Some Basics Of Natural Philosophy

NO MULTIVERSE, NO PLATONISM (Less Air Travel, Too):

Some people go around, and brandish the “Multiverse”. Of course, the “Multiverse” exists, in one’s brain. The brain, among other things, extends all over imagination. Out there, among the galaxies, in the real world, there is no reason to suppose there is a “Multiverse, whatsoever.

It is basically something to sell books with. Or, just as with evil minded religions, for some physicists to claim they are like gods and can believe in something really absurd, and grotesquely self-contradictory:

There is No Universe, But the Universe:

The Universe is all there is. By definition. By philosophical definition. Just by philosophical definition? Not so. Any logic is associated to a universe. If the “logic” is nature itself (“all of the logic”) the associated universe (in the Logic sense), is, well, the Universe.

If something some would want to call the “Multiverse”, whatever that would be, existed, it would be part of the Universe.

Galaxies Used To Be Called “Island Universes”. They Collide; This Is A Much Older Universe Than People Understand

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Age Of The Universe? Really?

Befuddled physicists go around, telling us about the “First Three Minutes” (Weinberg; Electro-Weak Nobel laureate), or the “History Of Time” (Hawking; remarkable survivor-physicist in a wheelchair).

That rests on their perfect knowledge of how the universe evolved.

This, in turn, depends upon ignoring Dark Energy. Dark Energy shows up as an unpredicted acceleration of the expansion of the Universe.

The old theory of expansion of the Universe was established before Dark Energy was discovered.

So they think they know, but I know they don’t really know.

I don’t know if the Universe has an age. But it is aging, or, at least, let’s be more cautious, the Universe is changing.

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How Both Physics And Mathematics Became Not Even Wrong:

Mathematics themselves have always been developed in particular directions, in light of what it was felt was needed to understand the physical world. That was certainly true with Buridan, and his students, who developed computational methods, and graphs, to handle what they wanted to do with inertia. That was true with calculus developed for all sorts of engineering and physics explanations.

And so on through the next three centuries. However, in the last three decades, what I personally viewed as extremely erroneous notions in physics became dominant.

Indeed, it had become that clear time was not “relative” (whatever that is supposed to mean). True, time was local, as per Relativity, but it was local in an absolute way. The absoluteness comes from Quantum Theory… And the absoluteness of curvature in cosmology (the focusing of light, by galaxies and galactic clusters is absolute, thus so is time, locally around such focusing objects!).

Efforts were launched towards was felt would be the mathematics of “superstrings” and “field theory”. That would have been wonderful, if the initial meta-axiom motivating the whole enterprise, that nature worked with strings, super, and field mathematics perched on field math, all the way down… had been, roughly, correct.

Mathematics is not “natural”. Or let’s say, not anymore “natural” than the human brain can get contrived. Mathematics is an adventure in what the geometry, the Quantum geometry, of neurology is capable of.

Mathematics is not unreasonably effective (as the famous physicist-mathematician Wigner put it).

Mathematics is reason, manipulated to be effective in a particular way. Correctly determining in advance what the way will be makes the difference between understanding nature, and failing to do so.

Math is just, roughly, neuronal geometry that “works” (“working” here meaning what the brain does, whatever it is, beyond just manipulating electric and chemical signals).

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Do We Need To Tour Frantically With Jets? 

In other news, after the crash in France of a Lufthansa A320 plane, pundits will surely come, and claim aloud that air travel is the safest mode of travel.

Is it? It depends upon the method of measurement.

The way advertisers come up with the “air travel is the safest form of travel” statement is by dividing number of people killed by distance travelled.

However, another measure would be to divide the number of people killed by the number of travels they engaged in. This is a more significant measure to think about. And air travel looks much good that way: in just one day in Europe, more car travels happen than all the air travel for the entire world, in a year.

Not to say that air travel should be discouraged. It is not exactly like smoking, with no redeeming value, whatsoever. Families ought to be reunited. Getting to know other countries, encouraged. However one week tourism, far away, thanks to plane travel ought, in my opinion, to be discouraged.

Instead, the projections are that air travel will augment considerably in the next few decades.

Between Barcelona and Dusseldorf, one ought to be able to travel just as fast by rail (not all the high speed lines are built, nor will they be built, thanks to plutocratically imposed austerity, and subsidies to… air travel). Electric trains pollute much less, by more than an order of magnitude, and are much safer.

The global CO2 situation is that bad. Besides, look at that entire high school classroom of fifteen year old that went down with the plane… Just for a week in Barcelona?

Patrice Ayme’

100 BILLION YEAR OLD UNIVERSE?

Abstract: Dark Energy is a fact. Dark Energy is not a theory such as the Big Bang, which is an extrapolation from extrapolations, as it requires extrapolations such as Cosmic Inflation (necessary to make the BB work!)

Dark Energy, discovered only two decades ago, enables a completely different cosmology. Taking Dark Energy seriously renders Cosmic Inflation and the Big Bang superfluous… Philosophically and logically speaking.

And using only Dark Energy to expand the universe makes it much older than the Big Bang Theory has it.

The basic reasoning establishing the Big Bang is of primary school level: it spreads all over, so it all came from a singularity in time. And yet, from recent observations, it is probably erroneous. I propose that the universe is rather of the order of 100 billion years old, rather than the official 13.8 billion [sic!]. Why do I think the universe is much bigger, and much older than most accredited, professional cosmologists do? Why would celebrity physicists be misinforming the public?

