The Darkness and Edgar Allan Poe's Cosmology
The scientific community, seeking an explanation for the accelerating expansion of the cosmos, and so far, failing to find one, would predictably find it difficult to believe that the observed acceleration has already been explained, and indeed, was predicted, by an artist; an ‘outsider’.
It stretches credulity; something that seemed simple to explain and to understand to an artist could not have been thought of by anyone in the scientific community, and that even after it had been affirmed by observations, they would still fail to get it.
The assumption would be that the explanation cannot be as simple as something that a layman/ artist should understand. It would have to be something new in physics that is presently beyond understanding, something that is complicated and only within the grasp of some genius astrophysicists.
But that raises the question ‘Why should the laws of physics be made complicated?’ That could suggest some artificial contrivance in the universe for the purpose of making understanding only accessible to people with complicated minds. Elsewhere, the laws of physics are essentially simple, but no less mysterious and difficult to fathom or understand. Gravity for example, is a simple effect, easy to detect and observe, but very mysterious all the same, especially at its extremes (so who needs things to be more mysterious than gravity?).
In society, we expect our solutions and answers to come from the trained and agreed experts. However, in some cases, the views of the experts don’t provide the solutions, and may even obstruct the way to the answer or solution. This may be because there is some crucial fault or mistaken assumption wrapped up in what the experts have learned. By contrast the ingénue or outsider can come to a problem with a clear head, or, because they are not too close and have come from a more distant perspective, they can have an objective viewpoint that sees the solution, with a facility not encumbered by pre-set ways of thinking. And sometimes the outsider has learned things in other fields and disciplines that the experts of a given field are not aware of, but which help to arrive at the solution.
Explaining the Darkness, and Edgar Allan Poe.
And so we come to Edgar Allan Poe, as the perfect historical example of this. Poe was known as a poet, and a writer of very dark tales, so, as far as the world of physics and cosmology were concerned, it was not his field, he was an outsider, and yet it was he who saw the answer, the solution to one of the great mysteries of cosmology - and the answer he saw remains at the heart of modern cosmology.
The problem, known as Olbers’ paradox, was the question: ‘Why, if the universe is infinite, is the night sky’s background dark?’ As Olbers (and many others) had reasoned, if the universe was infinite and complete with stars, then there should be no direction in which there were not stars, near or far, to see. And that would mean the whole sky should always be ablaze with light.
For centuries the greatest minds in science and astronomy pondered this puzzle. But it was Poe who found the answer, or the answer that cosmologists have today. It was simply that (even if the universe happened to be infinite) it had an age, and so it was not old enough for the light beyond a certain distance to yet reach us - so what lay beyond would be dark, invisible.
What’s remarkable about Poe’s realization is that it is so easy for anyone to understand - in fact quite a natural realisation; that everything has an age. So the mystery is why all those clever scientists never thought of it. And even after Poe thought of it and self-published his theory, with a certainty of its correctitude, it was not considered for a long time. Even Einstein, even after his theories of relativity, still thought of the universe as a steady state. It was not until the observations of Edwin Hubble, that the universe was expanding (deduced from redshifted starlight), that astronomers turned to thinking of a universe with an age (starting with a big bang) and thus the answer to the mystery of Olbers’ paradox.
So one may wonder, why Edgar Allan Poe?
Who knows, but perhaps it helped that he was not just a poet and a writer of dark tales. He had great artistic abilities, was a very athletic youth and he had the confidence of becoming famous from his writing. His life was a mixture of success and blissful happiness and extreme tragedy and destitution. His loves died of consumption (TB), he became an alcoholic and he also died young, in mysterious circumstances. It’s said the joys that turned to tragedies were what turned him to writing such dark, horror tales.
And as for his answer to Olbers’ paradox, the joy of that eureka realisation was also tainted with the tragedy that it was ignored, and he died long before seeing he was proved right.
