20 Q Theory Part 4 – Evolution of The Modern Universe 1Sep17
I’ve written this blog to have some fun and present some ideas different from the conventional and orthodox. This is the fourth and final chapter in a creation myth I’ve called Q Theory. It discusses the evolution of the macro features of the Universe. The central theme is that a primordial energy field called Q leads to a Theory of Nearly Everything (TONE).
In this chapter I suggest that the Q field provides the reference frame for linear and rotational inertia and that it is dragged around within huge gravitationally bound structures like galaxies. The idea was presented more seriously in an earlier blog.
We left off last time at the stage where matter was being created and the Universe had become transparent to light ….
Formation of Proto-Galaxies and Stars
The Universe becomes a soup of energetic material. Photons and neutrinos are everywhere, conveying energy from one place to another. Simple nuclei, atoms and molecules have formed.
The Universe develops clouds of low atomic weight atoms. The clouds become bigger and bigger. Some areas have more matter creation and expansion than others. This creates turbulence and rotational swirls in the Q and matter clouds.
Clouds of matter condense like the brown bits in Miso soup. I’m not sure whether to suggest that this is condensation due to gravity plus cooling, or whether the matter is left behind in rafts by the expansion of the Universe, like crusts on an expanding sphere.
The formation of giant nebulae of hydrogen gases is not smooth. There are whorls and swirls in the Q. Maybe these help create the clouds of matter. Or maybe the clouds of matter give rise to the whorls and swirls.
Clusters form and clusters of clusters form. Big clouds pull little clouds apart. There are great streams and sheets and walls and other great conglomerations of atomic matter and dust. And all the time this is happening, the matter within the conglomerations is being drawn into clouds that give rise to stars.
Formation of Stars and Heavier Elements
Within the clumps of matter gravity takes over. Clouds collapse under gravity and become dense and hot enough for nuclear synthesis to begin. Stars come into being.
Some stars feature nuclear reactions that create the full suite of elemental nuclei. I am not sure how these nuclei get their electron shells, but one way or another the thermonuclear processes in stars and subsequent phenomena create all of the first 92 of so elements in the periodic table. The most common elements are the ones that are easiest to make, or the hardest to break.
Some stars merge into each other. Some become white dwarfs. Some white dwarfs explode into supernovae. Some stars become black holes. Some become red giants. It’s all a bit chaotic.
Top Down and Bottom Up Cosmic Processes
As stars form in the swirling miso soup of gases and dust, they start to interact with each other. There are top down processes and bottom up processes.
The top down processes involve the Universe becoming increasingly filled with matter, and expanding, and breaking into pieces as its does so. Huge clouds of stars, gas and dust form and then break apart from each other to form proto-galaxies. These eventually give rise to galaxies. Stars form within the galaxies, or possibly even earlier at the proto-galaxy stage. Many of the stars are drawn into clusters.
Or maybe the last step here is in reverse order. Maybe the big clouds in proto-galaxies break up into smaller clouds and each of these then gives rise to a star cluster.
The characteristic of top-down processes is that big things form first and then give rise to details.
Bottom up processes, which are also largely drive by gravity, sees stars forming early on and then the stars arrange themselves in small groups and the small groups eventually pull themselves together into galaxies.
One way or the other, through top down processes and bottom up processes, stars find themselves in clusters, clusters find themselves in galaxies, galaxies find themselves in clusters of galaxies.
A whole fractal “Russian-doll” set of structures emerges. The incredibly huge and intricate tapestry of the Universe evolves and the process is still continuing,
All sorts of galaxies form. The most common form of galaxy is a spiral galaxy. This has a flatted bulge or core in the middle surrounded by a disc of stars, often arranged into what looks like training arms in pairs, and often with a bar or band of stars across the middle.
There are also elliptical galaxies, lenticular galaxies and a range of irregular galaxies.
The galaxies form out of clouds gases, dust and stars. They range in size from hundreds to million of light years across. About 60% are spiral galaxies. Most of the rest are elliptical galaxies. There are some lenticular galaxies which are somewhere in between a spiral and an elliptical galaxy. The remaining 5-10% of galaxies are irregular galaxies.
