No Explanation for the Cosmos!

No Explanation for the Cosmos!

 

Our Milkyway galaxy

The science behind the current description of the universe, our theories about its beginning, size, structure and “evolution” has been amazingly successful.  Our physics and complex computerized telescopes have not quite supported our theoretical explanations for how all things got here, but has allowed us to generate good questions and we have learned how to answer them.  It is nearly impossible to believe we have succeeded in advancing our concepts into realized facts of the material existence and space and this without a lot of empirical experimentation.  The models of expansion of the big bang, the successful modeling of gravitational collapse of hydrogen gas in the vacuum of space and our ingenious understanding of how galaxies, galactic clusters, super clusters and galactic walls are held together, even with rotating motions, are the embodiment of human ingenuity and brilliance. Or has our perfect explanation of the universe been forced upon us by pure imagination – not science?

A strange and beautiful galaxy.

For over a century we have wondered how gases could defy fundamental gas laws for an ideal gas in a vacuum.  This is what is found in space at the evolutionary beginning of time.  These gas laws apply on earth for air conditioning, refrigeration, heat pumps, combustion engines, even hot air balloons.  Lab experiments in physics 110 and 111 demonstrated the law of entropy and can be equated to the pressure multiplied by volume equals the amount of the substance (in Moles) multiplied by the ideal gas constant multiplied by temperature or PV = nRT.  In essence gas expands to fill the volume it is contained in and temperatures increase the chaos.  We would have thought this to be true for hydrogen gas shortly (400,000 years) after the big bang event when the diatomic molecule first formed. But the universe with all of its hydrogen burning in stars are here and so we need to explain it. And the big bang, as smooth as it must have been, had only a marginal deviation of less than a percent in homogeneity just so clumps of matter would be left over creating a starting point for the collapse of gas atoms into great balls of fire – the stars. 

Artistic conception of protoplanetary disk formation.

To guarantee the collapse of matter we calculated the mass of our Universe only to find a good 90% of the matter in the universe is missing.  At least some of the missing matter, once thought to comprise 90% of all matter, must be contained in an invisible and undetectable form since we can’t see, touch, taste, smell, or hear this material on our own planet.  We call this dark matter, for obvious reasons.  It is identical to regular matter only different! (How’s that for an explanation?). It does not give off light but it is like regular matter only, well, different.  Dark matter could cause the collapse of gas into stars and help pull the stars together to form galaxies; galaxies into clusters and clusters in super clusters etc… 

But why do suns, planets, galaxies and galactic clusters rotate?  This too seemed like a problem until it was realized that a finely tuned universe with the just the right amount of lumpiness and the correct distribution of dark matter could begin the collapse of gases and since gravity, being the most significant energy in space-time, acted in ways that created a tidal effect on the collapsing gases.  This was due to the influence of the tiny fluctuations present in the distribution of matter.  This means gases collapsed with an angular momentum until the formation of stars and clusters of stars amplified this momentum into a unified and evenly distributed rotation that we see today as spiral galaxies, rotating stars and the movement of the earth around the sun today.  Whew!  That explanation almost got away from us, didn’t it? 

Everything is rotating out there! Explosions (the big bang) do not sustain rotation even in space.

While we sort of solved how rotational movement started, we discovered that galaxies are rotating too fast; there is too much angular momentum generated by matter distribution fluctuations.  Something more needed to hold the universe together.  Galaxies are rotating so fast and are so large that they should not hold together for long.  They should fling apart due to centripetal forces.  Glue was needed and dark matter once again rescued our model; not only pulling but holding things together.  Calculations suggested that we only need 5 times more dark matter than visible matter to achieve this stability for some galaxies.  Other galaxies need different amounts of dark matter.  Just the right amount of dark matter is always available for different galaxies.  Thank goodness dark matter is dark so we can manipulate its availability without having to know anything about it.   After having brought the universe together and gluing it there, we noticed in the 1990s that by tracing the expansion of the universe more intensely through type 1a supernovae (exploding stars) the universe was not just expanding, it was actually accelerating at its boundary.  (And this in spite of the fact that we decided the universe is unbounded.) Some powerful but unseen repulsive force was overcoming the gravity of all matter, whether it was dark or light matter!  The energy was determined to be dark energy.  Now with all this push and pull of gravity and of hot and cool spots in the universe and the supremely calm existence of nicely rotating galaxies, the structure of the universe seemed almost balanced…except for a little extra repulsive energy needed to balance all the equations at the beginning of time. 

