The universe may not be expanding.

Originally posted by escapevelocity
Most Esteemed Creator of Universes (???),

A simple “Heavenly Father” will suffice; or you may call me Phil. I promise not to strike you down.

Metaphors. …

That discussion belongs in a literature category, not cosmology.

Messy spots. …

Some of the images at this link are CGI, but most are actual photos. I think it is unlikely that so many collisions would be occurring if the cosmic foam expanded smoothly for ever. Popping cosmic-foam bubbles make such collisions inevitable.

The two kinds of cosmic foam. … It seems like the cosmic foam at a certain level is the ether foam of the next level, going from the bottom to the top of a cosmic hierarchy. This is incomprehensible without further explanations. "Sub-universes" below our own level remain undefined.

You’re right about that. Our sub-universe (the next small scale universe in the hierarchy) is even more of a mystery to me than our super-universe (the next larger scale universe). Due to the inversion of the arrow of time, there’s no telling if the sub-universe is older or younger than ours. The two universes should act the same age for one instant in their evolution. Perhaps the sub-universe resembles the way our universe was in the first nanosecond after the beginning of time as we know it. Perhaps it is more like the way our universe will be a trillion years into our future. Not only are the two universes running in opposite time directions, but they are probably running at vastly different speeds (perhaps a googol to one ratio). Not being a mathematician, I don’t expect to narrow down the possibilities much more than that. If my model enjoyed the status of “standard model”, a clearer picture might emerge.

Theory of the Breathing Universe.

I see no explanation of why galaxies collide (or merge) in you model. Nor do I see any explanation of why the universe breathes. It almost sounds as if our observable universe is a small section of a lung of super-universe giant. In fact, it was something like that which first got me interested in the idea of a fractal universe. I heard it said that our universe is a bubble in the head on a glass of beer being drunk by a giant.

Anyway, you are free to suppose that the universe is cyclic, as I am free to suppose that it is fractal. Let’s not accuse one another of assuming, when we are merely supposing.

Sorry. I rushed and overlooked the other paragraphs about the types of foam and of universes, which sound like science-fiction, except, maybe, the revival of the old ether concept because, waves being nothing in themselves, and merely disturbances in a medium, electromagnetic waves must be evidence of a medium too subtle for us to detect. They refute this by saying that those waves are not of the same sort as water or sound waves and thus imply no underlying medium.

That has to do with my extravagant but logically consistent concept of space as an infinitely dense matrix, which belongs more to the realm of philosophy than to physics. Since nothingness is nonexistent by definition, then there is no such thing as "empty space". It has to be utterly packed with something.

We could debate which concept (an immaterial medium made of nothing but mathematical space, or an ultra-dense, ultra-stiff material medium) is more worthy to be called physics and which is merely philosophical. I prefer to believe everything is made of something, rather than nothing. I think the idea that e/m waves have no substantive medium is a fall-back position after centuries of failure to describe the medium correctly. In other words, “Sour grapes!”

The concept of sub-universes reminds one of the movie where a bead on a cat collar holds an entire galaxy. It's like the Russian Matrioshka dolls: universes within universes within universes, and so on.

Those are good examples of scale-wise fractal structure. A better example is illustrated in an intro to a TV episode of The Simpsons. Note that it makes the transition from galaxies of one universe to atomic nuclei of the next universe. My model suggests the existence of another 23 orders of magnitude. A super-universe electron (in my model) is about a trillion times wider than our observable universe.

"I see no explanation of why galaxies collide (or merge) in you model."

Why would there have to be other causes, apart from gravitational attraction?

"Nor do I see any explanation of why the universe breathes."

No model is capable of furnishing ultimate explanations. Big Bangers have none for the beginning (the existence of the primordial "singularity" and what started its expansion).

I should've said that the Theory of the Breathing Universe is not entirely original and merely a modern version of the Hindu cosmology. When Brahma exhales the Universe appears and a Day of Brahma begins, and when It inhales the ditto dissappears and the Night of Brahma falls. I think it's not clear whether or not the consecutive universes are all different, or exactly the same one. In the latter case then it would be the same idea that the Stoics had about our being trapped in a time loop, an endlessly repeating cycle. Nemesius, an early Christian philosopher of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries who was the Bishop of Emesa in Syria wrote a treatise titled "On Human Nature" that describes this Myth of the Eternal Return.

"When the heavenly bodies, in the course of their movement, have returned to the same sign and to the latitude and longitude that each one occupied in the beginning, there takes place, in the cycle of the times, an utter conflagration and destruction; then there is a going back, from the start, to the same cosmic order and once again, as the heavenly bodies move just as before, every event in the preceding cycle repeats itself without any difference whatsoever. In fact, Socrates and Plato will exist again, and every individual with the same friends and fellow citizens, the same beliefs and the same arguments in discussions, every city and village, will come back. This universal return will happen, not just once, but many times, to infinity." (De nat. hom., 38)

This is disturbing because the déjà vu phenomenon might be hinting that it's true. The universal and spontaneous foreknowledge of future events seems to be suggesting that endless repetition has left a sort of imprint of the past, somehow and somewhere. Moreover, if we're forever going around in a circle then the past and the future are one and the same. When you move in a circle, what lies ahead is something you've already gone over.

