2.
So why don’t I just hang around and wait for the outcome of the various experiments going on before unloading yet another theory of space/time upon the world? Well, as Robert Burns said, “Time and tide wait for no man.” Actually he said “Nae man can tether time or tide,” but we’re not in English class now so we’ll take the rough translation. Almost as soon as I began to conclude that the entire universe was expanding even at the local level, I began to see how accepting this as a fact might solve some other problems that have been plaguing physicists for some years. The best test of a theory is whether it provides answers where there were none before.
When I taught science in elementary school, I used to use a couple of balloons and an open bottom jar to demonstrate how the diaphragm draws air into the lungs. The set up looked like this:
Diaphragm Demonstration Apparatus
When you pull the string down, in the direction of the red arrow, it creates an area of lowered air pressure in the jar, drawing air into the glass tubes representing bronchial tubes, and inflating the two red balloons representing lungs. Well, it’s a poor analogy of what I have in mind for an expanding Universe, but it will serve for now. The idea is that as space/time expands, every quark and every bit of space between quarks is induced to expand. This expansion forces the expanding matter to “flow” through time, or maybe time “flows” through it, or perhaps they just “flow” together. But I imagine the result of this expansion to be what “powers” the nuclear forces that bind quarks together.
Let’s look at another poor analogy from my old science teacher days. I have lots of these poor analogies. Someday someone may come up with a better one, but I have to work from my own background and experience.
Bernoulli Demonstration with Balloons
In this simple demonstration, two balloons are dangled from strings so that they hang close to one another. I used to take the core cardboard tube from a paper towel roll and ask students to predict what would happen if I used it to blow a stream of air between the two balloons in the direction of the blue arrow in the above diagram. Many students would guess that the balloons would be blown apart, but in fact, the opposite is true and the balloons are drawn together by the lowered air pressure caused by the rapid movement of air between the two balloons.
So it may be with the strong nuclear force, inducing quarks to cling tightly together as space/time expansion passes through them at one speed and through the space between them at another slightly faster speed. We already know that this “flow” of space/time is not uniformly the same throughout the universe. Einstein’s time dilation experiments show us that time can be noticeably “slowed down” in an object moving near the speed of light, relative to other objects not moving so fast. Perhaps the vacuum of empty space between quarks is drawn through this expansion of space/time faster than the quarks themselves, causing a Bernoulli-like phenomenon that we call the “nuclear force.”
Whether you accept my analogies or not, IF it can be proved that the expansion of the Universe is happening at the sub-atomic level as well as on the grand scale of galaxies, I guarantee that SOMETHING has to result when quarks and the spaces between them expand. I’m betting that the result is the force that hold quarks together. Such an expansion would account for a great many heretofore-unexplained forces.
So that’s why I don’t just hang around and wait for the jury to reach a verdict on my theory of universal expansion. I can already begin to see that a great many mysteries would be solved IF we start by assuming that the universe does, in fact, expand along with space/time.
As another example of this, here’s a quick mystery explained by expansion: why is there a limit to the speed of light? Why can’t light go faster than 186,000 miles per second (or 299,792,458 m/s) in a vacuum? IF we imagine that the speed of the expansion of space/time in a vacuum is 186,000 miles per second, then it is reasonable to expect that light cannot exceed the speed of time. However, this also creates somewhat of a paradox. If the universe is expanding in the way that I have postulated, then the length of a mile (and every other commonly accepted standard of measurement) is expanding right along with it. Does this mean that the speed of light/time is no longer to be considered a mathematical constant? No, that number will still work in all equations which require it, but we may need to revise our thinking and possibly create a new math to take the expansion into account… sort of a super calculus.
So, here at last was my answer to the problem of C in the equation E = MC2 . The fact that C happens to be the same as the speed of light is coincidental. It is really the speed of TIME that matters, and the speed of light simply indicates what the speed of time is. But now I can understand that TIME, flowing through matter and expanding it as space/time itself expands at that enormous speed, fills it with an even greater (squared) amount of potential energy.
If you need a good explanation as to why C is squared in the famous equation, you’ll find it in the book by the same name: E = MC2 , A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, by David Bodanis.
Now let’s try a mathematical trick with the famous equation. Let us imagine a single quark, the smallest piece of matter in the universe, and let us say that it has a mass of 1. One multiplied by any given number is equal to that number, so one times five equals five, one times a million equals a million, and one times C2 equals C2 . Imagining Mass to have a value of 1 turns the famous equation into: E = C2 . If we assume C to be the speed of light, this makes no sense... but if we consider that C is also the speed of TIME, it begins to make a glimmer of sense. The speed of light is irrelevant to the amount of energy contained in mass, but the speed of TIME is very relevant. It is this expansive motion of time, proceeding from the past into the future that puts energy into everything. All energy comes from this expansion of time. Go back and insert space/time into everything I've said about time, because the two are inseparable. The tiniest bit of matter, whose mass has a value of 1, is expanding with space/time at the rate of C. If it were to change from matter to energy, the energy would be the expansion rate of space/time multiplied by itself.
This is a Work in Progress - To be continued...