Wobbly Universe

It is my contention that present day cosmology as proposed by many physicists and cosmologists is totally lame. They laugh about Ptolemy and his epicycles. Yet the big bang theory with its various add ons such as inflation, dark matter, and acceleration the opposite way to gravity, is a system that keeps adding new features to explain every new observation that does not fit the predictions. The big bang is bung. You can tell when the physics went utterly silly, because they no longer teach it to people in school or popular science magazines. Instead, they write articles about it without ever actually saying how it works. The ultimate in this regard is string theory.

This is intended to be the first in a series of articles which will explain how the universe works in a way that flows from a very small number of premises and explains many facts, including well documented ones that cosmologists and physicists pretend are not true because they cannot explain them.

While I am saying who was wrong I might as well mention Democritus. He started the idea that matter is made of indivisible units which he called atoms. In modern times this idea has been retained after being revised a couple of times to make the indivisible units be electrons, protons and neutrons and later quarks replaced the protons and neutrons.

My contention is that although there are things which might be loosely called "particles" these are no more fundamental units of the universe than is the share market cycle. That might sound a very strange things to say, but eventually I hope to convince you that it is so.

To make a universe ...

First, take a blob of stuff that is totally uniform throughout, which has high tension inside it like a piece of steel, but which has no internal structure whatsoever (that is, is not made of atoms but is uniform).

The physics of blobs of stuff is reasonably well understood. If you deform its shape and let go, it tends to return to the original shape. However when bent and released, it doesn't just bend back to the original shape but overshoots it because of the momentum gained in springing back.

All this is well known and described by a simple equation known as the wave equation. No matter what strange and complex distortions of a blob are made, the simple wave equation will tell you all the twisty and springy motions that will ensue once you let go of it.

If our blob of stuff like steel but uniform inside were in a vacuum and was set vibrating, then it would continue to vibrate indefinitely. At first it would seem to repeating certain vibrations repeatedly and exactly, but eventually something different would happen. The reason for this something different is the really important thing about what I am telling you that makes it different from what physicists have generally considered to be important, but it is not unknown.

The fact is that if you put some steel under tension, for example a guitar string that is tightened up, then that extra tension means that the waves in it travel faster, so that the guitar notes get higher frequencies. Our blob of universe is just the same, even though we have let go of it, some parts are at times under more tension and sometimes less. This variation effects the local speed of sound waves in the blob so that the speed is not a constant but a property of local conditions.

Now I want to go back to this blob and the wave equation. It is a fact that in the nineteenth century a number of physicists worked out how electricity and magnetism worked and this culminated in James Clerk Maxwell presenting some equations that brought it all together. These equations were wave equations just like the ones that I mentioned for a blob of stuff like steel but continuous all the way through.

There were multiple equations and not just one. But the various equations all had the similar wave property and could be understood as certain derived properties of the local motion of the blob. For example the local rotational aspect of the blob is the property that relates to magnetism and indeed that property of rotation of the material was even called curl. All the properties of Maxwell's equations were understood as motions of a blob which was considered to be made of a substance called aether. Maxwell was able to deduce that the properties of electricity and magnetism and this wave stuff would mean that there was a type of electro-magnetic wave that would travel through the aether at the speed of light. So this completed the combined understanding of electricity, magnetism and light as all being aspects of the same thing

If you ask a physicist today about the aether theory they will tell you that it was discredited. They will say that the Michelson and Morley experiment searched for the motion of the Earth through the aether and showed conclusively that it did not happen. But there was an accident of history that meant that a wrong interpretation happened and it never got put right. By the time the other facts had come along the wrong turn had been well and truly taken.

The problem was that this aether, which was actually much higher in tension even than steel, so that its sound waves travelled at the speed of light. And yet physicists could not understand how such a solid stuff could allow bodies such as the planets to pass through it without resistance. This was a huge mystery.

There was one man who had the answer, William Clifford, who understood that matter itself was not a different thing, but was also a type of wave in the aether just like light. That type of wave is what is called a standing wave. The difference between a travelling wave such as light and a standing wave such as matter is the difference between flicking one end of a rope and getting a ripple to go along it and plucking a guitar string so that it vibrates in place. But poor William, a recognised brilliant mathematician died at the age of 33 without publishing much of his work and his idea never caught on.

So physicists had this weird idea about matter as being something made of solid particles called atoms and could not work out how they passed through the aether which was so solid without any resistance. And after Michelson and Morley's experiments and Einstein's general relativity they decided to abandon common sense and say that waves travelled in nothing. It was nothing that waved about and transferred energy from one place to another.

Actually, there were people like Lorenz and others who understood that if an electron had an electromagnetic wave nature then it would suffer the same effects as light when moving through the aether and so the Michelson Morley result would be expected. Initially Einstein disagreed with this, but later he made a speech in which he acknowledged Lorentz, and with general relativity he actually spoke in favour of the aether again.

Other famous men such as Schroedinger and de Broglie also understood that matter was made of waves and not particles, but somehow, although their famous equations were adopted their ideas were not. And physicists continued to say that matter is not made of waves and that there is no aether.

But I have jumped a way ahead of where I wanted to go with my first part of making a Universe. The way that matter comes about is much later in the story. But it is much easier to talk about an aether when describing how the universe works. However if I say aether without mentioning all of that, then physicists will say not to believe me because I am a crackpot. Now, I have given you the evidence that proves it is not so. In fact, all of Michelson, Morley, Einstein, Lorenz and other famous physicists died believing in an aether. And yet today we are told those very same people disproved the existence of an aether. Isn't that just bizarre?

But back to the main story. I mentioned that when you stretch some part of that blob, which we can now call aether, then we increase the tension in that part and make the wave speed greater in that region. So the wave speed, which we have now found out is the speed of light, is not actually a constant but depends on the local tension. Oh no! I have said another bad word according to the physicists, wash my mouth out!

Well I will have to detour again to explain why the constancy of the speed of light is not right even though everyone says that Einstein proved it. Well, the constancy of the speed of light is most certainly not a fact. If you ask why light refracts in glass or water you will be told that it is due to the different refractive index. If you ask what that is and why it bends you will get a little diagram that show that this really means that light travels at a different velocity in glass or water to what it travels at in air.

So the speed of light is not constant. It varies with many things, but what Einstein assumed is that it is the same for people in motion as for people at rest. This is confirmed by the Lorenz transformation equations which in turn follow directly from Maxwell's equations. And Maxwell's equations are the equations of waves in an aether. So go figure that. It was explained by Lorenz and is still referred to today as LET or Lorenz Ether Theory. It works and proves that an aether has no problem with producing relativity equations despite what most physicists believe but cannot prove.

It is these little blind parts of physics that prevent anyone who is educated in Universities today from being able to think correctly about fundamental physics. So they have to invent 10 or 26 dimensional spaces, little strings and weird big bang epicycles in order to try and make things fit. If intelligent youngsters were given the correct facts during their early education they could solve the quandaries of physics and cosmology quite easily.

So we have this blob of aether and we now know that it is very big and very high tension and that it is given some twists and belted about about and then let go and behold there is a Universe. Now we just have to work out what will happen, and I will show that with only things that were known more than a century ago, the structure of the entire cosmos can be explained in ways that have never been done before.

In the beginning was the vibration*

* substitute "word", "light" or "vibration" according to religious taste.

Don't miss the next exciting episode where waveman escapes the evil clutches of the physicists, evades the cosmologists and lets the blob of aether begin to sing. Translated this means that you can subscribe to this blog by clicking on the feeds at the bottom of the panel on the right.

See step 2.