-space, no-time and near-infinite gravity had
already done their jobs and come up against the ultimate bumper: the beginning of time in this 5th Dimension’s singular conduit: a Singularity.
Which was what?
But by now you must surely see what it was.
It was the Cosmic Missing Link; it was yesterday, today, and would eventually be tomorrow. Or at least, that was how Einstein defined it. It was the Big Bang – but it wasn’t the biggest. Some billions more bangs (I don’t know
how many, and neither does anyone else; we don’t have the maths) were following it; and billions more bangs had preceded it. They were all screaming down their Black Holes, their missing links, and are doing it even now,
continuously, from all the cores of all the galaxies whose centres of gravity are greater than the speed of light!
But surely you’re going to ask me to hang on there, aren’t you? For Einstein didn’t believe in faster than light – did he?
No, but as a writer of weird stuff I perhaps prefer to believe that it wasn’t that he didn’t believe but where he drew the line; which statement I offer as my apology, and most reverently, indeed on my knees. But after all, it was his
theory, wasn’t it? Except it wasn’t just a theory but a fact. E=mc ! It’s that tiny-but-terrible, inverted-yet-immense in the equation that does it for me. That and all the other things that depend upon it, upon my theory, that is –
and upon its continuity – its Steady State, yes!
Fred Hoyle didn’t believe in something out of nothing – his big mistake. Oh, he instinctively got it right, but neither did he get the how of it right! He saw what was obviously impossible, but still fudged it because any other
conclusion must also be impossible (or, as Einstein might have considered it, however briefly) undenkbar. Note how I’m being very careful with my words here. I won’t go putting words or theories into His mouth, be sure…he
very rarely needed that kind of help, especially not in German. Now, I said rarely, but undenkbar, (“inconceivable,”) would be a far better word, and even then might only just suffice.
Very well, that’s one theoretical solution to one of the biggest problems we come up against on contemplating the Big Bang. But here’s another:
Edwin Hubble needs no introduction. As for his Universal Expansion Theory – a possibly if unevenly or not quite scientifically proven fact that has it the greatest distance in the universe is to its rim, which is continuously
getting greater – in short, that the universe is expanding – but in addition, that it is expanding more rapidly than the rest, even to the extent that the very farthest stars are fleeing at close to the speed of light! Which is an
incredibly strange thing, because that’s what we might more readily acknowledge as the very opposite of what we would expect. For in other words, let’s face it, we’re told that gravity is a universally attractive force; so how can
we accept on the one hand that every massy item in the universe attracts every other, when in fact everything seems to be fleeing away from everything else – and fleeing faster with each passing moment? Almost like gravity in
reverse…
Ah, well you see, that’s all down to Dark Matter – oh yes, and Dark Energy – which is to say Dark Forces. And quite frankly, I for one would much rather have been left entirely on The Dark Side of that Force along with Darth
Vader…
But let’s return to our stuffed star as it breaches the unimaginable escape velocity of its Black Hole conduit and bursts (literally) into a renewed existence as the primal soup at the beginning of time. The entire energy of a huge
star released from gravity’s grasp in that first instant of birth and of the universe. Now, what else would we expect it to do but expand from a mathematical point into an unthinkably massive primal soup bowl?
Well, okay – but just how big a soup bowl? Hmm! So let me put it this way:
I’m told that the energy unleashed over Hiroshima came from a very small amount – just one ounce – of uranium. So then, how much heavier is all the heavy metal in a giant star? Because that’s the amount that was slammed
together in my so-called initial singularity!
Initial? But this is all theoretical, remember?
And of course “initial,” because it’s a continuous occurrence. I mean, did you really think the fissionable content of just one giant star’s critical materials could create an entire universe of particles, pebbles, planetoids and
pulsars that keeps on expanding forever and ever? Or have I now perhaps thrust an element of doubt into your mind?