Galaxies To Infinity. 100 Billion Years Old, I Say.

[One photon a minute to get this picture!]

Boldly averaging observations of red shifts in our neighborhood, it has been artistically found that galaxies located 3.2 million light years away recede at 72 kilometers per second (that art was involved is obvious when one gets in the detail… And why Hubble got the numbers wrong by a factor of two initially).

Divide that inter-galactic distance by that speed, and that should tell a primary school student when the universe started. The good news: physicists understand this. The bad news: it’s all too simple, reality seems to disagree.

Let’s do the computation in detail.

(We will use the notation “^” to indicate powers; so 10^2 is (10) (10), 10^4 is 10,000, etc.)

Light covers (3) (10^5) kilometers in one second, and there are around 100,000 = 10^5 seconds in a day. So light covers (3) (10^10) ( 3) (10^2) ~ 10^13 kilometers in a year (=10,000 billion kilometers). Multiply that by (3) (10^6), the distance to that receding galaxy, to get:

(3) 10^19) kilometers (3 times ten billion billion kilometers). Divide by 70 kilometers per second, to find how many seconds it took for galaxies to separate 3.2 million light years: that’s ½ (10^18) seconds. Now there are around (3) (10^5)(10^2) seconds in a year. One gets roughly 14 billion years.

14 billion years ago, or so, the material of that 3.2 million light year away galaxy was next door.

From, there, applying the Principle of Homogeneity (PH: that everything is everywhere roughly the same), one deduces that all those things that became galaxies were next to each other. Notice that this recourse to PH is a philosophical jump: it seems likely, because it is the simplest we can think of, but it’s not a sure thing.

The only way this could have happened is if this expansion all started in the same place… in time (not space!). Presto, you have the result that the history of the universe is that of a Big Bang that started 14 billion years ago. So far, so good.

Notice a second philosophical jump occurred: to get to the conclusion that there was a Big Bang, we assumed that the expansion happened at the same rate, all along. That sounded like the easiest hypothesis, 80 years ago (or when the Big Bang was explicitly formulated, around 60 years ago). But there was NO proof, that the expansion had been at that rate all along, and some observers of things cosmological, or theoreticians, begged to differ (even during the 1960s).

I certainly did not agree with the certainty that the preceding reasoning was a sure thing, because it was not. I do not trust concept that are viewed as sure things, when obviously they are not. I view in them probable examples of herd effects.

However, in the last ten years, it turned out that, to everyone’s amazement, a fact unanticipated by the majority of cosmologists emerged. The rate of expansion was found to be increasing noticeably.

A force expanded the fabric of space ever more. It was called “Dark Energy” (energy, because that’s what one needs to expand space, dark, because the force vector itself could be not be seen; also there already was one problem, called “Dark Matter”, mass distributed all over, dwarfing the visible mass).

I Propose Doing Away With Weird Stuff On Left Side Of the Sketch (Explosion, Cosmic Inflation, etc.)

The very existence of “Dark Energy” immediately busted the “universe is 14 billion years old” conclusion. Indeed, one cannot assume the expansion was 71 kilometers per second, all along, when we see that this expansion is now accelerating. It’s changing: get it? C H A N G E… It’s changing now, so it should have been changing in the past.

It’s more logical to suppose the expansion was always there, and accelerated all along, that the expansion accelerated in the past as it does now. So as the expansion of the universe is NOT linear now, it’s only simpler, logically, to suppose that it was NOT linear in the past. Instead, it looks as if, in first approximation,the expansion of the universe was some sort of exponential tapering fading in the past.

(In other words, since its rate is accelerating now, we may as well suppose it accelerated similarly, all along! Instead the extrapolated Big Bang + extrapolated Cosmic Inflation + Observed Dark Energy implies that the rate of acceleration of the Universe varied enormously in the past: first accelerating gigantically, then slowing down, then coming to a standstill, then re-accelerating… Weird!)

On the back of an envelope, considering the present rate of acceleration of the expansion, and extrapolating that acceleration in the past, your generous servant can determine the universe ought to be 100 billion years old, rather than 14 billion years.

Some will whine: and what of the Cosmological Background Radiation? Well I have a Quantum answer to that. There are also other explanations available such as Olbers Paradox, and Tired Light (which my own theory, SQPR brings naturally, for deeper reasons).

The 100 billion year old universe is philosophically, axiomatically, simpler. (It also gives a lot of time to explain enormous large scale structures such as bubbles and walls of galactic clusters, which looked too organized to have evolved in a mere 14 billion years; “100 billion” is just an order of magnitude, not a precise number; maybe it’s 200 billions…)

Why is it that physicists are presenting the date of 13.7 billion years for the age of the universe with so much certainty? Because smug, god like certainty, is what sells. Everybody loves knowing living gods exist. To know things that only an oligarchy knows, especially if this esoteric knowledge violates common sense, can only make one famous, thus powerful. Hence well fed, the pelt lustrous and the mien proud.

Some do not require more than this: they are simple apes, greed is their event horizon. Real thinkers are made of nobler stuff. Meanwhile, the universe is out there: let’s look carefully, but emotionally, at the picture above: millions of galaxies, as far as we can see. One cannot avoid the feeling that this universe is much older than simply thrice the age of the Earth.

And now that’s what the simplest logic, clinging to the established facts, embraces.

Patrice Aymé