There is yet another irony though, which is that though Poe’s solution to Olbers’ paradox is the answer that is accepted today, it may not actually be the ultimate answer.
The Simplest Answer - is the best?
Like Poe’s answer for Olbers’ paradox, the thought that the visible universe could be accelerating apart should have occurred to someone in the scientific community, long before it was observed.
On realising, from the Hubble redshift , that the visible universe had an age, a beginning , a big bang, the question was how old was the universe. Given the general assumption of the time (up to the 90’s) that there had been an expansion against gravity (somehow) but that gravity should at least be slowing down the rate of expansion, then it could be calculated how old the universe was from the Hubble constant. The problem arose that from this calculation the universe was too young to account for the apparent age of its constituent galaxies.
So, the simple solution is that the present rate of expansion would have been arrived at from an acceleration rather than a deceleration, and that would make the universe calculably older and more agreeable with its apparent age.
On realising that the visible universe ought to be accelerating apart (before this was observed) I wondered how that could be, apparently against the force of gravity. To me the solution was simple, for on the large scale nothing should beat gravity, so it had to be gravity itself. Gravity makes things fall toward each other, so if the visible universe was falling apart, it should be because it’s falling toward something else; a greater surrounding infinite and eternal universe, made up of infinite other sub-universes or cosmoses. So, Eureka!.. That was the solution.
But this solution, that might be considered a multiverse scenario (but with gravitationally interacting sub-universes or cosmoses), no longer affords Poe’s answer to Olbers’ paradox.
The surrounding greater universe (of bangs that may pop in and out of existence) would be eternal, so the theoretical problem light from the infinity could again fill the sky.
But Poe and Olbers were not yet aware of General Relativity – and Einstein’s realization that gravity can reduce the frequency of light, potentially to zero.
Now, if in your infinite volume of space there is a random distribution of cosmoses, ergo a (probable) average density of matter, then there will be a scale at which the mass to radius ratio of a collective object will be the equivalent of a black hole (from a distance at which that collective object could be seen as singular (even if it might be a cluster of cosmoses). This is simply because the mass/volume will increase cubically in proportion to the radius. In other words, in an infinite eternal universe, it is gravity that deals with Olbers paradox and makes the night sky dark.
This is a better answer than Poe’s solution, because it puts the answer ultimately down to the laws of physics rather than something circumstantial (a one-off big bang).
This same answer to Olbers paradox (from general relativity), can also very simply explain why objects at a great distance apart should appear to gravitationally repel each other rather than attract as they do at short range. For now every object carries its own gravitational context where, at a range, there is a gradual slope toward a black hole like surround. That surrounding black wall does not pull the object in any particular direction, because it surrounds in all directions. However, objects at a great distance to the object may be on that object’s downward slope to the infinity i.e. in a position where gravity demands they be falling away to the surrounding infinity rather falling towards the reference object. This GR based scenario is not gravity pushing objects apart at a distance, but gravity defining the spatial contexts of objects distant to each other as localities that must fall apart relative to each other, and it looks like an accelerating expansion of space on the cosmic scale.
They key objection to this theory, i.e. the pre-set thinking that obstructs it, dates a long way back, to Newton and his shell theorem. But it’s now appropriate to overrule Newton’s reasoning with Einstein’s understanding of gravity and relativity.
Newton’s use of the shell theorem is inherently ‘shell –centric’. Einstein however realised that reality was reference frame centric, and if you apply reference frame centricity to Newton’s same scenario you come up with a different result, that objects a distance apart may experience a differential in vector/movement, to move them apart (as I show in my paper). This is further underlined when one considers gravity as something that takes time to travel (Einstein) rather than being an instant force (Newton).
In accordance with that we gather that the accelerating expansion of the cosmos did not appear to happen immediately after the big bang. Gravity waves from the emergence of the bang would have taken some time to radiate out into the greater universe, to engage and then start the acceleration, which would then increase in rate as things moved further apart.