The Hindu cosmic cycle requires modifications because it might be a simplification. It could be that the "breathing" they describe doesn't imply a periodic destruction of the Universe and is an attempt at explaining the neverending rhythmic expansion and contraction of the T.E.M.U. (Theory of the Eternal etc.).

" (…) you are free to suppose that the universe is cyclic, as I am free to suppose that it is fractal."

The two things --cycles and fractals-- are not mutually exclusive. I started to describe an endless pattern when I said that there could be, not one, but many throbbing "sponges" hovering side by side in space. Taking it a step further, that space with the numberless "sponges" could be merely one of many such spaces. One can go on and on like this, and again it would be like the dolls within dolls.

"We could debate which concept (an immaterial medium made of nothing but mathematical space, or an ultra-dense, ultra-stiff material medium) is more worthy to be called physics and which is merely philosophical. I prefer to believe everything is made of something, rather than nothing."

The infinite-density-of-space notion wasn't meant to imply that it was "material". Besides, the borderline between the material and the immaterial is as yet undefined. Apparently at some point the former blends imperceptibly into the latter. It seems to be a continuum. I know because I've been there, just like so many other people. It was a spontaneous OOBE. I found myself up against the ceiling, in a corner, looking down at my sleeping body, as though I had been a balloon full of helium that someone had turned loose. In other words, the walls seemed to be holding me there. Others go out through the walls.

I'm aware of the thread on this subject here, and the skeptical comments about it being a hallucination. Some people who have gone through these experiences have been able to prove it's "real". I could describe one such case I know about. It was a woman who suffered an electrolytic shock caused by certain pills. As she lay clinically dead (no vital signs) in the hospital she could see everybody worried about her as the doctors tried to revive her. Then she found herself outside, up in the air, holding on to the lampposts, a further hint of the interaction between the material and the immaterial. She saw her husband arriving in a rush in their car, and he was so agitated that as he approached he drove in the wrong direction along the one-way street in front of the hospital. Eventually this was confirmed.

"For super-universe space to expand, the number of bubbles must increase; hence, the arrow of time reverses between successive universes." (…) "(…) the arrow of time reverses from one universe to the next."

That's a non sequitur (the conclusion or inference does not follow from the premises). What do you mean, "hence"? Why would there have to be a reversal of the timeflow??? It's a needless complication, like inventing up to 24 levels of universes cohabiting in the same space, each one being unaware of the others because the differences in size are too great. This sounds delirious, I'm afraid, but I know that one man's delirium is another man's rock-hard reality.

(What movie was that, with the cat carrying around a galaxy and nobody realizing it? "Men In Black" maybe?)

reply to post by escapevelocity


Well, the mainstream model, appears lacking..............

Yes, but it explains certain things adequately, like that the expansion of space doesn't nullify the action of the force of gravity locally. Otherwise everything on every level would fly away from everything else, which is not the case. We see stars around which planets and rocks of various sizes move, planets around which moons move, double and multiple star systems whose members move around a common center of mass, clusters of stars that are bound together by gravity, galaxies around whose center stars, gas and dust move and clusters of galaxies, like our own Local Group, whose members interact gravitationally, so it's not necessary to come up with other explanations, in accordance with the rule of logic called Occam's or Ockham's Razor. The clearest wording of this rule is Isaac Newton's: "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances." That's why Phractal Phil's idea that galaxies merge or "collide" because the walls of galaxies around the voids or "bubbles" break due to the stretching of space is completely unnecessary.

Having (I hope) made that clear, one can start to see how the conventional theory can be improved. One can even go to the extreme of wondering whether or not its elementary notions about that force are correct.

For instance, what if gravitation is not, as everybody thinks is obvious, a property of bodies in space but a property of space itself, that manifests itself as though, to all appearances, it emanates from the bodies? In other words, it could be that space imparts upon the bodies a certain behavior, according to their mass, that is falsely construed as being an inherent feature of the objects it harbors. This simple idea could eventually explain the anomalies that have been observed and that are ascribed to what they're calling "dark matter" because they're hopelessly puzzled. The dark stuff seems to be just as ridiculous or as brilliant as the idea of space as the source of gravity because there's no way anybody can prove or disprove them.

I'm sure this sounds crazier than anything that Phractal Phil has ever dared to come up with or will ever manage to conceive. Maybe both of us are afflicted with progressive schizophrenia…or maybe I'll be nominated to the Nobel Prize for physics.

I'm asking you be the first one to suggest both of us as candidates, and then you tell me what reply you got. What makes you the perfect agent in this case is your writing talent. This ensures that your letter will be eloquent. I thank you in advance for agreeing to be a go-between.

reply to post by escapevelocity


Thing is that's EXACTLY what the BBT proposes. That the galaxies are flying apart from each other. Well, in a nutshell by space expanding between them increasing the distances.