While the average distance between the stars in a galaxy is billions of time larger than the stars themselves (not counting red giants), the average space between galaxies is only a few Megaparsecs (say 3 to 5 million light years). So the average separation between galaxies is only about 50 times the diameter of the average galaxy (about 80,000 light years).
Imagine an average sized room filled with a hundred soap bubbles to get some idea of the density of galaxies in free space.
All this structure tells us an enormous amount about the Universe. We do not understand a lot of it. Theories abound but mysteries remain.
Some astronomers/astrophysicists argue that elliptical galaxies are a result of interactions between spiral galaxies.
A simpler theory is that elliptical galaxies evolve from clouds of gas, dust and stars pulling together, but with low levels of aggregate angular momentum.
Bear in mind that the gravitational pull outside an elliptical galaxy is towards the centroid of the ensemble. However, within clouds of stars, many of the gravitational tugs and pulls work against each other and cancel out.
The stars form a massive n-body cluster, something like a swarm of bees. Elliptical galaxies do no have as high degree of new star formation as spiral galaxies, so maybe they are descendants of spiral galaxies.
The lenticular galaxies seem to be similar to spiral galaxies, but with minimal disc formation.
Irregular galaxies are understood to be the result of interactions between the other types of galaxies. Astronomers can see many examples of galaxies that are interacting closely with each other or even in the process of passing through each other.
Indeed, the Milky Way is thought to be interacting with a couple of nearby dwarf galaxies and is headed fairly rapidly towards a collision with the Andromeda galaxy in about 4 billion years time.
The Milky Way also seems to contain some particularly large clusters of stars that some astronomers consider to be dwarf elliptical galaxies which the Milky Way may have “swallowed”.
I think spiral galaxies are particularly interesting because they have a regular but complex shape that potentially tells us a lot about their dynamics and how they were formed. They might even reveal something new and fundamental about large scale physics.
In Q theory spiral galaxies begin when a cloud of gases, stars and dust form into discrete clump or band due to the effects of gravity in the turbulent matter creation phase and resultant chaotic expansion.
The stars pull together and as they do so they start to swirl. They give up angular momentum to the galaxy as a whole. A central axis of rotation emerges. A disc forms. Stars in the halo migrate to the disc and bulge.
Spinning stabilizes a galaxy. Stars find an orbit where the gravitational pull from the rest of the galaxy is balanced by inertial tendencies to move outwards.
As per the virial theorem, the total kinetic energy equals half the total potential energy. It might not look like that but its true.
Note that the net gravitational pull is more or less zero in the middle of the galaxy. This can be explained by simple symmetry arguments.
Many spiral galaxies feature a bar of stars and dust lying across most of the disc in a symmetrical fashion. The bars look like two opposing spokes in a wagon wheel, but maybe the bar is not rotating like the spokes of a wheel at all. Maybe the bar is a dynamic effect created by a density wave in the distribution of stars in the disc. Think of a Mexican wave amongst the spectators in a football stadium. The wave travels but the spectators stay put.
The density of stars and gases and dust increases in the density wave and this creates a hot zone for the creation of new stars.
The density wave could be in the direction of the spin and travel faster than the rest of the disc. Or it could be moving slowly and become manifest itself as the rotating disc passes through that particular zone in space.
One theory is that the density wave is created because a lot of the stellar orbits are a bit elliptical and some of the orbits catch up to the ones in front. An attractive aspect of this theory is that it explains the symmetry of the bar – two equal arms in opposite directions.
Another possible avenue of investigation is that spiral galaxies formed when great filaments of matter in the proto Universe broke apart and that the bars are remnants of these spinning filaments.
The Rotation Curve Dilemma
Redshift data suggests that tangential speed of stars in spiral galaxies is much higher than expected. Classical dynamics suggests that the tangential speeds should decrease with distance from the centre. Observations suggest that they do nothing of the sort and that the graph of rotation speed versus distance from the galactic centre is more or less flat.
This is the rotation curve problem. When astronomers eventually agreed that the data was revealing a significant problem (~1970) they quickly seized upon the idea that the reason must be a lot of hitherto unknown and invisible missing mater in the halo of the galaxies. They called this imagined missing material Dark Matter.
