One Theory to Explain it All
[a tongue in cheek look at physics]
“A dragon roared into the coldness of space and the stars are condensation from his breath.”
“No, stars aren’t like condensation, they are like a diffraction pattern from x-rays shining through a crystal.”
“No. That is stupid. There was a little boy who blew a bubble which popped and the droplets from the popping are the stars.”
“No. That is also wrong. The little boy didn’t blow just one bubble, he blew bubbles everywhere throughout all of space at all length scales.”
“You’ve both got it all wrong. There was a pail of bubbly goop and an ogre started to shake it around until it organized itself into the cosmos through collective effects.”
“The ogre didn’t shake the pail, he microwaved it. That is what the CMBR is, of course.”
“You know, this is all too complicated and speculative. I prefer, “In the beginning, there was the word.”
“Like, a story?”
“Or a computer program.”
“What? Like we are all just in a big computer simulation?”
“That can’t be. That means that math came before nature and we all know that math was invented to describe nature.”
“But if space filled with bubbles is like space filled with binary numbers, then it still fits.”
“If you say so. There was a bucket full of ones and zeroes and an ogre started to shake it around and that was “let there be light?”
“Why not?”
“I prefer the dragon to the ogre.”
“Don’t you see that the dragon was the ogre’s pet? He lived in the bucket of bubbles. And he was made of bubbles.”
“Okay. I don’t want to be a cosmologist anymore.”
“I don’t blame you. What would you rather do?”
“It looks like that bridge is falling into disrepair. And it looks like there are a lot of homeless people living underneath it. Maybe I should work on that. Maybe some of them are musicians or artists and they need instruments or a place to work and sleep.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
This is my impression of the state of human understanding. If I try to be more serious, the result is rather boring:
Time is the friction resisting our motion. It is defined by circles.
Space is what we move through. It is defined by the straight lines of a grid.
Time is space which has been curled into a circle by turbulence in the wake of something which moves. When a boat travels though water, the water will curl off into swirls around the boat. Those swirls prevent the boat from moving infinitely fast. I think of those swirls as measures of time.
When the turbulence is strong enough to cause time to curl up into whirlpools or bubbles, the result is matter: something that has mass and takes up space.
Mass is defined by the linear motion of the centers of circles.
Spacetime describes how mass changes the flow of time in the vicinity of matter.
Motion in a circle appears to be clockwise or counterclockwise depending on where you are standing.
This is why, on the scale of fundamental particles, the direction of time is relative. When particles with opposite clocks collide and annihilate, their clocks stop and the particles disappear.
People ask why all particles haven’t annihilated already and the reason is that they are moving through space and motion through space gives rise to time, the very thing which creates and sustains particles.
In our everyday lives, we move through space and experience time as something which keeps us from moving instantaneously through space.
When we look at the waves within a clock and the waves within our brains and we notice that they are roughly synchronized throughout space, we see this as an indicator that both circulations are driven by the same collective motion.
What is the nature of this collective motion? What is the nature of our accelerated frame of reference relative to the coordinate system which defines space?
The popular view today is that this collective motion is expansionary — space is expanding as every particle weakly accelerates linearly outwards from every other particle. This leads to a lot of abstract and confusing results, like stars moving apart at faster than the speed of light despite the fact that nothing can move faster than light.
I prefer the view that the collective motion is oscillatory and that this oscillation gives the illusion of space expanding over cosmic length scales. The idea is that every particle is driven by a master oscillator which causes them to jiggle around in the same direction at the same time. Every motion which is not in sych with the master oscillator is responsible for the fundamental forces: electromagnetism, gravity, and dark matter.
These master oscillations occur over a broad band of frequencies and over every spatial direction. Resonances along a frequency comb give rise to the physical structures we see at all length scales. The smallest oscillations keep our smallest particles alive, larger cyclical motions are responsible for the roughly synchronized electrical cycles of our brains and clocks, and even larger circulations are responsible for the structures of the cosmos.
This leads to the metaphysical question I have: To what extent does our existence in time and space loop back upon itself? If there were some sort of repetitive cycle associated with our motions or emotions, would we overlap spatially with another version of our selves? Does this blurry overlap give us our sense of free-will?
This is all very sci-fi, but, I like the idea of traveling through space and intersecting with an echo of myself from a previous iteration — with each choice I make increasing or decreasing this intersection.
Aside: Many physicists get confused by the fact that the random clock orientations on the scale of fundamental particles would add up and cancel out, making matter (clockwise) and antimatter (anticlockwise) cancel out. But that would only be the case if the group of particles is not moving relative to something more absolute — the confusion arises because relativity tells us that there is no absolute reference frame, so there can’t be any collective motion relative to anything absolute.
These people often say that there must be an asymmetry in the particles which we haven’t yet been able to detect with particle colliders. Fruitless billions have been spent on this issue when all that was required to understand the issue was to step away from the microscope and reconsider the notion that there could be collective motion relative to an absolute reference frame which is impossible to detect directly because every detector is moving along with every object you want to detect.
The objection is: how can anyone talk about the physics of something which is impossible to directly measure?
The response is: When all of the physics puzzles of the 20th century can be explained by a simple oscillatory motion which is impossible to directly measure, then perhaps it makes sense to consider that it has been indirectly measured via the uncertainty principle and other effects and that the billions spent to directly measure it were poorly invested.
This is the state of physics on the microscale, but what does it look like on the macroscale?
At the moment, if you measure the Hubble constant in five different ways, you will get five very different values for it.
A journalist who observed a recent conference on these discrepancies found the debate and the participants rather preposterous. He thought of the song by Steelers’ Wheel
“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Here I am. Stuck in the middle with you.”
There are several possibilities to explain these discrepancies:
- Space expands (or vibrates) at different rates at different locations and over different length scales (sounds likely to me)
- We are doing solar spectroscopy wrong (also likely)
- We have no idea what quasars are (it is hubris to believe otherwise)
- CMBR measurements are possibly local and say nothing about distant space (I have my doubts)
- Astronomers do not know how to apply relativity (of this I am certain)
Once you’ve resolved all of those issues, then there is the question of how to interpret the data.
- Big bang LCDM physics (spokespeople: Victor Toth or Ethan Siegel)
- Tired light physics (my response to the pop-sci perspective)
I have often written about how these two approaches have very different heuristics and definitions of space and time. One of those heuristics fits rather well with quantum concepts and collective effects, the other does not, but because it doesn’t fit, it provides a justification for funding requests.
Personally, when I see a question about how many billions of years old the universe is, I think: who the hell cares? What the heck does time even mean in this context? A universe created in seven billion years sounds just as magical and silly as a universe created in seven days. The real question should be: Why are we giving this community of jokers so much money and notoriety? Is someone trying to start a religion or something?
Then I think a bit about Newton and chronology and change my mind about all of these things. How we imagine the cosmos has profound impacts on how we view ourselves and our purpose in life.
