Enabling a Universe that Supports Intelligent Life
Author: Stephen Perrenod
An e-book now available through:
- Amazon for the Kindle
- Apple iBooks
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- ISBN: 9781611560770.
- Where to find: https://darkmatterdarkenergy.wordpress.com/where-to-find/
We are immersed in a sea of light emanating from ordinary matter that is floating, as it were, on an ocean of dark matter. The dark matter itself floats on the dark energy of the particle vacuum that in turn is in embedded within the scaffolding of space-time – which is shaped by the dark gravity effects from all matter and energy.
Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Foreword (by Rich Brueckner)
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Scale of the Universe
- The Big Bang Model
- Inflation
- Dark Matter
- Dark Energy
- Dark Gravity
- Future of the Universe
- Glossary
- References, Suggested Reading and Viewing
- About the Author
Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Gravity 
July 22nd, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Dark Energy Or Just Plain Gravity
Logically, everything has a center. It’s simply common sense to subscribe to that axiom when dealing with all things material.
According to many cosmologists, however, the universe does not have a center—at least one we can see or point to. However incongruous that conclusion might seem, everyone should agree that the universe is a vast and mysterious place where, probably, anything is possible.
In 1929 Edwin Hubble, a prominent astronomer, discovered that the billions of galaxies in the universe were accelerating in their expansion in relation to each other rather than slowing down, putting in question the theory, until that time, that the universe was created with a “big-bang” and would ultimately, at the end of its expansion, progressively contract in size and dimensions until it returned to its pre big-bang state, due simply to the laws of gravity.
With the new information of the ever increasing acceleration, subsequent cosmologists had to reevaluate the accepted postulations concerning the nature of the expansion. The current postulations are that the universe is full of dark matter and dark energy which is pushing on the visible matter causing it to increase in speed.
Here again, I’m just a layman in the field; and the cosmologists are studied experts; but that doesn’t seem logical. Logically, an object or a group of objects would not accelerate beyond the speed of their initial impulsion without the intervention of an outside source of additional energy. In the field of weaponry, it’s called muzzle velocity. The fastest a projectile will travel is the speed it’s traveling when it leavers the end of the barrel.
It seems to me, for the galaxies to be accelerating in speed, some natural force would have to be pulling on them rather than pushing them; and that force would be the force we all know as gravity. For it to be gravity effecting the galaxies like it is, that would mean the gravity would have to be coming from somewhere outside the universe, or on the periphery of the universe, rather than somewhere inside the universe at the unseen origin of a big-bang.
One cosmological theory I’m aware of is that their are multiple universes and they are all spherical in shape, like bubbles. The spherical shape is logical, because the sphere is a natural shape in nature. A drop of liquid in space will be spherical in shape because the pressure is equal on all sides, just as a universe should also be spherical in shape.
The proposition that our universe is spherical and that the accelerating force acting on the galaxies is gravity pulling them outward from outside the universe rather than an unseen, unknown force pushing them forward from the inside is the most logical explanation.
And if that proposition is true, take it a step further and apply the proposition to space travel. Rather than pushing ourselves into space as we do now, we could figure out how to tap into that universal, exterior, gravitational force and manipulate it to then draw ourselves into space at phenomenal rates of speed. Logically, we should be able to travel through space as fast as, if not faster than, the galaxies do.
DJ Adams
dadamsx@comcast.net
July 23rd, 2012 at 9:47 am
DJ,
Thanks for the comment. Your discussion about Edwin Hubble is not accurate. What Hubble discovered in 1929 was that the galaxies are moving away from each other, the universe is expanding. At the time the data was insufficient (the telescopes and detectors not powerful enough) to determine at that time whether the expansion was decelerating or accelerating. That become a large effort for the next several decades and the results generally seemed to indicate that the expansion was decelerating. It was not until 1998 with both Type Ia supernova studies and measurement of very small variations in the cosmic microwave background that astronomers demonstrated conclusively that the expansion is indeed speeding up. The postulated explanation is dark energy which is the residual energy of the vacuum – even “empty space” has energy, which is a consequence of quantum mechanics that allows for virtual particles to pop in and out of the vacuum. They are only allowed to have a very brief existence. It’s like you overdraw your checking account in the morning, but before the end of the day you make a deposit and everything works out when the bank rectifies its balances at night.
This dark energy acts like a pressure, it is a push analogous to the way you pump air into a tire or balloon and that pushes outwards. Imagine you have a patch of space with a boundary and inside these virtual particles are popping in and out of existence, they will push on – exert a pressure on – the boundary and cause it to expand. This is only an analogy, but it gets the idea across. And this force is greater than the average gravitational force inside the universe so the universe as a whole is expanding and accelerating in its expansion.
Now there are of course some regions where the gravitational force is stronger than this dark energy push. The Earth, the Sun, the solar system and our galaxy are all tightly gravitationally bound and do not explode due to dark energy within. Even groups and clusters of galaxies are gravitationally bound to each other and once they are they tend to remain so. For example the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy are bound to one another and in fact will eventually merge due to gravitational tidal forces. But the era of forming clusters and groups of galaxies is pretty much finished because the dark energy has been dominating for the last 5 billion years of our Universe’s life (which is now at 13.8 billion years). On the very largest physical scales is where the dominance of dark energy overwhelms gravity due to matter, both ordinary matter and dark matter.
What’s incredible is the accelerating expansion is self reinforcing. As new space is essentially created as a result of the expansion it also has the dark energy within it and that causes more expansion and so on…
That’s the standard model for now, but it is not proven, there are alternatives, but it seems like the accelerating expansion of the universe will continue for a long long time.