It is easy to understand why theorists were drawn to imagine same hitherto unknown forms of matter must be holding spiral galaxies together. Nuclear physicists were discovering new particles every other year or so and winning lots of Nobel Prizes. Furthermore, inventing invisible fluids has a long tradition in human history – miasmas, spirits, humors, pholistogen etc.
Once the dark matter hypothesis became established, herd effects took over and minds started to close.
However, in Q theory, spiral galaxies have a lot less angular momentum than is commonly believed. This is described in an earlier blogs in this series of Heretical Physics.
In Q theory the hypothesis is that inertia is a manifestation of the interaction between matter and the Q field. In a sense, matter is “sticky” within the Q. But the opposite is also true – Q tends to stick to matter.
When an enormous number of stars form into a giant gravitationally bound collection of stars turning slowly in space, they collectively drag some of the Q around with them, a bit like stirring a soup.
At the same time the rest of the Universe and the rest of the Q tries to hold the Q filed still. The net result is a three dimensional eddy in the Q field, with maximum movement close to the visible edge of the spiral galaxy.
The effect is clearly evident in the rotational velocities of stars as revealed by their red shifts. The stars are actually rotating at their correct Keplerian speeds in their local Q but because the Q is itself being spun around in that direction the stars look like they are going much faster.
If there is any merit in this idea at all then there is may be no need to imagine the existence of enormous amounts of exotic cold dark matter. Which could be handy bit of theory to have in case the search for Cold Dark Matter continues to as futile as it is improbable.
Expansion of The Universe (Contd.)
Around 1922, Aleksandr Friedmann applied Einstein’s equations to a model of the universe as a whole, treating it as a fluid with a more or less even distribution of mass and energy. He showed that there could be quite a few solutions to Einstein’s equation in this particular model, including an expanding universe.
In 1925-1929 Hubble showed that there are a lot of other galaxies other than the Milky Way. Furthermore they are all moving away from us at a more or less constant speed.
Theorists eventually imagined this expansion model running backwards. They came up with the idea of an initial Big Bang. This eventually held sway over steady state interpretations of the Universe.
Lets consider the expansion more closely.
There is no doubt the Universe is expanding – possibly accelerating even. In the Q Theory creation myth the expansion is not caused by some sort of explosive big bang, but rather by the formation of atoms. Each atom is enormously larger than its constituent material. The formation of particles soaks up Q, but the formation of atoms creates relatively enormous bubbles in the Q. The formation of bubbles drives everything apart, a bit like the leavening agent in a cake.
The whole Universe is a fluffy, foamy, pudding! Once matter is given a boost in one direction or another, it keeps on going until acted upon by an external force (usually gravity) to stop.
Is it just the space between galaxies that is expanding, or are galaxies expanding along with everything else? It seems to be the former. Gravity seems to be countering the expansion within galaxies.
Q theory would suggest that areas of hydrogen formation should be associated with particularly high dynamic turbulence.
It is an interesting mental exercise to try to imagine the whole evolution of the Universe. But, like a maze, it is fraught with blind alleys. Down the end on one such blind alley you will find a piece of science fiction called the Big Bang theory.
A worse name is hard to imagine. It is completely the wrong mental image. There was no time scale and no distance scale in the early stages of the Universe, so the concept of an explosion has no meaning. There was certainly no noise, so the word “bang” is pretty silly.
If everything emerged from a singularity then it would have been an infinite black hole. We now know of thousands of black holes and there is no evidence of any black hole ever exploding.
If the Universe emerged from a singularity then it would have a centre. There is no evidence of any centre to our Universe.
If the expansion of the Universe came from an initial explosion, then it would be a decelerating Universe due to the omnipresence of gravity. There is no evidence of such a deceleration. If anything, the evidence is opposite.
The list of weaknesses goes on and on.
In fact the whole mental approach of somehow standing outside the Universe and watching it evolve as if it were a movie is invalid, possibly even arrogant. Physicists know that there is no absolute time, and no absolute time scale, so why do they stay silent when book writers and journalists pretend there is?
Very Large Scale Patterns
There seems to be a lot of structure in the universe as a whole. Periodicities in the rate of expansion. Large voids. Filaments of super-clusters of galaxies and so on. There is even some suggestion that spiral galaxies tend to line up with great voids in the macro structure of the observable Universe.
