A Gift to the Rumble Museum
Gift to the Rumble Museum at Cheney School Oxford
The Eternal and Infinite Universe 2019
Painting on a wood panel
This painting, TEIAU 2019, is a smaller 2019 version of The Eternal And Infinite Universe 1994 with the same text (but without the last half - which would have made it too long for this painting). The text simply encapsulates a theory of the universe, or multiverse, according to which our visible universe should be accelerating apart (because it is falling gravitationally out towards the greater mass of the infinity and many other cosmoses).
Historically, back in 1994 when the original was painted, no one thought that the 'universe' could be accelerating apart. It was thought that after the initial expansion of the big bang (whatever caused that) gravity would be slowing the momentum down. There was a mystery in this scenario though, which was that according to the present rate of expansion (aka the Hubble constant) the universe was calculably only 10 billion years old, and many astronomers thought that was not old enough to account for the apparent age and state of evolution of many galaxies in our visible universe.
I figured that if, instead of the expansion having slowed down from a faster time, it had speeded up from a slower time, then that would mean the visible universe was older, and could then account for it's state of evolution. Of course I also needed to think of an explanation for why the visible universe would be accelerating part - and that was included in the 94 painting.
Here is a transcript of the text in the painting
If the galaxies of our universe appear to be separating this would be a consequence of its emergence within a greater infinite universe containing infinite other sub-universes, bangs clusters etc. The gravitational pull from this surrounding infinity, being absolutely infinite, would. fortunately cancel itself out but each mass within the universe would nevertheless exert a gravitational pull of its own (proportional to it's own mass) on the surrounding, relatively inertial infinity. This pull may act as a slight tendency for mass or collection of masses to pull itself apart. It would not be noticeable in the small collection of mass of our solar system but would become significant in the collection of mass of our sub-universe to account for the apparent expansion. As such the present rate of expansion would be the culmination of an acceleration starting as a long gravitational tug of war (when the masses were closer together) which would give a calculable age to our universe long enough to account for its state of evolution. Perhaps the most significant and wonderful aspect of this gravitational separation is the mathematical condition that say the mass contained in any volume would have a greater tendency to 'pull itself apart' than the mas contained in any sub-division of its volume. This would not only effect the random 'clumping' of matter which eventually produces galaxies etc, but also perhaps the imagined division of a uniform mass energy into separate particles in the very early stages.
Confirmation of the theory?
Luckily, in 1998, with great improvements in astronomy (or we would have had to wait hundreds of years) collective observations of a certain type of exploding supernova (type 1(a) by Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt, showed that the visible universe was/ is accelerating apart. These astronomers later won the Nobel prize for their discovery - while I can claim to be only person who predicted this accelerating expansion!
Olbers Paradox
When thinking of the possibly infinite universe, one has to consider what is known as Olbers paradox, named after a German astronomer of the past who asked 'Why, if the universe is infinite, is the whole sky not always bright with the light of infinite stars?' Olbers reasoned that every direction you look in there should be stars, near or far, so there should be no dark gaps, just as in a big forest everywhere you look you will see trees. Because the night sky is mostly dark, the conclusion drawn was that the universe cannot be infinite; it must be finite with a finite number of stars and galaxies, beyond which is darkness.
Curiously it was a writer and poet (famous for dark tales) who thought of another explanation for the darkness of night. Edgar Allen Poe said it was not because the universe was necessarily finite but because the universe had come into being once upon a time, which meant that light, which takes time to travel, could not yet have reached us beyond a certain distance, so we would only see a finite number of stars. Sadly for Edgar, though he was very famous, his theory was ignored and forgotten by the scientific community
It was only much later, in the twentieth century, when a team of American astronomers led by Edwin Hubble made a certain startling discovery, that people accepted Poe's answer. Hubble and co. made two amazing discoveries that even surprised the likes of Albert Einstein.
All the stars that you can see with your eyes are within our galaxy, the milky way, and that was thought to be the entire finite universe. But with Hubble's telescope they saw much more, that there were many other galaxies. It is remarkable to think that less than a hundred years ago we didn't even know there were other galaxies, while now we can see there are at least a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe.
The other discovery was that the further away these stars and galaxies, the more 'redshifted' their light was. Light and electromagnetic radiation comes in waves (and wave packets/photons) of varying frequency and the red end of the visible spectrum is lower than the blue end, so when light appears to be reduced in frequency then we call it red-shifted. A redshifted/lowered frequency means something is moving away from you. Like a train that is approaching has a higher frequency sound (note) than after it passes.
The universal red-shifting, increasing with distance, meant that the whole visible must be expanding, as if from a point in space and time. Hence the big bang theory was born (and Poe was right - that the visible universe had an age). Before that discovery it was generally thought that we lived in a kind of steady state universe, that was not expanding and kind of eternal but not infinite. We now look back on this view of the universe as very dated, but even Einstein thought that was the nature of the universe until Hubble's discoveries. Hubble had confirmed the answer to Olbers paradox, that the universe had an age.