Originally posted by escapevelocityI'm sure this sounds crazier than anything that Phractal Phil has ever dared to come up with or will ever manage to conceive. Maybe both of us are afflicted with progressive schizophrenia…or maybe I'll be nominated to the Nobel Prize for physics.

I'm asking you be the first one to suggest both of us as candidates, and then you tell me what reply you got. What makes you the perfect agent in this case is your writing talent. This ensures that your letter will be eloquent. I thank you in advance for agreeing to be a go-between.

It's unfortunate for us that the Nobel prizes are awarded for discovery, not genius. I think it goes all the way back to Alfred Nobel's accidental discovery of dynamite. Take, for example, Penzias & Wilson, who didn't even know they had discovered the CMB until the guys who lacked the necessary equipment told them that's what it was. So who gets remembered? I can't even think of the other guys names.

Watcher-In-The-Shadows, either you're not paying attention or you're unable to grasp the matter. Yes, the BBT says that galaxies are flying apart, but, once again, ON A LARGE SCALE. As regards tiny and relatively small corners of the Universe, starting at the solar-system level, gravitation is able to make things interact in such a way that they manage to counteract the expansion of space because, I guess, at those levels the expansion allows it. (This, by the way, hints that my gently breathing Universe is more likely than a frantically expanding one.) Several people on the present thread have said this. Moreover, the example of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy has been mentioned about four times here. Please go over the previous pages slowly. Nor did you spot my mistake, it seems, when I wrote "T.E.M.U." instead of "T.E.B.U".

Let me add that Andromeda, which is 2.3 million light-years away, is the most distant heavenly object visible to the "unaided eye", as astronomers call the "naked eye".

I's going to suggest that you sound deadly serious and praise our virtues in that letter to the Nobel Prize committee but here comes Phractal Phil and spoils the plan by pointing out that there must be a discovery involved, not just theories.

Phractal Phil, it's a notable coincidence that just a few days ago I read about the unfairness in that particular case, in an article in the "Scientific American" magazine (2010), on the CMBR. It was unfair because Penzias and Wilson were incapable of understanding what they'd discovered. They thought it was just an annoying noise. It's true, as you say, that those who immediately understood the meaning of the noise "lacked the necessary equipment", but they were in the process of building it, exclusively to detect the CMBR, so for them it was obviously the radiation predicted by Gamow. I wonder what they did with the hardware. Did they ever finish assembling it, or did they decide it was no longer necessary? They were Rob't. Dicke, Jim Peebles, Peter Roll and David Wilkinson of The U. of Princeton.

Anyway, my purpose is to convince you that you've lost your way, because it's such a pathetic waste of brainpower. It does seem like things on the material realm get both infinitely bigger and infinitely smaller, like a fractal, but to imagine that in both directions one will find unimaginably big and unimaginably small material universes with matching sentient beings is going too far.

When physicists found out that protons and neutrons were not primordial particles but particles that were made up of quarks they started to suspect that it didn't end there nor further down the scale and that the search for the ultimate primordial particle would be like a wild-goose chase. They believe they might eventually be able to smash quarks, too, and discover an even tinier particle, and that if they were to smash this other particle etc. etc. etc.

You're populating that realm of the infinitesimal with beings like ourselves on several levels, which is why you're truly a Creator of Universes. There's no way to prove you're mistaken. All one has is an "intuitive" feeling that it's a sort of methodic madness, like Hamlet's.

It's like you've pushed yourself into a corner, even geographically, because if you insist on going even further to the northwest you'll collide or merge with Vancouver Island and then they might want to see your passport and frisk you. Here I'm like a Customs officer you've run into who's asking questions and expecting reasonable answers before you go further ahead, and if you can't come up with those answers then you'll have to go back and find another way out.

I want you to join my Order of the Throbbing-Heart Universe. You could also say it's the Heart Universe. Start out by answering the two most important questions about it, apart from the source of the beat, which would be: 1) what is the duration of two opposite movements, and 2) is there a pause or "silence" between them, like the silence that can be noticed between the systole and the diastole when listening to the heartbeat through a stethoscope. The ancient mystic dictum, "as it is above, so it is below", would be indicating that both the respiratory and the cardiac rhythms hint at the way the Universe behaves as a whole.

Hi. I was just curious if anyone knows why inflation is necessary. If you look at what happens during an explosion, you see some stuff fly out fast and some kind of slow, as blast energy dips quickly after the initial. Such an explosion in free space would send stuff flying in all different directions at varying speeds. The effect of this would be for all the particles to appear to be receding from all the other particles. Since this is difficult to explain without visualization, I put together a video to explain what the hill I'm talking about. It can be located by typing "debunking inflation theory" into google, or going here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4mYUoXjNo

I find it hard to believe that this could all be a simple mistake and a kind of a panic reaction when Hubble learned all the galaxies were moving apart from one another (as you would expect in an explosion), and this gut reaction turned into decades of mathematics for no good reason. But, who knows.

So, if you do know, please tell...but please also tell me why simply physics (as demonstrated in the video) does not adequately account for the phenomenon of "galactic recession."

Alex Kaye