There is a project afoot to map the macro features of the galaxies in quite a lot of detail. A heroic and worthwhile project. It will be interesting to see if galaxies are closer together in the earlier/older Universe. It will also be interesting to check whether there are differences between the older galaxies and the galaxies in the later/newer/closer Universe. e.g. in the rate of star formation, proportion of spiral galaxies, metal ratios in old stars etc.
Is the Expansion Accelerating?
Supernovae type 1a stars are white dwarf stars whose mass has exceeded a certain stability limit, thus causing them to explode. This creates a ‘standard candle’ – an object with much the same intrinsic brightness everywhere it occurs. Hence the dimmer a candle appears to us to be, the further away it is. This creates a very useful way of estimating the distances of far away galaxies.
However, there are several other distance scales. One involves a clever set of steps. We can see how big nearby galaxies are by direct observation. And we can measure their surface brightness. Therefore we can develop a model of size versus brightness. There is a very good correspondence between size and brightness for a fairly common class of galaxies. This is the Fisher–Tully relationship.
We can measure the brightness of galaxies further away, so if we can estimate their size somehow and compare it to their brightness, we can estimate how far they are away. There are theories for how bright certain galaxies should be. Some of these involve the classic virial theorem.
The virial theorem shows that the total kinetic energy of the particles in any self-bound and stable system has a fixed ratio to the total potential energy. (If the kinetic energy gets bigger than this, the whole system simply gets bigger, reducing the kinetic energy while increasing the total potential energy, thus restoring the balance). This theorem can help in estimates of the size of distant galaxies.
If we compare the size of stars with their age and brightness we can identify a statistical correlation that is called The Main Sequence. We can match this to our theories of the creation, evolution and death of stars. We can test these theories by the nuances in the electromagnetic radiation that they have sent in our direction, and wherever we can see them interacting with each other and with surrounding dust.
There is a special class of stars called Cepheid variables whose brightness pulsates at rates proportional to their mass. We can observe the duration of these pulses and also their brightness. Comparisons then give relative distances.
The light emitted from known sources (such as the spectral lines from hydrogen) has definite wavelengths. So if the wavelengths are longer we can conclude that the sources were moving away from us at the time of the emission (Doppler redshifts).
Studies of nearby galaxies suggested a constant rate of expansion. However, by the 1970’s the estimate for this rate of expansion still varied by ±50%. Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope (ironically) helped to pin the answer as being something close to 71 km/sec per megaparsec (proper) distance away from us.
Comparisons with other methods and models further tightened the measurement of this Hubble expansion parameter.
At the turn of the 21st century, studies of the brightness of distance supernovae became possible using space telescopes. Comparing the distance estimates to redshift data threw up a surprise. Using the best estimates of the Hubble constant and the observed Doppler redshifts of the supernovae gives a measure of their distance. But this conflicted with the calculations using their dimness. The supernovae were about 15% dimmer than expected.
Conversely, if the dimness data was used to calculate distance, then the redshift/Hubble model calculations were wrong. Either the Hubble “constant” must be bigger in recent times than it was in older times, or the light from the distant supernovae has somehow become less red. Or something totally unexpected is going on.
The answer most astronomers/cosmologists prefer is that the rate of Hubble expansion was slower in the earlier/older (and hence now further away) time than it is “now”. In other words the rate of expansion of the Universe has increased since the light from those supernovae light started travelling towards us.
Hence the need for theorists to conjecture how this might occur. Once again they leapt to the conclusion that some hitherto unknown substance was the culprit. They called it Dark Energy. The Dark Energy is supposed to be increasing the “stress/energy pressure” in the Universe, thus causing the expansion to accelerate.
However, the whole reasoning process contains a lot of assumptions, both hidden and explicit. An accelerating expansion might not be the only possible conclusion.
It is much too early to be absolutely positive that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. So I think it is too soon, foolish and premature for all the world’s scientific talent to get on board the mental bus called “Dark Energy” and then shut the door behind them and exclude any non-believers.
The whole issue should be called the “Standard Candle Redshift Challenge.” It is a marvelous opportunity to learn something new.
Q Theory and the Accelerating Universe Conjecture
Q Theory is compatible with an accelerating expansion if the process of atom formation is continuing. In Q theory, the formation of atoms (mainly hydrogen) creates the pressure that drives the expansion.
