The Infinite Mess

 

(Black Hole at the center of Messier 87, picture from Wikipedia)

The isolation of quarantine has given me plenty of time to listen to YouTube videos on cosmology and quantum physics.   In college, I was very much disoriented reading the lecture books of Feynman, and having to deal with the mathematical equations always made me go crazy.  These days, several videos from top-notch scientists such as Leonard Susskind, Brian Green, David Tong, Jim Baggott, Arvin Ash, Sean Carroll, Andrew Pontzen, Jerome Gauntlett, Brian Cox, Philip Ball, Chris Impey, Roger Penrose, Don Lincoln, Sabine Hossenfelder, Carlo Rovelli , Kip Thorne, Becky Smethurst and Matt O'Dowd are easily available on the internet, and things get pretty much more interesting whenever theory is laid side by side with observed evidence.  I have to hand it to these fine individuals who smash cosmological gobbledygook into simpler bite-size Planck chunks.

I've been trying to reconcile many of the things I have heard and seen over the years, and I've been trying to make sense of the reasoning in my head.  The Infinite Mess, I call it.

It started out with the concept of negative time which Dr. Marasigan, my math professor, said he didn't believe in.  Time has an arrow, which flows from the principles of entropy.  My physics professor, Fr. McNamara, further piqued my interest by mentioning the idea of tachyons.

When I was a boy, my favorite TV programs were Star Trek and The Time Tunnel.  Films like Event Horizon and Interstellar kept my interest going during my work years.  After watching Ant-Man and Avengers: Endgame, my old cosmological interests came around and resurfaced.  By the time I heard that Dr. Strange would have a Multiverse of Madness, I knew I had to brush up on the science.  Anticipating Cris Nolan's Tenet and its time-inversion premise keeps me excited.  This stay-at-home season is just perfect for me to put my theory of everything together in my mind.

The 2012 confirmation of the Higgs boson made big press at the time.  The God Particle, the journalists called it (interaction with the Higgs field rendered mass to particles).  I remember spending a couple of days reading the newspaper articles that time, trying to make heads or tails of the idea, and furthermore, the significance of the discovery.

The universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years.  And some space telescope confirms that the expansion is accelerating, such that we will never see certain portions of the universe even if we wait for eternity.

The singularity of black holes was another conundrum I had to re-read.  Scientist hated the idea of infinity.  Fields or particles?  Dark energy.  Dark matter.  Too many things that make my mind bog down.

Here's my take on things, and I mostly align myself with Roger Penrose on this:

1. Looks to me like gravity is a membrane force.  It is weak field, but it is enough to keep space-time formed.  It acts as the barrier between fields and particles.  Maybe this is why we can't find the graviton, because the force is not transmitted as an excitation of fields, but because of the interaction between field and particles.
2. Black holes force particles back into fields.  Black holes do not create gravity that "creates" escape velocity that is faster than light.  There is no time at the speed of causality, everything is instantaneous and therefore there is no such thing as a "spooky action at a distance."  Everything is everywhere at every time.
3. Singularity in black holes just means matter goes back into field state.  Particles go back into waves.  Quanta have possibilities of being anywhere and everywhere.  Isn't this what infinity is all about?
4. The ultimate rest state of particles is the wave state.  When all matter dries up into the wave state, that is essentially infinity and eternity.  That is the death of the universe as we know it.
5. The collapse of the wave function just means the exit of a particle from infinity (wave state) into finitude.  Or conversely, the entrance of a particle into space-time as we know it.  The duality no longer exists, and the "known-ness" renders certainty that "etches" onto space-time, and gravity sets in as a membrane onto mass.
6. Having theorized number 4 above, the quirk is that even in eternity and infinity, the rest state of fields will ultimately move to disorder.  While a minute probability, there is still a possibility that the rest state of the infinite field gets restless.  The excitation of the Higgs field is critical to the emergence of mass (which is why it's called the God Particle).  Once the Higgs is agitated, a white hole forms, and the Big Bang was the product of that excitation.  Matter is excreted from eternity and infinity, "winning" by small margin over anti-matter.  Mass renders quanta, renders finitude.  In the Plank time length right after the Big Bang, gravity comes in to "coat" all matter.
7. I do not think that for every black hole, a white hole brings up a new universe in the multiverse (sorry Spiderman fans).  Occam's razor.  All mass must end up as fields before a white hole forms.  Yes, a singular white hole, none other than our white hole.  Yes, comic fans will see in this theory Stan Lee's take on Galactus and the formation of our universe.
8. Dark matter?  Maybe the matter formed in the 11 dimensions, as a spillover shadow manifesting as excess in our 4.
9. Dark energy?  Elasticity of space-time.  Counter force to gravity's membrane.  Allows space-time to stretch and accelerate.  Played a great role in cosmological inflation.
10. Each iteration of universe has a different texture, and different physical laws.  Different lifetimes, different entropy rates.  That would depend on which field interacts with the Higgs field first (to jump-start mass formation), and the rate of subsequent matter accumulation and compounding effects.  The Yoyoverse.  Well, sorry, the Loopyverse (the Yoyoverse stretches time in opposite directions from the Big Bang).
11. Conservation?  Yes.  The amount of information at the Planck time right after the Big Bang will be the same amount of information surrendered to infinity at the time of the death of the universe.
12. How long has the Loopyverse been looping along?  My theory is the it's been looping on itself for eternity, which begs the chicken-or-egg question.  My guess is as good as yours!

Of course I don't have empirical evidence.  Of course, it's not the full reality.  It's just me trying to make sense of things.  Gives a certain amount of order in my mind.  Keeps disorder in check.  Otherwise, that gnawing angst will keep me awake the whole night!

It's true no one fully understands these things.  Not yet, I hope.  We may never fully merge the principles of the quantum realm with our cosmological understanding but my mental paradigm sure helps me visualize some sense into the Infinite Mess.  Someday, maybe.  As Asimov wrote in The Last Question.

I think curiosity and imagination is very important in the advancement of science.  The constant testing of "What Ifs" are what keep knowledge moving along.  Enjoy, budding scientists out there!  Fan the flames of curiosity and one day the Eureka moment will pay you a visit, to a gush of tears and great delight...