useful, usable, compelling.

So in my last post, “Universe, You Got A Lot Of ‘Splainin’ To Do,” I put forth a proposition. I said that while the Big Bang Theory says that everything erupted from nothing, it is equally valid to assume that the Universe began with everything that was ever in the Universe and what we’re experiencing is the release of the contents from our Universe into another. In other words, our Universe could have begun with all the matter that ever was spread out evenly in a complete state of entropy and the order from disorder we’re experiencing is the eddies in the flow of this Universe through a rupture. I’ve been struggling with a thought experiment to explain it and I think I have one.

Imagine, if you will, an aquarium filled with a gas. The gas represents the quantum foam of virtual particles blinking in and out of existence. In practice, this amounts to a completely equal distribution of cosmic stuff. Not really matter as we know it, but not dark matter either. For lack of a better term, let’s call this “gray matter.” One of the central (pun somewhat intended) assumptions of Big Bang Theory is that there is a point of origin to the Universe – the place where all space and time erupted from, and where it will all return someday in the Big Crunch. So, to remove that assumption, let’s assume that the aquarium is donut-shaped, or even better, a slightly elongated donut shaped like a teardrop.

Now, imagine a rupture at the apex of the teardrop. Let’s say that’s the inter-Universe rupture that serves the same purpose as a Big Bang. The completely smooth gray matter would begin making its way to the exit. But, like any dynamic system, there would be ripples through the gray matter caused by the rupture, so you would get clumping of the gray matter as it made it’s way to the rupture. The order we see in our Universe could be explained by those ripples. If gravity was the force that held our proto-Universe in stasis (the force that held all matter equidistant from all other matter), those ripples could cause the clumping that we see as nebulas, stars, galaxies, planets, etc..

Now, imagine riding one of those clumps toward the rupture. We would look around us and see everything moving away from everything else. We wouldn’t see things converging on a point, because that would require the frame of reference from being able to see the aquarium. We would just see other gray matter and it would all be moving away from other gray matter. In addition, if we look in the direction everything was moving, we would see that it was moving faster than if we looked back toward the rounded end of the donut. It would appear that we were moving faster now than we were in the past. However, we would not see the giant drain toward which we were moving, because it would be the fabric of space and time that was pouring down that hole.

From our perspective, as time and space approached that hole, they would be moving faster and stretch out over greater “distance” so that it would seem like the outer edge of a bubble continuously expanding. In fact, it would appear very much like our Universe had a center from which we were expanding. However, it would eliminate the need for cosmological constants or dark matter/energy to explain why our Universe behaves the way it does.

I’m not saying this is the right answer (I just thought of it a little while ago), but Occam and his razor would be sitting in the bleachers on my side of the field.

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