Even as a kid, I never thought much of the idea of Space as a Vacuum. Apart from the philosophical considerations, it seemed obvious that, if you had Something adjacent to Nothing, that Something would tear itself apart trying to fill the Nothing. So, as far as I was concerned, we had two Universes - the Universe of the Very Big (the stuff we can see) and the Universe of the Very Small (the stuff we can't see). Latter, in the 60s, when high-energy cyclotrons began spewing out sub-atomic particles like confetti, I had my confirmation for the UVS.
At the same time, during the 50s, the first time I saw a photo of a spiral galaxy I though, "there's gotta be something really heavy" at its center. A few years latter I was lucky enough to find a semi-technical book detailing both Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity and his Theory of General Relativity - in, of all places, the book section of a local department store. In those days, the 60s, information was a rare commodity - only three TV networks, very limited lending libraries, and no bookstore chains or computers or anything approaching the Internet. If you didn't live in NYC, Chicago, LA or a university town you were pretty much out of luck as far as information was concerned. So I figured I'd hit pay dirt and to this day I wonder how this, for the time, esoteric little volume reached that skinny shelf.
I poured over the book many a night with Poe's The Raven echoing through my mind as I worked through the math. The book also covered some of the major implications of both theories and one of those implications caught my attention - the fate of stars larger than 12 solar masses. In theory, they would collapse into Massive Gravity Wells so heavy that even light could not escape. The author of the book didn't buy it and referred to the idea as a mathematical anomaly. I did buy it and, imagining a spiral galaxy, saw the possibility not only of a Massive Gravity Well at its center, but also the possibility of a Supermassive Gravity Well powering the entire galaxy. I had my "really heavy" something.
And this accounts for the title of this essay - Black Holes (Massive Gravity Wells), Dark Matter (the UVS) and both of them being, on consideration, just plain old Common Sense.
Black Holes
Except for following the emergence of Black Holes in the popular media and winching every time someone referred to The Vacuum of Space, The Great Void or the Emptiness of Space, I really didn't give either idea much thought until, around 1996, I began to wonder, "what made the Big Bang go Bang?"
I'd always been a fan of the Big Crunch/Big Bang School, so I'd always seen our Universe(s) as resulting from the explosion of a Primordial Black Hole. But what made that PBH go BOOM? And, since Black Holes were our closest analog, I began wondering, "What would make a Black Hole go BOOM"?
It didn't take long to figure out that, until I understood the Singularity, I couldn't answer that question. Somehow, the Singularity had to contain all of the mass of the Black Hole while, at the same time, squeezing all of that matter into something that had no limit. Once the Strong Nuclear Force is breached, we have nothing that can stop the collapse of matter - but into what?
So, I began trying various models that would allow the Black Hole to retain mass while continuing an endless collapse and nothing worked. I kept this up for couple of years, on and off, until finally, out of frustration, I imagined myself hopping onto a proton falling through the event horizon. The proton continued to spaghettify as we approached the Singularity, shedding energy and mass, until, almost there, Woosh!, we slungshoot around and sped back towards the event horizon, gaining mass and energy along the way until, momentum spent, we fell back again towards the singularity.
This was all a shock - Singularities are limits, not points of infinite density, and Black Holes are maelstroms of matter, energy and pressure - not the sleepy model of Event Horizon, inert space and Singularity.
While I hadn't figured out Boom!, I did have a viable model for the Black Hole itself that was not only theoretically possible but provable as well. If I was correct, Black Holes would behave like any other semi-spherical object in the UVB - they would bulge at their equators, wobble along their axis of rotation and "pulse" slightly, the event horizons fluctuating as the ratio between mass and energy varies ever so little.
Giving myself a gold star, I slid this idea into a drawer for a time - until the popular media became enamored by Dark Matter.
Dark Matter
I'm not sure when I first started hearing about Dark Matter but I do remember my initial re-action: how long will it take for the Cosmological Community to figure out the UVS? As of this writing (May 2009), they haven't.
My second reaction was to think, "I need to write this stuff down and post it on the Internet". The title didn't take very long but the content rattled around in my head for a couple of years as I kept procrastinating.
Then, around 2003-4, I began hearing about Gamma Ray Bursts and one of the questions I'd had about Black Holes was answered. At the time that I realized that the "very heavy somethings" at the center of spiral galaxies were Supermassive Gravity Wells, I wondered whether or not those SMGWs had anything to do with the formation of the galaxies as well. Now I had the answer - Yes. The Gamma Ray bursts were in exactly the right place (star nurseries) at exactly the right time (9 -12 or 13 billion years ago) to be the birthing cries of not only Supermassive Black Holes, but of the spiral galaxies that would form around them and again I wondered, how long will it take... With the same result and a renewed resolve to write this stuff down.
The Age of the Universe
For some reason, the news of the Gamma Ray Bursts triggered another question that I and everyone else, especially Cosmologists, should have asked a long, long time ago: "How have we managed to get 9 - 12 billion light years away from anything in only 9 - 12 billion years?" Are we in some quirky way really moving at the speed of Light or, since Hubble first discovered the Red Shift, has everyone been confusing Age with Distance?
