There are two “Big Bangs” – there is the one that marks the beginning of the universe and it is this which most of us are by now familiar. But then there is the other, more pertinent one, that will undoubtedly herald it’s end. Let me begin with the first and try to explain it in such terms that will hopefully make the circumstances of the second “Big Bang” more comprehensible, and thus more avoidable; as we yet live in hope!
The conventional view of the Big Bang is of an initial massive expansion. Most would accept that the energy provided to chase this expansion to it’s endpoints has largely cooled. Hence, we now have material that could not have existed say in the first yoctosecond. Quark and anti-quark annihilation etc have ensured the present-day proportions and kinds of matter … but these things are just distracting, the bottom line is that things have cooled down sufficiently to call a halt to the jostling, the more it cooled down, the less jostling and the more “space” then provided for the now coagulated elements to further inmix and syncretise.
It may be easier to picture it like this. If you’ve got a floppy balloon and you blow it up until it’s nice and hard and round and as you’re taking your fingers away to tie a knot in her a little air escapes. The escaped air allows the balloon to deflate a little, maybe loads if you do a sloppy job, but if you are well practised there should be a nice happy medium where your balloon will shrink back in upon itself lowering the amount of pressure and keeping its hide of sufficient toughness that it will not pop when scratched – as in when you go about looking for a Higgs boson (to pre-empt a little my concluding remarks) – but will remain a nice functioning softer balloon. The “hide” of the balloon is not made of rubber but is the capacity potential of the amount of “air” to fill up the space into which it has been forced. In the “air” then, composed of pure energy which having forced most of itself into the ‘hide’s carrying potential and dropping off it’s “tail” (the escaped air) it eventually nestles itself into the environs of the carrying potential.
What happens when the door is shut behind it; ie. when the knot is tied in the balloon? The energy will be rushing around the inside of the hide carrying potential until it settles down. Now you’ve got two substances, and two will eventually always tango, especially when they’re both trapped and there’s nothing else for it but to mingle and co-habitate. The properties of the ‘hide’ carrying potential will be eaten or scraped away only slightly, but enough to alter the conditions within this now firmly enclosed space – so, we can rule out an infinite unbounded universe, but only for our universe, as our universe is being defined as the volume occupied by the hide’s carrying potential. What lies outside of the space occupied by the balloon’s expanding volume is undoubedly a higher-level of quasi-organic matter and may well go on infinitely, but our area within is now strictly circumscribed.
What has been taken away from the “wall” of the hide will now co-mingle with the pure energy but it cannot become part of it, being of a different substance; what looks like what is called “dark matter” and that will now become a “membraneous” connection to the original hide. The now extracted hide, the “dark matter”, which, as it co-mingles but strangely never “touches” with the inrushing energy is now left to circulate within the bosom of the hide. The graviton field must be the common area shared by these three substances; pure energy (light), matter (which is just cooled energy) and the extracted hide (dark matter). This is the area that they all must share and what binds them together must be the interior stitching of the atom. The hide may be made of the same stuff that this dark matter is made of, who knows? After all, there must have been a reason it became dislodged from the interior of the hide’s carrying potential in the first place.
But in effect the rapid strong inrush once having encountered a resistance now circulates in a swirl (the so-called “dark energy” which militates against the tractive force of gravity) – just like your cuppa when you give it a good clockwise stir, then, as you just as fast stir it the other way creating a funky clash (cosmic microwave background radiation) that brings a good bubbly broth to the top. The black holes should be like whirlpool zephyrs still spinning under the surface of this broth.
Now, each black hole region (most spiral and elliptical galaxies have now been determined to have one at their centre) must have it’s own protective membrane but not quite as developed as the protective membrane that surrounds the universe as a whole. Can elements from one black hole region pass to another black hole region? Milky Way to Andromeda like. Or must they go through the recycling black hole to get there? I would suggest it is impossible to cross this divide using any technology yet dreamt of.
The universe is however no ordinary balloon and this analogy can only take us so far. It must be some kind of a very strange balloon with a rough hide polished exterior. Is the universe excretory? Undoubtedly. It should need to expel it’s elements like any other cellular-like entity. It has to be contained and it has to have developed a “soapskin wall” that can gently disgorge it’s contents. The black hole dotted and specked interior makes no sense otherwise. The membraneous exterior soapy hide involutes and stretches inwards to a centre which spore-like, radically radiates back onto and into the surface of soapyskin exterior. There is no other possibility I’m afraid. The black holes recirculate the material and act as internal regulators. There is no fundamental difference between it, in terms of its “structure”, in fairness, with a common cell with centrosomes. Is there a “nucleus”, are there several “nuclei”, are the black holes themselves the “nucleii”? How can we tell? Earth’s, or rather the Milky Way’s black hole is not the largest observable, so if there’s is a central black hole …. I digress endlessly.
Now, the universe is “growing” like any other lifeform, like a cabbage, a spud, a stem cell, a foetus, or whatever. If something keeps growing sooner or later it willl meet a pressure that forces it to come back in upon itself but this coming back in will be a momentary fluctuation, or several fluctuations, like you pluck a banjo string real hard it poings outwards rapidly and violently leaving the observer seeing only a blur but it will come to rest at some point because there is a tension (in the case of the two-dimensional banjo or guitar string that tension is provided by both ends of the string being fastened at either end of the guitar’s frame). With the universe, the tension must be provided by this connective bridge being maintained by the membraneous dark matter which, at the intra-atomic level – is stitched into the atom, every atom – via the Higgs boson – or “God Particle”, as particle physicists now prescientlyrefer to it as.
What is our Fin that is again awake? It is a diamond stylus scratching the interior surface of our membranous hide. We are in the Nile of somethingness and our river runs but where? O Anna Livvy Plurabelle. Famous meandering creature from the joy scene sear’s nightscape musings in the Wake, as if you didn’t know. She started one end and came out the other; like a punctured vomit bag, if you’ll excuse the French. A big bang? Ploosh! there we are now again, the lot of us. Whose “wake”? The wake of the heavens and earth and everything around us.
Now, the mathematics which informs the operations of the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss border is inscripted from the onset from poorly understood and incompletely defined epistemological paradigms – somewhat ironic given that the massive boson is thought to provide a solution to gravity, and therefore fill in the missing piece to an understanding of the four forces, which by the way should tell us all we need to know about how “involuted” their thinking is – even the historical derivation of the Standard Model on the point /particle dichotomy being resolved on the issue of duality with all that that entailed for the direction of future research – the craze for Feynman diagrams for instance when they were only ever intended as pedagogical tools; obviously, there are a number of “ghosts in the machine” here and the “known unknowns” have been duly accorded a statistical probability within a fancy matrix but this attribution itself is somewhat dubious since it derives its authority from nothing more substantial than a prevailing wind.
What is under the microscope here is the beating heart of the atom which is of course connected to every other atom and therefore every thing in ways that we do not or perhaps cannot fully understand, the Kantian ding an sich applied if you like to both an open and closed oosphere, the ghosts outside of which, are, to my mind, far more pertinent to the discussion at hand; sure listen they know that we know that they don’t really know what they are doing but they are going ahead and doing it anyway; is that fine by me, not really, but sure hey what can you do about it anyway?
Alive a live O a lone a lost a lonely love again.
She will continue, but mourn fully.