Let’s look once again, from my theoretical point of view, at how all this came about, and how it has been kept going:
Some star somewhere in the universe, gives its last gasp, flings off its shell or shells and collapses naked into itself – that is, into the gravitational Black Hole which it has become. Let’s say that it’s one of the first, the earliest
collapsing stars (note: but not the first, just one of them) far away in space and time on the outer rim of our lumpy universe, where it has chosen to perform its suicide and almost instantaneous subsequent resurrection as
quark-and-electron soup at the beginning of everything. There are many such stars in the Cosmos, even billions of them, indeed trillions, but not nearly enough to explain to our theoretical physicists the Cosmos’ pitiful
paucity of stars, galaxies, and indeed mass in general. They have it, and possibly correctly, that the mass of the universe is desperately sparse: somewhere between only nine or ten percent of what it should be, according to their
reckoning…
And I can’t argue against that, for every time one of those stars wherever it’s located opts for temporary oblivion, it takes a “hole” lot of material with it. In fact all of the stuff within the attractive radius of its gravity. And once
its gravitational force exceeds the speed of light…
Ahh! (you may say, before remembering that the Laws of Physics have just been totally torpedoed.) For I, you, we, have accepted that light-speed is only definitely finite in our universe, while down the Black Hole’s oesophagus
no such limit exists; certainly not that we know of. And that even as I’m writing this a vast and expanding shell of suicidal stars – possibly millions of them – are collapsing in upon themselves and taking the dust and gas and
debris of all those lesser objects with them along the route of Einstein’s ultimate curve. No wonder the future – which so many of us can only seem to envisage as a vast, gloomy dead-end where everything is doomed eventually
to run away from everything else – looks so very drab and empty:
But that’s all because the universe is emptying – and replenishing – itself! Or rather, it was and still is, according to me. And that’s because when we look way out there into space as far as we can see, all those quasars and all
those other vanishing “Singular” exceptions are not being sucked away into our future but into their past – as it was – after all that alleged primordial soup had metamorphosed into harder stuff – the stuff that the universe is
now!
That’s where most of that 90% of the universe’s mass has gone – and is still going – but only temporarily. And since there’s only one beginning, one continuity, one Initial Singularity, this has to be the most massive case of
Cosmic Constipation ever! Millions of stars – even the remaining galaxies and every last granule of mass and matter – carved out by the insatiable greed of gravity…all matter, within the range of the last Black Holes, returned to
the Big Bang!
But not all at once, because of course there can’t ever be the last Black Holes, only the next generation…
For while our universe is being denuded, stripped of matter at the bitter end, the paradox is this: that the end can never come! Because the sheer mass of that stolen – no, borrowed – 90% of matter is pushing itself out at the
opposite end of the Continuity, the collapsing Black Hole. It’s cramming itself into the as yet sparse newly created space at the Beginning. But while there’s no time in Einstein’s no-space no-time infinite curve, there is time
here, now, today, and there was time in all the time since time began. Which means the stuff that’s only just arriving EVEN NOW at the inception of the Big Bang is bursting forth – Big-Banging its way continuously into that
roiling primal soup bowl – driving ferociously into the reality of what was already there almost fourteen billion years ago (well, according to some…but in fact, and as God only knows, how many billions of years before that!)
Why can’t we see it; why can’t we picture it; where’s the evidence for it, you ask? But of course we can’t do any of those things. Its heat has replenished itself over and over, but can never die out; all evidence of it has been
replaced, vanished into time; its light, hasn’t so much as reached us yet! Because back then there wasn’t any light and wouldn’t (wont be!) for at least the first 400,000 years – nor the brightest light of stars and galaxies for at
least a billion more – and we human beings have only been around for 1/500th of such an amount of time, a measly couple of million years.
But since those stolen constantly consumed incalculable amounts of mass were uneven, so is/was the space being occupied as the Planck Era and other conjectural formative time-concepts zipped by – and the amount of our
universe’s mass that is being stolen today is still cramming it, or Plancking it, for room against all the soup that’s only just beginning to coagulate yesterday…
Except it wasn’t just for yesterday but every day that this Cosmic Cycle has been cycling and will continue to recycle forever. It’s the answer to the origin of all those huge empty spaces, the vast deserts of space-time that we see
in our best telescopes. It’s why there’s a limit to what we can see, or why we can’t see beyond a certain distance: because the closer to E=mc our fleeing, far-away stars and galaxies are, the fewer they get as gravity devours
them. It’s why the background radiation remains the same, because it is constantly replenished. And it’s why everything that’s here now is going to be eaten…and then spat out again and again, at the beginning of time. Not a
mere thirteen point something billion years ago but forever ago – or as far as we can imagine!
And you ask why, amidst all this pushing and pulling, is the universe expanding? But it isn’t; it’s gone as far as it can go; because all the energy of that ninety percent that’s endlessly pushing – all of that continuous cramming
that the previous emptiness can barely keep up with – was/is at least as strong as gravity’s pulling! All of which constitutes the maintenance of my Steady State Theory!
But then again it’s only a theory, and however you accept or reject it, still it makes me wonder: could this be the answer for every galaxy, and therefore the entire Cosmos? Which leaves, I think, only three last infuriating
questions:
When did it all begin…and how…and most importantly, why?
Finally, while I’m probably in for a kicking from most of you, still I believe I’ll get a nod from Albert himself: him with his, “The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a persistent one.”
And I’ll leave you with a choice:
Is it remotely possible that I got it right? Or did you, and do you still, believe in something for nothing? From a mathematical point – infinitely less than a single grain of sand – to every beach on every watery world in the galaxy,
indeed the entire Universe?
Whatever your choice, I lift my glass to you.
Cheers!
Brian Lumley
Torquay, Devon.
17 June 2016
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