In an effort to drag the topic kicking and screaming out of the other thread I've decided to post my own personal thoughts on the big bang.
My theory is grounded more in philosophy that science, because quite frankly I'm not a physicist, just an arm chair scientist at best. The big bang is postulated on an assumption that I don't think is necessarily correct. The universe appears to be expanding and if it's expanding equally in all directions then it stands to reason that if you were to run the arrow of time backwards you would have a "big crunch", i.e. a singularity from which all matter and energy in the universe came into existence ex nihlo, we call this the big bang. Einstein never believed in this conclusion from his own equations so he introduced a cosmological constant to keep the universe in a steady state. However it was shown later that the universe is in fact expanding and so he ditched the cosmological constant and felt rather embarrassed about it in his later years. Later it's discovered that there appears to be a problem with our observations. The rotation of galaxies is uniform from our observations, the only way this is possible with our current theory is if we assume that there are vast quanities of matter that we cannot see in fact so much matter that we cannot see that it must make up much more of the universe than ordinary baryonic matter, whatever it is we can't see it, thus we call it dark matter. Fast forward several decades and we discover that not only is the universe expanding it's accelerating, to explain this observation we modify our equations with the aforementioned cosmological constant and call it dark energy and hail Einstein the visionary that he really was. None of this is sitting quite right with me, what I'm about to say is really nothing more than my own gut instinct based on a fundamental disagreement with science, or possibly a bit of indigestion, so take it for what it's worth, which is probably nothing. What if the universe isn't expanding in a truely linear fashion? In otherwords what if we don't really understand what it means to expand the universe? One thing that has never been looked at closely as far as I know, is that if the Universe is N dimensional and we exist in 4 dimensions which are expanding, ummm, why are we only looking at the expansion of 3 of those dimensions? Why is time somehow exempt from the expansion of 4 dimensional spacetime. What if instead of the universe accelerating; what if time is actually expanding too. What if it were stretching and thus slowing down. Wouldn't it appear to us looking back in space and therefore time, that the universe is accelerating? If that could be true why couldn't the converse be true also. Which is to say, if time is stretching in one direction (colloquially called forward), couldn't it reach a breaking point at some point thus flipping or altering the arrow of time? Wouldn't that simplify things a bit? Especially if it didn't do perfect 180 but instead, what if the offset of the arrow of time were altered by say 1 degree each iteration. Wouldn't that explain the multiverse concept and eliminate the need for other universes, as well as taking care of dark matter and energy? I call this my "spring theory" of spacetime. To visualize it imagine that you have in fact only 1 force with 2 sides, we'll call them order and entropy. Each one is a nail holding a spring we call "spacetime" or "the universe" in place. If we flick the string with our finger (add energy to it), a wave will be setup which travels from one side of the spring to the other and back, or put another way, it goes from order to entropy and back. But no matter how you set the spring, the wave will change slightly at each crest and valley and will alter in some small way the spring itself. I have a hunch that it is this wave, specifically the crest of this wave that we are riding and this is what we experience as time. Therefore to me, time is merely a collapsing probability wave, moving back and forth across the universe, slightly altering it with each tick. Thoughts? /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