However, Q theory likes to question hidden assumptions. Take the speed of light for instance.
Every known experiment to measure the speed of light in an inertial reference frame in a vacuum gives the same answer. But all such experiments are here and now. Who is to say that the speed of light has always been the same? If the speed of light was slower in an older (denser?) Universe, say 10 billion years ago, then all bets are off.
Furthermore, it seems that in spite of a century of special relativity, most humans keep on imagining that they can somehow imagine the evolution of the Universe as some sort of movie. But a movie has a steady external timescale. The Universe does not.
All we humans can see is a set of spherical photos of the Universe around us. Each one further away and older. The frames do arrive in what appears to be a steady rate and orderly sequence, but as a movie they leave much to be desired because most of the events out there are happening on timescales of millions of years. If we wait a few billion years we could watch some of the grander events unfold. But few of us are that patient!
Relationship of Q to Rotating Matter
Q gives matter both its inertia and its mass. All matter tries to maintain a stable consistent relationship with Q. The converse is also true. Q tries to maintain a stable consistent relationship with matter. However, it is an unequal contest. There is a lot of Q.
Except in a few astronomical situations – inside and near a massive rotating object, and inside a massive rotating system. What happens here is that the massive amounts of matter slowly and gently stir the Q.
The consequence of this is that the reference frame for inertia changes. For an object to be at rest near a massive rotating object, it has to find a compromise between the slight stirring effect of the nearby massive rotating object and the resistance to this from the Q everywhere else.
The effect may show up in the anomalous precession of the perihelion of Mercury. Although this can be modeled by imagining that spacetime is curved, in Q theory part of advance in the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun may partly be due to a slight dragging of the inertial reference field due to the Sun’s own rotation.
This produces an immediate test for Q theory versus General Relativity. Q theory predicts that if Mercury went the other way around in its orbit then the perihelion precession effect would work backwards. In General Relativity it would still precess in the direction of the orbit. The author offers a $50 bet at even money on this, with the outcome to be decided by experiment.
In summary, Q Theory tries to conjure up the whole Universe out of one primal substance, and in the process address many very fundamental questions in physics. There is deliberately no timeline, but there are multiple stages:
Q starts to become “denser”. Positive and negative grains form but are unstable.
Annihilations produce neutrinos.
Neutrinos spin-stabilise the grains and they form electrons and positrons.
The interaction of matter with Q gives rise to inertia and to gravity.
Inertia and gravity give matter its mass.
Other properties of Q give rise to basic dynamics and thermodynamics.
The Universe becomes hot.
A highly charged subatomic “soup” forms which includes quarks and mesons etc.
Neutrons and protons form, along with their anti-particles.
Competition between competing chain reactions sees matter triumph over anti-matter.
The Universe becomes transparent. Photons can travel freely.
Hydrogen and other atoms form.
The Universe starts to expand.
Nebulae form, and stars within nebulae.
Top down and bottom up processes build the Universe as it is today.
Q Theory Differences From The Standards Model
The main point of difference in Q theory is the hypothesis of a primal universal substance/field called Q. There are three reasons Q was conceived: (i) the evidence points that way, (ii) it is very useful in explaining lots of things and (iii) just for fun.
provides an explanation for both gravity and inertia
explains that gravity and inertia define mass
resolves Mach’s Principle
explains Newton’s First Law of Motion
does away with ‘action at a distance’
posits an explanation for charge parity violation
reconciles gravity and electro-magnetism
provides a description of photons consistent with Special Relativity
resolves wave particle duality
does not require spacetime curvature
suggests a reason for the expansion of the Universe
supports a hypothesis that eliminates the need for exotic dark matter
gives a possible explanation if the expansion is indeed accelerating
is open to heretical ideas such as the possibility that the speed of light might have been different in the early Universe.
I’ve enjoyed making up this creation myth. Please feel free to borrow ideas from these speculative musings if you like, and to open up your own thinking just a little bit more.
In later blogs I’m planning to make some heretical criticisms of general relativity. Though this is a very clever theory it may not be as ideal, complete and final as the dyed-in-the-wool cognoscenti assume it to be. And I’d like to try to put gravity back into physics in a simple but modern way. But first I am going to take a short holiday. Thank you for reading these blogs.