Or had he?
The New Answer to Olbers paradox (in a Multiverse).
With the idea that the universe is infinite and eternal, with our big bang just a sub-universe surrounded by infinite others, I had to rethink the answer to Olbers paradox, or again we should reason the sky should always be very bright. Unlike Olbers though, I could use Einstein's theory of General relativity that says gravity can affect light. Everyone now knows a bit about black holes. where the gravity is so extreme that light is theoretically not able to escape. Well for an object to be a black hole it has to exceed a certain very high mass to radius ratio. That does not necessarily mean a small dense object. A very large object can achieve a high mass to radius ratio without being so dense (because the volume /mass of something increases to the cube of it's radius. That means that, even in an infinite universe where there is a low average density of mass, there will be a scale of things where the mass to radius ratio equals a black hole's - but that applies where you see that 'collective object' (possibly a cluster of cosmoses) from such a great distance that it looks like a singular thing. In other words, to simplify, we need not worry about the light from the surrounding far away infinity because the gravity of it's collective sources will not let it reach us.
But should we not see some visual evidence of this light from the infinity?
Well yes indeed, because between here and the far distant range where the gravity of the collective object redshifts the light to zero frequency blackness, there should be a progressive gravitational redshift associated with distance. This progressive redshift would add to the progressive redshift that we assume is due to the receding motion of stars and galaxies in the expansion of the visible universe. It would also add to the redshift of the Cosmic Microwave background radiation that we attribute to the long cooled down afterglow of the big bang.
Does this interfere with our calculations about how fast the visible universe is accelerating apart and how old it is?
Well yes, but in a good way, because it provides an answer to another problem that is presenting itself to astronomers and cosmologists at the moment.
Those who observe the redshift of stars and galaxies using the modern Hubble space telescope calculate that the visible universe is expanding at a faster rate than those who are observing the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the Planck telescope (the CMB calculation is based on the temperature and how much it has cooled down over time due to the expansion of the visible universe). There is a discrepancy of about 9% between their calculations.
Now if you say some part of the redshift of stars is not due to receding motion but due to a background gravitational redshift then that means the universe is expanding slower and is older. Whereas if you say some part of the CMB's redshift is due to the background gravity shift then that means the CMB is not as cool as appears and the universe is therefore younger. So the CMB calculation and the astronomy calculation can converge to agree when we factor in a background gravity redshift.
Other considerations
Having said that, there are other factors to consider that would stall clarity. One is that the CMB background may not entirely be the afterglow of our big bang. It may in some part be the far redshifted radiation and afterglows of surrounding other cosmoses. In support of that there is an area of the CMB known as the southern cold dark spot. This anomalous cold patch is surrounded by a relatively warm ring. Such a pattern suggests, to me, a distant dark object beyond our cosmos (maybe a disparate remnant of a nearby older cosmos) that is gravitationally lensing CMB light from the collective other cosmoses beyond. Another anomaly in the CMB that is difficult to explain with the standard theory is what has been dubbed 'the axis of evil' i.e. the observation that there is a directional pattern (anisotropy) in the temperatures measured in the CMB - and it seems to be aligned coincidentally with the Earth and the Sun. This observation questions the whole imagined scenario of how the CMB happened.
The history of cosmology does indeed show that we should question the theories of the day, and indeed beware of observations that we think support our theories. As if to remind us of that, we can occasionally observe, during eclipses, that the moon is almost exactly the same size as the sun. We know of course that it is not, it is just an incredible coincidence that it happens to appear so in the sky, due to it's position.
My explanation has not yet been agreed by scientists - but then no other explanation works. Scientists have coined the term 'Dark energy' for whatever the reason is for the accelerating expansion, mainly because they don't know or cannot see the physical reason for the expansion.
If the theory in the painting is correct then although we might find increasing evidence to support it, we will never know for sure if the greater universe is infinite and eternal, meaning that the ultimate nature of the universe is unfathomable, mysterious and beyond the scope of science to definitely prove - so it becomes appropriate to put it in the (con)text of a work of art.
In the years since the painting of 1994 and the supportive observations since 1998, I have continued on the explanation that began with the simple easily accessible concept, to include many other considerations that scientists refer to when thinking about the infinite universe. In particular Newton and his shell theorem, Einstein's Special Relativity and General Relativity (both important), Friedmann's solutions, Olbers paradox, the nature of black holes, what is dark matter, anti-matter and other cosmic mysteries. including the existence of physical reality. That involved 16 further text and diagrammatic paintings and many articles and a booklet The Pi Universe III (which needs updating).