The first thing I did, when this question introduced itself, was to go back and re-examine every measure of the age of the UVB I could find, from Hubble's Constant to WMAP. In every case, those measurements represented distance, not time and the only number that counts, the average expansion rate of the UVB, is a number we don't have. Further, the only way we can calculate that number would be to measure how fast galaxies at various distances are moving away from one another, a project requiring the collection of so many data points that it would rival the Genome Project.
As a measure of the strength of long held ideas and despite being intellectually certain that we simply could not have covered X light years of distance in X light years of time, I still feel like I missed something. This time, I don't expect the Cosmological Community to ever tumble to this idea - it's simply too embarrassing.
And an important implication of this idea is that the UVS, expanding at a speed closer to the speed of light than all of the slow, heavy stuff of the UVB, is much larger than the UVB.
The Fabric of Space
This question of the Age of the Universe(s) finally put a fire under my feet and, in the spring of 2008, I started putting pixel to screen. The result was the first version of Black Holes, Dark Matter and Common Sense, an essay verbose with the exposition of how I reached my conclusions and the addition of ideas as one thing led to another.
One of those ideas was the Fabric of Space, the second shoe of The General Theory of Relativity (Gravity being the first).
The Fabric of Space, while clearly being the thing warped (curved) by the Gravity of Massive Objects, has never been seriously addressed by either branch of Physics (Experimental, Theoretical) or by the Astronomical/Astrophysical/Cosmological Communities. It's simply been considered unknowable and the fact that you can't begin to understand Gravity without understanding The Fabric of Space was ignored.
As I was explaining this in BHDMCS.1, a flash of inspiration led me, eventually, to the realization that any universe of X dimensions would have to be evenly dense if restricted to those X dimensions. Further, matter would be massless, so no Gravity (shades of the Standard Model). In order to have both variations in density and Gravity, that universe would have to exist in the context of X+1 dimensions. This would allow variations in density to extrude into the X+1 dimension, enabling Gravity and giving matter mass. If that universe has spin, gravity becomes centrifugal force.
Holding that universe together would be a constant that limited the speed with which energy traveled through matter - energy couldn't escape because it is contained by matter and matter couldn't escape because it could never reach that constant and you get E=MC2 (amazing how often that little equation pops up).
I was amazed that the answer was so simple - for us, The Fabric of Space is a fourth spatial dimension.
And this led to a whole bushel of implications as well as the fact that I now had a complete, self-contained model for the Universe(s) as a whole, from Big Bang to Big Crunch.
In short, at the time of the Big Bang the Universe consisted of matter ranging in size from nearly nothing (fermions are a conceit of the Standard Model) to a relatively small number of Hydrogen and Helium nuclei. This Universe quickly spilt into the UVS and the UVB, with the UVS continuing to expand at near light-speed while the UVB (the Hydrogen and Helium nuclei) slowed and began to condense into gas clouds. At an exponential rate, the denser pockets in those clouds began to ignite as bigger and bigger stars whose shorter and shorter lifetimes began producing bigger and bigger Black Holes. In some cases, those denser pockets went straight through the star phase and produced Supermassive Black Holes, which in turn ignited even more stars and began the formation of spiral galaxies.
The UVS continued its expansion while all of this was going on and became analogous to a sea upon which the UVB floats and expands. Ironically, the expansion of the UVS implies the formation of tiny vacuums between particles, causing the particles to divide in order to fill the vacuum (this strongly implies that the particles themselves are bubbles of electro-magnetic energy) until these really, really tiny particles reach the stage of their last division (when both sides of E=MC2 equal one for each particle) and the expansion of the UVS slows to near nothing.
At the same time, the UVB continues its expansion, actually accelerating relative and in inverse proportion to the slowing of the expansion of the UVS until it circumnavigates the UVS and begins forming a Primordial Black Hole in a Big Crunch. Once this PBH has consumed the UVB the two Universe(s) are united and it will begin consuming the former UVS. At this point, gravity is still a function of the former UVS, with the PBH being an increasingly massive pimple on the recombined Universe. Eventually, the mass left in the former UVS will no longer be able to sustain its gravity (relative to the PBH) and Boom!, the gravity of the Universe fails, igniting another Big Bang.
Implications
There are a lot of implications to this scenario, the most devastating applying to Quantum Theory.
QT is based on the assumption that Space is a Vacuum, the photon (which carries electro-magnetic energy through that vacuum) and the particle/wave duality of photons and electrons. Once the vacuum is gone, QT begins to disintegrate: photons are no longer necessary and particle/wave duality turns into particles surfing on waves. Once those underpinnings are gone, replaced by a coherent physical model, the really, really basic axioms of QT - that the sub-atomic world can only be addressed mathematically and that the Observer determines the state of the wave/particle - fail.
QT initiates, adepts and masters are not going to like this version of Reality and that is very ironic since, from QT's inception, it's mimicked that Reality in such concepts as Zero Point Energy (UVS bubbles of electromagnetic energy barely quivering at E=1 and M=1), Quantum Foam (the UVS in general) and Loop Quantum Gravity's Big Bounce (an analog to the Big Crunch/Big Bang). The older Qt gets, the closer it seems to get to the model I'm proposing.
Finally, volumes could be written about the implications of these ideas but, I think, the major points have been made.
For more detail go to http://bhdmcs.com
Charles Kolsrud
May 2009
