In my last post, we gave
birth to the spacetime model that the physicists are missing—one of the reasons
why they’re not making progress. Now we need to flesh out the model by adding
the structural details that will allow us to explain the standard models of
particle physics and cosmology.
Our baby spacetime consists
of two coupled point fields, one fermionic and one bosonic. The points are
quantum states characterized by intrinsic
quantum numbers or labels: position, time, and spin. Starting from a single
point, the points multiply with amazing speed, a phenomenon that we recognize
as the big bang, followed by inflation. As the explosion of points
continues, the bosonic points attract each other and carry the fermionic points
with them, sweeping everything closer together until the fermionic points call
a halt because no two can ever have the same position. The halt is very abrupt,
sort of like a train wreck, except that the trains bounce off each other and
then crash again and again, so the entire space is left in a state of
oscillations. The expansion continues at a much slower, but still accelerating
pace.
There is no preferred
observer or reference frame here, meaning that the universe must look the same
regardless of where in it the observer is located. A geometry that meets this
requirement for our three-dimensional universe is the three-dimensional surface
of a four-dimensional sphere. It’s like the two-dimensional surface of an
expanding balloon, but with one more dimension. All of the fermionic points
have to fit in this finite surface area without touching. That’s why they run
out of room, halting the superfast expansion. But their positions fluctuate
randomly, so there’s always going to be a hole here and there that’s large
enough for another fermionic point, and the expansion doesn’t stop completely.
The physicists call the energy that’s causing this accelerating expansion dark energy, and they don’t have a clue
what it is.
When the fermionic points are
as close together as they can be, each one is confined to a little cell, which
we can imagine is roughly spherical. The walls of the cell are other points. If
a point tries to escape from its cell, it immediately runs into another point
and bounces off. The positions of the points are random, but within limits. At
the beginning there are few points, the limits are very loose, and the points
can vibrate all over the place, but as time goes on the vibrations get smaller.
In the language of the standard cosmological model, the universe starts out
very hot right after the big bang and cools down rapidly as it inflates.
Each spacetime point vibrating
in its tiny cell looks very much like a particle in an infinite spherical well,
but there are no particles yet, only spacetime. However, the walls are oscillating,
and that’s energy above and beyond the vibrational energy of spacetime points. We can
make particles out of that. This condition, a particle in an infinite spherical
well with oscillating walls, has been studied. In our case, if the oscillation
energy is greater than the point’s vibrational energy, the point will absorb
the energy and become an excited
point—a particle! If the oscillation energy is too small, it just stays there and
causes gravitational effects—gravity without matter! This condition has also
been studied. It was found that this energy looks exactly like dark matter. I’ve done some rough
calculations that show that a maximum of 22% of the oscillation matter could
become luminous matter in this way. Observations show that the actual ratio of luminous
matter to total matter is about 16%.
The physicists have been
trying to figure out what dark matter is for decades and haven’t succeeded
because they don’t have the right spacetime model. The physicists who studied
gravity without matter sheepishly admitted that their work probably didn’t have
any practical use because there was nothing in fundamental physics to support
it!. Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction has just posted on
recent dark matter results and how frustrating they are for physicists.
But not for us. We already have luminous
matter, dark matter, and dark energy. Our baby spacetime has grown a bit but
there’s still a lot of structure to be added. I’ll continue in future posts.