Note that this explanation of the accelerating expansion has an agreement with the conservation of momentum, the simplest and most basic law of physics. If the cosmos is pulling (gravitationally) on a surrounding infinite universe of other cosmoses then the inward momentum that gives to those cosmoses is equalled by the outward momentum given to our cosmos. There is no conservation of momentum in the so-called dark energy scenario, with the cosmos just accelerating apart at an increasing rate, with no counter inward momentum from ‘outside’. It pays to observe the basic laws of physics! It might be appropriate to call this the outsider theory for this reference to conservation of momentum.
Time to pause here, but the full theory goes on to explain more about the cosmic acceleration as well as the mysteries that are emerging concerning the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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The Cosmic Microwave Background radiation
Is said to be the evidence for a certain theory of the 'Big Bang.
In 1989 the CoBE satellite was launched to examine the CMBR. A test of the theory would be if there was a pattern of fluctuation in it. The gathered evidence was launched in the form of photos in 1992. They famously showed the expected fluctuations (lumpiness in the heat map) and a room full of scientists whooped and cheered as the photos were revealed.
They were called a photo of God, and indeed such was the sense of revelation and certainty at that time that Professor Stephen Hawking predicted that by the turn of the millennium we would have the theory of everything and understand creation.
However, to refer to another quote liked by the Professor "The greatest obstacle to knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge". And so it was that this illusion of knowledge, or nearly knowing it all, came to be displaced by a more sceptical and sober examination of the CoBE map.
And then of course, just before the millennium, the observation that the cosmos was accelerating apart, which confounded the expectations of the scientific community. The world/universe view subtly changed from astrophysicists believing/lecturing that nothing existed before the big bang to a common acceptance of the idea that the big bang may have emerged from an already existent, greater universe, or the multiverse that everyone now talks about.
As time went on and better observations of the CMB emerged, recurring problems got more attention. One was the so-called axis of evil in the map, ie a broad swathe or mark of variance from a random variation, which could not be explained in terms of the accepted theory. The other was a large and quite circular relatively cold patch in the map, which is surrounded by a relatively warm ring or boundary. Then more recently it has emerged that there is an alarming disagreement between the age of the universe according to redshifted starlight and the age deduced from the CMB background. Collectively, these observations suggest that the theory of the CMB is to a greater or lesser extent, wrong. And then we can add that the observed fluctuation is not an observation that would be unique proof of the theory as the same fluctuation might be expected with any theory that could explain the CMB.
But these apparent anomalies are easily explained in terms of my theory that simply explained and predicted the accelerating expansion. Remember that in the theory the darkness of the infinite surrounding universe is explained by the gravitational blackshift of the light that might come from it. This gravity blackshift would also cause a progressive redshift in the light of objects between here and the dark infinity, so the Hubble shift we observe is not entirely due to a Doppler effect/ receding motion. In other words distant stars and objects may seem to be receding faster that they actually are. A further extension of this reasoning would suggest that before we get to the ultimate blackshift there would be the redshifted radiation of the nearest cosmoses in the infinity, which would be like a surrounding nebula (with random fluctuation). And in the intermediate distance between our cosmos and the dtisant ones that make up the surrounding nebula, there might be one or two cosmoses that by means of gravitational lensing cause an image just like the 'cold dark spot in the CMB.
If so it means part (or all) of the CMB may not be the theoretical 'afterglow of the big bang'. The 'axis of evil' also suggest that another theory is required - and in fact the big bang theory actually has no physical explanation for how matter (particles) were actually generated, in the sizes that they occur. They are supposed to have emerged from a very hot gas, without any theoretical mechanism, as if by magic. The scientific community celebrated the discovery of the Higgs boson, the god particle, as the thing that gave particles mass, but again Higgs theory cannot explain allocated mass sizes, so the Higgs theory is an illusion of knowledge that stands in the way of a more complete theory that explains particle generation in the big bang, and the 'axis of evil' could be the signature of that means of genesis.