David Battersby writing for the New Scientist (March 05, 2013) summarizes for us:

“All of this leaves us with a precise recipe for the universe. The average density of ordinary matter in space is 0.426 yoctograms per cubic metre (a yoctogram is 10^-24 grams, and 0.426 of one equates to about 250 protons), making up 4.5 per cent of the total energy density of the universe. Dark matter makes up 22.5 per cent, and dark energy 73 percent. Our model of a big-bang universe based on general relativity fits our observations very nicely – as long as we are happy to make 95.5 per cent of it up.”

And just when we thought we had it all solved it was not sufficient to explain how the universe could be so perfectly uniform in every direction and this from an explosion?  Today a new exotic entity exists (was imagined) that took over the repulsive force of dark energy for just a fraction of time at the beginning of time to assure that space would be flattened and any major irregular lumpiness was smoothed.  The particle had the explosive force 10 ²⁵ times more powerful than that of dark energy. 

The particle called the inflaton (inflationary particle), flattened space when the universe was 10 ^-36   seconds old and at the right time the field generated by the repulsive particle then transformed into matter and radiation.  (Isn’t that convenient?).  What stopped the field from continuing to expand to create hundreds of universes is not as important as knowing it stopped to create ours.  Now with all 100% of the universe explained, what is left to discuss? Well, according to Battersby there are a few anomalies that might need a bit more research. In his studies he has found some things don’t jive perfectly with the acceptance of the big bang, dark matter, dark energy and the inflaton particle.

“The model faces a few observational niggles, too. The big bang makes much more lithium-7 in theory than the universe contains in practice. The model does not explain the possible alignment in some features in the cosmic background radiation, or why galaxies along certain lines of sight seem biased to spin left-handedly. A newly discovered super-galactic structure, 4 billion light years long, calls into question the assumption that the universe is smooth on large scales.”

While we need a certain imperfectly perfect smoothness for the universe to have fit a big bang explosive model, dozens of other assumptions must have been fixed before the trigger for the big bang was pulled.  (I wonder who pulled the trigger?)  Even after adding the fudge factors (yes the make-believe fudge of dark things and inflationary particles that work only when we need them) we are finding that super structures, rotations, missing isotopes of elements still muddy the water.  Let’s face it the really big problem with perfect explanations of the universe’s existence is not a missing isotope but reliance on make-believe:

“We don’t know what dark energy is and we don’t know what dark matter is, and that should be a little bit embarrassing,” says Robert Kirshner, a cosmologist at Harvard University and a member of one of the supernova teams that first exposed dark energy.

Neither do we know what or where or how to prove the inflaton particle exists or who or what controls its fantastic switch to matter and energy before it resolves to create multiverses.  I agree with Battersby, we need to start over with science and not science fiction.  These new methods of inventing magic beans and fairy dust are not becoming of our science.  They start a trend in geology, biology, astronomy, mathematics, statistics and astrobiology (a field of study having nothing to do with reality, yet) where people invoke anti-science and reverse the laws of nature for the convenience of preserving failed hypotheses.   This is not how science is supposed to work.   However, we do have cause to wonder if there is design in every aspect of the material universe.  Instead of invoking fairy dust why not invoke what is required – intelligence.  After all, it appears to be required by every modern  scientific field that we have developed so far.  It’s just that we prefer fairy dust because fairy dust is potentially materialistic.  

Friends, you really don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that Western science is leading society into “the pits of nether gloom” reserved for the damned.  I’d rather we don’t have dark matter explaining life’s existence any more that I want to return to the ignorance of the Dark Ages. How about you?  Yet it seems we’re going there anyway.