Chairman’s Chat
Insomniac Cosmologist

It is 3.30 am and I cannot sleep. My head is filled with theories of the universe and I feel I must burden you with them …

My telescope is a time machine. I can look back in time but never forwards. The bigger the telescope, the older the light it will reveal to my eyes. Nicholas Copernicus’ universe was comparatively very small because the very best lenses he had to work with were imbedded in his eyeball. Galileo’s universe was slightly larger because he used optical aid to look further back in time at older light than the unaided human eye is able to detect. Edwin Hubble’s universe was comparatively enormous; the realisation that those patches of nebulosity were not part of the Milky Way, but “island universes” outside of, and not too dissimilar from, our own galaxy. Today, astronomer’s universes are gigantic – they use redshift, background microwave radiation, type 1A supernovas and distant quasars as yardsticks to estimate the currently generally accepted size of the universe.

I have just seen the HST press release picture known as the Ultra Deep Field – the result of photographing the same spot in space and time for 11,3 days. The result, the caption at the bottom of the picture reads, are 10 000 galaxies just 700 million years old. In essence, a photograph of the oldest light to date: 13 billion years, the newspaper article reads. Supposedly, we are looking at a small fraction of time just before the birth of the universe. This “popular theory” has been bothering me for a long time. It all seems a little too convenient: a neatly packaged great pop that creates everything. I don’t like it and I don’t buy it. Why have we fallen into the trap of deifying the big bang. When we humans don’t understand some thing, we form a singularity out of the problem. It becomes our one and only ultimate creator. 

There was not just one big bang that created everything. There have been many big bangs in the past. There are big bangs going on right now in distant universes. We just cannot see them. Remember, telescopes only detect light from the distant past. We have absolutely no idea what the universe actually looks like RIGHT NOW just a few hundred light years outside of planet Earth. 

Let me take one step backwards in my reasoning. We humans rely solely on the  electromagnetic spectrum to tell use the story of what the universe ACTUALLY looks like and how it is behaving right now. But in essence, it can only tell us what the universe WAS doing in the past. The signals tell us that the further away the object is from Earth, the faster it is (or should that be was) moving away from us. This forms the basis of current popular theory: an expanding accelerating universe. But this evidence is based on old light; on historical light. The further back in time  and space that astronomers see in modern telescopes, the closer they look towards the time of this universe’s big bang. But that is history. It makes sense to my logic that objects observed closest to the time of the point of initiation will have been travelling faster than objects closer to us right now. But, those objects are not necessarily still accelerating away from us right at this moment in time.

Remember the basic law of energy conservation – energy is neither created nor destroyed. So, no energy has been created since our own particular big bang. The energy has merely been transferred into the dynamics of galaxies, black holes and everything else that populates the modern universe. If we were in an accelerating universe, where would the energy be coming from RIGHT NOW to power the acceleration. This, to me, flies in the face of the basic laws of physics.

The way I understand it: space time can be compared, rather crudely I might add, to the skin of an expanding balloon. Every physical particle of matter that has ever been is on the surface of that balloon. As space and time expand, all particles (galaxies, etc) on the balloon’s surface move away from each other. It’s not the galaxies that expand but rather the space between them. When the balloon started inflating, the particles on the surface moved faster away from each other, and relative to one another, than when the skin surface of the balloon is stretched and inflating more slowly. Our most powerful telescopes look back to the time just after the big bang and that’s why we see most distant objects (from the most distant past) moving faster away than objects closest to us. 

But what is everything doing RIGHT NOW?

Using the balloon analogy, if the surface were expanding RIGHT NOW, everything outside of the Milky Way should be flying away from everything else, regardless of the relatively weak force of gravity. If the balloon surface were contracting, all objects would be seen to be moving towards each other. However, because of light time delay, if our current universe started contracting relatively recently, we would observe only the nearest objects moving towards us. Our telescopes (being the time machines they are) would still observe the most distant objects racing at accelerating speeds away from us. 

The closest galaxies to us, including the Larger and Smaller Magellanic Clouds, are collapsing in on the Milky Way. Our sister galaxy, Andromeda (M31), has an estimated closing velocity on us of 35 kilometres per second (Burnham vol. 1) … the galaxy’s light is blue-shifted with respect to us. Our next nearest spiral galaxy, M33 – Pinwheel Galaxy in Triangulum – is, according to Burnham (vol.3 ) “one of the few galaxies that does not show a redshift”. It has a net computed closing velocity of 20 kilometres per second.   

These are objects in our immediate vicinity. The light is still young from these objects. They give us the most up to date evidence of what is actually happening in the universe. They are closing in on us and I don’t believe the weakest force in the universe – gravity – has everything to do with it.

The older the light is, the further away the object, and the less reliable the evidence for what is happening in the universe at this instant. What if the universe has already started to re-collapse … within the last 2.3 million years or so? We would have no evidence of the contraction whatsoever – save the nearest galaxies showing evidence of a closing velocity. 

Astronomers can only look at historical electromagnetic evidence, not current evidence. This is because light only travels at 300000 km per second and we have only been scientifically inspecting known regions of the electromagnetic spectrum for a few hundred years. Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are nothing new in the universe. They are only new to us because we detected them, by accident, in what we (currently) think is the most energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum.  

I wonder if there are events or objects, nearby or far, that do not run physical characteristics or properties in the human-understood electromagnetic spectrum? 

Imagine a scenario in which light is instantaneous. In other words, light (or all electromagnetic radiation for that matter) has no travel time. We would then be able to see the most distant objects as they appear and behave right now. We could then say for certainty that the universe was expanding around our immediate vicinity and at the most distant points. I’ve often wondered if gravity is instantaneous; if a massive object were to just suddenly appear in space and time, whether its gravitational effects would be felt instantaneously everywhere in the universe, or if gravity has the same travel time as light?

Like many of my fellow society members, I wasn’t brave enough to attempt  a classical education in quantum physics and applied mathematics. This has left me short of the tools I often fondly desire in order to put my personal theories into some form of scientifically acceptable evidence. I am a chronically frustrated armchair physicist. Consequently, my cosmology will never be taken seriously by those who have cut their teeth via the academia. Having proposed the ideas above without the requisite physics, I feel like a caveman wielding a light sabre at a herd of incredulous mammoths. 

But, it’s now 5.30 in the morning and my mind roams freely and unbounded through theories of the universe, space and time … and it feels wonderful.

Dave Gordon

Fellow Canopus readers, I would like to experience your theories of the universe and everything. That’s why I joined this society! Get your fingers flying on those keyboards and send your theories for our May Canopus to chris@penberthy.co.za

Our own particular universe could be collapsing in on itself right now and we would know nothing of it. 

So I would like to unleash my own theory on you. Here goes …

I think the oldest light that I have looked at through my 10 inch telescope is estimated to be about 300 million years old.